Heal Nourish Grow Podcast: Recent Episodes
Cheryl McColgan
In this episode, Cheryl sits down with Brad Pitzele to unpack a long and complicated health journey that began with early autoimmune symptoms and escalated into psoriatic arthritis, debilitating fatigue, and eventually melanoma linked to immunosuppressive treatment.
Frustrated by a system that offered only escalating medications and limited answers, Brad began an intense period of self-experimentation and research. His turning point came after a Lyme disease diagnosis, one that helped connect years of seemingly unrelated symptoms. This ultimately pushed him deeper into understanding the root causes of chronic illness, especially the role of mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation.
From there, the conversation shifts into the tools that helped Brad reclaim his health, including exercise with oxygen therapy (EWOT) and red and near-infrared light therapy. He explains how both approaches work at a cellular level to improve oxygen delivery, support mitochondrial function, and reduce inflammation. Thseare are all mechanisms that have implications for conditions like chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis and even cardiovascular health.
This episode is a deep dive into resilience, curiosity, and the power of continuing to search for answers when conventional paths fall short, offering both practical insight and hope for anyone navigating complex or unexplained health challenges.
Connect with Brad at One Thousand Roads.
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Takeaways* Chronic symptoms do not always have clear answers and standard care often focuses on managing symptoms rather than addressing root causes * Mitochondrial health plays a central role in energy, recovery, and overall resilience and when it is compromised nearly every system in the body is affected * Inflammation and low oxygen levels go hand in hand, creating a cycle that can worsen chronic illness over time * Exercise with oxygen therapy works by increasing oxygen delivery to tissues and may support energy production and reduce inflammation * Red and near infrared light therapy may enhance mitochondrial function by increasing cellular demand for oxygen and boosting energy output * Combining oxygen therapy with red light can create a complementary supply and demand effect at the cellular level * Healing from complex or chronic conditions is rarely quick and consistent cumulative inputs over time matter more than short term fixes * Self advocacy and curiosity are critical when navigating unexplained health issues or when conventional approaches fall short * Small improvements over time can rebuild momentum and hope even before full recovery is achieved * Simple inputs like oxygen, light, and movement can have powerful effects when applied consistently and strategically
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan and today I am joined by Brad Pitzley and we are going to talk about some of his health history. He has a really interesting background with some challenging diseases and scenarios that he went through. And you know, like many of the guests on the HealNursery podcast, he just has a health journey that he wants to share with people and kind of what ended up actually helping him. Because so often people go down these roads with
different conditions and they just have a lot of trouble finding out number one what it is, number two if there’s anything that can help them feel better or how to treat it. And so I think Brad’s going to have a lot of really interesting things to share with us today. So Brad, if you could just maybe start by, I don’t know how far in the way back machine you want to go, but kind of just, you know, give us a little bit about your health journey. And as we go along, I’m sure I’ll have some kind of questions to fill in for everyone.
Brad Pitzele (00:50)
Yeah, I had weird health things going on since grade school. I was diagnosed with psoriasis, but then I had other weird things that just kind of came and went. We’d go to the doctor, they’d give it a label. It would last for a while. There was no treatment for said label and then it would kind of just disappear and then I’d move on with life and then a year or six months or whatever, something else might pop up. But it really kind of started to come to a head.
Um, probably around 2010 or 11, I started to develop autoimmune arthritis, what was considered psoriatic arthritis, which is, it’s basically like rheumatoid arthritis, but it’s what you get with psoriasis. Um, and they started to test all sorts of different drugs on me. The first sets didn’t work. Then they put me on, um, some immune suppressive drugs. They gave me relief for like maybe six months and they’d start wearing off and they would double the dose and they’re.
I was kind of worse off when it wore off and then it would kind of bring me up a little bit. And then was kind of like I was taking a stair step into, you know, into a worse and worse place. And I was on those drugs for probably about two years. And then I developed melanoma. And that’s one of the side effects of the drugs is it’s got a high risk of cancer and specifically melanoma.
So that was kind of a, a jumping off point for me. I, during that period, I also started to develop weird other symptoms. Like I started to get stiffness in the back of my legs. had tremendous brain fog and energy issues. had pain in my feet and I would take this back to the rheumatologist and I’d be like, this is, is this part of the, this disease? assume. he was like, no, that’s not part of the disease. And I was kind of shocked and like, well, it feels like part of the disease. It’s kind of, you know, it’s just.
Cheryl McColgan (02:38)
All right.
Brad Pitzele (02:41)
another symptom of whatever’s going on with me. But he didn’t really acknowledge that. And then when I got cancer, I went back to him and I was like, Hey, you know, I’m really afraid I’m like, if I keep taking these drugs, more risk of cancer. I don’t take these drugs. I, you know, I die, cripple crumpled up in a ball in the corner, so to speak. And he was kind of like, no, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Yeah. I think we’re just going to try another drug in the, the, the same category.
And that was like, just started having alarm bells in my head. Just started shouting at me. was like, either path feels like it’s very bad. And I was a, I had a young children at the time. I was a relatively new father and that was even more scary. I was kind of the single income in the household. And I just started like, I’m like, what happens if these things happen to me to not just me, but my family. and that’s kind of when I started jumping off and like doing my own research and trying to figure out what I call a third path for
because neither of those really made sense to me.
Cheryl McColgan (03:40)
those both sound like
not very good options. I’m just kind of curious when you were going back to the doctor with these things, kind of two questions here actually. One, and I think I already know the answer, but one, were drugs the only answer that this doctor was able to give to you? And secondly, I think having the cancer being a known side effect of the drug is really interesting. you ever talk about what the mechanism there is or anything to know about that just for people with curiosity?
Brad Pitzele (04:07)
Yeah, so yeah, mostly it was drugs. He did also offer me injections of steroids into some of my joints. He was very skilled at it, because he said it was gonna be very painful. It wasn’t that painful, but steroids turn off your immune system. And it’s the same thing with some of the drugs I was on. One of them was a…
I won’t call brand name, but it was a TNF inhibitor. TNF stands for tumor necrosis factor. And it’s basically in a component of our immune system. And so there was some research done and they found that if they turned off that component of your immune system, hey, the pain and symptoms go away. Unfortunately, as the name alludes to, it kills tumors. when you turn it, we all have cancer in our
Cheryl McColgan (04:49)
Yeah
Brad Pitzele (04:52)
body. Like right now as we speak, everyone has it. It’s just our immune system is able to kill it off and so it never really gains a foothold. But once you start tipping the balance of the scales, obviously, you know, it can run amok. And that’s what happened in my case.
Cheryl McColgan (05:08)
Yeah, very interesting. also it just brings up so many other questions that I’ll have to go down a rabbit hole after we’re done with our conversation. But so you had these things, you didn’t have good relief, you were still having symptoms, then you got cancer. And I assume obviously you had to get treated for that at that point. Was that really the turning point for you to just be like, I’ve got to find some other way to manage this? How did how did things go from there?
Brad Pitzele (05:30)
Yeah, it was, and I’m not gonna tell you it was a fast turn for me. It took me several years. But I mean, from there, I just started reading anything I could. I read books, I was out on the internet, I was in chat groups talking to other people who had similar symptoms, Facebook groups, Googling on PubMed, looking at research, so many rabbit holes I ran down.
I was joking, I’m recovering engineer. ⁓ I got my undergraduate in mechanical engineering, so I’m very analytical by my nature, I suppose. Research didn’t scare me, and I just was reading anything I could. I wasn’t gonna…
Cheryl McColgan (05:55)
You
Brad Pitzele (06:07)
You know, wait for them to find something in the research and then try to translate it 20 years later. Like that does me no good. and I tried everything. I did a lot of self experimentation, everything from complete changes of diet, supplements, so many, mean, different modalities, all sorts of weird stuff. Sometimes my family looked at me pretty good side, I when they saw some of the stuff I was doing. but you know, when you’re, when you’re really desperate and.
things are getting worse and worse. And particularly when you also feel this responsibility and obligation to your family, you just, it’s not even just about you. You’re like, what do I do? I like, I’m gonna disappoint all these people and life is not gonna be good for them. I just told myself, I’m not allowed. know, like this is absolutely not allowed. This is not gonna happen, but it kept happening for a few more years. And then,
I ended up at a doctor’s office and he tried all sorts of things. Nothing was working. He was an MD, but he was non-insurance, so was integrative. And he was trying all sorts of alternate modalities on me. Even the things he was sure were gonna do anything, nothing was doing anything. He’s doing testing on me, nothing was popping. And then he suggested I do a Lyme disease test.
I remember thinking, I’m like, doctor, I don’t have Lyme disease. I’m like, I’ve never been bitten by one of these ticks. I’ve never had that bullseye rash thing. I’m thinking to myself, I don’t have that. But I was kind of like, you know what? And it was expensive test at the time. It was like 500 bucks. Insurance didn’t pay. But I was like, you know what? I’m gonna pay the 500 bucks. I’m gonna do the test so he can see it’s negative and we can get him off this Lyme thing. We can get to the real deal because it’s not Lyme.
And sure enough, it came back that I had Lyme disease and one of its co-infections called Bartonella, which is the infection that causes cat scratch disease as well. And I was so shocked. went back to him. was like, doc, what’s the chances this is a false positive? I don’t think I have it. And he was like, Brad, it’s a urine PCR, which means you have the DNA of those bacteria in your urine. What do you think is the chances it’s, it’s false positive? I’m like, got it.
Cheryl McColgan (08:12)
Not.
Brad Pitzele (08:14)
And that’s when it finally started to hit. ⁓
Cheryl McColgan (08:16)
Well, just for people that aren’t familiar, I think everybody’s kind of heard of Lyme disease at some point, maybe Bartonella, but what did that kind of mean to you at the time? Like I’m sure once you got that diagnosis, you wanted to learn more about it. Were you thinking that that explained some of the things that you had up to this point or how did that mesh into the whole symptom profile?
Brad Pitzele (08:36)
Life disease is incredibly challenging.
for a variety of reasons. One, it’s very difficult to get under control. There’s a lot of folks in America and across the world, quite frankly, suffering with it right now. The other reason it’s tough is there’s not a lot of doctors willing to treat it. There’s this whole stigma about it. What makes it particularly difficult is there’s this question on if it actually exists in some doctor’s head. It’s like the weirdest thing in the world.
We know there’s this infectious agent, we know it infects humans, and yet when a human comes to the doctor and says, I’ve been infected by it, they’re like, are you sure? And so you kind of get, I think the term I hear often is medical gas lit. And on top of that, doctors, for legal reasons, often don’t want to touch it. So my doctor didn’t want to touch it. And he was like, look, you have to go to a Lyme specialist three hours away.
I recommend him as best I can. And it was a long waiting list to get into this doctor’s office. And while I was waiting, just…
I was relentless, you I just couldn’t sit here and let myself deal with all this. It was a three month wait. And so I just started reading voraciously on Lyme disease to your point. was reading all sorts of research. I was reading books on it, a lot of books on the, like the science and what was happening to your body mechanically. And it was actually pretty eye opening because when I started to read all these symptoms, I was like, I started to piece together all these pieces, the puzzle that happened to me in my childhood, ⁓ things that happened
Cheryl McColgan (10:12)
Mm.
Brad Pitzele (10:13)
more recently, things that the rheumatologist couldn’t explain, but now we’re clear as day what was going on. And so the jigsaw puzzle started to fall into place for me. So it was kind of an epiphany from that perspective, yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (10:29)
Yeah, that’s got to be the waiting had to be one of the hardest things, I’m sure. then once you finally got to him, did he because he was specialized in Lyme specifically, did he have any solutions for you? Or then was it somewhere that you still had to go to go down the road?
Brad Pitzele (10:42)
No.
You know, the disappointing thing is, I ended up, the whole family was diagnosed with Lyme disease, not just me, my children and so forth. So we all carted in the car down three hours from, I live in Dallas area down in Austin. He had a lot of things to say to us. It was kind of stuff I’d already read. Most of it I’d already tried.
know, supplements I’d already run through myself and like it became cost prohibited both the time and the visitation and we just didn’t get anywhere. So we probably visited him.
five or six times and then I was like, okay, well this is not, know, and was, each time it was kind of clear, like his tools were somewhat limited. And so then it was time to kind of, while I was doing his stuff, I was also just actively experimenting. was, you know, was a, you know, a test dummy every set, every second of it, because again, you know, you just can’t wait, you know, come back in two months. You’re like, if this thing doesn’t work in a few weeks, I got to, I’ll keep doing it, but I’ll add other things.
See where I go.
Cheryl McColgan (11:46)
Right, well, I’m sure
once you knew that your whole family had this issue that probably made you want to solve it even more, not that it wasn’t enough for you to solve it for yourself, but now you’ve got other people in your family that you want to feel well, you know?
Brad Pitzele (11:53)
Yes.
Absolutely, absolutely. was definitely set heavy on my mind. Just I didn’t want the kids to have to go down this path.
Cheryl McColgan (12:06)
So this kind
of leads us into this whole backstory into the sign that’s behind your head right now, 1000 roads, because you kind of did that many roads to get here, right? And so what did you come across? I thought that was like one of the best business names I’ve ever seen, the way, knowing the backstory. But anyway, what was it that you found in the research or what led you to kind of, there’s a couple of things that did end up helping you, which is awesome, because I think now we’re going to share this with people because
Brad Pitzele (12:16)
Yeah, that’s right.
you
Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (12:35)
Like you said, there’s plenty of people out there with Lyme disease. There’s plenty of people out there with unexplained illnesses or things that are affecting them. And, you know, there are some interesting tools that do work, worked in your case. So how did you end up finding what actually ended up working for you?
Brad Pitzele (12:50)
Well, I eventually started doing a lot of research on all sorts of things. And one thing that stuck with me was mitochondrial health.
I hear more and more folks talking about it in recent years, which is great, but this is probably about a little 10, 12 years ago. It really wasn’t a well-spoken about area. the more I researched about mitochondrial health, the more I realized this is at the root of everything. So for your listeners, the mitochondria are this little organelle, this little subset inside all of your cells that produce the energy. And they’re extremely fragile.
And when they get damaged or they’re not working efficiently, nothing works efficiently because everything takes energy, right? Us talking takes energy, thinking takes energy, moving our muscles, our organs working take energy, repair our immune system, all of it. And so often when you’re dealing with chronic health conditions, particularly when you’re dealing with an infectious agent or even cancers, they go after our mitochondria.
because they kind of take the power down in the system and that gives them a leg up on our immune system and our defenses and it allows them to kind of I would call it just burrow deeper into our biology and you know shift the biology to be more favorable towards whatever that is. So for me it that was kind of an epiphany and I delved into a couple tools and the first one was something called exercise with oxygen therapy.
also known as EWOT, E-W-O-T. No one was really talking about it. It was kind of the small little thing, not a lot of information out there. And then there was a second one, more folks have heard of today, which is red light therapy, and really red and near infrared light therapy. And they both work through mechanisms that help the mitochondria restore itself.
Cheryl McColgan (14:45)
Yeah, the exercise, I was looking at the photo on the website of the EWOT contraption and I’m kind of having a hard time conceptualizing. think what, and actually before we go into that, let’s address this other question that came up in my mind when I was looking at the contraption, because I’m like, okay, the thing that most people are probably somewhat familiar with nowadays is a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. And that is used in cancer treatment. think it was, Dr. Seyfried has this thing, and you might be familiar with him just like.
through your mitochondrial research, but it’s called like a press pulse thing that they use with cancer patients. And it has to do with ketogenic diet, because you’re starving the cancer of sugar. And then also this hyperbaric oxygen therapy. That’s, that’s all just kind of a weird aside for people that are hearing this, it really has nothing to do with this conversation. But it’s interesting to look up. But for your thing, the hyperbaric works in one way. And I think people like you can visualize it, because you go in and you kind of just lay down. And that’s what it is. But this
And when people go to the website, they’ll see it. It’s kind of, looks like a big balloon or a box. So guess I’m having trouble kind of conceptualizing how do you even use that or, how do you exercise with that? That’s a very long winded question, but hopefully we’ll get there.
Brad Pitzele (15:47)
Yeah. Sure. Well.
Yeah, that’s great. So I think it’s two questions. What is it? How does it work sort of thing?
Exercise with oxygen therapy at its principles really simple. It simply involves doing any sort of exercise, preferably something that gets your heart rate up, generally cardiovascular exercise, while wearing a mask and breathing near pure oxygen, so about 93 % oxygen. So to your point about how does the contraption or the EWATS system work, it works as, it’s like this, there’s actually a device
called an oxygen concentrator that can produce an endless supply of oxygen. You plug it into the wall and you flip the switch and it takes the oxygen in your room, which is probably at like let’s say 21 % at sea level, and it purifies it to 93 % oxygen by separating out the other gases, the nitrogen and the argon.
which is great, but these machines that you can plug into your wall, your home outlet, they produce only five or 10 liters of oxygen in a minute. And when you exercise, you can easily use 50 or 60 liters in a minute. So to get a 15 minute session in, you can easily use 900 plus liters of oxygen. And that machine’s only putting out at the best 10 liters of it. And so every minute. And so what we do is we take that machine
and we fill a large reservoir to a thousand liters. So think of it as about six feet, five and a half, six feet squared. It looks like a big pillow. And we fill that thing with oxygen. Now to like dimensionalize this for folks, a thousand liters of oxygen is similar to the amount of oxygen you’ll breathe in an entire day. And we’ll fill this, this, you know, bloom, what we call a reservoir with oxygen. And then we’ll attach a hose with a mask on the end of it. Put the mask on and you just breathe out of that reservoir.
of water. So again, in that 15 minutes, you can take in a whole day of oxygen. It’s really a massive amount. Now, how does it compare to hyperbaric oxygen? That’s a really good question. Hyperbaric oxygen, at its core, what you do is you get inside of a chamber, they pressurize it, and that forces more oxygen through your lung membrane and into your blood. Now,
Once it gets past your lung membrane and into your blood,
your, what happens in hyperbaric oxygen is it goes not just into your red blood cells, because if you look at your red blood cells right now, which are the parts of your blood that are designed to carry oxygen, they’re at capacity. Like you can put a little pulse oximeter on your finger and it’ll say 99 % or 100 % or 98%. And so there’s not room for more oxygen, but what hyperbaric does, and EWAT does the same thing, is it actually forces oxygen into your blood plasma.
Now blood plasma is this clearish brown liquid, it’s effectively water plus plus, that all the red and white blood cells ride on. And so it can actually turn that into an oxygen carrying vehicle inside your blood, something that normally doesn’t carry very much oxygen.
And that’s through a process called Henry’s Law, which goes beyond human biology. It’s really just a chemistry law that says, you take an insoluble gas and enforce it on top of an insoluble liquid, it’ll force the gas to go into solution. In this case, the gas is oxygen and the liquid is blood plasma. Now, in hyperbaric oxygen, the body tries to get back into balance. It notices there’s a surplus of oxygen in the blood.
And so your body tries to regulate, go back to homeostasis by using something called vasoconstriction, which means your blood vessels constrict. They get smaller to allow less of that oxygen through. So your body is naturally fighting against delivering that oxygen. In spite of that, you deliver a large dose of oxygen to the tissues. In IWA, what we do is we come to the opposite. Instead of using pressure to force more oxygen into and through your lungs, we use exercise to pull it through.
So when you start exercising, your body immediately recognizes that it needs more energy. And the gating factor in producing more energy is oxygen. We all in this Western world generally get enough food. It’s just we’re…
When you’re exercising, there’s not enough oxygen. So when it notices this, you have all these physiological changes, right? You start breathing faster and deeper. Your lung membrane actually thins out to allow more oxygen to pass through. Your heart starts beating faster. Every beat is deeper. Your blood vessels actually dilate. They actually open up to allow larger blood flow through them. And then when you exercise, naturally, actually, your blood pressure goes up. And most of us think, no,
high blood pressure is bad, but in exercise it’s actually really good because the more pressure inside your blood, that differential between the pressure in your circulatory system and the tissues is like a driving force that drives the oxygen out of the blood and into the tissues. we do EWAT, we’re taking advantage of all those physiological changes to allow us to take in oxygen very quickly and deliver it deeply into the tissues. in a 15 minute EWAT session, you
could take in as much oxygen as you would in a hyperbaric session in 90 or more minutes. It’s really quite a large dose.
Cheryl McColgan (21:09)
Wow. then what about, so how does that affect the mitochondria? Does it just give them more energy and kind of helps them repair quicker? Or what’s the connection between mitochondrial health and the EY?
Brad Pitzele (21:16)
Thank
This is actually the really fascinating part. And this is the thing that really got me more interested in it.
EWAT was founded actually in the 1960s and 70s. There was this prolific inventor named Manfred von Arden. He was a German physicist and inventor. He invented the scanning electron microscope. He helped commercialize television technology in the 1930s. And he got interested in oxygen in 1960s and 70s because there was a gentleman named Warburg in the 1920s who had proven
that he could take any cancerous cell, any regular cell and turn it into a cancerous cell simply by depriving it of oxygen. And the reverse was true. So Von Arden got interested in that, wanted to start experiment with oxygen, simply trying to reverse cancer. And along the way, what he discovered is something really powerful about our circulatory system, which is as we age, this thing we now refer to as inflammation happens inside our bodies, this slow,
gradual increase in inflammation and that affects every part of our body including our circulatory system. But our circulatory system is actually kind of a weak link. At the very end of your circulatory system is your capillaries and they’re incredibly thin and they’re actually the component where the oxygen and the nutrients gets transferred from the circulatory system to the tissues. So you’ve got these really thin capillaries, thinner than a human hair, actually smaller
than a red blood cell. In order for a red blood cell to get in a healthy capillary, it has to fold over like a taco to get in because it can’t fit in normal if it’s fully expanded. So there’s not a lot of room for error. And when you start having this inflammation, it causes blockages in the capillaries. So when that happens, you lose circulation downstream. You have what I call a brownout. All the cells on the other side of that inflammation are no longer getting
red blood cells, they’re no longer getting oxygen. Luckily, our body does have a backup generator and that’s called anaerobic respiration. Anaerobic respiration is when they create energy without oxygen. But the problem with it is multi-fold. Number one, it only can produce about 5 % of the energy, it can produce what has oxygen. So immediately the cells are like powering down, they’re not able to do all of their essential functions.
problem is it produces a massive amount of metabolic waste and free radicals and those things damage our mitochondria because our mitochondria are incredibly fragile as we spoke about earlier and they’re right at the heart of it wherever you’re producing energy you have some free radicals but now when you shift over to anaerobic all of a sudden you’re just spitting out all sorts of damaging chemicals if you will and it has no energy so it has no way to actually clear it and so it becomes
I kind of call it’s like a doom loop, which is it starts with dysfunction the dysfunction causes more free radicals which causes more damage and dysfunction and Soon enough, you know, you’ve got these kind of almost zombie cells. They’re just having a hard time Doing anything and then when you do IWA what’s amazing is the oxygen because it’s Inside the plasma it can get through those blockages. So it immediately starts to feed those
downstream cells the oxygen they’ve been starving but more importantly than that immediate fix if you will is they cause an anti-inflammatory effect and this was another like big aha in my healing journeys when I realized
There’s plenty of research on this. Anywhere in your body you have inflammation, you have the hypoxia, which is the fancy medical term for oxygen starvation. So inflammation means local oxygen starvation. And anywhere you have oxygen starvation, you have inflammation. They go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other.
And so when we restore oxygen, even in the circulatory system, we can turn off that inflammation that’s happening in our capillaries, reestablish normal blood flow. So you get done doing your EWOT sessions. And Von Arden discovered this. had elderly people, he looked at their capillaries and their throughput, and he had them do just a couple sessions of EWOT, and they came back weeks later, and their microcirculation was still reestablished to more youthful levels. So he was able to open them back up where red blood
cells were able to deliver oxygen.
really at the root of it all is, you know, every chronic illness you can think of, it has inflammation. Right? mean, there’s not one Alzheimer’s, cancer, autoimmunity, the list goes on and on, name one and it has chronic inflammation. And there’s actually, there’s a gentleman, Arthur Guyton, he wrote the textbook, Medical Physiology, and every doctor any of us has ever gone to had to use that medical physiology book.
when they went to medical school, it’s been the standard across the world for over 50 years. And he has this great quote where he says all disease at its root is lack of oxygen. And it’s really true because once the mitochondria break down and we start having inflammation, all the negative effects come from downstream from that. And so that was kind of my. Aha. Light bulb moment, which is if I can turn my mitochondria on it, and I can turn down the inflammation and eventually turn off the inflammation.
then like my body will have energy to get ahead. can start to repair itself. It can start to detoxify the immune system. Then we’ll have energy to do everything it needs to do and help, you know, kind of kick on and start to fight a good battle, so to speak.
Cheryl McColgan (26:58)
Yeah, I mean, I want to go back to how this actually helped you and how you actually found one and all that stuff. But my brain is just going, the one thing that I keep coming to hearing your explanation, and that was an amazing explanation, by the way, for lay people, I can tell you’re an engineer or so. The system where you’re talking about going all the way to the capillaries, I heart disease is the number one killer, right? And we have, I think a lot of it is the chronic inflammation that you’re talking about, but.
Obviously once that process is already done, you’re describing how the capillaries can’t get any red blood cells. So to me, it would make perfect sense that this might be not only did it help you in your disease process with Lyme disease and the arthritis and everything, but it seems like it would be pretty amazing for cardiovascular patients or people that don’t have good blood flow, like that on top of the mitochondrial benefit.
Brad Pitzele (27:41)
Hmm
It’s actually, we are helping folks with everything from autoimmunity, cancer, Lyme, long COVID, chronic fatigue, Parkinson’s, heart disease, so many things, because if you can turn off the inflammation and you can give the body energy to heal, it will do just amazing things.
That was kind of like the shocking thing to me when I first got into it. was like, wait a second. Like every time I was treating myself as a pin cushion and trying something new, I always had to the question like, what if this doesn’t work?
and like what damage could I be doing? know, because there were things that were a little bit risky to be quite honest, where I found out risks, you know, a little bit too late for my liking. But this was one where was like, it’s oxygen. And like, so it was kind of shocking when I started looking at the benefits and I was like, this is kind of crazy that we’re talking about something as simple as oxygen with all these health benefits. But yeah, we’ve had folks with all sorts of different chronic cardiovascular conditions
Cheryl McColgan (28:31)
Right.
Brad Pitzele (28:48)
Now, there’s a lot of health benefits to it, but the other crazy thing about oxygen is there’s all these athletic performance benefits. And this is important because directly to your cardiovascular component, which is actually a lot of Olympic teams have used EWAT to improve their athletic performance. because athletic teams are very science driven, there’s some really good research on it showing it improves VO2 max, reduces recovery time.
improves short-term memory, it improves power output, et cetera. And all of this is really due to being able to fuel our cells and our muscles more, and also helping clear out all that metabolic waste, because that metabolic waste primarily develops when you have a shortage of oxygen when you’re exercising.
Cheryl McColgan (29:34)
Amazing that something so simple could be so hugely beneficial. So once you finally saw this, you’re like, Werber knew this about cancer and this guy’s onto this exercise with oxygen thing. Like, well, how do you do it? Where do you get it? Like nobody’s ever seen this before. I think like you’re saying the athletic teams might have it and stuff, but I mean, I’ve certainly never been anywhere where I’ve seen like, hey, get EWOT therapy here. So how did you find it?
Brad Pitzele (29:56)
Yeah,
it’s really, really kind of a rare thing. 15 years ago, it was incredibly rare. There really wasn’t anywhere to go. You could find it occasionally. You might find it in a chiropractor’s office here or there or some sort of recovery clinic. Nowadays, they’re more widespread. So there are places that do it, doctors, chiropractors. But for me, there were a couple of folks selling it, but they were…
I didn’t have a whole lot of faith.
There was no customer reviews. was no customers talking about it on chat. It was just them as the company and they, a lot of them spoke in superlatives and like marketing speak that it just didn’t make me feel really comfortable. And they were very expensive too. you know, they were maybe the cheapest was 5,000 and the most expensive one I saw was 25,000. and it was this kind of cross hatch of I didn’t have confidence and geez, that’s a lot of money for this next experiment when the last
Cheryl McColgan (30:31)
yeah.
Brad Pitzele (30:49)
26 behind me didn’t do anything or 57 or whatever it was. So that’s when I kind of decided, did a little bit more research and decided I was going to try to build my own.
Cheryl McColgan (31:00)
Yeah, was thinking that I was like, I was an engineer, the next thing would be like, can I just build this? So that’s what you did, obviously, right?
Brad Pitzele (31:06)
I did it out of necessity because I just didn’t have faith. I built my own. didn’t think it was, I’ll be honest, I didn’t think this was gonna be my solution. Nothing else was. And I started doing it and…
You know, slowly but surely I started to walk out of that basement, that proverbial basement. I just kept taking steps up and up. At first it was subtle and then it was kind of all at once sort of thing where I was shocked. You know, was like things like, my gosh, my brain fog’s gone. I’m like focusing in a meeting or I just got down on the floor and played with the kids and I don’t need to lay in bed for two days in pain. And you know, slowly but surely I just felt better and better.
And it wasn’t until I saw that same doctor again, and he was like, wow, you’re like a year later. And he was like, wow, you’re so much better. What did you do? And I told him, and he’s like, wow, would you consider selling them to my patients? And that was kind of the, you know, jumping off point where I was like, well, gosh, yeah, maybe we could help other people with this.
Cheryl McColgan (32:04)
Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m
so glad, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s always an interesting thing on podcasts because sometimes you get, I think not on this particular podcast, but other ones, it’s like people that kind of are just selling stuff, you know, or snake oil things or whatever. But what I really love is when there are people that, you know, had their own health problem, they dive into the research, they try it all there, use themselves as an experiment as a pin cushion, as you said, and then they find something that actually works. And then they
they make it so that they can share it with everybody else. don’t just keep it to yourself, because I’m sure it kind of felt like a miracle at the time if something finally worked for you.
Brad Pitzele (32:41)
You know, it really was. I was, because the hardest part is also when you’re in these groups and you’re talking to all these other folks and they’re like, oh, try this, nothing worked and then this worked. And you try that thing and it didn’t work. You you try 57 other different things, as I was saying, and you kind of just start losing any hope. You’re like, I don’t think, I think I’m just that case that there’s nothing that’s going to work.
But yeah, when you do find it, it’s, yeah, it’s obviously life changing, even having hope and like, I always tell folks like when you’re really sick, it’s not about, you wanna get to 100%, like 100 % is amazing, it’s the dream we all have when we’re sick, but.
more important than 100 % is like feeling better this week than last week or this month than last month because at some point when you’re in it, you just lose a lot of hope and it becomes kind of this like the spiral downward that you just don’t believe in anything and it just lowers you spiritually I just say. And having something to know like, hey,
Yeah, it still kinda stinks, but like, remember a month ago it was worse, and so like, now you’re like, yeah, I can’t wait to see how I’m gonna be two months from now, you know, or where am gonna be by this summer sort of thing? Like, it was, it’s kinda the exact opposite. It’s kinda like this hope spiral, if you will.
Cheryl McColgan (33:55)
Yeah. Well, it’s kind of that’s something that I think it’s good to point out for people too, is that, you you mentioned there is all this research on this. There’s a lot of good science to back up mitochondrial health, that’s kind of mitochondrial health is kind of a long game. And it’s kind of something that you have to continually do not over, you know, just a few days and you’re going to feel so much better. It’s week after week, month after month, the more that you support your mitochondrial health, the more chance you have of really feeling better. So it’s not just this thing where
you can try it for a week and you’re like, that doesn’t work. You have to keep up on it for a while, right?
Brad Pitzele (34:24)
Yeah.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right in general speaking. mean, we have…
people come to me and they ask like, how long am I going to have to do this for? I tell them is, I can’t say how long until you get to the top of the mountain, so to speak, but I find that most folks who get to the top of the mountain, they feel so good when they do it, they don’t ever want to stop. And some of those folks never really exercised, they hated it, but now they’re like, it’s like 15 minutes, I do it three or five times a week, and I feel amazing, so why wouldn’t I do it? And we talked about that capillary thinning,
Cheryl McColgan (34:52)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Pitzele (34:58)
That’s actually a chronic thing that happens to all of us in Western society. And so this is something that’s anti-aging at that very kind of cellular level. So I recommend it for folks, but.
I guess for me when I was really sick, always say one of the hardest parts was the ceremony is this what they call them. Counting pills every night, doing this protocol, doing that protocol. You keep adding, like if there’s 10 more minutes in your day, you add 10 more minutes of some protocol that you’re hoping will make you feel better. And then you get to a point where you realize you’re spending six hours of your day, you know, just all you’re doing is these protocols and it just becomes overwhelming. like, even if I felt better, what’s the purpose of all I’m doing is going from
from the sauna to the this and I’m doing this pill and I’m doing that. And that’s kind of the, what I found, one of the things I really loved about EWOD was it was something I could do consistently in my home, 15 minutes a day. And it helps with your mitochondrial health. It helps with detoxification. It helps with energy. So it’s like, multiple, it’s kind of multifaceted in the way it benefits you.
relatively short period of time.
Cheryl McColgan (36:07)
Yeah, and you mentioned,
and I want to be respectful of your time. know we’re kind of getting a little bit long here, but one of the other things when in respect to mitochondrial health is red light therapy. And there’s also a ton of great research on that. And so I kind of wasn’t surprised when I went to your website that that’s something that you also got into. I mean, I think that’s when you look at the number and the breadth of research on that, I think it’s pretty undeniable that it is good for people that serves a real purpose, that it does help the mitochondria. So at what point,
Brad Pitzele (36:34)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (36:35)
after you found the EWAT,
I’m assuming you kind of got on this mitochondrial health thing and then maybe stumbled into that stuff. that how it went or is there something else?
Brad Pitzele (36:44)
Yeah, I started looking at it early on, probably about six months after I was doing EWOT, four to six months right in there I’d say, I started doing Red Light. So you’re right, there’s like tens of thousands of peer-reviewed research studies out there and what it does. They work really interestingly together.
Because we mentioned EWAT, when you do it, you increase the supply of oxygen massively, right? It’s a day of oxygen in 15 minutes. So you’re flooding your body with oxygen. And then if you do red light immediately afterwards, what it does is the way it primarily works is it increases oxygen demand in your mitochondria. So it forces the mitochondria to suck up more oxygen. And when they do that, they produce more energy. So any of the research
you read on red light whether skin health collagen growth bone
mental, brain health, me, athletic recovery performance, healing in general, it all comes from the same thing, is that it’s just forcing our mitochondria to suck up more oxygen and produce more energy. So if you compare those two, you compare them at the same time, you first drive a massive increase in supply of oxygen, and then you increase the mitochondrial demand for it, and so you get this kind of one-two punch.
The interesting thing is why I think we need it in today’s society as well is
we’re actually deficient on red and near infrared light. And the reason is, if you look at the sun, the sun is full spectrum. has everything from ultraviolet and the blues through the reds and the near infrareds. So when you go outside and it changes throughout the day, early and late in the day, you get more of those reds and near infrareds. And at high noon, you get more of the blues. unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, over time as as ⁓
species,
we’ve moved indoors and we started using indoor lighting primarily and we spend more and more time there. And then more recently, we’ve switched from incandescent to LED lighting. Now, LED lighting is very energy efficient and one of ways they make it incredibly energy efficient is they take out all the reds and the near infrareds that we experience as heat because obviously you don’t want your lighting to heat your room. You don’t want it to, everyone sees that as energy.
waste and to that extent you’re trying to use it for lighting it can be. However, that puts us in a place where we spend a lot of time bathed in blue lights and not really getting enough of the reds and the other parts of the spectrum.
Cheryl McColgan (39:27)
Yeah, that’s another
interesting rabbit hole for people to go down if they haven’t already is just the, you know, changing out some of the lighting in your home or using specific lighting for certain scenarios, like in your bedroom and towards night as you’re getting ready to go to sleep. But anyway, I just want to clarify one quick point there, because I’m envisioning, that was actually what I was envisioning when you started talking about the synergy between red light and the EWAT. So do you like do your EWAT with the red light panel like in front of you or do you just do it right after?
Brad Pitzele (39:53)
Yeah.
I prefer to do it right after. The challenge with doing it right on you is to get the best benefit from red light. Red light works on something called a biphasic dose response, fancy science term, which just means the benefits over time look like a bell curve. So too little, you won’t get any benefit. There’s kind of like a just right where you get peak benefit. And then if you do more, it starts diminishing in benefit. It doesn’t harm. It’s just a waste of time, right? So you spent five more minutes to get less sort of thing.
Cheryl McColgan (40:21)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Pitzele (40:22)
with exercising in red light is one, I like to get as much skin exposure as possible so you’re hitting as many mitochondria as possible. And two is you’re moving. So sometimes you’re close to the light, sometimes you’re further away. And so you’re not really able to kind of measure that dose effectively to get inside that biphasic kind of peak zone.
Cheryl McColgan (40:43)
Okay, no, that makes a ton of sense. Although I still am going to put this out to you that, maybe you put at least on, you know, the little face mask while you’re exercising. I feel like you can attach it to the oxygen part, you know, and just put a red light around it. Maybe that’s a little too, maybe that’s a little too much. But anyway, well, Brad, this has been so wonderful. And I just appreciate you so much sharing your whole journey and then how you came to find this.
Brad Pitzele (40:51)
There you go. It makes yours waterproof.
That’d be fun.
Cheryl McColgan (41:09)
If people want to connect with you online or learn more about EWOT and learn more about Red Light, where’s the best place that they can find you and connect with you?
Brad Pitzele (41:17)
Yeah, go to 1000roads.com slash Cheryl and we have a great offer for your listeners. They can check out. You can also ⁓ go to our YouTube channel. put out weekly videos. 1000roads, HQ is our channel. It’s all spelled out, O-N-E-T-H-O-U-S-A-N-D-R-O-A-D-S.com.
Cheryl McColgan (41:25)
Awesome.
Okay, awesome, and
all that will be in the show notes for everyone, so don’t feel like you have to write it down. But Brad, again, thank you so much for coming and sharing your knowledge today, and I really appreciate it.
Brad Pitzele (41:46)
Thank you so much, Cheryl.
In this episode, Cheryl interviews Dr. Christo Frangopoulos about how certain lifestyle factors related to cancer. Most people overlook one of the most powerful tools in preventing cancer: movement. Dr. Christo Frangopoulos reveals surprising facts about how simple lifestyle shifts, like breaking up sedentary time, can drastically cut your risk of cancer and boost your body’s ability to fight it. If you’re tired of just hearing “eat healthy and exercise,” this episode uncovers actionable strategies backed by the latest science to enhance your health span.
Discover why sitting is just as dangerous as smoking when it comes to cancer risk, and learn the practical tips to make movement a seamless part of your day. From how often to get up during work hours to the science of muscle-derived anti-cancer proteins called myokines, Dr. Christo shares insights that can change your approach to health.
We break down the true impact of sedentary behavior, the science behind autophagy and muscle contraction, and the critical role sleep plays in cellular repair and cancer prevention.You’ll also uncover: the truth about alcohol’s relationship with cancer, the importance of inflammation markers like CRP, and why maintaining consistent sleep and circadian rhythms is crucial for lowering risk.
This episode is perfect for anyone looking to take control, whether you’re battling family history or just want to live longer healthier lives.Dr. Christo Frangopoulos is an anesthesiologist, lifestyle medicine expert, and personal trainer known for integrating science-backed strategies to improve health outcomes across the U.S.
His insights on cancer prevention through lifestyle modifications are revolutionary yet accessible, making this a must-listen for health-conscious individuals and medical professionals alike.
Don’t miss this opportunity to turn simple daily habits into potent cancer-fighting tools. Your health journey starts with the right knowledge and this episode delivers it. Hit play now and learn how to reframe your lifestyle for longevity and resilience.
Visit Dr. Frangopoulos at AltasMD360.com
Takeaways* How sedentary behavior independently increases cancer risk, even with regular exercise * The importance of muscle contraction and myokines in fighting cancer * Lifestyle changes that can lower the risk of developing common cancers, especially colorectal cancer in young adults * The critical role of sleep in DNA repair and cancer prevention * The impact of inflammation markers like CRP on cancer risk * Rethinking alcohol consumption and its nuanced effects on health * Practical habit formation techniques, including the ‘two days’ rule for sustainability * Resources for health professionals and individuals via AtlasMD360.com * Book: The Telomere Effect by Elizabeth Blackburn & Elissa Epel A scientific approach to aging and health
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNurshGrow and today I’m really excited to be joined by Dr. Christo Frangopoulos and he is kindly letting me shorten his name to Dr. Chris or Chris, but he will introduce himself here in a moment. And why I really wanted to have Dr. Frangopoulos on today is because he is a board certified anesthesiologist. He’s also a lifestyle medicine doctor and he’s a personal trainer. So, you know, those are all things if you’re a listener to this podcast that I am super excited about and that I love to chat about.
take it from here and just introduce yourself and share with people what you’re all about and what you’re here to talk about today.
Christo (00:35)
Wonderful. Well, I just wanna say thank you so much for having me. This is an honor and I really hope we can reach at least a few people out there to make a difference with the information I’m going to be sharing with Cheryl. As Cheryl said, my name is Christof Rangaples. It’s much easier just to say Chris. I am an anesthesiologist for about a decade now. I have also got board certified in lifestyle medicine and a certified personal trainer and a lot of what I do
is share information that’s evidence-based and science-backed that can optimize people’s lifestyle. As a physician, I travel the country, I’m certified in about 10 different states, and the problem of healthcare is it’s everywhere. And the state of our nation can really utilize a change in how we attack our health.
And I think lifestyle medicine offers so many great tools and it’s super helpful. It’s not overly complicated and can make a huge difference.
Cheryl McColgan (01:39)
It’s so nice to have a doctor on that really appreciates that because I think so often, you we have more of a sick care system than health care system. And I’m sure that we’ll get into that a little bit more. But the fact that you are trained in lifestyle medicine, that you recognize the significance and the importance of it, I think is a huge step in the right direction for the medical field. So I’m so glad that you’re kind of promoting that and you have all that information on your website, all your good programs and continuing education. So I think that will be a huge benefit to the medical community. But one of the things that you’re
Christo (01:49)
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (02:09)
particularly interested when your team reached out is around cancer. And some people that know me personally or know some of my work and some of my writing will know that I have a lot of cancer in my family. And it’s a big reason that I do a lot of the things that I do in my health and my life. So what what have you how did you become interested in cancer specifically? And then let’s start with like what your number one top lifestyle change people can do to prevent cancer.
Christo (02:39)
Sure. So as an anesthesiologist, you can imagine we see every sort of surgery from something simple to very complicated cancer cases. And over my years, I’ve seen a lot of cancer surgeries and how they’ve affected.
their families, their communities, and it really is a, it’s something that every one of us have experience with, whether it’s yourself or a family member or a friend or a coworker, we are all affected by cancer and it is everywhere. But the truth of the matter is a lot of lifestyle change can actually make a huge difference in our cancer rates across the country.
And most people probably don’t know this, but only about five to 10 % of cancers are from inherited gene mutations. Okay, so the other 90 % are often attributed to either a lifestyle or environmental exposures. So, you know, a lot of people think they’re destined to get cancer because their family member has a cancer or whatnot. That is a small chunk of cancer.
It is actually our lifestyle and environmental exposures that can affect getting cancer, how we respond to cancer, and the aftermath of that, either being successful in treatment or not. And there’s a lot of things we can do for it.
Cheryl McColgan (04:12)
Yeah, just to drive that point home, share that we were talking before we started recording and Dr. Christo was just kindly asking me if there was any, you know, thing to avoid around cancer because I had said that it’s a lot in my family and it’s been a while and it’s always going to be hard. But my dad, when I was around, he was one of the first runners in the running boom, always going to the health food store, did all these super healthy lifestyle behaviors before this was really popular. And so was quite shocking, you know, when he ended up having these multiple cancer diagnosis later in
But as a young man, he, we lived in the south, we live in Louisiana, and this is in the 70s before a lot of OSHA things and whatever, and he worked in chemical plants. And he was a chemist by trade. you know, so I’m pretty fully convinced that for him, it was those environmental factors that you spoke of. So in addition to being in an environment like that, that’s kind of an obvious situation. What are maybe some things that aren’t as obvious that people might be exposed to that they can limit in order to prevent cancer?
Christo (05:10)
Yeah, and not to scare anyone right now, but it’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re being sedentary, we’re sitting down right now. it is, sedentary behavior is ubiquitous in our culture, right? It’s how we do work every day. A lot of people sit at their desks in the office and there’s sometimes little movement. Well, we know a lot of things, what are causes of cancer and actually sedentary behavior.
Even if you meet all of the activity guidelines, sedentary behavior itself is an independent risk factor for getting cancer. Of course, there’s a bunch of numbers with these, but it’s something that a lot of people don’t even think about. And an easy solution is trying to get up and get moving every so often. For myself, am I stuck at an office or in an operating room case, in their long cases, I make sure I’m getting up.
every single hour on the hour, something I can remember just to get moving. And we’ll talk more in depth about this, but movement itself is as a prevention for not only cancer, but a number of other things. But yes, sedentary behavior is a big one that we really don’t think about very much. And a lot of us are exposed to that.
Cheryl McColgan (06:27)
Yeah, and I just want to I kind of want to build on something that you said just to make it super clear for people because I know this information, but if this is the first time somebody’s hearing it, they might not understand it. So I think the recommendation right now is correct me if I’m wrong, because I know you’ll know the right answer to this. It’s like 150 minutes per week of physical activity for most adults. Right. But you’re I think what you’re saying is, OK, say you do that. You go to the gym and you do your 150 minutes. That’s not the end. It’s actually been that eight hours that you’re sitting at your desk is still putting that on top
Christo (06:45)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yep.
Yes.
Yes, so you are correct. It is 100, so the physical activity guidelines is 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity activity per week. It could also be 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous intensity activity or a combination of both knowing that one minute of vigorous intensity activity is equal to two minutes of moderate intensity activity. All that being aside.
150 minutes of moderate activity per week is the goal. It’s something easy to remember. But yes, this sedentary behavior is independent of that. So if you’re going to the gym and you’re hitting all your marks, it doesn’t give you license so much to go home and be a cash potato the rest of the day. And that’s kind of the idea here. When we look at all of these different factors, it really comes down to getting your blood flowing.
No, it’s more than that, that’s simplistic explanation. But the simple answer is get your butt up, get moving, get your blood flowing, and it’s something that we have to make it habitual. And again, we have such a sedentary lifestyle, it doesn’t mean we’re not doing anything, it just means that we’re sitting at a chair at the office, we’re at the desk all day, we’re typing on the computer. It’s just how our lives are built.
So we therefore have to change the environment around us to make sure that we aren’t so sedentary. And there’s a number of things that we can do for that.
Cheryl McColgan (08:30)
So what would be some of your favorite tips for people? mean, I think you mentioned saying getting up on the hour, everybody has a cell phone nowadays, so setting alarms or using apps. What are some other things besides that that people might do to kind of combat this sedentary behavior?
Christo (08:36)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sure, so that’s a big one for me. It’s something very easy to remember. On the hour, every hour, get up and get moving. Now if you’re at the office or if you’re somewhere where you’re not at home, make sure you are going to the restroom that’s farthest away from you, using the kitchen or water fountain that’s not close to you, walking up and down the stairs just to get moving. It doesn’t have to be difficult. It doesn’t have to be
You know, I have to meet these marks. The simple answer is just get up, get moving, incorporate it into your day that’s seamless. That’s something that easy to remember for you. Maybe it’s you have a favorite coffee station at the office, whatever may be, just try to make it make sure that you’re able to incorporate as much movement as you can.
Cheryl McColgan (09:37)
I think that’s really clear. So we want people to go to the gym. We want them to be strength training so they can prevent sarcopenia, maintain their muscle mass. That’s all great for metabolic health, but we also just need people to just get out of the chair from their desk or away from the TV and just move
Christo (09:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
one of the most simple things that we can be doing to prevent cancer. And of course, there is more to
exercise in cancer prevention. We’re talking about sedentary behavior, but it also can go from light to moderate activity, vagus activity, and then meeting the guidelines. They all have their unique benefits, and we can talk about that if you’d like.
But the sedentary behavior I think is just one of the most more shocking ones that people just may not know about
Cheryl McColgan (10:18)
Yes, totally agree with that statement from just getting moving because I think like I said before, people think they go to the gym and that’s good enough. That’s not that’s not the end of the story. But you did touch on one I would like to maybe chat about a little bit more. And that was the use of exercise maybe in a different way. So I was very focused on fasting for a while when Dr. Urashimo I’m going to mess up his name. I’ll put it in the show notes. But you know, when they first kind of discovered a Toshi back in 2016, and I learned about fast.
Christo (10:35)
Yeah.
You
Cheryl McColgan (10:47)
And
I was very focused on that for a while. But now that I’ve gotten older, my bigger concern is maintaining muscle mass as I get over the age of 50. And so I’ve kind of stopped that because I also learned that exercise actually promotes autophagy really strongly. And maybe I’ll just have you actually talk about autophagy in a more scientific way so that people understand its relation to cancer. So maybe if you could talk about that with exercise, that would be awesome.
Christo (11:13)
Yeah, so I think how I relate this is something called myokines. When we exercise, you get our bodies moving and our muscles are contracting, they release something called myokines into the bloodstream. The simple answer is myokines are anti-cancer proteins. And the more we contract our muscles, the more these anti-cancer agents are moving around our bloodstream and
not only are we able to more effectively kill cancer cells, it is something that’s going to promote, really just promote overall health in general, not just cancer, but everything else as well. There’s actually a recent study in 2025 about breast cancer, it’s out of Oxford, I believe, and they talk specifically about these myokines, and it was something
Don’t quote me exactly on the number, but it was just one bout of vigorous intensity activity. It increased their blood circulating myokines by like up to 30 % and they exposed those myokines to breast cancer cells. And actually that number, the rate of growth was reduced by 30%. So it just goes to show how effective muscle contraction and movement is in
the anti-cancer in our body’s ability to fight cancer off.
Cheryl McColgan (12:35)
Yeah, I will share. And I mean, again, not to bring it back to the but I think it’s really relevant to what you’re saying is I mentioned that my dad was kind of in the running boom and he had always lifted weight. He was like Jack Lilley basically, which was why it was such a shock that this but anyway, when he got this more serious diagnosis of cancer, I’m really convinced that the reason he did so well for so long was because every time he did a treatment, he got right back to his three days a week strength training, running, playing golf, super active, never let that go.
Christo (12:45)
⁓ wonderful. Yeah.
Absolutely.
Cheryl McColgan (13:04)
for the longest
Christo (13:04)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (13:05)
time. And so I think that that actually helped not only helped his quality of life while he was living with cancer, but also probably got him further down the road. I really think that’s true.
Christo (13:11)
Yeah.
100%, there is so much robust science about this. a lot of, you of course, after something gets a diagnosis of cancer, of course, your body’s going through changes and it is even more difficult to get up and get moving, going to gym and doing those things. So kudos to your father and anyone else who has gone through that to make sure they’re giving their body the exercise they need because it’s not only
It’s exercise is not just a ⁓ healthy lifestyle modification. It’s an actual biological intervention that helps fight cancer. Like it is proven. It is not just, it’s not a replacement for your chemotherapies and your surgeries and whatnot, but it absolutely reduces your risk of getting cancer. It improves your survival if you do get cancer.
and there is only benefits from this. So this is just a really hard point to make that exercise is proven to improve your survival in a number of different ways. We’re talking about cancer today, but there’s a number of other things as well.
Cheryl McColgan (14:28)
it’s pretty much the cure for everything, right? If you really want to look at it, it is. Yes.
Christo (14:30)
It is. It is. And it’s free. It’s free. We can all
do it. You know? Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (14:36)
I know it’s very
exciting. Well, most of us, know, thankfully. So on that note, there is, I think I’d be remiss not to at least mention this and maybe get your thoughts on this. Because as you said, you’re in the operating rooms, you’ve seen all these different kinds of cancer. Have any of your colleagues or you yourself had any thoughts on the significant rise of colon cancer in young people? ⁓ Are we thinking processed food? Are we thinking other lifestyle factors? Kind of what’s your sense of it after being in the trenches with that?
Christo (14:57)
Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, very astute question because that’s actually the statistic I believe is colorectal cancer is the only cancer that is rising in people under the age of 50. And more recently, you know, this is early 2026, James Vanderbeek passed away, which a lot of us know from like Dawson’s Creek and you know, other movies.
and Chadwick Boseman, another big time actor, and they both passed away from colorectal cancer at young ages. And sometimes it’s a difficult pill to swallow when these people, you know, we don’t know them, but they’re part of our formative years. And the good thing about, and I don’t say good thing, but maybe the positive silver lining is it’s bringing awareness to people that this is something.
Now, do we know why colorectal cancer is increasing in this specific age group? No. As you alluded to, could very well be what’s environmental exposures and I’m not saying this specifically to those gentlemen, but it can be a number of things. We don’t know the exact answer. We do know there’s a lot of different risk factors
for colorectal cancer that a lot of people do have and it’s present in our nutrition system and how the United States is kind of set up. And it’s a lot of processed foods, it’s processed meats, it’s adiposity when you’re carrying some extra weight and obesity, being overweight, all of those things play a role into cancer.
Real briefly, this is something that I think a lot of people may not know, but obesity itself is a chronic form of low-grade inflammation, okay? So your body is under this chronic inflammatory state when you have obesity. And the reason that’s important is because when we have bodily inflammation,
that increases the risk for mutations in our DNA, in our cells, and that’s exactly how cancers can arise.
Cheryl McColgan (17:11)
So would that mean also, I think the most common marker that people probably get when they go to their annual checkup is an HSCRP, which is kind of a marker of general inflammation in the body. So would it be accurate to say that if you have a higher HSCRP that you are probably slightly more at risk for cancers and that would be a thing to maybe consider trying to actively lower?
Christo (17:19)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so CRP is one of the, ⁓ C-reactive protein is one of the markers for inflammation. There are a number of other ones, cortisol being ⁓ another big one. I don’t wanna say, I don’t wanna say for certain that yes, that is, that’s true, because our body undergoes inflammation. Rewind a second. When you get a lab ⁓ test done, that is one point in time.
Right, it’s that day. So it’s hard, you’re not gonna be testing your CRP every single day to know are you always under the same state of inflammation. That being said, your body undergoes inflammation for a number of reasons. And sometimes inflammation isn’t bad. Sometimes it’s reactive and appropriate for what we’re doing. But yes, in the general sense, if you have…
maybe like dietary inflammation, if your body isn’t sleeping properly and your body’s in a general state that’s heightened for inflammation, then yes, those kinds of things on a long-term basis are more what we’re aiming for here. One lab test, it depends. It can be a number of different things. There’s also a lot of…
different medical states and conditions that can increase your CRP. So it’s not always like a perfect marker. It may be a clue and your healthcare provider can kind of clue you in to like put the whole picture together, but every individual is very different. And as I said, it’s kind of a one marker in time. So lab tests can be helpful, but it’s just not the end all be all.
Cheryl McColgan (19:06)
Yeah, understood. Just kind of wondered if there was any association there. And you mentioned one of my favorite words when you were just answering that question, that is sleep. I think it’s one of the most underappreciated health.
elixirs basically for people and that so many people struggle with it. ⁓ But how would you describe sleep’s relation to cancer? I know a lot of the stuff about sleep’s relation to possible Alzheimer’s prevention, but I haven’t necessarily heard as much about cancer, so I’d love to hear your views on that.
Christo (19:18)
Yes. yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple of things to know regarding sleep and cancer. And I’m gonna draw back a discussion I had with a patient where they were like, I’m exercising all the time, I’m eating well, I’m getting all my minute guidelines, my stress is well managed. And then you dive a little bit deeper and they’re like, oh, I only sleep four or five hours of night. And I’m like, oh, why are you doing that?
Well, you know, they’re crazy busy. They’re always productive. And we kind of take a step back and get more of a clue of, you know, the whole picture of that patient. And it was telling because as you mentioned, sleep, a lot of people, we almost treat it as an afterthought. You know, it’s at the end of the day, we kind of get in our beds and go. However, sleep is so critical
for our overall health that it really needs to get more of a bright light on it because it’s that important. And the relationship to cancer is actually, it’s very clear and I’ll tell you why. At night, throughout the day, 24 hours, your body is always undergoing maintenance. Your body’s always fixing damaged DNA, fixing
cells that are damaged for whatever reason and we’re repairing them or we’re scheduling them for apoptosis and getting them out of our bodies. Now that happens all 24 hours, but it’s way more active when we’re sleeping. It’s when the maintenance workers of our body are going to work and that happens at night. So if you’re not getting enough sleep, we are, or quality sleep.
We are not restoring, we’re not repairing those DNA in the cells and those mutations. It’s almost like a glitch in the system where these mutations occur and then they live on and they thrive. the more and more those mutations grow, that’s when you get a tumor. So when we don’t get that sleep at night, our maintenance workers aren’t working and those mutations kind of can grow into cancer more easily.
Cheryl McColgan (21:43)
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And what would you what would your advice be to people? I mean, I’ve written about this a lot. So there’s some free resources on my website for better sleep. And I do all the things I am committed to sleep. You know, I have the cooling bed, the cooling bed, the dark room, the I like everything. So there’s all those kind of tips. But if somebody wants to do something without devices, and without drugs in particular, I think that people
Christo (21:53)
Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Sure.
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (22:08)
I’d love to hear your perspective on that and kind of what are some more natural ways people can approach doing this that aren’t devices that don’t cost a lot of extra money.
Christo (22:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, we can talk a lot about this. think it’s actually, ironically, it’s sleep awareness week right now. So it’s, ⁓ yeah, it’s a big topic right now. So what can you do? So you mentioned a lot of things regarding sleep environment, where you’re sleeping in a cool, dark place, cool, dark and quiet place, not silent, but quiet. And a lot of people focus on that, which is really good.
Cheryl McColgan (22:23)
Nice.
Christo (22:40)
But something that people may not know is what we do during the day matters very much how good quality of sleep we get at night. And this is not going to be a shocker, but one of the best activities that you can do during the day to get more quality sleep, a higher level of deep sleep, is exercise. exercise really is just a panacea for everything.
⁓ But the reason being is when you exercise, your body’s obviously working a lot harder and its body temperature goes up. Well, a few hours after, your body temperature starts to cool down and that’s exactly what we would like for sleep. So it’s just something that every single day we wanna incorporate some sort of exercise for that.
And there are a number of other things like the three two one zero rule if you’ve heard of that or we could talk about that. ⁓
Cheryl McColgan (23:39)
Yeah,
I’m not familiar with that one. So I’d love it if you’d share that
Christo (23:41)
Yes, yeah, yeah, the three, two, one, zero rule. It’s something easy to remember because of the numbers, but three hours before bed, you don’t have any more food. Are you able to do a light snack? Sure. But you don’t want to have your dinner too close to bedtime. You want to give your body enough time for digestion. If you’re eating too close to meals, excuse me, too close to bedtime, you can have indigestion. You can have a number of different things that can cause disruption to your sleep.
Two hours before bed, no work or no stimulation. You really want to, yeah, I know, I’m a culprit of this. It is, it is. It’s one of those things where I’m like, what’s the phrase? ⁓ Don’t do as I say. Yes, that’s it. Yep, so I’m a bad one on that, because I’m a workaholic. But yes, no more work two hours before bed. And it’s really just trying to unwind and kind of decrease your stimulation. That’s the real reason.
Cheryl McColgan (24:13)
That’s a hard one.
Do as I say, not as I do.
Christo (24:38)
One hour before bed, no screen time. And this is something where I say, mean it, no screen time. Blue, I talked to a sleep medicine doctor last year or so, and she’s a great friend of mine. And she just says, how many people are, we’re all so glued to our phones. And not only that, it’s like a fifth appendage where we’re sleeping, it’s right next to our beds. And the, one of the best tips that she gave me was,
to use an actual alarm clock. Get that phone away from your bed. You don’t need it when you’re in the bedroom. It’s, know, emergencies happen and whatnot, so you can have it somewhere nearby, but it doesn’t need to be an arm’s length. anyway, no screen time after one hour before bed. And then the zero is a little bit different. It’s the number of snoozes were allowed, or ideally allowed, zero.
Cheryl McColgan (25:34)
you
Christo (25:36)
And that really focuses on having a consistent wake time. And that’s even something that we wanna do on our days off from work. And the reason being actually does relate to one of the risk factors for cancer is circadian rhythm disruption. If you have a consistent wake time, your body is just much happier.
it works more efficiently. The nighttime maintenance things that we talked about are more, just work better. And you really, you keep that wake time and then if you have to adjust your bedtime, you adjust your bedtime to something earlier. But a consistent wake time is something that is a forever rule of thumb if we’re able to.
Cheryl McColgan (26:21)
Well good, I’ve got to work on the zero and the two probably a little bit for myself. ⁓
Christo (26:27)
Yeah, yes, none
of us are going to be perfect at this. An 80-20 rule, try to aim for 80 % of these, 20%, give yourself some grace.
Cheryl McColgan (26:36)
Yes, progress over perfection, one of my favorite things. So ⁓ one thing that we didn’t hit on yet that I think is fairly important for cancer stuff, and I think it’s, it’s good because there’s a trend, there’s a downward trend in alcohol consumption, I think since the pandemic, basically. And I think everyone has always known that alcohol consumption is related to cancer, but somehow it wasn’t being driven home as much as it has maybe the last
Christo (26:39)
Yes, exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (27:06)
five to 10 years. So we’d just love to get your thoughts on that. mean, nobody wants to hear this if you like, you know, having a glass of wine with your steak or something like that. But, but I think, you know, minimizing these things, like we’re talking about minimizing environmental exposures, maximizing sleep, I mean, can we talk a little bit about it? Because it’s going to be unpopular, but it is a thing.
Christo (27:08)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So I try to tiptoe just to be gentle with this because people do have strong feelings like I want my red wine at night and you can’t convince me otherwise. There’s a lot of topics to talk about. There’s a lot of discussion points. The plain answer here is no amount of alcohol is
Cheryl McColgan (27:28)
you
Christo (27:44)
helpful for your health, okay? So there’s no benefit to it. Some people who drink red wine say there’s, you know, the, my God, nitro, it’s skipping my, yes, Reservatrol, yes, thank you so much. Is helpful for you, yes, it is, but so are having a handful of grapes and you don’t have to have it in a wine form. ⁓ So there’s,
Cheryl McColgan (27:52)
Reservitrol.
I think I read that to get enough Reservatrol,
you’d have to drink like 25 barrels of wine or something to get so it’s like, it’s not even a thing.
Christo (28:08)
Exactly. Yeah. It’s one of those reasons that Hawaiian connoisseurs are like, yeah, well,
it’s fine. I’m one of those people where you have to enjoy life too. it’s, you know, take everything with a grain of salt. But yeah. And then a lot of people actually bring up like the blue zones. Have you heard of the blue zones before? Yeah. Perfect. So blue zones, one of the discussion points
Cheryl McColgan (28:27)
Absolutely. Yeah, we talked about it a little bit on the podcast.
Christo (28:35)
is having red wine in moderation during meals when you’re socializing. So when you’re watching Netflix having a bottle of red wine, it’s not the same as having a glass of wine slowly over a couple hours with dinner socializing, which is a protective factor for your health. So it’s a little bit different. It’s kind of a scenario.
⁓ but yeah, they used to kind of say two drinks for men, one drink for women per day. That’s, that’s changed. There’s another, the most recent administration came out with new dietary guidelines, for Americans just maybe a month ago or so. lots of talking points there. We won’t go too into that, but there is one regarding alcohol and they
They kind of, I’m trying to word this correctly, they said enjoying some alcohol in moderation isn’t advised, but it’s it’s okay to do, which I think where they’re coming from with that is trying to have social connections, it’s a, because the reality is a lot of people do enjoy alcohol together and it brings people together and there are,
health benefits to that. The alcohol standpoint, as I said, no organizations recommend any healthy amount of alcohol, but there is something to be said about enjoying your life and having social connections and bringing people together. And I think that is positive. I think they at least nailed that part for sure. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (30:13)
Yeah, and I would agree with you that I think that that having traveled extensively in the Mediterranean that that is where, you know, there’s a lot of issues with those Blue Zone studies, right? We don’t need to go into all that today. But I think that the one that probably everybody can agree on is the importance of community and support systems and the amount of movement that all of those zones get. They’re very active. They have this great support and connection and they have this community that a lot of other places in the world don’t have. So whatever you think about their diet or their wine consumption or
Christo (30:24)
Yes, yeah.
Yeah.
100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (30:43)
of that I think that
we can agree on the rest of it for sure.
Christo (30:47)
Yeah, you’re nailing
it on the head because when we have these discussions, if you see these other very in-depth evidence-based discussions online, we’re really zooming in on one little thing. And the reality is it’s the totality of our lifestyle that affects our health outcomes. Having a glass of wine, I’m not gonna say don’t do it.
But what’s the rest of your health look like? What’s rest of your lifestyle look like? We have to be reasonable about it and not getting a good night’s sleep here and there, no big deal. But if it’s a consistent chronic issue, sure, then you address something. But a lot of us have the idea of any 20 or progress over perfection. It’s just the idea of trying to do our best to improve and giving ourselves some grace.
as we alluded to way back when, in the beginning of this conversation, what we’re doing right now for most people in this country, we’re not successful with our health. We just simply aren’t. And so we have to start addressing these issues more head on and figuring out what can we start changing? And that kind of brings up another point. A lot of us know what’s healthy. We know what’s healthy, but we’re not so good at
how to make effective change and how to keep those change long, you know, as a sustainable habits for ourselves. And I think that’s something that we could all kind of work on, especially the health and fitness professionals teaching people how to do those things.
Cheryl McColgan (32:26)
Yeah, that’s that’s one of the huge focuses of my work is to have my background in psychology. So the whole habit change is something that’s been a very long time interest of mine. And so it’s Yeah. So since you brought Thank you. Yeah. Since you brought that up, I want to be respectful of your time. But I think just one final one final actionable thing that we could have here is in you. Like you said, you’ve been a personal trainer, your lifestyle, medicine, doctor, that probably is the biggest challenge for me. I think everybody at this point
Christo (32:32)
⁓ yes.
Yeah, I saw the 30 day challenge too. Love it. Love it.
No, it’s okay.
Cheryl McColgan (32:56)
they should be doing, they know they should be moving more, know they should be eating better, they know they shouldn’t be drinking too much, but at the execution of it. So what would be your best tips for people on how to actually make changes in your experience? Like what’s been the most successful?
Christo (32:59)
Yeah. Yeah. Mmm.
Yeah,
really good question. So I am a big proponent of utilizing the current routines you have and adding on to them. It’s a lot harder to start something brand new. So if you’re able to, so say in the morning you already, you you brush your teeth, you wash your face. Well, you know, start adding in healthy habits to that existing routine and do that. Most habits take a.
The science says 66 days if you’re doing it every single day. It’s really about the repetition. And our brains, they’re neuroplastic. So we can learn to do these things. We can be successful in them. The idea is just making sure we do them repetitively enough that it sticks. Just like swinging a baseball bat and learning how to play baseball or work on the computer and getting better at typing or whatever analogy you wanna use. We can do that with our lifestyle as well.
And I think most of us have some sort of routines already. So we wanna kinda zoom out, look at our routines. What can you add into that routine that’s going to improve your health? What are you trying to improve? And once you kinda get that awareness, you’re able to add something in. Do it every single day. I use the rule of twos. I kinda made this up, but for two months, do a new habit for two months.
without missing two consecutive days. And that is something that kind of, again, points to the consistency repetition. And then once you get that, add onto it. Start small and build up, and over time, you’re gonna have this considerable change that’s gonna be really, make a big impact on your health. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (34:51)
Yeah, I love that two days rule because part of that you mentioned the 30 day challenge part of it was like not making people overly stressed about it like hey, if you miss a day, it’s fine. But the challenge with that is it’s okay to miss a day, but you don’t want to miss like two, three, four, then all of a sudden, it’s not a habit anymore. So I love that just don’t miss two days in a row. That’s very good.
Christo (34:59)
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah,
easy to remember.
Cheryl McColgan (35:11)
so we’ve covered some awesome information today. And I’m really excited for people to connect with you. Can you share your website, tell them about some of the programs we talked about before we have for professionals for regular folks, what are all the good things that people can learn from you?
Christo (35:25)
Yeah, absolutely. So atlasmd360.com, it has a bunch of resources, a of free resources as well. You can do a health audit assessment, you can take some quizzes, there’s a free 30 minute course, there are free resources on how to improve your ⁓ heart lab work, and a bunch of other things. And if you are a professional looking for continuing education,
There are approved accredited programs for health and wellness coaches, personal trainers, and AMA category one credits for a bunch of physicians and NPs and PAs. And then if you are non-professional and you’re looking to improve any part of your lifestyle, there are programs for you as well. But overall, we have a lot of free resources and I just, hope when I these podcasts, I honestly just hope
One person learned something good that they can take away from this and make some positive difference.
Cheryl McColgan (36:23)
Well, Dr. Frangopoulos, I have no doubt whatsoever that people learned way more than one thing in this conversation. And I just want to thank you for sharing your time and knowledge today. So I appreciate it.
Christo (36:28)
I hope so. I hope so.
Thank you Cheryl for having me. I appreciate it and I’m loving what you’re doing so keep it up. It’s awesome.
Cheryl McColgan (36:39)
Thank you.
In this conversation, Kiara Loucks shares her profound experiences during a health crisis that taught her the significance of community and support. She reflects on a moment of vulnerability when she had to rely on her husband for help and the intimate experience they shared before her surgery.
Kiara emphasizes the importance of allowing others to be there for us in times of need and how such situations can strengthen relationships and foster personal growth.
Outdoor retreats: heroutdorjourney.com
Kiara on Instagram @kiara.loucks
Takeaways
- Other people need to be in our lives sometimes.
- Facing health crises can reveal the strength of our relationships.
- Intimacy can be found in shared vulnerable moments.
- It’s okay to lean on others during tough times.
- Support from loved ones can be a source of strength.
- Crisis situations can deepen our connections with others.
- Prayer and faith can provide comfort in uncertainty.
- Allowing help can be a sign of strength, not weakness.
- People often want to step up and help when we need it.
- Vulnerability can lead to personal growth and understanding.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch on YouTube
Show Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Carol Nourish Grow, and today I’m joined by Kiara Lux. Kiara and I met this year when I competed in the fit model competition in Kentucky and she had the same coach that I did and ended up doing the same show. And I just immediately loved this woman. So what I learned.
about her journey and her health stuff I had to have her on. anyway, Kiara, welcome. If you could ⁓ just tell everyone a little bit about who you are and then we’ll get into some of your health journey. Because I think it’s really interesting and I think there’s a lot of things there that will help a lot of people.
Kiara Loucks (00:35)
Absolutely. First off, thank you so much for having me. I’m so honored to be here. My take on our meeting is very similar. I just fell in love with you from the second you texted me asking if I wanted sourdough. We had never met. You brought me sourdough. I was like, I don’t know her, but I love her. So yeah, I’ve had quite a wild journey. Health and fitness have been at the center of my journey.
Cheryl McColgan (00:43)
you
Kiara Loucks (00:57)
Really since I was young, I’ve been an athlete my whole life in different sports that have taken me all over the world and brought wonderful people like yourself into my life. Outside of professional athletics, I work in tech on my, like my nine to five, I work on Wall Street in paid media. And then I actually am now running an organization on the other side of that.
with all of the spare time called her outdoor journey, which is really focused on bridging the gap for women and families in the back country. So whether it’s survival, holistic wellness, it’s really this concept of community and education to get women and families outside, which is now actually evolving into co-ed opportunities. So in a very, very high level nutshell, that is me. My fitness journey was, I’m sure we’ll dive into it, but.
I don’t think you knew this, but I’m actually over 100 pounds down from my heaviest, so that was 11 years ago. Just, think, like most people, kind of gave up and had always wanted to compete, but it was a pipe dream that never had any real legs to it until it did. So really excited to dive in with you, and I’m just excited to be able to chat with you. You’re one of my favorite people.
Cheryl McColgan (02:04)
I know it’s
been I wanted to catch up for so long. And we just like you’ve been traveling so much and doing really exciting work with the project that you mentioned, and we’ll get into that. But before we go into all that, and we go into the weight loss thing, because that is definitely a subject that people are on this podcast are interested in. But I have to have you tell people, you to kind of just glossed over that whole professional athlete thing, tell people what you what your sport is, because I think it’s so wild.
Kiara Loucks (02:07)
I know.
Yeah,
so I’m kind of in this purgatory season right now, so not actually professionally competing in anything, but I’ve been a professional rower. I’ve been a professional bobsledder for the US and Canada. I’ve been a bodybuilder, Olympic weightlifter. We’ve been all over the map. Yeah, and I’m kind of getting back into the endurance side of things right now. I’m not done with bodybuilding or
Cheryl McColgan (02:43)
That’s the one.
Kiara Loucks (02:54)
Bodybuilding isn’t done with me yet, but we’re on a little hiatus. As you know, it kind of takes over your whole life. And I’ve lived a season for the last decade where sports is my whole life. So I’m kind of just turning my brain on for a little bit and creating and doing other things.
Cheryl McColgan (03:08)
Yeah, and I think that’s, it’s an interesting mindset being an athlete for most of your whole life. So you said though, at some point you kind of gave up, can you share a little bit more about that? Was there an injury? Was there something that happened in your life where things just shifted for you? And how did that go? And then how did you get back to where you are now?
Kiara Loucks (03:19)
Thank you.
Yeah, great question. You seem like the type that’s okay to go kind of deep and heavy off the rip because that’s just life. So I had actually signed a scholarship agreement with UC Santa Barbara to play softball ⁓ once I graduated high school. And my senior year in high school, I both broke my back quite literally to vertebrae on my back in a terrible sledding accident.
And then I also endured a sexual assault. So I was raped my senior year in high school. And those two, I think combined, just put me in a place I didn’t know how to cope. And so I learned growing up that food is comfort. And when we hurt, we self-soothe. And I didn’t have the tools in my toolkit to do that in a healthy way. So I started partying a lot, started eating a lot. And honestly, by the grace of God, I walked onto campus to try to rush for a sorority. I missed.
I missed rush, but I had walked by the rowing recruiter tent. And some young gal shouted at me. She was like, Hey, you have really big legs. Would you want to row? And I was like, simultaneously so offended and so flattered. I was like, let’s try it. And that opened this new avenue we’ve been on for the last decade. But prior to that, I just like, like I said, I had given up and food was really my reprieve.
from life.
Cheryl McColgan (04:47)
And I think a lot of people will be able to relate to that. And I’m so sorry that you had to go through that experience. Although often some of the great tragedies in our life really end up shaping who we are. And I think that that is definitely one of the reasons that’s contributed to you, you know, being so successful and being able to overcome all that. So, but anyway, definitely a heavy subject and thank you for being willing to share that with people. So after all that happened, you wrote in college and then let’s fast forward to like just
Kiara Loucks (04:59)
Delicious.
Agreed.
Mm-hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (05:16)
before we met because you had some pretty crazy health things and things happening in your life right before you decided to compete. So I’d love it if you’d kind of share that journey.
Kiara Loucks (05:27)
Yeah, so like I alluded to bodybuilding was a dream of mine for the last 12 years like I saw someone do it and thought it was the coolest thing and Never thought it was a realistic opportunity for me and then fast-forward lots of things changed and Decided actually a year ago that I was gonna get into bodybuilding and got into it locally it went swimmingly like I just Found a lot of success very quickly
But in an extremely unhealthy way working with a coach which bodybuilding is wrought with coaches who went pro and then think that they have the license to dictate someone else’s health. So went down that rabbit hole came out of we did four shows back to back to back to back. We blitzed last fall and did really well coming into the offseason after my last show in November of last year.
Cheryl McColgan (06:12)
a lot.
Kiara Loucks (06:20)
I was following my reverse diet to a T and was putting on weight extremely rapidly and Not only was it a mental Battle it was also physically feeling out of control of my body and on top of that I started bleeding Like non-stop started presenting pregnancy symptoms had no idea what was happening in my body had just kind of taken on its own life And so it was controlling all that I could
At first they thought I had cervical cancer and so we went kind of through some rounds of testing for that and then coming back in January This was like a three-month saga coming back in January found out I was pregnant and Then they thought I was having a miscarriage because I was bleeding the entire time. So I was extremely anemic I was just exhausted. I couldn’t really do much and I Would not give up training like that was the only thing I really had was just training and trying to be present for the holidays and so
After they thought I had a miscarriage, my HCG levels, which are the hormones present when you are pregnant, were actually going back up. And so it was end of January, or this year, that they found out I had an egg-topic pregnancy growing in my left ovary. And we were early enough that they had attempted to treat it with chemotherapy. So methotrexate is a chemotherapy procedure that they typically will try.
before they go to surgery as an intervention in order to try to get the cells to kind of reabsorb into the body. It stops everything from turning over, which my goober brain decided to still train, still try to move through all of it, even if that was just walking on the treadmill for most days. So was extremely humbling. But through that, I had one round of chemo, which was just hell for lack of a better term.
and then it ended up rupturing anyway. So by rupture, I mean I was internally bleeding, had come up with a fever in the midst of all of the chemo symptoms. So for those out there who are not privy to what that looks like, your body feels like it’s on fire. I couldn’t smile, I couldn’t chew, I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t cry. Everything from my head to my neck to my back would just seize. And so in the midst of that, I popped a fever.
We went in and as we were walking into the ER, I was rupturing. And so they opened the OR middle of the night and had a surgical intervention for that. And then me being me, I needed something on the calendar. Maybe not the best way to cope, we’re learning, but I’ve always been someone that when I have something to shoot for, the in-between between here and there doesn’t really matter. We have a goal, we’re working towards something, we’re progressing, we’re…
Controlling our environment for lack of better term as well. So put a show on the calendar and decided to find a new coach because like I mentioned, my previous coach was not health conscious at all. And so I found Adam who’s just a godsend and was able to actually reverse some of my endometriosis symptoms, certain things through protocol with supplementation and food. It was a miracle and we started prep while I still had chemo in my system.
We were like hitting the ground running, let’s go. And that was beginning of February, March timeframe. And then we walked into the show that you and I met at, which was in Louisville. went well, not as well as I’d hoped, but it’s okay. It was still a blast and I met you. And then we did two shows right after that in Las Vegas and then in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So.
Cheryl McColgan (09:57)
and she’s leaving out that she won one of those shows, which I was not surprised because seeing you in person and now knowing everything that you went through leading up to that, mean, the amount of muscle that you have.
Kiara Loucks (09:59)
We did bring home Miss Nevada this year. I was very excited about that.
Cheryl McColgan (10:17)
is a testament to, I think something that people kind of lose sight of sometimes is that your muscle is a metabolic sink for a lot of things that it helps control your blood sugar. helps. It helps you survive times like what you went through. And I’m convinced that’s one reason my dad did so well with his cancer treatments over the years is because he was always really muscular. He was like Jack Lillane, basically my dad, he was like into that way before anyone else. So he’s never like huge, but he always was very concerned. He always lifted.
And so I would say, you know, do you feel like both your mentality as someone that was into fitness helped you as well as the fact that you were already in such good shape to start with? Because I think you just, the outcomes are so much better if you have some muscle.
Kiara Loucks (10:59)
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I think twofold. The physical side of it, there’s research to support that muscle mass is an indicator of longevity and it’s also the best way to push off atrophy in the body as we age. So knowing that no matter what sport you’re doing, having lean muscle mass is going to always be a benefit. That’s kind of the first part and it allows your body to bounce back really quickly. Like you’re a lot more resistant to…
whatever life throws at you, whether it’s disease or acute injury. And so that’s kind of the first side. And then the second side is the mental side. So when I, know, as someone who’s been an athlete my whole life was told I can’t do anything, let alone like I can’t even walk on a treadmill. Mentally, I just crumbled. But then you realize and you’ll get this too, no matter what sport you do, or just lifting in general for people that just go to the gym to stay healthy.
It’s not easy and it hurts. Like you are training your body to deal with things that hurt knowing full well that you’re going to be better for it. And I think that was the privilege walking into my health situation last year was that mentality that I’m going to make it through this. It sucks and it really hurts. It’s not going to last forever. I guarantee it. And I’m going to be better on the other side of it, whether that’s mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or all of the above.
We’re going to be OK.
Cheryl McColgan (12:26)
And how so how did you get from the point? Where I mean, to me, like putting something like that on the books is just.
unbelievable. And then to see the shape that you showed up in, I mean, it was just unbelievable. So can you talk about your mental state during that time a little bit? Because I think there’s, you know, whether people are an athlete or not, I think there’s always something to be learned with mindset. And I think the more that you can share about maybe that part of that and how you, you know, seemingly made it through to the other side. I mean, nobody’s saying everything’s perfect all the time, but you still move through
Kiara Loucks (12:39)
Thank you.
Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (13:04)
life,
you created these amazing goals, you are still working all this time. Talk a little bit about your mindset and how you, how do you overcome that hurdle like once you were on the chemo and doing all this really crazy health stuff.
Kiara Loucks (13:17)
That is such a good question.
Yeah, I think when life really kicks her teeth in, it’s usually there to teach us something. And I hate to be the person that’s like, it always happens for a reason, because it doesn’t always. But being able to take a really poopy situation and make meaning of it and find that meaning while you’re walking through it is really the best way to endure it. So for me, I’ve always been an incredibly independent woman. I don’t need anyone. I don’t need help.
and I never ask for help. And so my husband had just gotten out of the army. So we’re actually one year free as of two days ago on Veterans Day. And when he came back, we actually had a really hard time because I had kind of established this life where he was more of an accessory than a need. And I didn’t have an issue with that. In fact, when he got home, I reminded him that I didn’t need him. I want him.
And know, like all of these pieces that I think the intention was pure, but this chapter, the health chapter we’re talking about really taught me that other people need to be needed in our lives sometimes. And allowing space for that, I didn’t have an option. So there was literally a week where my husband had to help me go to the bathroom. And I still remember when we were in the OR.
We didn’t know we were going to go into surgery when we went into the ER and they basically threw a pack of ammonia wipes at us as they’re opening the OR because it was like you can die relatively quickly from internal bleeding. And so they threw this bag of ammonia wipes at us and it was such an intimate moment where they were like, all right, wipe yourself down like we’re going to go open the OR. We’ll be back. And my husband and I both took a wipe and we just started cleaning things off.
like prepping for surgery. And I’m standing there like, I know you’re not a believer, but I’m just gonna pray over us and the situation and where we’re going. And that whole evolution taught me it’s okay to need other people. And people in our lives are often eager for those situations where they can step up for us when we’re the ones typically stepping up for everyone else. So mentally, it allowed a lot of intimate.
relationships to just flourish in my life, both my husband, my family, who all stepped in for me. And through that, it was like this mental battle to be okay not being okay on a daily basis. And then as we put the show on the calendar, things are kind of turning around, things are getting better. Then it became this super cool ethos of
Everyone’s gonna hear the high school musical theme. We’re all in it together. Like it was cool that we were all in the trenches together like great We all watched movies together. Everyone helped me. It was fantastic But now we’re on the come-up together and realizing how rich that come-up was with everyone in tow And so my husband was there in Louisville. He was there in Chattanooga for Nationals Like he’s texting me constantly when I’m at shows and he’s not there
Cheryl McColgan (15:58)
you
Kiara Loucks (16:22)
It brought us so much closer together and it made me realize that win, lose or draw, I’m a better person for being in this with the people that I love building something that’s inspirational for other people. Like the number of messages I had of people who, from people who had watched the whole health journey into the prep, into the shows, into doing very well in the shows, who reached out and said like, holy shit, I’m going to get off the couch and I’m going to do this because if you can do this, like I can do that.
And so it’s realizing mentally, we don’t live for ourselves. Like the fullest life we can possibly aim to live is that for others. And bodybuilding is an incredibly selfish sport, but this whole evolution turned it around into this is for my family, this is with my family, this is for other people. And I will be extremely transparent about all of the highs and the lows and everything in between. So I don’t know if that answered your question, but yeah, it was a really cool turning point for me that has.
completely transcended bodybuilding into my career, into my hobbies, into my passion projects on the side. So it’s been really cool.
Cheryl McColgan (17:28)
Yeah, and it’s been it’s been so fun to watch as people on the outside, like you said, you had so many people rooting for you and just following along with your journey. And, you know, I guess part of our time together was like we were at the show doing this and we were in separate divisions. And so we kind of had to stick to, I guess, you know, I don’t want to say surface level conversations, but we didn’t get a chance to really dive deep into some of this stuff. So it wasn’t until later afterwards where I was watching, you know, some of your Instagram stories and
Kiara Loucks (17:42)
Yes. Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Cheryl McColgan (17:58)
of the comments that people were making about your health journey and all this stuff that I really was able to see, you know, just how much you would come through. so hearing this today kind of like puts all the pieces together and just makes the whole thing even just more amazing. And I think it’s really exciting now what you’re kind of turning that into because I have a feeling that all of this
And you know, just recovering after a show people that haven’t done it. It’s, know, bodybuilding is not a healthy thing. Let’s be real lifting weights is healthy, but bodybuilding is a very extreme sport. You’re getting to an extreme level of leanness, which especially for women is really hard, like on your hormones on your body, everything. And, you know, I’ve certainly experienced that. I don’t know, aftermath, for lack of a better word. ⁓
Kiara Loucks (18:27)
No.
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.
Cheryl McColgan (18:49)
And it’s just a very interesting mental challenge afterwards as well as physical. And ⁓ so it wasn’t surprising to me that I saw after your show, you kind of turned to ⁓ this retreat that you ended up going on. so now I would love it if you’d share about that. Like what made you become aware of that? And is my sense right that you kind of just needed some like recharge alone time? I’d to hear just all about that, how that happened.
Kiara Loucks (18:54)
⁓ Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah,
I love this. It’s like the most exciting thing in my life right now. So 100 % you’re correct. Once the show season was over, I just realized how much of my time had been spent in the gym, working, and then being a wife, being in the family. Like it’s just every day just trying to go. And one of my favorite things is spending time outside.
Like I firmly believe that it is the closest place to the divine. It makes me happy. It gives me clarity. Like it is my favorite place to be. I live in Colorado. So I realized like a year went by that I hadn’t gone just to play outside with my dog. Like, okay, like I just need to get outside more. And I was feeling this void, which did you feel after the show too? It’s like this depression a little bit.
Cheryl McColgan (19:45)
Love it.
a little bit. It’s kind of a, you know, I wish I would have done a better job documenting some of that stuff I kept meaning to, because it is just kind of a wild thing. But it never I guess, for part of it for me is because
Kiara Loucks (20:11)
Mm-hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (20:16)
I always knew that I would, you know, I’m still working, going to the gym five days a week and still just really trying to build my lean muscle for the purposes we were talking about, just making sure that I stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible and that I can lift myself off the toilet when I’m 80 years old and things like that, you know, if I’m lucky enough to make it to that age. ⁓
Kiara Loucks (20:30)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yep.
Exactly.
Cheryl McColgan (20:39)
So I guess in the back of my mind, it was like, well, this was an interesting process and stuff, but I was anxious to kind of get back to quote unquote normal life. Like what you’re talking about, like more time to spend time outdoors and more time to enjoy food and drinks with friends and not have to be so focused on every single bite you’re putting in your mouth. I don’t know, somehow I kind of, feel like I distracted myself from a little bit of that, but I…
Kiara Loucks (20:48)
normal yeah
Exactly.
Cheryl McColgan (21:06)
I’ve read a lot of and heard a lot of other people’s stories that talk about that because this almost like well you you had these goals, the goal you got there basically. And then what you kind of go off the cliff, right? Yeah, I don’t know. I avoided that a little bit. I don’t know that sure how
Kiara Loucks (21:15)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so perfect.
You know, I’m thrilled for you. did not. I just, I don’t know. Like I think if I had a body that could sustain it, which I don’t think anybody’s meant for it, I would compete all year long every year. Like I just love it so much. But when we finished nationals in Chattanooga, I just knew my body was asking for a break. Like there were just several signs that I needed to pump the, pump the breaks and chill. And so coming out of that, I realized I needed to be outside more and I just felt this void like.
this one thing I’d been working for and felt meaning in, all these people invested in my story, it just was suddenly gone. And so I’m like, okay, I just need to go outside. And I had a dear girlfriend of mine actually come out and we went up to a cabin in the mountains and we were chatting and it like, I just don’t know what I’m chasing after. Like I always have something I’m chasing after and I feel like I’m missing it. And she was like, well, Kiara, you’ve been chasing outside. Like since you finished competing, all you’ve done is chase the mountains.
And I’m like, well, no, no, no, like that’s just a medium. That’s a catalyst for me to find clarity. That’s not what I’m chasing. Yeah, that’s ridiculous. And sure enough, it is what I was chasing. And for the last several years, I’ve had on my vision board wanting to start a business to allow space and build a community for women to get out into the back country together. Because like all of the same things that you and I probably took away from bodybuilding, the confidence, the discipline, the community aspect, if you’re fortunate to have that, like
Those are all things that I’ve found historically in the outdoors, but I think the value of the outdoors far outlasts and has much deeper lengths to it than bodybuilding. And so it’s been on my vision board for years to start a business that I can just take women outdoors and on these retreats and do cool things. And it was just another pipe dream, right? But God bless vision boards and always coming back to like ourselves and where we find meaning and purpose.
And so just by happenstance, this opportunity dropped into my lap in August. So my last show of the year was middle of June, went outside a bunch, kind of just got my head screwed on a little bit for the rest of June and July. And then this opportunity dropped in my lap to go to Montana with a group called Her Outdoor Journey in August. And it was gonna be their summit, which means they were doing everything from
Butchery to survival to fieldcraft to foraging to defensive shooting to Glassing which is basically understanding how to scope the side of a hill and look for animals They were doing all of this in one event. I was like alright cool I will help you guys out in trade just to go check this out because it seems kind of rad and I on a whim didn’t know anyone got in the car drove up to Montana like 12 hours
And I show up and this week completely changed my life. mean, I’ve never been around a group of 20 plus women and there’s no drama, no clicks, people wanting to help, people wanting to serve, everyone having a blast. Like, and not only that, it was the skill sets that we were handed, like the education and the content. was like, I need more of this and I need to share this with as many people as I can. Like, how can I get more in the weeds on this? So
I sat down with Courtney Pridi, who is the founder of her outdoor journey. And we just kind of started dreaming up how we could work together and she needed me. I needed her. Like it was this extremely serendipitous, miraculous meeting of two people who desperately needed each other. And her and I since then have walked hand in hand, just blowing the lid off of this thing. So we have like over 15 events next year, all across the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii. We’re also looking at Canada.
But our mission really is to teach and empower women and get them outside. And it’s like this beautiful thing that happens when you’re learning and you’re vulnerable, when you’re outside, like all of these perfect elements that bring out the most beautiful side of people. And that’s the part that I love is nurturing these women, these people, these families, seeing how we can impact as many women and families as we can. So.
Yeah, long story short, it has been the coolest thing I have found and I also fell in love with butchery out of that. So have kind of been on this whirlwind of working with feedlots and local ranchers and processing plants, understanding truly what is it that we’re eating. So going back to health and wellness, we just talked about bodybuilding is not a healthy sport. And so when you’re given a certain set macros for the day, you’ll eat trash as long as it fills those macros and you’re enjoying it. When
Cheryl McColgan (26:02)
Thank
Kiara Loucks (26:04)
Much
like you, I got into this because I fell in love with taking care of myself. And so I had completely gone off path. And when I found this, it was like, ⁓ I can literally make an entire meal for me and my family off of literally just what exists out here in the back country. Understanding the seasonings, the foods that we are given naturally growing in the mountains or wherever. What Google reactions. ⁓ she is.
But yeah, ⁓ so it’s just
Cheryl McColgan (26:31)
you
Kiara Loucks (26:33)
this really cool journey that’s now evolved into the butchery side of things and long tail like I would love one day to open my own high end butcher shop and do high end steak dinners for people that they get to pick right out of the case supporting local agriculture, which is a dying breed in our country right now. So bringing awareness to those things, bringing people along for the ride. I have no idea what we’re going to do with all of this, but I’m just so happy.
Like I’m just right where I feel like I need to be.
Cheryl McColgan (27:02)
Yeah, watching some of your stories when you were on that retreat, I felt the same way. I was just so happy for you because I could just tell you were enjoying it so much and you’re in your element. And it did not surprise me afterwards that you’re like, I’m going to be a butcher. I mean, you’re crazy. I’ll get on to something. I’m just like, Oh, well, this is now this is my thing, you know, which is amazing. So so people are hearing this and they’re like, Okay, that sounds really cool. I would love to, you know, spend some time with other women out
Kiara Loucks (27:10)
Hmm.
No!
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
Cheryl McColgan (27:31)
doors,
do all the things. And also though, I can see how maybe some people like there probably will be some people to be like, okay, I like a lot of that, but I’m not into the hunting or I like a lot of that, but I don’t know that I want to chop up a deer and skin a deer on this retreat. Tell us how that works.
Kiara Loucks (27:40)
What?
yeah, very fair. Not expected, not
expected at all. So we actually offer a whole host of opportunities for people to get on trips with us. One of the events I’m looking forward to the most is actually an adventure retreat up in Alaska. So we are literally gonna go jet ski in the glacier, ride horses, ATV, spa day. Like it is an adventure retreat. There is no hunting, there are no guns.
There’s no butchery. There’s no nothing that should really kind of raise flags for some people. Knowing that, everyone has different thresholds. So if you come on any of our trips and you’re like, this part is not for me. So for example, the event that I was just talking about back in August, the defensive shooting, we had women that didn’t feel comfortable being on a range with other women who had never shot a gun. Great. They went out and had their own like they went for a hike. They read their books. They went and hung out.
There’s so much freedom and liberty to do whatever you’re comfortable with. Our mission is to serve you and make sure you’re walking away with what you intended to get out of an event. So whether that’s rest and recovery, a little adventure, learning skills or trades, we do it all. And there’s never any judgment when you decide something isn’t for you.
Cheryl McColgan (29:01)
can you share the website and where they can find out information about the trips and do you know off the top of your head like when the next one is? Because this episode will come out fairly soon here.
Kiara Loucks (29:09)
Yes,
absolutely. Yeah, so our next one coming up is actually our first winter retreat in Yellowstone. So you can find out more at heroutdorjourney.com or on Instagram at heroutdorjourney. And we’re actually just launching all of our events for next year. So take a look. We actually have everything from, like I said, the adventure retreats to archery, long range shooting, you name it. We got it.
And we also have payment plans. So knowing that some of these are maybe a little bit more expensive, we do have payment plans and we also have gift cards. So knowing the holidays are coming up, if you want to gift some special lady in your life the time of her life and change her world forever, we are your people. So give us a shout.
Cheryl McColgan (29:52)
Awesome. And on top
of that, where can people connect with you personally and kind of follow along with your journey? ⁓ You post somewhat frequently Instagram, but I don’t know if you have any other socials that you want to share.
Kiara Loucks (30:03)
Yeah,
yeah, no, Instagram is the best. As I’m kind of defining this new chapter of my life, I’ve tried to be a little more conscientious about what I’m posting and how I’m presenting to the world. So we’re gonna get back in the saddle here pretty soon with more consistent posts and all sorts of exciting stuff going on in the world. But yeah, follow along at at Chiara.Lowx. Yeah, at Chiara.Lowx. My brain is halfway here. Yeah, there you go.
Cheryl McColgan (30:25)
One, I’ll have it in the show notes as well if for some reason you can’t find her. Well, Kiara,
it’s been so wonderful catching up with you again today and ⁓ sharing more of your journey that I was not aware of. And I’m really excited for everything that’s going to happen next. And I will be following along to see what amazing things you do from here.
Kiara Loucks (30:43)
thank you. And thank you again for having me on. You’re just one of my favorite people, even though we haven’t spent a ton of time together, obviously. But sourdough, you won my heart forever. So thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (30:53)
It’s
my love language. All right, take care and we’ll see you again next time.
Kiara Loucks (30:55)
I’m here for it. Sounds good.
Thank you.
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan shares actionable insights on establishing sustainable habits, building strong foundational practices for health and wellness, and overcoming common challenges like overwhelm and inconsistency. Whether you’re starting out or looking to refine your routine, this conversation offers clear steps backed by research and personal experience.
Takeaways* The importance of small, consistent habits over quick resolutions * How to implement a 30-day healthy habits challenge * Transitioning from habit trials to long-term integration (90-day focus) * Introducing the Foundation Series: organizing habits into manageable categories * The role of protein, balanced nutrition, and strength training in health * Simplified strength training: two full-body workouts per week * Overcoming gym intimidation and creating an accessible strength routine * The value of coaching for accountability and skill-building * Moving toward mastery and self-sufficiency in health management
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow. And today I wanted to chat with you about a new program that I just started. And it’s actually a whole little system called the Foundations series. So a lot of this came about because over the years, as you know, if you’ve watched some of my content before, I’m very focused on habits. My background is in psychology and I’ve been basically interested in health and wellness my entire adult life and have had
many different kind of jobs and coaching in this kind of area. And so it’s something that I’ve worked on for myself for a long time. It’s something I’ve worked with other people on for a long time. And it is the content that you see every day on Heal Nourish Grow all has something to do with these sorts of things. So when I thought about it more like how can I put this all these learnings and all the information that I have learned for myself over the last years and practice for so long, how can I put it into a foundational system
that will actually help other people without being overwhelming, being organized and get you to a place where you actually do these things. Cause I feel like a lot of people will say to me sometimes, well, I know what to do. I just don’t actually do it. And so part of that, I think is the overwhelm of it. Part of it’s just that life is so busy, you know, so many factors, but this really breaks it down into little buckets that you can focus on for a small period of time. And just again,
As I always talk about with habits, just starting really slow and building on them. And so that’s why I called it the foundation series, because it literally is the whole foundation, find foundational practices, foundational ideas that will really help you just build your life to meet your goals from there. So these very small things that you start with and creating this very strong foundation will really allow you then to create whatever it is that you want for your life, for your health, all of that.
So I feel like most people, again, they just don’t fail because they’re not trying or they don’t want to. It’s just they’re not really clear yet about their own priorities. Like they think that they know what’s important, but you know, quite often the choices that we make every day don’t match what we think are our priorities. So really identifying them and making them clear in your mind is a really big part of that. So the first thing I started with, with the health
of the situation because once you get your health in order, once you are able to sleep well, eat well, feel good in your body every single day, that also just helps everything with your mental health as well. focusing on these foundational principles that relate to your health that are small things you can do every day, I think really make it a lot less overwhelming than it might be otherwise. And so these are all just daily consistency.
low friction routines, creating things that are easy to repeat every single day.
Cheryl McColgan (02:45)
The very first part of the program is something that’s really in alignment with this time of year, which it happens to be January, 2026 when I’m recording this. And that is working on healthy habits as kind of a challenge for the new year, because people often make New Year’s resolutions. And usually by about this time, by about the end of January, a lot of those have already gone by the wayside, because quite often people just take on too much at once, rather than doing small
things over time and consistently building. really think that’s a much more sustainable way to approach habit change and to incorporating new healthy habits into your life. So the first thing is the free healthy habits challenge. It doesn’t have to be the beginning of the new year. Whenever you find this video, you can always start the healthy habits challenge. You just put in your email and then it’ll start a series of things that you do every single day. It will send you some worksheets. There are links to research that backs up these small practices like why they’re good for you and
what kinds of things it helps. And so you just try a new simple habit every day for 30 days. None of them take any more than 15 minutes. And you can always dive deeper into any of the subjects if you want. Like I said, there’s research links you can read, there’s journal prompts, but the minimum is just doing the habit that day, trying it out and then noticing if that’s something that you think would work well for you in your life that could really help you feel better, look better, perform better, all of those things.
And then ideally after the 30 days is finished, you identify some of those things that you tried that you really want to incorporate going forward for the next 90 days. And so that’s when I decided that I would actually create this whole other series of programs after the free healthy habits, because a lot of times it’s like, well, what’s next after you do that, you kind of, you know, it was great to try all that. And I do give direction in the healthy habits challenge. You’re identifying three to carry forward over 90 days. And you just really try to create that consistency.
But what if you wanted something that’s a little bit more structured and gives you more ideas about how to perform the habits that you’ve chosen, work towards your goals, all that. So that’s where the foundation series comes in.
Cheryl McColgan (04:46)
And so the first one that I decided to focus on, and again, if you’ve already are familiar with my content, this will not be a surprise. And that is protein, because once you get the protein foundation in place, identifying what’s optimal for your body and optimal for your goals, and then actually integrating that and hitting it every single day, that becomes the basis then for your whole nutrition plan.
So this first part, just focusing on protein is because it’s such an important building block in your body, it’s not the protein itself that we need. It is the amino acids that our body breaks down that we need for muscle, for metabolism. It creates more satiety makes it easier for you to feel full longer. And it is big in repair and recovery in your body. So having that proper amount.
on a consistent basis every day really just lays the foundation then for you to build your whole nutrition program. And that is the second foundation is nutrition. So that may sound, you we talked about proteins, obviously one of the major macro nutrients alongside carbohydrates and fat, but that whole thing is what really creates all of your nutrition. Like you can’t live on just protein. mean, you actually can. A lot of people do the carnivore diet these days, but for most people, that’s not a choice.
that they’re making, they want to create something that’s more balanced, that’s more sustainable, that’s easy to still be able to eat out, that’s still easy to go to events and not feel overwhelmed. And so the second foundation, once you have your protein amount in place that you’re going to create on that consistent basis, then you can start to focus on your overall diet. And so the nutrition thing really works with, it doesn’t matter what style of eating that you choose, it’s going to create something that’s balanced and that it’s in alignment with your goals.
And so that’s something that you’ll work on through the program is figuring out is your goal muscle gaining muscle. Is it losing fat? Is it just maintaining your current body weight? Is it maybe reducing inflammation in your body? So any one of those goals that you have will fit into this nutrition framework. So you’ll select those goals. You’re going to figure out your, macronutrients that work best for you. The protein part is always non-negotiable. That number
really never changes that much on a daily basis unless you have like a super hard workout or something that maybe you might go do a little extra for recovery purposes. But for the most part, that number will never change. And so then it becomes figuring out how to balance that and the carbohydrates in a way that make you feel good, that digest well, and that work with your goals. So that gives you a lot of flexibility. It really creates a way to think about things so that when you’re in an unfamiliar situation, you’re not
for yourself, you can still make really good choices and make things work for you. And again, a lot of this is things that people think that they know how to do or that they should do that kind of thing, but they don’t actually execute on a daily basis. And so that’s what the foundation system really helps with is creating that consistency. Again, it’s these small habits over time that build to help you get to your overall longer term goals. But you’ve got to get to those longer term goals. You have to work on those little parts of it every single day.
And so that’s really what this part of it is about. And then the last foundation is the strength foundation. And again, it’s something that you’ve heard me say before, and it’s something that I’ve come to appreciate a lot more now that I’m over 50. And that is that we really need to have some strength training in our life. And I know it’s a challenge for a lot of people, especially a lot of people in my age group, if you happen to be a woman.
⁓ There really wasn’t as much focus on strength training when I was younger I mean I got kind of lucky because I was exposed to it at young age through my dad and Then I did play sports in high school and college So I was in the weight room and I have probably more familiarity with it than a lot of women my age But I was in that same trap growing up in the 90s where it was all about, you know Being skinny was the thing and so I never really had a focus
on muscle is more just about, you know, maintaining my body weight. And I did that through running for 17 years, I kind of did almost the exact opposite of what is really good for your long term health as far as muscle mass anyway, I mean, ⁓ running and walking have a lot of great awesome heart and cardiovascular benefits, but it’s not so great in terms of building muscle. In fact, it often creates a body type where you don’t have nearly as much muscle. So
now that I am more educated and you know, you learn things over time and once you learn things, it’s hard to unsee the importance of it. And when you really think about muscle health in terms of your metabolism and in terms of just living well as you get older, you know, it’s a slow thing, right? That happens over years that you kind of have to just fight all the time and you don’t want to get to be
know, 70 years old and be so frail that you have a hard time getting out of the chair that you can’t do simple things like carry your own groceries in or shovel your driveway when you need to. had a lot of that here in the Midwest just recently in January 2026. So all that is to say that I think what creates maybe a little bit of fear or something in your mind about not wanting to do it as much is because we kind of envision this thing that we have to be in the gym.
five or six days a week, something like that to make it work. And you have to do a whole lot of strength training to make it work worthwhile. But after I’ve really taken a deep dive into this and done more studying and more learning, especially over the last three years focused on strength training is really that there is a minimum effective dose of strength training. And surprisingly, you can get most of the benefits that you can get out of training on a regular basis and just doing two full body work workouts per week.
I think twice per week is way, way less intimidating than the multiple times a week that many of us think of when we think about strength training. And it also then affords you to do many other kinds of physical activities that you might, that are more enjoyable, let’s say. So if it’s walking, hiking, biking, snowboarding, whatever it is for you, if you know that you only have to be strength training in the gym two days a week, I just feel like that mentally takes a lot of the stress off and it makes it seem
more doable. And again, it’s about creating these small habits. once you get into it, obviously, if you want to do more, there’s a little incremental benefit of that over two days a week. And there’s also, if you have very specific goals in relation to body composition or, you know, doing any kind of competitions or anything like that, then that program looks a little different. But all we’re talking about is what is the minimum effective dose for staying healthy and vibrant and strong into old age and just being able to take care of yourself. And that is really a strength training program that is two days a week.
So what I’ve done is I’m actually studying for my personal trainer certification right now. I haven’t taken the test yet. But the two days a week foundation, it’s really about like not creating this intimidation around the gym. Because I mentioned like for a lot of us women, especially in this particular age group, a gym can be very intimidating or just knowing how to use the machines or knowing what to do in the gym or going into the gym, seeing so many machines and this feeling overwhelmed because you’re not sure what to do.
That’s what this program is designed to counteract. If you’re more experienced, this definitely might be a little too basic for you, but this is really meant to take the person who has not been in the gym for a couple years, let’s say, or even if it’s been a year since you’ve been out of the gym, this might be totally appropriate because it’s just going to be a program like I said, is two days a week and it’s going to be simple and it’s going to have some videos to show you some things to do. It works if you’re working out from home with just a few simple tools.
So that’s what this part is. It’s designed to not create overwhelm and to just get you into the gym, get you into strength training and hopefully get you to realize the benefit of it. And then from there, obviously there’s so many more, more complex and more ⁓ extensive programs out there, but this is really just meant for if you’re just getting started again, or if you’ve never been in the gym before and to create this sense of kind of knowing what you’re getting into, knowing what you do in the gym.
and knowing where to go and just not having it be too many things at once hitting you, making it very simple, having a plan, having it written out. So that way, even if you go into big gym has a lot of machines or something, you’re going to feel like you know what to do. You know where to go, you know where to find what you need, and then you can get your workout done. So that is the most of the foundations program. And then at the very end, I have lifestyle foundations and that is a one-on-one coaching program. And I haven’t taken on any new coaching.
people for quite a while, but I decided to open that up again. So really what that is, it’s if you feel like you need more support, you need more accountability, you enjoy having a coach, which I have to admit when I was doing my competitions, this past year was the first time I had had a coach in that capacity for like a, it wasn’t so much health and wellness focused as it was training and competition focused, but having someone else being able to give that over for a little bit to a process that was really new for me.
was just so very helpful in reducing decision fatigue and really like making it easy for me to learn how to do these things that for me were very new at the time doing I’d never done a competition before. So of course I know I do it to expect and that was really nice and useful to have a coach to be able to hand that off to and not have to think about it. So but this kind of coaching is more around. Yes, we’re going to talk together about making your goals fit your lifestyle that you have now and
finding time to do the things. I know that’s always a big challenge for everyone, right? And then mapping it out in such a way so you have accountability, you know what the plan is, and then starting to really integrate these habits over time so that you learn a system that works for you long-term. And then at some point, wish, the hope, the dream is that you don’t need a coach anymore, that you just feel really accountable to yourself.
and that you’re able to evaluate goals and think of things in a way like once you learn the system, if you’re thinking of it in a way that, you know, just requires a little planning, then you don’t always necessarily need somebody kind of taking you to the next step each time or being accountable. You can just be accountable to yourself. So I do think that coaching is really useful in so many situations and for short periods of time. But I personally just don’t know if it’s that great for people to have.
a coach for years and years and years in relation to health and wellness anyway. Like I said, for other things like if you’re in the Olympics or you’re on a team or you’re playing sports, obviously coaches are amazing in that capacity and you kind of need them year after year. But I think when you’re working on your health and wellness, I think that the goal should be autonomy at some point and you’ve learned the tools that you need to just go on and live your life well and not have to.
somebody to do all those kinds of things for you or to talk that out with. So hopefully that’s making sense. Again, my background is in psychology and I was into clinical psychology. So obviously, I hugely see the value in all those kinds of relationships. It’s just that I feel like you should learn to fish, right? Instead of just being given fish all the time. So that old saying, it’s like, hey, if you learn to fish, you’ll never go hungry, right? And so that’s the idea of this program is really just teaching you new skills.
new systems, new ways to think about things in relation to your health so that then you can go forward and keep creating that in your own life again and again. So hopefully that was a great explanation of the program. As always, if you have any questions, I’m always available. You can email me. And if you want to go read the foundations page, it kind of shows you a little bit more about what each program is specifically and like exactly what you’ll learn inside of each of them.
But always if you have any questions just reach out you can reach me on all the social media heel nourish grow everywhere or you can email me at info at heelnourishgrow.com. So that’s it for again for today and I will see you next time.
In this final session of the 30-day healthy habit challenge, Cheryl McColgan encourages participants to reflect on their journey and choose three habits to continue for the next 90 days. She emphasizes the importance of building consistency through small, manageable changes and aligning these habits with long-term goals. Cheryl also discusses the significance of flexibility in habit formation and encourages participants to map out their habits for greater success.
Takeaways* Choose three habits to continue for the next 90 days. * Set specific, achievable minimums for each habit. * Focus on sustainability rather than perfection. * Building habits starts with small, consistent actions. * Align your habits with your long-term goals. * Flexibility is important in maintaining habits. * Mapping out habits can enhance success. * Reflect on your journey and celebrate wins.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
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Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of FeelNourishGrow and welcome to day 30 of the 30 day healthy habit challenge. You made it to the end and I’m so excited to be here with you for this last day and to hopefully hear all about some of your challenges, some of your wins. I would love it if you would respond to the email after the challenge is finished and just let me know how it went for you. I am always rooting for you. But anyway, for the final day, it’s another kind of reflection thing.
but it’s more future focused. I want you to choose three habits to continue for the next 90 days. So if you discovered there was a particular habit during this challenge, you did a lot of the reflection and reset throughout the challenge, and there were probably ones that you noticed that worked really well for you or that you thought, okay, this is a good habit. I can see this really helping me in my everyday life. Go back to those and commit to doing it every day for the next 90 days.
So ideally, I’d love for you to keep moving for 10 minutes every single day. Maybe it turns into 15, maybe it turns into 20, maybe it turns into going to the gym. These are the way that habits build. We keep doing these small little wins over time, and that’s how you create really big change. So choose those three habits for the next 90 days and set tiny minimums for each one. So you want it to be really specific with yourself what it is that you’re intending to do for those three habits. So again, if I mentioned movement is the one that you want to continue, you could keep it at 10 minutes.
Or you can say for the next 90 days, I’m going to do for the first 30 days, I’m going to do 10 minutes a day. For the second 30 days, I’m going to do 15 minutes a day. And for the third 30 days, I’m going to do 20 minutes a day, whatever it is for you. But making it specific, making it something that you meant to and making it something that’s still relatively small so that you’re going to maintain it. Because at the end of this next 90 days, I want you to set you up for another really big win where you prove to yourself that you can trust yourself.
and that you can make changes and you can create new habits that actually stick. So again, create the minimum, but let’s do three. Over the next 30 days, hopefully some of these habits have turned into a lifestyle. The focus involved with doing little challenges like this just builds like confidence in yourself and it beats perfection. We’re not looking, we can’t all be perfect all the time. We’ve got to just go for sustainability. And that is really how I’ve been able to like.
create these habits for myself that people always talk about me being so disciplined, that kind of thing. It really all started like this, just small little things. Whenever I get onto a new thing that I want to try, I’ve taught myself that if I go big in the beginning, I might be able to stick with it for a little while, but quite often I crash and burn or I just get burned out on whatever it is. But if I start adding it in a little bit of a time, that really creates more of a habit. A great example of this for me, I’ve had many of
exercise things over the years. think I mentioned previously in this challenge, I was a runner for 17 years. Obviously, I just didn’t go out the door one day and run a marathon. It took small changes over time and building consistency. The same thing now where I’ve really been on my streak with strength training is that when I initially started, I told myself, okay, I’m only going to go three days a week, half an hour max. I’m just going to get in the gym, mess around with the machines. That’s going to be a good enough start. Created that consistency mark for myself.
and that kept building and building over time to where now it’s almost like I can’t, in a way, don’t, I mean, I know it’s not that I don’t want to, sometimes your body needs a break and I build in rest days and all that, but I actually feel guilty now if I think about one day where I’m not feeling like going to the gym, it’s like, it’s a habit now, I have to do it. That’s basically how it’s turned out. these.
Consistency things over time is really where you create this thing where you almost feel like it’s just automatic and it doesn’t feel like you need to back out of it or should back out of it. It just becomes purely a habit. So that’s just one example, but it could also be food or sleep. You know, the same thing when I started keto, I didn’t just one day decide to start eating no carbs. I cut it back over time. I didn’t necessarily go cold turkey.
That’s all to say that it all starts with these little things. So pick three things that you feel are really going to feed into your long term goals. And if you haven’t done it yet, this might be a really good time to do that core values and goals worksheet. If this speaks to you, it’s if you go to the website and search ultimate wellness, what is ultimate wellness? The sheet, the link for the sheet is in there and I’ll just walk you through some cues and some questions.
to learn more about what is it they’re all about? What are your core values? And that’s how you create these longer term goals. And then you set these little habits in line to eventually reach those. So if you’re going to do something anyway for the next 90 days, that’s also a great time to do that exercise so that you can start to create these habits that are gonna get you to your five year goal, your 10 year goal, stuff like that. So if you’re wondering to like where to start with picking three, how do you narrow it down?
consider this, this is one option for you. Pick one that’s a movement habit, pick one that’s a mindset habit, and pick one that’s a food or sleep habit, and start with that. Write down the minimum for each of those, and then that’s your thing for the 90 days. Develop some cues around this. So when and where each habit is going to happen. And of course, you can be flexible. There might be days where if you say, okay, I like working out in the morning, I’m work out, I’m gonna do my 10 minutes of movement, first thing when I wake up.
Well, maybe one day for whatever reason that can’t happen. We can be flexible, of course. But mapping it out, putting it your calendar or having the intention to do it at a specific time every day or stacked with another habit that makes sense, that’ll just set you up for even more success. So again, it’s not that we’re not being flexible, but really giving yourself those cues about when and where this is supposed to happen. That way when you see the cue or go to the spot where it’s supposed to happen, will remind you.
that strengthen that habit over time, that that’s where it’s supposed to be. I think that is finally about it for us for this habit challenge. I hope that you got something out of it. I’d love to hear what you learned. I’d love to hear what worked for you, what didn’t work for you, what were your challenges, what were your big wins. As always, if you’re finding this later and you’re like, my God, the challenge is over. It’s not, you can start it at any time. I’ve designed this so that you sign up for the email.
and it’ll send you the series day by day whenever you get started. So whenever you find this, it’s available to you. It’s healnourishgrow.com slash habits. So I’ve said every day, I’ll see you tomorrow, but this time I won’t. I’m still be around on all my channels, all my socials on YouTube, but I’m not gonna have an everyday message to you for a little bit, hoping to get the podcast back on regular schedule, once a week releases, interviews with interesting people in the health and wellness space.
and me talking about whatever random topic of the day that I’ve turned into a research project for myself basically. But yeah, that’s about it. So I will see you somewhere down the road and I hope to hear from you. Take care. Bye bye.
In today’s episode, Cheryl guides you through one of the most important parts of building lasting habits: reflection. As the challenge nears the end, this is a chance to look back on the entire experience and notice what actually shifted for you.
Cheryl explains how reflection helps reinforce progress, identify what worked, and spot what did not work without judgment. Today’s habit is simple and quick, but powerful. You are going to write a few notes about what changed, what you learned, and what you want to carry forward. The goal is not perfection. It is awareness, progress, and building a sustainable approach to healthy habits that fits into real life.
Takeaways* Reflection reinforces progress and helps you recognize what is working * Noticing change helps your brain see the challenge mattered and created results * Small changes and small increments are the most sustainable way to build habits * Looking back helps you identify which habits you enjoyed and which felt harder * The tracker can help you spot patterns in consistency without judgment * Awareness is the first step to improving what comes next
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free
Drinking Ketones
Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life
Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow
Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
YouTube
TikTok
Amazon Store
The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 29 of the 30 Days of Healthy Habits Challenge. So we’re getting here towards the end and it is time to reflect again. So this will be similar to some of the reflect and resets that we did throughout the challenge on each seventh day. But today we want to reflect on what has changed this whole.
So what is it that you’ve learned from this challenge? What things changed for you? Did you enjoy moving every day? Did you discover a form of movement that brings you some joy while you’re doing it? I want you to write three quick notes about what changed today. So just the minimum, two or three things. Reflection helps you reinforce the progress that you’ve made and helps you notice what is actually working and also maybe what is not working.
So as you’re reflecting, can write down really any thoughts that you have around this, but at least three bullet points is what I’d like for you to come up with that changed. And we also see that there’s some evidence that your brain can see there was a change, that this wasn’t all for nothing, that it wasn’t just another exercise in futility, but things actually did change or shift. And so even if you weren’t perfect every single day, even if you missed some of the days, this was never meant to be about.
Perfect, right? Like when I said from the outset, I don’t want this to be something like a challenge that’s like 75 hardware, you miss something, you have to start all over, it’s really punitive. And I think there are obviously some advantages to those kinds of challenges as well, but this is just something to ease you in to making changes and to learn how the best way to make sustainable habits is to make small changes, small increments.
note your progress, really create it in a way that works, that can fit into a busy schedule, but that you’re still actually making changes and making progress along the way. Notice, maybe look at your tracker, if you need help thinking about things that worked or didn’t work, notice how consistent you were or lack of consistency if that’s the case. Again, we’re not judging here, we’re just noticing and hopefully thinking about some things that would carry well into your future.
As always, the links for the research are in your tracker and in today’s email. And if you haven’t signed up, if you’re just finding this and you’re like, what is this whole challenge all about? Just go to heelnourishgrow.com slash habits, and you can join anytime. So that is it for today 29. And I will be back with you one last time tomorrow for the habits and the final day. So get ready.
In today’s episode, Cheryl returns to one of the most impactful habits for long-term wellbeing: connection. In a world where so much communication happens through texts and social media, it is easy to feel socially connected without actually getting the benefits of real support and real interaction.
Cheryl explains why true connection is closely tied to both mental and physical health, and why it is worth repeating this habit later in the challenge. Today’s focus is about moving beyond good intentions and turning connection into an actual plan by putting something social or supportive on the calendar.
Takeaways* Real connection supports mental health, physical health, and overall wellbeing * Texting and social media can make you feel connected without providing real support * Scheduling time with people turns a good intention into a real plan * Community and support groups can be just as valuable as time with close friends * Making a specific time and date matters more than saying “sometime” * Social plans can be simple and still create meaningful connection * The sooner you schedule it, the more likely it is to actually happen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BnlCHBdhGc[k/embedyt]
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free
Drinking Ketones
Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life
Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow
Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
YouTube
TikTok
Amazon Store
The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey, everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 28 of the 30 Days Healthy Habits Challenge. Today, we’re going back to connection. We did this earlier in the challenge, but I think it’s important to hit on it again because in this day and age where everything has become text and social media and learning things about your friends and people in that way sometimes, reaching out and making true connections is becoming more more valuable. And it is so related to good health, good mental health, good physical health.
Thank you.
Bro.
community a strong support group.
people finding new people to connect with. And so today’s habit is
make it happen. So it’s going to be a social or supportive thing on the calendar. I would say that this could be, you know, an event, a social meeting with a person that you already know, or if we’re calling it a supportive thing, it could be more like seeking out a book club or a support group or a way to meet new people. So either one that you choose and one may be easier the other depending on if you’re introverted or extroverted, but you’re going to do one thing.
like that. So it’ll be to schedule this social time, you’re gonna get real support in real time, hopefully boost some happiness, get a few laughs. And putting it on the calendar turns this intention into an actual plan. The planning part is key because we all have intentions, right? How many times does somebody say to you, we should get together, but they don’t actually make a date or make a plan for doing to you.
and mental health and physical health. So one of the things that you can choose to do if you want to be mental health and physical health is to do something like make a walking date. Just take a walk with a friend, go for a walk in nature, go for a walk on the treadmill next to each other, but somewhere that you can talk and interact and actually have real connection. You can go for a coffee. It could even be a phone call if you can’t get together in person, but set aside time that you’re actually going to do it. And both people have availability. Yeah. So time and date.
leave it as, some time is not okay. It’s gotta be a plan, it’s gotta be on the calendar, it’s gotta be like, map. If it’s something that you can’t accomplish this week, I just want you to get on the calendar. It can be something in the future, but I really want you to intend to treat it as part of the calendar, actually do it. But if you can’t, this first day or tomorrow, actually have that interaction, have that schedule time with somebody, the sooner the better. There’s no time like the present, right? As always, the reason
links will be in your tracker and in today’s email. And if you’re finding this in the future on YouTube or on the podcast, you can sign up at any time. doesn’t matter when you find this. It’s heelnourishgrow.com slash habits. And that is it for today. As always, I will see you again tomorrow. We’re getting closer towards the end.
In today’s episode, Cheryl shares a simple but powerful habit that can completely change how you handle stress, conflict, and emotional triggers. The focus is on building a short pause between what happens and how you respond, even if it is something small like a frustrating comment, an anxiety spike, or an email that instantly sets you off.
Cheryl explains how taking just 10 seconds can reduce rumination, support more consistent decision-making, and help you respond in a way that aligns with the person you want to be, not just your first impulse. She also offers an easy cue phrase you can use in the moment, plus a beginner-friendly option if 10 seconds feels too hard.
Takeaways* A short pause helps create space between the stimulus and your response * Reacting immediately often leads to choices you would not make once you calm down * This practice can reduce rumination, meaning you replay the moment over and over later * Pausing works in social situations and in private moments when you feel triggered internally * Deep breathing during the pause helps settle your body before you respond * If 10 seconds feels too long, start with 5 seconds and build from there
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nurse Grow and welcome to day 20.
I call it a practice because this one is tough sometimes. It’s something that I have been practicing for a long time in my own life. And that is to today, your habit is to pause before reacting for 10 seconds. So a great example of this is usually
better word triggers you or makes you anxious or makes you frustrated. And you may want to just react in that moment. And quite often what you’ll find is if you just take a pause, a couple deep breaths are useful here as well, but take a pause, give yourself a moment to think, give yourself a moment to feel where that comment or conflict or whatever it was, where it landed in your body, where you’re feeling it and just take a deep breath and then respond.
And so why this is good.
And it’s going to reduce rumination, which is that idea that you just keep playing something over and over in your head. All of this is going to support consistency and create a space between the stimulus and the response. And this usually leads to better choices or better interactions. Another thing, you know, I’m talking about reacting with someone else, but it could also be that you’re alone. It’s a personal thing that you’re just reacting to in the moment. So that’s a
time to again, take some time, take a deep breath and just let it settle and figure out what you’re really thinking about it rather than just your initial knee jerk response. Because it could come in the form of an email or something that just happens to you and you’re just anxious and caught up in the moment. Just give yourself a beat. Pause, breathe, and then choose. That’s like a cue phrase. So along with this habit today to take that pause, think of pause, breathe, and choose.
what I like to do with a pause. And it’s funny that my my ex actually noticed this about me which I thought was pretty perceptive because if you would say something that was
A heavy sigh like.
and then just breathe a couple times and then I would respond. So maybe you don’t want to make it so audible or so obvious because this person in my life did notice this, but you could even say, you know, your thing about pause, breathe, then choose. It could be even a choice to say, I need a moment to think this over. I may need a moment to process this. Something like that that gives you just the time.
to go ahead and take that deep breath and to give it some reflection before responding. So if 10 seconds seems too long to you, let’s start with five, as this challenge has gone the whole way.
make yourself work towards up towards bigger habits, bigger goals, you know, everything like that. The small things will just make it seem more simple and less stressful on you. So if 10 seconds is too long, go for five. As always, the research will be in the email and in the tracker and you can join at any time by going to healnursegro.com. So if you find whatever you find it in the future, please join and you’ll get to take advantage of learning all these fun
new things that can help you get to your goals. So I will see you again tomorrow.
In today’s episode, Cheryl revisits one of the most important stress-related topics in the challenge: money. Since financial strain is a major source of anxiety for many people, today’s habit focuses on taking one small action that supports your future financial wellbeing.
Cheryl explains why progress on financial goals is linked to better overall health and stability, and she shares simple, realistic examples you can complete in 10 minutes or less. The goal is not to build a full budget or overhaul your finances. It is to make a quick “future you” move that reduces stress, creates more control, and supports your ability to stay consistent with other healthy habits.
Takeaways* Money is a common source of stress, and reducing financial strain can improve overall wellbeing * Small progress toward financial goals can help you feel calmer, more stable, and more in control * The habit is about long-term support, not daily spending perfection * Financial stability can make other healthy habits easier to maintain because stress is lower * Automation is one of the easiest ways to reduce mental load and improve consistency * Even small savings can matter, especially over time with compounding interest * If money habits feel overwhelming, the best approach is a tiny step and then pause
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Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan founder of Heal Nourish Grow, and welcome to day 26 of the 30 Days Healthy Habits Challenge. Today we’re back to money. We did this one habit earlier in the challenge and we’re coming back to it again because as we learned from the previous one, if you read any of the research or just listened to the podcast from before, that money is ⁓ quite a source of stress for a lot of people and this is no surprise, right?
But it does show in the literature that making progress, making financial goals and taking some of your financial stress away actually creates greater wellbeing. It just helps you feel more settled, less anxious, less stressed. So addressing money things now and again is a good idea.
Cheryl McColgan (00:45)
obviously I think we should be considering what we’re consuming, what we’re spending money on, that sort of thing every single day. But when you’re doing these future plans or kind of more extended timeframe things for savings, that’s maybe not something that you’re thinking every single day. So I didn’t mean to say that, obviously you shouldn’t be focusing on spending on a daily basis, but these kind of larger goals might be something that’s more a once a week, once a month sort of thing.
So back to today’s habit is to make one future you money move today. And so this is going to be something that lowers financial strain and just gives you stronger financial capability in the future. And that’s all associated with better health and wellbeing. It reduces stress, as I said before, creates stability and having stability and having control of your finances supports other healthy habits as well. It gives you the finances and the ability to invest.
in other areas of your health if you need to. And it also having less stress in your life makes all the behaviors easier to repeat when you don’t have stress cropping up. So to give you some examples to make this easier, do something like set up an auto-save program at your bank or on an app. So taking $10, $20, $1,000, whatever works in your particular financial situation to automatically save each month. Automated bill.
have a bill or two or all of them that are scheduled to pay every single month so that it takes the stress off of you remembering to send a check or to submit your payment online. Maybe increase your retirement contribution by 1%. This is an area that I’m really interested in because I have always been involved in some degree and both my partners have been in finance and I actually ended up doing a speech about it in college. But the compounding
Interest is such a huge thing the earlier you start saving even if it’s a small amount and then I say earlier I’m like the younger that you start saying your that money just has more time to double and double and double again over time With the you know compounding interest and if you start saving much later in life It doesn’t have as much time to grow now That’s not to say you still can’t start because like every all of this you can start any time But the younger that you start saving the better it’ll just set you up much more in the future for having some
again, gains without having to do anything else. The once in the money is in there and it’s growing with interest, it just keeps building on itself. If the automation seems too much, maybe it’s something like setting yourself a calendar reminder or writing a small financial plan, maybe for the next week or the next month. So we’re doing it in 10 minutes or less. We’re not making a spreadsheet here or creating an empire of things. Of course, if you want to do that at some point, I think that’s awesome.
But this is just meant to be, again, a small, doable habit that doesn’t turn you off from it. So setting up an automation, something quick like that, or setting aside more money to save is a good choice here. So if it’s triggering too much stress, just do a small step, something in relation to it, and then stop. And you can always come back to this at a later date or give it some further thought when it comes for the weekly reset and reflect. As always, the studies are linked.
in the email that you received and in your tracker. And if you haven’t joined yet, that link to join is heelnourishgrow.com slash habits, you can join anytime. It’s never too late. That’s probably the theme of this series so far. But hope you enjoyed this and I will see you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan emphasizes the importance of strength training for overall health, particularly as we age. She discusses how even short sessions can be effective and encourages listeners to incorporate strength and stability exercises into their routines.
Cheryl highlights the benefits of consistency and the need to challenge oneself with appropriate weights to stimulate muscle growth. She also addresses common misconceptions about strength training and reassures listeners that it’s never too late to start.
Takeaways* Strength training is crucial for functional health and aging. * Short sessions of strength training can be effective. * Two days a week of strength training can yield significant results. * Lifting heavy means finding the right weight for you. * Body weight exercises can be a great starting point for beginners. * Balance and stability exercises are important for overall fitness. * Osteoporosis and muscle loss can be reversed with strength training. * It’s never too late to start strength training, regardless of age.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Cheryl McColgan (00:01.902)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to a day 25 of your 30 day healthy habits challenge. This is one I’ve been waiting for to send to the very end here the last few days and that is to challenge you to do a short strength or stability session. So this is not going to require any equipment. It’s not going to require going to the gym or anything like that. But I just want you to try it if this is something that you don’t do on a regular basis.
because strength training has just so related to so many aspects of health. There’s more and more stuff coming about all the time. It is maybe more important than strict cardio for a lot of reasons, but it supports again, functional health, just moving around on a day-to-day basis. And it’s a lot of longer term, less health risks when you strength train. So strength and stability, it all supports healthy aging, it supports confidence and just again, your function in daily life. I always say,
you I’m training to be able to get off the toilet by myself when I get older because these are the kind of things that people lose the ability to do because they lose the strength in their legs. And that is just crazy scary. Also short short sessions are easier to maintain and it builds this consistency, which is an awesome thing for habit building. I’ve actually been following along with this other podcast recently called mind pump. I’m pretty sure that’s right. Like 99.9 % sure. But anyway, these guys have been
training people for years and years and years and just a great collective wealth of knowledge. And they have programs that are just 15 minutes a day. Now people do them six days a week for strength training, but that 15 minutes a day, it supports the habit, keeps the habit going. And it’s enough time if you do for 15 minutes, you probably do two to three sets of some strength training exercise, kind of a full body.
idea and they’re doing all the big lifts like deadlifts, squats, lunges, that sorts of thing. I don’t have their program unfortunately, but that’s the idea behind it is supporting this daily habit, doing it an amount of time that doesn’t scare people off and that people can fit into their schedule. And that’s all it takes to build strength. You can build strength with that little of strength training a day. And actually if you didn’t want to do it 15 minutes a day, like if you would have to go to a gym to do this and that seems like, oh, that’s a lot of
Cheryl McColgan (02:26.766)
driving time to go to the gym for just 15 minutes of work, even just two days a week of a longer strength training session that hits all parts of your body is enough to get 80 % of the 80 to 90 % of the strength that you’re going to get anyway. It comes from just two days a week. You’re hitting your muscles two days a week. You’re waking up the muscles two days a week. You’re stimulating the muscles to grow by lifting heavy enough that it puts a signal in your body to grow.
If you’re just doing something little and repetitive, that’s not a signal for the body to grow. That’s why you got to lift heavy for you. People get scared when they hear lift heavy because they think it means, you know, for example, that I would go pick up a 200 pound, you know, barbell off the floor. No, that is not. That’s too heavy for me. Right. I’ve got to do what’s heavy for me. And that means something that I can pick up and do maybe six, eight, 10, 12 reps. That’s the kind of range that’s really good for strength building and growing muscle.
And so you want to just do something that’s heavy enough for you doing these little two pound weights. If you’re, you know, even the average woman that might that even if it’s heavy for her, like for a week or two, that’s very quickly going to be too little of weight to cause any real change. So sorry for the little that was a bit tangential, but I just to get the idea of you definitely want to do it. If you’re going to go ahead and do it, like at least give yourself enough.
of a challenge that it makes some difference. Now, all that being said, I said you don’t need any equipment for this one and you don’t because especially if this is completely new to you doing body weight exercises and things at home are going to be plenty of new stimulus for you to try. If you already lift, you already have access to a gym, then I would just maybe challenge you to try a couple of exercises that you haven’t, don’t normally do or you don’t normally.
or maybe if you already strength train, you don’t have the stability part as much, maybe you’re gonna try some stability work for this part of the challenge. So just choose like a little, you can make a little circuit mentally for yourself that you’re gonna spend 10 minutes doing this. And so again, if you don’t have any equipment home or anything, maybe it’s an odd and you can just do this if you find it too stressful to think about figuring this out for yourself. Air squats, so just body weight squats. And if you don’t recognize any of these things, if you look here on look on YouTube,
Cheryl McColgan (04:47.554)
You’ll find plenty of videos that will demonstrate this for you, but simple body weight squats you can do sit to stand. So if you are worried that even a squat might be too much for you or too stressful, you want to just literally lower yourself down slowly to a chair and then bring yourself back up using the strength of your legs. So not pushing off with your, know, really using the strength of your body and your core to push you back up out of the chair. You can do some hinge work. So just literally
bending over or if you have milk jugs or soup cans or things like that in the house, if it’s just way too easy for you bending over pretending you’re gonna pick something off the floor, maybe actually have some milk jugs, something like that. And then you could also do pushups. Everybody knows what that looks like. You can do pushups against the wall if you’re not very strong. And if you’re already very strong, you can just do pushups as many as you can in a row would be a great challenge. also wall sits like literally
bending so that your quads, your quadriceps, the tops, your thighs are parallel to the floor and leaning your back against the wall and just sitting there. That’s an isometric exercise, also very strengthening. So those are all just it. So just 10 minutes, you’re gonna move your body in some ways you haven’t tried yet. If you’re looking to create stability, some balance types of things, most people don’t do those on a regular basis. It would always be surprising to me when I was in yoga class, we’d have.
obviously a whole section of that that was balance of balancing on one leg in some way, whether it’s stretching at the same time, holding a foot while you’re balancing on one leg or just simply balancing on one leg without the stability of a wall, something like that could be a good option for this part of the challenge too. So there shouldn’t be too much concern about figuring something out because there’s so many videos online now and just
Don’t pick anything that looks crazy or out of whack or too, too challenging. Just, you know, pick something that makes sense for where you are in your body right now and your current strength and skill level and just make it a little challenging. Maybe make it something new. But getting out of your comfort zone in regards to strength training, think particularly for some women, this is still a barrier. And it’s just such a shame because the
Cheryl McColgan (07:03.362)
things that happen with old age, especially to us women, bone loss, bone density, osteoporosis, osteopenia, all of that can be prevented and reversed. There’s some excellent data on reversing osteopenia and osteoporosis through strength training. So that’s pretty amazing. then sarcopenia, that is the loss of muscle mass as we get older. And if you don’t move, if you don’t put that stress on your muscles, we just continually lose muscle mass.
as we get older and older and become that’s how we become frail. That’s how people are not able to get off the toilet by themselves. That’s how people, you know, quit moving their bodies because they don’t have the strength to anymore. Again, though, this can all be reversed. I think that’s amazing news. But what I’d really love for you to happen is if you can make it a habit now.
and get as strong as you can now. Hey, believe me, it all, it all goes downhill. It’s all fightable. It’s all reversible, but the older you get, the more challenging it gets for a number of reasons. It gets more challenging mentally. gets more, you know, your time is, uh, tends to be more valuable just cause you’re busier as you get older, more demanding job, children, things like that. So whatever age you are now though, it is not too late. It’s not never too late to get started with strength training. You’ve just got to make it appropriate for where your body is now.
and make it consistent. And like I said, if you’re going to do it every day, that is totally fine. Keep it shorter if you’re doing it every day. And if you’re nervous, you can always hire a trainer or like I said, look at videos online, practice the movement at home, feel confident in the movement before you take it to a gym or like I said, hire a trainer. That’s always a good option so that you have somebody that’s there with you that can just guide you and walk you through it and teach you how to use machines, things like that.
So anyway, that is your challenge for today. I hope you enjoy moving your body in this way and challenging yourself. Like I said, make sure you, if you’re using weights in this little part of the challenge, make sure you pick up something heavy enough that’s actually challenging for you. Don’t just like move some little two pound weights around and think that that’s enough. We’re going to like actually try to stimulate some muscle protein synthesis here. So anyway, that is it for today and I will see you again tomorrow.
For Day 24 of the 30 Day Healthy Habits Challenge, Cheryl shares a habit that makes healthy living feel way easier: planning ahead. Today’s goal is simple, plan tomorrow’s movement and one healthy meal. This helps reduce friction, decision fatigue and makes following through with healthy choices easier.
This habit is all about keeping it realistic. Your healthy meal doesn’t need to be fancy or time-consuming, it just needs a plan. If tomorrow feels too tight, you can plan for a healthy meal sometime in the next three days instead.
Takeaways* Planning reduces friction and helps you follow through without relying on motivation. * Deciding ahead of time reduces decision fatigue, especially at the end of a busy day. * Meal planning supports variety, helping you include more ingredients and avoid repeating the same meals. * Aim for at least 30g of protein in your planned meal (breakfast, lunch, or dinner your choice). * Try adding one produce item you don’t normally buy to increase variety and support gut health. * Planning your movement mean choosing what you’ll do and when you’ll do it so it actually happens.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.014)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 24 of the 30 days healthy habits challenge. So today is one that I am particularly fond of and I think it’s fun. Some people will not think this is a fun habit to have, but that is to plan tomorrow’s movement and one healthy meal. ideally we’re going to plan one healthy meal for tomorrow, but I will say that
if you have a particularly challenging work schedule or this is something that you don’t do on a regular basis, you can really plan for that healthy meal just sometime in the next three days. But the idea is to plan ahead to figure out what it is, how you’re gonna make it, what ingredients you need for it, if you need to find a recipe, all that kind of good stuff. And everybody’s definition of a healthy meal will vary slightly, obviously, depending on your goals and depending on.
you know, what that looks like for you. There’s, you know, there’s all kinds of different dietary practices that anybody might be following. So I’m not prescribing a specific one. Of course, you know, I’m going to say that I would challenge you to, for whatever it is to have at least 30 grams of protein in it. And this one healthy meal you can plan, can do it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever that means for you. It’s going to be, you know, if you’re not used to cooking,
I don’t want you to plan like a big elaborate thing, unless that sounds fun to you, then yes, you could do something like that. But it would mean just a nourishing healthy meal. It doesn’t have to be necessarily anything fancy or anything that requires a lot of cooking. It just has to have a plan. So planning reduces friction, reduces decision fatigue later. It might be decision in the moment that you have to make, but once that is done and once you’ve already planned for it and gotten the ingredients, you already know what you’re having for dinner tomorrow. So that should make everything really easy through.
throughout that next day, not having to worry about that one part of your day, that’s already decided. And then it also, in the literature, the research for today, it says that it supports food variety, which is really also great for your diet, great for your gut microbiome. People that plan meals tend to include more different ingredients rather than if you just, if you don’t do much planning, you just might grab whatever’s available, grab what you typically tend to buy anyway. And so it gets…
Cheryl McColgan (02:18.71)
you know, can get pretty repetitive. So this planning ahead to try a new recipe or to make something slightly different can also just introduce variety into your meals as well. And then as far as picking your movement, that can be whatever you’ve stuck with for the whole challenge for your 10 minutes, but you’re going to plan like when in the day you’re going to do it, what time, what’s going to work for you tomorrow. So this, this idea of this habit is just the idea of planning ahead just helps make everything run more smoothly.
And it can be, again, the minimum. It doesn’t have to be a ton of cooking. Just make it a healthy nourishing meal, whatever that means to you. I will challenge you, like I said, get your 30 grams of protein in that meal and maybe a piece of produce that you don’t typically pick out. Maybe try something different. Maybe just go to the grocery store and be like, this looks interesting. I’ll try making this and then look up a recipe that goes along with that ingredient that you happen to find in the produce aisle. So hopefully that gives you some ideas about how to approach this one.
Again, optional journal prompt for you. The links to the research are in your tracker and in the email that you received for the day. And that is it. I will see you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of creating a stress release ritual as part of the healthy habits challenge. She emphasizes the benefits of consistent practice in managing stress, including physiological and mental health improvements.
Cheryl shares various breathing techniques and practical applications for stress relief, encouraging listeners to find what works best for them and to incorporate these practices into their daily routines.
Takeaways* Create a stress release ritual to manage stress. * Consistency in practice helps build resistance to stress. * Breathing techniques can significantly reduce stress levels. * Box breathing and movement can aid in stress relief. * Anxiety during breathing practices may indicate shallow breathing habits. * Research supports the benefits of meditation and breathing exercises. * Incorporate stress release practices into daily life for better mental health.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.494)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McCogan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to a day 23 of your 30 days of healthy habits challenge. Today’s challenge is to create a stress release ritual. This is either going to be movement or breath. And this is just going to be something simple. It’s something easy and that you can repeat and that’s about 60 seconds of breath if you’re choosing breath or two minutes of movement. And we’ve had some…
of this in the challenge already, you’ve tried different types of movement, you challenge yourself to move in a different way on some of the days. And so maybe if there was something that you tried and you notice like, hey, that’s really good for me. And it does relieve stress. Maybe it’s that maybe it’s if you try to need a mobility exercises we talked about or stretching or something like that to release stress or if it’s 60 seconds of a breath practice, one of the previous days we mentioned the three
just three deep breaths, something that simple 60 seconds is going to take longer. So it might be like five deep breaths, 10 deep breaths, but you’re just doing something that’s more extended amount of time. was like a quick stress release in the moment. This is something that is more focused on bringing your heart rate down, just, you know, bringing your stress in your body, your heart, your blood pressure, that kind of things like reducing all of those are really getting the parasympathetic system nervous system to come into play on this so that it
relieves your body and your mind of stress. So we’re just doing the minimum, the minimum, the minimum today. We’re just doing the minimum today on this. And this short stress ritual is good for a couple of reasons. It can reduce physiological stress, so your body stress and build resistance over time. And then can also reduce mental stress. So if you do this consistently as a reset, it’ll help you to respond rather than react in the moment. It’s going to make, you know,
that makes for better discipline, better decision making. If you’re not just flying off the handle at a moment’s notice, it also helps with your interactions with people. If you happen to notice when you get stressed that you snap people little more often or respond in a way that is not professional or calm. Having this little ritual will give you a way to kind of downshift. And the more that you train yourself on this, you know, you might notice anytime that you take some deep breaths, it helps. But when you train this every single day as a habit,
Cheryl McColgan (02:17.43)
It is a response that trains your brain to automatically go into that more relaxed state just by the act of you starting to do it. So it’ll become more effective and act more quickly every single time. So here’s some examples. If you’re having trouble thinking of one to do, we can go back to that three breath rate set, but you might do it for longer. Just set your timer for one minute and inhale, exhale, slightly longer exhale to really bring in that parasympathetic nervous system response.
You could try box breathing. You could do a quick walk. You could do wall pushups or you could do the stretching routine. Those are all good ones. And if you have something else outside of that that you think of to do, I would love to hear about it in the comments so that we can share that with others. And then, you know, one of the times you want to try it is any time during the day where you’re feeling a trigger or something that’s making you nervous or anxious, angry or anxious.
And so maybe it’s like you got an email from your boss and it’s automatically creating stress in your body. That’s a great time to do this stress release routine. Or if you are getting ready to sit down for a meal and you’ve been running around all day before you try to start eating, maybe calm your body. It’s just gonna promote better digestion and better, you know, mindfulness of your chewing and experiencing your food. So again, it’s just to be repeatable. It doesn’t need to be really complex or…
long or drawn out, like I said, just 60 minutes for breath practice, two minutes for a movement practice. Some people might notice, and I did notice this when I was teaching yoga a lot, is that for some people, a breathing practice can kind of create anxiety. And usually if that’s the case, it might be that you have, your body is kind of trained to take very shallow breaths and not expand the diaphragm. So really thinking about when you’re breathing to let your…
abdomen and belly expand as you’re breathing. So if you were to lay on the ground and put your hand on your stomach, you want your belly to be expanding up as you’re breathing. So that’s really feeling all of your lungs, not just the top of your lungs, but your lungs are going like all the way down almost to your waist. So you want to expand your lungs as fully as possible. And again, that slightly longer exhale, that’s going to really calm any feelings of anxiety. So if you notice that you’re trying to do the breathing, but it’s causing some anxiety for you for some reason,
Cheryl McColgan (04:32.376)
I’m going to guess it’s because you’re kind of habitually a shallow breather and you’re kind of just breathing almost in the upper chest. So try that low, slow breathing that expands your belly and see if that doesn’t help. So that’s about it for today. Start this stress release practice, whatever that looks like for you. As always, the links to the research are in the notes and my gosh, there are so much good data on meditation and breathing and things like that for
relieving stress and anxiety and just doing a whole lot of great things for your physiology as well as your mental state. So definitely check that out if you have time and then optional journal prompt for you there too. So anyway, that is it for today and I will see you again tomorrow.
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan discusses the concept of habit stacking, a technique that involves attaching a new habit to an existing one to make it easier to adopt. She shares her personal struggles with maintaining new habits and provides practical examples of how to effectively implement habit stacking in daily routines. The conversation emphasizes the importance of cues and motivation in forming lasting habits, as well as the value of research in validating health information.
Takeaways* Habit stacking is a technique to make new habits easier to adopt. * Attaching a small habit to a daily routine can enhance consistency. * The perceived importance of a habit affects motivation to maintain it. * Using strong cues can help in forming new habits. * Daily routines can serve as effective cues for new habits. * Habit stacking can reduce decision fatigue.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.174)
I’m Cheryl McColgan founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 22 of the 30 days healthy habits challenge. Today is something that we’ve talked about a little bit throughout the challenge, but I haven’t really dedicated an episode to it yet and I haven’t challenged you to actually do it as part of the habit challenge and that is to habit stack. So habit stacking is really simple. It can sometimes be hard to find ones that put together that make sense.
But when you can find those ones that go together that make sense, it just really makes this such an easier thing. So today’s challenge is to attach a small habit to something you already do every single day. So I think I just even mentioned this in the last recording for day 21 in the reflection thing is about if you missed habits, know, habit stacking is a great way to do those. Because if you’re finding them challenging to fit in your day,
sticking them to something you already do is going to be one of the easiest way that you can make that stick. And then so I’ll give you an example of the one since I started making this challenge, I’ve been thinking about this a lot for myself. And here’s the one that I’m working on right now. So I have had this hair trauma for the last three years. It’s a really long story that you don’t need to hear about in this episode, which I have actually done a podcast episode on it before. But at any rate, it’s, you know, I’ve had a lot of
trauma to my hair. I’ve had a lot of hair falling out. I’ve had some scalp irritation, things like that. And so I’ve been very focused on that. And one of the things I purchased to help me deal with this is this OS one supplement. I’ve been using their skincare for a while now. Absolutely love it. I have an article over at the website all about it. He says a peptide science. It’s really cool technology and it actually works and there’s some good clinical data behind it all. But anyway, oh, and just because I mentioned that
If you read about it, you do get a little extra discount with my link or something. But anyway, the point of none of that is the point here. The point is that I find it difficult. I bought this hair serum and I bought like I can’t remember if I bought a three month supply or six month supply because you definitely get a bigger discount if you buy more. And plus, if you’re doing anything with your hair, it’s going to take you a little bit longer to actually notice results. Right. So anyway, I’m getting to the point I promise is that I bought that serum, probably a good
Cheryl McColgan (02:20.305)
six months ago now or maybe even longer. And I’ve only used it maybe a total of five times and I’ll start to think, okay, I’m going to use it today and then I’ll get on the new habit of doing this every day because you got to do it every day for it to really be effective. So I haven’t been able to do that up to this point. I don’t know why it’s such a simple thing. It’s not difficult. You literally split your hair, you put the serum on the scalp, you rub it in, you go to bed. Easy peasy, right? Can’t seem to make myself do it, but
The one thing I do every single night is wash my face, brush my teeth and put on my skincare. put on the same skincare by the same brand that I put on my face every single night without fail. Doesn’t matter how late I’m out. Doesn’t matter what else I’ve done. I will not go to bed without washing my face, putting my skincare on and brushing my teeth. That is a solid set in habit that does not fail. for the last few days or since this challenge when I was talking about habit stacking several times, I’m like, this is just ridiculous.
have this perfect habit that this pairs with, which is like I mentioned, my teeth and skincare routine in the evening, I just need to put that hair serum like literally where I cannot miss it. And so I had it on the counter next to my toothbrush. I don’t know why, but that wasn’t quite working because the flow. But what I found was I put the hair serum inside of a drawer that has the skincare. I took the hair serum out of the cabinet off the counter.
put it in the drawer like literally right next to the moisture. And this is so dumb right, you’re like, why can’t you just put that in your hair every night? I don’t know why. This is why anybody has trouble with habits, right? This is why we’re doing this whole challenge. But put it right next to my skincare so that it’s literally right where I take them both out. I do the skincare part, I put that back and then I take the hair stuff and then I put it and rub it and put it right back next to the moisturizer. So that seems to be working.
So that is a habit stack. So that was a very long winded way of telling you. But I also think it speaks to the fact that, you know, obviously none of us are perfect. Even those of us that are very good at discipline, very good habits. And also there’s something about the perceived importance of the habit, I think. So this particular thing, like if I put this stuff in my hair or not, it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t affect anything. I’m not even sure 100 % that it will help or that it will work. So it’s not a high
Cheryl McColgan (04:40.651)
value habit, right? There’s not a whole lot of motivation example for me to continue that habit. Whereas something like changing your nutrition or changing your diet, if you’re say your goal is to lose weight, there’s a lot higher of motivation or importance. I won’t want to say motivation because motivation like we talked about that comes and goes. But the importance of that to your health or to your future goals, looking a certain way or having a certain body composition, the importance of that is a lot greater.
than something like putting this stuff in your hair that may or may not work. You know if you change your nutrition behavior, change your eating behavior, that that will have a positive outcome. So I think you also have to look at the importance of any particular habit in relation to how hard that’s gonna be to maintain or how hard it’s gonna be to force yourself to do. So the whole reason this works is pretty obvious. The habit stacking, the first habit, the existing habit is the cue and there’s no motivation there.
The second habit just comes right after it, because that’s where you’re sticking it now. And so again, this creates less decision fatigue. It just makes it easier for you to just go ahead and do it. So here’s an example. made this little formula that I wrote out so that we are all on the same page with this. It’s so ridiculously simple. But just for clarity, it’s after I blank, I will blank. So for example, after coffee, I will drink water. But I would put that in reverse, because as we talked about,
It’s stacked like that can still be stacked even though we’re supposed to drink the water before the coffee because well the coffee is still the cube. We’ll go to the thing to get coffee and we’ll be like oh yes I’m Annie and I’m going to drink this water first. And the other thing is after brushing teeth I will stretch two minutes. So you’re picking a cue that happens every single day because we want this new habit we want it to be a habit that’s like an everyday habit we just stick it with there. So that is really it for today. If you keep forgetting then you might need a stronger cue.
the more automatic the queue is, the easier it’s going to be to get this new habit to stick. So look for those things, like I said, like brushing my teeth or things that you’ve never missed. Those are the ones you want to stick it to. And as always, the links for the research, the links for the research, this week aren’t exactly tied to or for today aren’t exactly tied to habit stacking, but they’re just kind of the.
Cheryl McColgan (07:01.517)
way that goal setting interacts with habits and things. So I think those are pretty interesting, but those are in your email and in the tracker. As always, the optional journal prompt is there if you want to do that. And the research is always optional to read, but hopefully it’s, know, mostly if you just skim the abstract or skip down to the results, that would be a super quick read for you less than a minute. So also that could be a come a new habit, just like looking at, you know, looking at the research or especially, I don’t know, this one’s turning into a longer little episode here.
But just this is a totally random unrelated thing, but to encourage you whenever you hear certain things online, before I repeat them, or before I invest a whole lot of time in belief or disbelief or whatever, I’ll go search the topic in the PubMed and just see if there’s any existing literature or research on the topic and see if it’s even in the direction of what the person is claiming online. Because there’s a lot of bad information out there nowadays. I’m sure you already know this.
but it’s always nice to just consider the source, number one, and then go check, do a little research on your own and see. And the reason I like to go to PubMed first is because too many articles on the internet are all full of opinion, right? So just looking at the existing literature is a pretty good hint and a good signal to whether something is valid or not. So anyway, sorry to be a little tangential on this one, but hope you…
Enjoy today’s habit. I hope you can find a habit that you can stack with one of your existing ones. And I’d love to hear all about it as always in the comments below. Or if it’s something you don’t want to share publicly, you’re always welcome to email me as well. And if you’re not signed up for this challenge yet, if you just randomly found this on YouTube and you’re like, what is this all about? You can go to healnourishgrow.com slash habits and you can start this 30 days of healthy habits anytime for free.
just check that link out and you’ll get started that very same day or the next day, you’ll get the emails and then you’re onto your 30 days of creating new healthy habits. So that is it for today and I will see you again tomorrow.
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of reflecting on progress during the 30-day healthy habits challenge. She emphasizes the flexibility of the challenge, encouraging participants to celebrate small wins and make adjustments to their habits for better integration into daily life.
Cheryl also highlights the significance of planning for long-term habit maintenance beyond the challenge, ensuring that participants can sustain their new habits over time.
Takeaways
- You don’t have to be perfect on this challenge.
- Celebrate the progress and reinforce the behavior.
- Small adjustments prevent an all or nothing mindset.
- Keep your focus on being consistent.
- Choose the habits that resonate with you.
- Missed days are just data for you.
- List out three wins this week, even if small.
- Creating small daily habits supports your core values.
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
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Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
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YouTube
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The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.142)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNourishRo and welcome to day 21 of your 30 days of healthy habits challenge. So day 21, we’ve made it through the third week and if you’ve been doing the challenge along with us the whole time, then you know that this is time for the weekly reset. We reflect and adjust. So again, you don’t have to be perfect on this challenge. That’s why all the habits have only taken five to 15 minutes a day is so it gives you some things to try, gives you some things that
see which habits could really work well in your life, what could help you the most. And knowing that you don’t have to start over again, if you miss something, you can just do the little habit along with the next day’s habit, or you can just jump right back in. It’s not anything, one of these challenges where you have to start over if you miss a day. This is meant to be very flexible, to fit easily into your life, and to just give you some new ways of thinking about habits that might be helpful to you, and that you might wanna integrate.
each and every day going forward instead of just trying it on these little five minute, 15 minute intervals. So today’s habit is look at your tracker, celebrate what you did, and then choose one habit to make easier next week. So some of these, if you’ve been going through, you know, I’ve encouraged you, you’re just trying the one habit each and every day. But if you found a habit that speaks to you or that was super easy that you wanted to add in for the entirety of the challenge, maybe you’ve been doing those.
And so notice if you told yourself, hey, I was gonna drink that glass of water every single morning before I drank coffee. Have you stuck with that? Have you done it? And just notice what’s making it more difficult to keep that habit in is that you didn’t put the water next to your bed like I suggested, or maybe you go downstairs and you just go straight for the coffee and you forgot one day to do the water first. So whatever it is, just look what’s making these easier. And so I’ve been sending out the emails at 6.30 a.m. Eastern time.
Eastern time, that’s probably not the perfect time for everyone in the whole world that decides to do the challenge, obviously. But noticing if it’s harder to integrate into your day because you just got it later, maybe you kind of set it the day behind where you read today’s habit and you actually do that tomorrow so that you can plan ahead for it and know where it best fits in your day, that sort of thing. So again, we’re just looking to make these easy. We’re looking to make them fit with the habits that we already have, trying habit stacking, putting one habit, sticking it with another that makes it easy. Like we had the idea about,
Cheryl McColgan (02:19.554)
taking supplements when you brush your teeth kind of thing, or putting your running shoes next to the door where you have to see them before you go outside to go to work and remind you to take your bag with you for the gym. know, whatever it is, you’re just trying to plan ahead so that you make things easier and repeat it every day until it becomes a habit. So the consistency is the key.
Again, not every day is gonna be perfect, but making these small adjustments on a week to week really prevents you from getting to this all or nothing mindset like, why are you missed three days? So now it’s too late and you just forget about it and you never come back to this. It’s always noticing that evaluating the week. Okay, yeah, maybe I wasn’t perfect this week. I missed this and this. How can I do that better next week? Maybe I’ll come back to those habits because I actually missed them this week and I wanna try them. But just you’ve got to celebrate the progress.
and reinforce the behavior so it feels rewarding. So we want to notice the positive. We always want to be training our brain to notice those positive things, have gratitude for the things that did work this well, easy this week, and then set your mind up for noticing which ones were more challenging and figuring out a way to make that easier for yourself the next time. It just, you know, also keeps the momentum going. So we just want these small wins. And I want you to list out.
Three wins this week, even if they were small. Ideally, they’re related to the habit that you did. You were able to try this one that you weren’t so sure about. But you can also just start with three wins, period. Just evaluating your week and thinking about the positives. And then choose one way to make it easier. So if you missed some of your 10 minutes of movement every day this week, how can we make sure that you hit that every single day next week? Because really,
I think that that is one of the most beneficial habits that if you don’t have already integrating that, you will just do yourself so much good. And specifically, like I mentioned, if you can make sure that you walk outside on a regular basis, you’re not always being in the gym on the treadmill, something like that, but being outside, connecting with nature. So if that was one of the friction points when you were having your habits this week, maybe plan out next week where you look at your calendar, you figure out what’s your biggest, busiest day, and then figure out where you’re going to fit in your movement.
Cheryl McColgan (04:34.85)
figure out where you’re gonna fit in your five minute habit. And then again, we’re just resetting the miss days, they’re just data for you. We’re just observing, we’re not judging, we’re just noticing what went well, what didn’t, that’s it. So don’t look for, you know, I didn’t do enough, I didn’t, you I messed up, no negatives like that. We want to keep it all positive and just frame it in a way of learning and noticing the data so that we can make it better the next time. So keep your focus on being consistent.
doing the little habit every single day. We’ve got seven more days to go at this point. And I hope you’ve enjoyed it up to this point. Like I said, there’s gonna be habits where you might do them and you think, okay, that’s not really for me. That doesn’t resonate for some reason. Or maybe there’s some habits that really do resonate. And then you look in the literature on it, you look at the research. I just gave two links, but most of them, there’s many more links that you can look at for these habits.
So just choose the ones that you want to dig into and notice what might be better for you going forward. We’ve got, like I said, only about a week left. So at some point you’re going to come out of this and you’re going to need to have a plan for maintaining these habits. Because I’m assuming if you’ve practiced this the entire time, you really want to create new habits in your life. So we want to figure out a way that we can keep carrying that forward, not just after 30 days, but 60 days, 90 days, a year, year after year, repeating those small habits that are going to get you to your bigger.
goals. And I think I mentioned it before on one of the other podcasts is I have the 10 year core values and goals worksheet for you. So that’s at the website. If you go and search what is ultimate wellness, the link for that form is in that article. And it also just talks about, you know, figuring out what is wellness for you, figuring out what habits work for you on a day to day basis. So the article is kind of all about that. And the worksheet helps you notice like, what are your core values? What’s important to you?
And it kind of goes back to the very beginning when we picked the three focus areas for this challenge. You know, that’ll give you a good hint into what might be your core values and what might be these overarching things where you want to plan out for the next five years, 10 years going forward. know, creating those small daily habits that will support that. So anyway, that is it for day 21. I hope you have a nice little reflection and reset. And as always, I would love to hear in the comments what you found challenging, what
Cheryl McColgan (06:56.652)
What were your wins? It’s just always exciting to celebrate along with you. So that is it for today. I will see you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of adopting small, manageable habits to improve mental clarity and reduce stress. She emphasizes the benefits of a five-minute decluttering practice, which can lead to a calmer environment and a sense of accomplishment.
Cheryl shares insights on how clutter can increase anxiety and how small wins can build trust in oneself. The conversation encourages listeners to embrace these habits as part of a broader 30-day healthy habits challenge.
Takeaways
- Clutter increases your stress.
- It creates a calm Zen mind.
- You get to check it off your list and it’s done.
- Touch it once, that’s the practice.
- Don’t be tempted to deep clean.
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free
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Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life
Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow
Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
YouTube
TikTok
Amazon Store
The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.62)
Cheryl McColgan founder of HealNourishGrow and welcome to the day 20 of your 30 days of healthy habits challenge. Today is one that I use pretty frequently and I think it is so helpful and actually looking into the research about it I always knew that there was a reason that this was a thing that was good for you. But today’s habit is that you’re going to declutter one small area for five minutes. So you’re just going to set a timer on your phone or in the kitchen time or something like that and stop when it ends.
Now, I will say what happens to me when I use this little habit is that sometimes I kind of get on a roll and I don’t really want to stop. So if you want to keep it super manageable and not let it go kind of taking over other parts of your day, if you have a really busy day, you might want to just take a five minute section that’s right before you need to do something else. So you definitely have to stop. And it’s interesting how it almost leaves you kind of craving more because once you get started, quite often you get a little bit in a flow and then a
rhythm or you want to do a little bit more. And it’s kind of like the other habit that I shared with you, I mentioned how I would kind of trick myself when I used to have to get out the door to go run or go exercise or something like that. And so it’s kind of the same with this. saying I’m only going to declutter for five minutes and then I’m going to stop. So it takes away the resistance to that. Because I know a lot of times if I have a big cleaning project or if I have an area that’s a big mess and I just I want to reorganize it and I want to deal with it, but I just I will mentally put it off forever because it seems like it’s going to take too much time.
And it creates a lot of mental stress for me specifically. So I think that this habit is a really good one to take on. It is something that, again, like all of these habits has research to support why it’s good for you. But basically clutter increases your stress. So like I just described, for me, it definitely creates, it’s more like anxiety for me, what it creates when I have a messy space. And a calmer space also supports calmer routines.
It makes it easier to carry through on your other habits because you’re not looking around thinking about all the things that you need to clean up or organize or do. It’s just a calm Zen space really creates a calm Zen mind. So this small reset can also help reduce visual stress and make your environment just more supportive for everything that you’re going to do in that space. For example, right now, if I look at my desk, there’s a few papers and things on it that aren’t making me so happy in the moment, but
Cheryl McColgan (02:22.466)
That’s probably what I will do for my five minute little clutter cleanup today. So you start these short sessions and it really helps you build trust with yourself because again, it’s a small win. And so in this scenario, the way that we set this up, decluttering a small space, you’re going to have the small win where you finish what you started and you get to check it off your list and it’s done. And that always feels great, right? So that’s another way it’s really supportive. So as far as picking a tiny zone,
Here some examples or ideas that you might want to use. So for example, a counter space, maybe the kitchen, junk drawer. I don’t know, my junk drawer would probably take more than five minutes. I might not pick that one for this particular one. One specific shelf, or maybe it’s a part of your car. Maybe it’s like just vacuuming. You know, this one’s not really decluttering per se, but say you had trash or work things or piles of paper or something in your car, you can declutter that space.
And then the simple rule is just you only want to touch the things once I think that is a really good practice as well I try to get my husband to do this with the mail, but he just he’ll sort through it He’ll kind of look at it and then I’ll put it down. It’s like touch it once So that’s what we’re doing with this declutter habit and you just trash it donate it or relocate it That’s your choices. So it’s either trash donate put away just you’ve got to deal with it though in that moment and So again kind of stopping at that five-minute mark even when you want to keep going the reason this is
important for this particular habit is it’s about repeatability. So you can’t, you know, you can’t put it off as easily when it’s only five minutes. If you get into a whole thing where you try this five minute habit and then it takes you 20 minutes because you didn’t stop and then you’re kind of annoyed by it because it took over some other space in your day that you needed. That is so I think it’s good to sit mentally that parameter at the very beginning and then that way when you stop again you get to check off.
that thing off your list, you did it the way that it was supposed to be done, and that’s it. So if you have problem with that touching it once kind of thing, or something you really need to give it more thought, because even Marie Kondo, is that her name? I think she’s the one that’s the lady that’s the declutter lady. But a small decide later, Ben, is OK. And this is only for one day, so you probably won’t need that. But if you’re going to carry this habit forward into the future,
Cheryl McColgan (04:43.958)
maybe have a small side later been that way you can put some little things in there when you’re feeling overwhelmed, but you can still put it out of the way and make the one space that you’re focused on actually being, you know, completed like we’ve discussed. So even just if it’s one square foot, that is it. It’s like, don’t be tempted to deep clean. Just remind yourself that this is a small little habit that you’re going to start repeating over and over. And that’s why we want to keep it super manageable. And this one is again, you can tell I’m talking about this one a lot because it is definitely something
that I find challenging, where if I would practice this habit every single day, these small five minute cleanups, I’d be in so much better shape than when I ignore it or I wait until I have enough time to do the whole thing, because you easily keep putting it off and keep putting it off. So anyway, hopefully that was useful for you today. As always, the research links will be in the tracker and in your email for the day. And if you haven’t signed up yet for the challenge, if you’re just running into this video on YouTube and you’re like, what is this all about? This is a 30 day healthy habits challenge.
you can sign up at any time. And that link is healnursgrove.com slash habits. And so that’s it for today. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of setting digital boundaries to improve mental and physical health. She highlights the negative effects of excessive screen time, particularly from social media, on anxiety and overall well-being. Cheryl offers practical strategies for implementing a digital detox, such as uninstalling apps and creating physical distance from devices, to foster healthier habits and reduce stress.
Takeaways
- Setting digital boundaries is crucial for mental health.
- Excessive screen time can disrupt sleep patterns.
- Social media contributes significantly to anxiety levels.
- A digital detox can free up valuable time.
- Uninstalling distracting apps can help focus.
- Physical distance from devices can improve well-being.
- Using Do Not Disturb features can reduce interruptions.
- Awareness of screen time can lead to healthier habits.
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Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Cheryl McColgan founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 19 of the 30 days of healthy habits challenge. So today’s habit is that we’re going to set one digital boundary for the day and why this matters is probably obvious to you. There’s so many so much information and so much research now on screen time and how it’s affecting people and there’s so many reasons it’s not healthy. So the number one
and we talked about this before in relation to sleep is the blue light that emanates from your phone. You’re holding it very close to your face for a great part of the day. So it definitely interferes with your circadian rhythm and sleep. In addition, you know, just the act of looking at your phone, having it in your hands can create wrist carpal tunnel kinds of issues. It creates a hunch in the shoulders and this forward head lean that is very hard to counteract. And then saving the probably the most important one to talk about for last.
is that it really affects depression and anxiety. And we’re seeing a lot of research come out on this having to do with social media specifically and young children and screen time. And there’s kind of two separate things just screen time in general for children is less clear, I think in their literature, because I saw at least one research study recently that was saying something about it. wasn’t really the screen time itself necessarily interfering with neural
development so it can be a positive in some cases but screen time as far as social media for both adolescents and adults is not healthy. It creates a lot of anxiety and depression and some of this is by design. So the app designers and if you ever listen to any of the interviews with people that talk about this stuff it’s really interesting how they purposely want to make you scroll more and spend more time on the app and now
I think TikTok has gotten to be especially the worst because now it’s all like live streams of people trying to sell you something. So it’s also become a means by which you can, you know, lose some control of your financial situation. And, know, TikTok in particular, they’re just making it so, so easy to click on a live video and purchase the product immediately or put it into a cart where you’re still can watch the video and then prompts you to buy. So there’s any number of reasons giving yourself
a digital detox is a good idea. In addition to just freeing up some of the time during your day, if you ever look at the stats on your phone about time spent on social media, like unless you’re scrolling social media while you’re on a treadmill or working out or something like that, that’s probably about the only other thing you could really reasonably do at the same time. But if you ever look at your screen time on your phone for specific apps, it can be really interesting and give you a big clue as to whether
you need to do this type of detox a little more often or not. those, the links to that, some of the research will be in the email, of course, for you to read all about that if you want to do something extra. But today’s only habit is to just set the one digital badge boundary. So I want to give you some ideas about what that might be. It could be to uninstall.
the app entirely from your phone for the day. That’s one really easy way to do it. There’s also some different apps and features, I believe, on either Android and iPhones that can put on a Do Not Disturb where you don’t get notifications for a certain period of time. You can also take it at a specific time of day or kind of have it stack it with other things. So for example, there’s also some literature that says maybe having the Wi-Fi next to your head at night or things plugged in next to your head, the EMFs, is not that great.
So instead of plugging in your phone next to your bed, maybe today your digital boundary is you plug your phone in another room and just leave it in the other room. And then that way you also aren’t having that instantaneous access to it when you wake up first thing, you can kind of wake up more naturally and maybe take a few breaths and do some of your gratitude practice or one of the other habits that you’ve been working on throughout this challenge. And so those are just some ideas about how you can do this. Now, if you need for your phone for work, obviously,
or you have apps that you use specifically for work on your phone, you might need to figure out how to let those specific notifications come through. Or like I said, if it’s just one app that’s particularly problematic for you that you tend to spend too much time on or let it distract you, maybe just uninstall that one from for the day. So hopefully that gave you some good ideas to set your digital boundary. As always, you’ll be doing your 10 minutes of movement, which is amazing. And then optional.
are the extra reading, but I do think these are two pretty good ones, although it seems maybe obvious to you at this point that because it’s been in the news so much that too much screen time or too many apps and social media can create a lot of anxiety and depression. But those links will be in the email. And yeah, I think that’s about it for today. So I hope you enjoy trying this little detox, digital detox, and be sure to let me know in the comments if this is something you practice already on a regular basis or it’s something that you’re
Going to try, would love to just hear your thoughts about the digital media space and how you’re taking any steps to mitigate that. So I will see you again tomorrow.
Today’s habit for the 30 day healthy habits challenge, is a seriously under appreciated part of health. However, it’s one that impacts both how you feel now and how you age over time: connection. Having supportive relationships and a sense of community isn’t just good for your mood, it’s strongly linked to longevity, resilience, and overall well-being.
For today’s habit, you’re going to reach out to someone. Call or text, but take it one step further and make an actual plan. Suggest a specific day and a specific activity, even if it’s simple and free, like a walk or a coffee. If you can, I want to encourage you to call. Hearing someone’s voice or even leaving a quick voice message creates a deeper kind of connection than a quick text, and it’s something we’ve gotten away from over time. Relationships require communication and follow-through, and today is about being the person who makes it easy for connection to happen.
Takeaways
- Connection and supportive relationships are linked to mental health and longevity
- Isolation can negatively impact health over time, and reaching out helps reduce that
- A quick message is good, but a real plan is better
- Suggest a specific date and a specific activity so it doesn’t stay vague
- Consider calling instead of texting to create a more meaningful moment of connection
- It does not have to be expensive or complicated, a walk, coffee, or casual catch-up counts
- Relationships require communication and consistency, and someone has to initiate it
- You can build a strong support system with just a few key people, but you have to invest in it
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Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.394)
Cheryl McHogan founder of HealNourishGrow and welcome to day 18 of your 30 days healthy habits challenge. Today is one that is such an underappreciated part of health and that is to reach out to someone and having connection in your life and having a supportive community is really just so key not only to your mental health but also it’s highly related to longevity. So if you want to be healthier
Creating a small circle or a large circle of people that you have in your life that are available to you is just really important and an underrated aspect of health. So today’s activity, today’s habit is to reach out to someone. Now I’m gonna say call or text, but plan something. Plan to meet, plan to meet in person, plan to go somewhere. It doesn’t have to be somewhere where you spend money necessarily, maybe go for a walk or just grab a coffee or it could be dinner.
just anything like that. And I am going to encourage you, I said text or call, but I’m going to encourage you to call because we all have gotten maybe a little lazy with that over time. And it’s just nice to hear people’s voices, even if I’m not able to pick up the phone for some reason in that moment, I always love getting a nice voice message because it’s just something we don’t do that much anymore. Why this matters again, social connection, it’s protective for your mood and longevity and
It’s just going to make you less isolated, which is also related to health over time. And if you don’t reach out, you’re not going to have those connections. You’re not going to have a actual relationship like relationships require communication. It requires touching base. And I have to say, I’m really impressed. There are certain people in my life that are just so very good at this. And I really admire that quality. They’re always the one to reach out or just say, thinking about you or let’s get together soon and throw out a date and throw out an idea.
That’s another thing. mean, people, I feel like that’s one thing when you say, yeah, we should get together soon. That’s not a plan. That’s why that’s part of this conversation of this habit is to get you to be the one that says, how does next Thursday work or throwing out a date and an activity? Because a lot of people, you were the one to reach out. You’re the one that was thinking of them. And so I like for that to be kind of the way that you connect is to actually put an idea out there and
Cheryl McColgan (02:22.99)
not make it so ambiguous because quite often I have people in my life that will say that, we should get together. And yet they never suggest a time or an activity or a date. And it’s just kind of, I don’t know, it falls flat, I think in the realm of relationships. So it shouldn’t always be one sided. You shouldn’t always have to be the one to do that. But for this habit for today, I’m going to say, I’m going to put that on you to make that challenge to just reach out to somebody that you miss, that you want to catch up with, that you want to see and make some plans.
And so that is today’s habit. As always, the research behind this, if you want to dig into it a little bit more, you’ll just find that it’s so related to many aspects of health. And I think you might really enjoy reading that if you need any encouragement about staying in touch with people, because it doesn’t have to be a big group. You just have to have somebody that’s got your back, somebody that you can rely on. And you have to create that. You have to put some energy into it.
So that is it for today’s habit and I will see you again tomorrow.
Today’s habit might surprise you, but it’s one of the most important for overall well-being bring some attention to your finances by creating small win. Financial stress doesn’t just live in your bank account, it aksi shows up in your body and your mental health, too.
For a lot of people, the biggest stress isn’t even the numbers, it’s the avoidance of financial related tasks or thinking. So today, we’re keeping it simple: one small money action that helps you feel more in control, builds momentum, and makes bigger financial tasks feel less overwhelming.
Key takeaways:
Financial stress is closely tied to mental and physical health, this is wellness, too.
A tiny step helps break the avoidance cycle and builds confidence fast.
Keep it small and doable.
Ideas: cancel a subscription you don’t use anymore, move $10–$100 into savings, pay a bill you’ve been putting off, review your expenses for the week or month, look at your credit card statement and spending categories, use your card’s built-in tools to spot patterns.
Even a one-day change (like skipping a habitual purchase) can be a helpful reality check and can add up over time.
If you want extra support, I’ll include a tool I’ve been testing (Rocket Money) in the show notes (free trial link if available).
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Watch on YouTube
Episode Transcript: Cheryl McColgan (00:00.43)
Cheryl McCogan founder of Heal Nourish Grow and today is day 17 of the 30 days of Healthy Habits Challenge. So today is an interesting one and I think it’s one that people don’t always think about when you’re thinking about your health and wellness but it is actually so important especially for your mental health and just for overall well-being and that is today’s habit which will be to do a small financial win. So this could be
anything really just a small money action that’s going to lower your financial stress because financial stress is really linked strongly to mental and physical health and taking a small action can help build confidence and reduce the stress of avoidance because a lot of people don’t do financial stuff because it’s like they just don’t want to think about it they don’t want to take the time to deal with it they think if they ignore it it’ll just go away something like that but you can have this tiny win today that will create some momentum and make
bigger challenges feel less overwhelming. Is it like anything else? Like all of these habits we’ve talked about, you got to start small and build on it. So to make it easy, here’s some few options and examples of things you might do. One might be to cancel a subscription that you’re no longer using. That’ll save you maybe $10 a month, $20 a month, something like that. The streaming services have all got us crazy lately because everything you want to watch is on a totally different channel. So take a good look at that and maybe consider pairing that down.
You might move $10, $20, $100 to your savings account, a pay a bill that you’ve been putting off, review an account, maybe review your expenses for the whole month or review your expenses for the week. Review your credit card bill. Really just take time to actually look at it and see where your money is going. There’s actually some good tools in most of the credit card things. If you log on to your account online, it’ll kind of…
break it down into categories like, you know, bills and utilities. You might be looking at Amazon specifically, it’ll give you the whole amount that that has. If you look at whatever card that you have, it tends to have some good tools along with that that can show you how you’re managing your finances or where you’re spending. And then noticing once you see where you’re spending, that’s how you have been able to like create one of these small wins, see if there’s something that you can eliminate or something that you can change.
Cheryl McColgan (02:28.586)
Also an app that I’ve been testing out lately. I believe it’s called Rocket Money, but I’ll I think I have a link for now for a free trial period or something like that. But I’ll find that and put that link in the show notes for you. But it’s just a nice tool. can help you keep track of some of these things and give you some ideas on how to, you know, look, start looking at your finances a little bit more critically. You don’t want to do a big overhaul here. Don’t get into a whole thing about, you know,
doing a grand evaluation of everything that you’re spending, everything you’re doing, try to just identify something that’s simple. Some of the things I mentioned, maybe it’s like skipping your $7 Starbucks for the morning, something like that for a lot of people that can really add up. But we’re just trying it for one day to day and just giving a little bit of attention to this. You can see if it’s something that is alignment with your priorities that you set at the beginning of the challenge, those three focus areas, you know, depending on what those are.
your finances could be a really big part of that and part of the big key to keeping those moving in the direction that you want to move them. So as always the links for the studies will be in the email and in your tracker and so if you’re interested in diving a little more deeply into this you can find those links there and like I said it’s strongly related to mental and physical health a lot more people a lot more than people really realize.
So taking a look at your finances and having the small win today, where can you cut back a little or where can you save something for your future will be a nice little mental uplift. So that is the habit for today and I will see you again tomorrow.
Today’s habit for the 30 day healthy habit challenge is simple, powerful, and genuinely fun: set aside 10 minutes to do something creative or playful.
As adults, we often stop making time for “silly” or purely enjoyable moments, but those short creative breaks can lower stress, boost your mood, and make it easier to stay consistent with healthy habits the rest of the day. Whether you put on music and fully immerse yourself, try painting, cook, take photos, knit, or explore something totally new. This is about giving your brain a reset and letting yourself experience a little joy.
Takeaways
Today’s habit: Do 10 minutes of fun or creativity, in addition to your daily movement.
Fun isn’t “extra”, it can lower stress and support your overall well-being.
Short creative breaks can improve mood and stress resilience, making healthy choices feel easier.
As adults, we often forget how to play, making fun a habit helps bring that back.
If you work in a creative field, choose something different from your job to truly reset your brain.
Aim for an activity that helps you enter a mini flow state. This allows you to be extra focused and not thinking about everything else.
Try something new you’re not “good” at. Being a beginner can actually make it more immersive and fun.
If you’re too tired for “fun,” choose something restorative (like a relaxing read) and still count it.
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Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
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The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
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Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.558)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 16 of your 30 days of healthy habits challenge. Today is fun because it actually is doing something fun or creative for 10 minutes. So this is of course, in addition to your 10 minutes of daily movement, but you’re going to take a separate 10 minutes at some point today and set that aside to do something creative or fun.
So this is often challenging for people. When I even think about it for myself, I’m like, what do I find fun? What would I actually do with this 10 minutes? Well, the beauty is it can be anything. And hopefully you have a hobby or a thing that you do, whether it’s art or singing or dancing or just something that speaks to you and creates fun.
This fun or creative activity, it can lower stress, it supports your well-being, and it just makes healthy habits throughout the day easier to maintain if you always have a little bit of fun. Short creative breaks can also support your mood and it creates stress resilience. fun, we don’t always make time for it, but you can make that a habit too. And that’s why I wanted to include this one in the challenge because I definitely think it’s something that when we become adults,
that we do this less and less. And it’s too bad because those times that you’re silly, and I find, at least for me, it’s often easiest for me to do this with friends, is that the silly creative or just fun times, it creates so much joy and you almost forget what it’s like. Whereas I feel like when we were younger and kids, we were more carefree and had less responsibilities.
it was easier to just say pull off work and do something fun for 10 minutes. But it really will pay you benefits if you look at it in terms of your work, because when you give yourself that little mental break, and especially if you’re in a creative field, it is nice to take a break and do something fun or different from whatever it is creative that you do for your actual job. So I would encourage you if you are in a creative field, if you do, for example, you do some people call it I do creative, I don’t know if I really think that it’s because I don’t.
Cheryl McColgan (02:12.332)
I don’t think of writing creativity in the same way that I think of like drawing or painting or things like that. To me, that seems more like creative activity, but it is, it really is creative. And even when you’re doing it kind of more in a work component, that it’s not, you know, I’m not writing fiction or anything like that. So it’s not creative in that way, but it is still a different kind of skill of creativity. So for mine, I would not choose writing, obviously, I would do something completely different. And for me, I’m more likely to choose fun.
for this challenge. So I would probably just maybe put on some music and you know really just take a moment to immerse myself into it and listen to it. I find that very fun and very rejuvenating and very refreshing break from work. So here’s some other ideas for you if none of that is resonating with anything so far but I already mentioned music. I mentioned drawing or painting. There’s also cooking.
or taking photos or some other hobby that you have. Maybe it’s knitting, crochet, maybe it’s, one of my friends does this thing with these little like sparkly crystal things, putting them into pictures and stuff. just anything like that. And ideally also something that you can get in a flow state with if you can within 10 minutes, because it’ll just give you that stress relief because you’re totally focused and you’re not thinking about anything else. And in the past when I’ve done this,
I haven’t thought it was fun. cannot draw or paint at all. Just was never a skill of mine, but I had bought this inexpensive acrylic set from Hobby Lobby. think those are pretty all over the US anyway. And it’s just a place that has a lot of different creative supplies and housewares and things to decorate with and stuff like that. So a lot of stuff for creativity. But being a person that doesn’t paint or draw at all bought
this little inexpensive paint kit with how to canvas and spent the afternoon on my patio and started, I had an inspiration piece that was a flat perspective thing that I had seen somewhere that I had a photo of and I got so immersed such in a flow state, was unbelievable. Excuse me. And I think that it was even more so of a flow state because I didn’t know what I was doing. So.
Cheryl McColgan (04:30.67)
Extra bonus points if you try something new with this challenge that you’re not used to because I think it can create an extra fun thing. So if you’re extra tired when you’re doing this and this fun doesn’t seem like the thing go for relaxation whether it’s just a 10 minute break to do something you don’t normally get to do like reading something like that. That would be fine as well. So that is your habit for today. And if you’re not yet signed up, you can always start at any time. We’d love to have you and that’s it for this one. So I’ll see you again tomorrow.
Setting an intention for the day can help keep you focused on what’s really important. It gives you the ability to make decisions that are in alignment with what you’ve chosen to focus on for the day.
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Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free
Drinking Ketones
Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life
Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow
Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
YouTube
TikTok
Amazon Store
The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.142)
everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 15 of your 30 days of healthy habits challenge. This morning is going to be simple. We’re going to pick an intention, just one priority. So at the beginning of the challenge you identified three areas that were your top priorities. So let’s set one intention that’s related to one of those priorities. You don’t have to do all three, just one. So.
You will do this, write it down like we said before, there’s something about hand to real paper, actually writing something out that is very different than writing in the app. But if you’re using the app or you’re using a simple note in your phone, something like that, that is totally fine as well. But if you’re keeping a journal or you’re using that throughout the challenge, I definitely recommend actually handwriting this one. You could also write your intention for the day on a post-it note and put it somewhere where you’ll see it often throughout the day so that it keeps reminding you.
So whether that’s on your computer, if you’re working or maybe putting in your purse, or if you’re in the kitchen a lot, dealing with your kids throughout the day, putting it on the refrigerator, something like that. So just one thing, and this thing about choosing a priority, or choosing an intention for the day, it really reduces decision fatigue. So if you’re really trying to stay mindful of that intention throughout the day, it’ll just make your decisions.
easier. So you’re like, okay, is the decision I’m about to make in line with that priority, that intention that I set for the beginning of the day or not, and you definitely want it to be one try a whole day where you’re just really being in alignment with what it is that you want for yourself. It also just helps you reduce mental clutter and it directs you gives you some attention to your purpose. And it just makes the chances that you’re going to follow through a lot more realistic when you set that intention at the beginning of the day and actually
Like I said, keep reminding yourself of it. Another thing you can do is actually set a timer or a reminder on your phone so that it pops up every once in while and again, just brings it back to the forefront. So you can keep it as easy as two sentences if you need it some kind of more, a little bit more direction around this, but it’s today I will blank and I will show up as blank.
Cheryl McColgan (02:16.576)
Again, having those little reminders around are a great way to approach it, but you could also attach it to some cue that you do something that you do throughout the day. You might be like every time I open my laptop, top, I’m going to repeat that intention and then just bring it to top of mind. So however it is that you’re going to be able to keep it in the forefront, do that, whether it’s the writing, the putting it on the phone, the attaching it to a cue.
It’s kind of like the attaching it to you is like that idea of habit stacking that we’ve talked a little bit in the past. If warnings are too hectic, you could always write this intention the night before, or if you get stuck and you’re just can’t figure out something, maybe choose from being calm, consistent, present, kind, focused. Those are all ways that you could show up. Or today I will be one of those things, something like that.
As always the links for the research are in your tracker and in the day’s email. If you’re not signed up yet, healthy habits challenge, be sure to go to healnourishgrow.com slash habits. You can easily sign up and start anytime that you find this. So you don’t have to wait till the beginning of the new year, the beginning of the new week. You just sign up for the challenge and then you’ll start getting emails the very next day and you’re off to the races. So I will see you again tomorrow. That’s it for today.
This is the end of another week of the healthy habits challenge, and Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of evaluating the week in order to identify ways to improve for the rest of the challenge.
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Episode Transcript: Cheryl McColgan (00:00.846)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Feel Nourish Grow and welcome to day 14 of your 30 days healthy habits challenge. We made it to day 14, that’s the end of week two and now it’s time for the weekly reset. So every week we do a reflect and adjust. It’s not a time to make any judgments about yourself or to be sad or unhappy with yourself for not doing a particular day or anything like that. You’re not perfect, you don’t need to be perfect.
We just need to keep repeating the habits and not get stuck on, you know, this idea that we, you know, there’s the streaks and stuff are fun. And I, again, I made this challenge to be manageable so that it’s five to 15 minutes a day. So that ideally you’re getting those wins every single day. But if you do miss a day, it’s totally okay. You’re just jumping back in. So for the weekly reset, we’re going to go back to the same thing that we did on day seven. And that is to list one win.
one challenge and one small adjustment for next week. Again, we’re doing always the 10 minutes of movement every day. I hope you’re enjoying that. I’d love to hear how it’s feeling in your body, what you’ve been doing for movement, what’s different for you with that. And then also going back to your focus areas. Ideally every day when you are looking at the habit that we’re doing, and I’ve tried to mention this a few times throughout the videos, but it’s not always easy for me to remember to do it on every single one, but to…
Keep the habit in the framework of your, the three things that you identified at the beginning as your focus areas, trying to integrate that in some way that supports those focus areas. And if it just doesn’t fit for you, maybe that’s not one of the habits that you’re going to keep going forward. But those focus areas, again, ideally when you have these kind of focus areas in mind, and I like to take the focus areas and eventually, you make them into goals that are maybe a monthly goal or a five-year goal or a 10-year goal.
things that are much bigger goals, you have to take these small steps to get there. And so, but these focus areas in, I have this other thing that I wrote up a long time ago and it was just about your daily or your goals and habits and kind of identifying what things are most important to you in your life. And,
Cheryl McColgan (02:23.566)
So was this program that I wrote about and it’s still on the website. I’ll include the link in the show notes for you, but it’s a goals and kind of identifying things in your life. Like what are you about? What are your primary drivers and what are some big goals in the future that you want to get to? You might have a five-year goal, a 10-year goal, but these daily little habits that we’re creating should all support your focus areas, your future goals, things that you’re gonna get to. the…
Example I always like to use is the marathon. You know, you’re not going to go out and run 24 miles, 25 miles, 26.2 to be technically correct in a day. I’d like just do that tomorrow. You’ve got to build up to it. Ideally, if you’re going to run a marathon that’s four months in the future, you’re starting out by running a few, you know, maybe it’s even minutes at a time if you’ve never run before. And maybe it’s a six month build up to this or a year build up to this goal. But it’s these little daily habits that get you there.
So anyway, all that is to say to just take these into account every habit that you try in this challenge, notice what’s speaking to you and then see how you can apply that to your focus areas. So hopefully that all makes sense. And as always, if you have any questions or anything, you can always reach out. But sometimes these things want to have a little bit of ambiguity around it because everybody’s got different goals in mind and different things that they’re doing. And so it’s nice to have a little bit of interpretation of it for yourself.
But again, if you’re struggling or having trouble or just have questions, always feel free to reach out. And if you’re not doing this challenge yet, I encourage you to go ahead and sign up. It’s healnourishgrow.com slash habits. You can start any time, no matter when you’re finding this, it is never too late to start again or to just get started. Going back to your three things that you’re doing, your one win, your one challenge and your one small adjustment. If this week was messy,
and you had a lot of little loops along the way. The win can be I did not quit. So it can be as simple as that. Again, this is not meant to beat you up or to be something that you yet again failed at like a New Year’s resolution. It’s nothing like that. This is all just bringing more awareness to your habits, giving you some things to try that will hopefully be useful in your real life after the challenge is over and that you can keep going for
Cheryl McColgan (04:48.174)
months, weeks, years, however much it supports your goals and your personal well-being. So that is it for today. I will see you again tomorrow.
For day 13 of the healthy habits challenge, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of emotional check ins for mental health and behavior change.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.046)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 13 of the 30 Days Have Healthy Habits Challenge. Today we’re doing a quick emotional check-in. So this is something that I noticed that when I’m just, you know, in work mode and I’m kind of moving through my day and I’m just checking things off my to-do list, you often don’t take time to just kind of check in with yourself and see how you’re actually doing. So it can be useful just to make sure that you
know what’s going on. You can check in and see if you’re you notice you’re overly stressed overly anxious if you’re doing too much and it’s just a simple one-sentence thing that you’ll do for this emotional check-in and that is to say right now I feel blank and we’re also noticing if there is any feeling in the body that’s associated with this. So it’s just taking kind of an overview of both your physiological and emotional state at the same time.
Quite often when we experience certain emotions, whether it’s stress or anxiety or excitement, you know, they don’t always have to be negative emotions that we’re feeling, but you’ll notice that you feel it somewhere in your body. And so that can just be useful to notice where you’re holding extra tension. And again, it just gives you some bullet points or some things to notice that you can try to counteract them. So for example, yesterday’s habit was the movement stack. And if you take an emotional check-in and you notice that you
feel anxious in that moment. Well, it might be useful to do one of our breathing exercises that we’ve checked in as a habit or to do a little bit of movement to, you know, move some of that anxiety out of your body, but to first notice it, you have to notice it if you’re going to be able to do actually address it and do anything about it. So the cue is right now I feel blank and just notice where you feel it in your body. So the reason this matters is that labeling emotions can help
reduce anxiety and help you respond with more intention. And then it also reduces the intensity. So especially if it’s a negative emotion, this naming it and noticing it will help you calm down and actually respond instead of overreact or react in a way that is not helpful for you. It also strengthens just self-awareness and mindfulness. So this is also something that we do sometimes in a meditation practice that you are
Cheryl McColgan (02:19.957)
you know, people’s minds are going everywhere, but you’re just observing thoughts and noticing them in a meditation and not necessarily trying to change anything, but just getting this idea of self-awareness. So if you get stuck and you’re not like can’t name what you’re feeling, you can use this simple list. This is or some of the most common ones that people might experience in the moment is stressed, calm, anxious, excited, tired, hopeful, frustrated, happy, sad.
all there’s all kinds but those are kind of the typical ones that people might feel and then add one sense to this and say I feel this because so you might again it’s this idea of tuning in so that you can be more aware of actually what’s happening to you in the moment and an example might be I might feel this way because I’m frustrated with my boss or
I might feel this way because I’m excited to go on my trip tomorrow or something like that. And if you want to go even a little bit deeper, you can ask what do I need right now? So if you are feeling stressed or anxious again, that’s what do you need? Maybe it’s some of the tools that we’ve practiced so far that help reduce stress and anxiety. So if you can’t, again, if you don’t know,
what you feel exactly. And this is this is really challenging for a lot of people. Start with a sentence of say something and see if it resonates with you say like I feel tired. And then, you know, think about that for a second. Is that it or I feel overwhelmed? Just pick any one of those things that I named off earlier in the video and try it on and see if that works out for you. But if you have trouble, that’s probably a sign that you need to take this on as a more
more practice that’s every day and something that you might want to keep because if you’re having trouble naming it, then that just is kind of identifying that maybe you’re not present in the moment and you’re not in tune with your emotions or feelings. So of course, there’s the links for the studies associated with this in the challenge emails and in the tracker. They’re always in the tracker, which is a great tool. So you’re checking off these days.
Cheryl McColgan (04:37.151)
of habits that you’re trying and kind of creating little streaks. And that’s also a great way to keep your habits intact and going from day to day into the future. So if you’re not signed up yet, the link is heelnourishgrow.com slash habits. And for those of you that are doing the challenge right now, I will see you tomorrow.
Cheryl McColgan discusses day 12 of the Healthy Habits challenge with the idea of a “movement snack.” Getting up from your desk on a regular basis and adding in small bouts of movement throughout the day has a number of benefits.
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Episode Transcript: Cheryl McColgan (00:00.11)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNourishGrow and welcome to day 12 of your 30 days of healthy habits challenge. Today’s habit is to do a movement snack after for sitting too long. So I love the name of this and normally I’m not a big, not opposed to snacks generally, but you’ll do better if you just eat real meals, but movement snacks, we’re all about those for sure.
So all this is going to do is do some kind of movement after you have been sitting for a while during the day. a lot of us have desk jobs where we sit in front of a computer. If you’re very active throughout the day, you have an active job. Maybe this is more like a movement snack in the evening after you’ve kind of wound down. You’ve been sitting around on the couch for a little bit. But anyway, just any time that you’ve been sitting for, you know, say maybe 45 minutes. For some people, you might get antsy quicker than that. For other people, you might want to sit longer.
but try not to sit longer than 45 minutes. So you’ll just do like a two minute little movement break. Ideally, you want to stand up if you’re working in front of the desk, doing stretches like I’m demonstrating here on camera. So if you’re watching audio only, I’m pulling back my hand with the other hand just to stretch out my wrists. I do a lot of typing. So that is a really good one for me. You can also put your arms behind your head and grab one elbow and do a nice stretch there.
So that could be the first part of your movement snack. And then to just get up for a minute, maybe go get a glass of water or just take a walk down the hall, maybe step outside for a minute, something like that. So your body is just really designed for frequent movement. And these long times that we’re sitting just really aren’t good for us. So especially if you’ve been sitting at a meal for a little bit, having that little bit of movement after.
a meal, whether it’s a walk or something like that is really good for blood glucose. So doing something like some air squats that there’s also a recent study on that where it showed doing some air squats. When I say air squats, I just kind of mean like body weight squats where you don’t need any equipment or anything like that is as effective as walking for blood glucose control. So that’s pretty cool. It also just can support circulation, energy, focus. These are just
Cheryl McColgan (02:19.24)
nice way to break up your day and again just not have yourself sitting all the time. Eventually when you sit for long periods you don’t counteract that it’s know shortens your hip flexors it create a lot of issues in your body. We all get this kind of forward head when we’re working in front of the computer so things that you can do to counteract that like bringing your arms behind your back and interlacing your hands and then really stretching back to create a stretch in the front of the chest is a way that you can kind of counteract some of that
you know, hunched forward movement. So I am mentioning a lot of stretching, but I do want you to get out of the chair for sure. Again, try to keep it to 45 minutes. If you get up more frequently, of course, that’s always amazing. But that is the habit for today. So try not to sit for too long. As always, if you’re not yet part of the challenge, you can go sign up. The link is in the show notes or in the comment box below. If you’re looking at YouTube in the description box, it’ll be there. And yeah.
Let me know if you find this helpful and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Cheryl McColgan introduces the idea of tracking one thing during the day for the healthy habits challenge. Tracking brings awareness to your behaviors and gives you a powerful tool for habit change.
This link is for the free Cronometer food tracking app mentioned in the episode. The habit tracker we recommend is Griply.
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Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.014)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow. Welcome to day 11 of the 30 Day Habits Challenge. And today we’re going to start a practice that is something that’s useful for a lot of parts of your life. It may be something that you’re not used to doing yet. For a lot of people, this is a very foreign thing to them. But the habit for today is to just track one thing. And so that could be tracking your movement, that could be tracking water, it could be tracking your mood, something like that.
Again, this is all about learning the skill of discipline. So it doesn’t need to be perfect. You just need to do it. So pick a thing that you’re going to track. Maybe it’s steps, maybe it’s water, maybe it’s like your mood, like I said, or maybe it’s protein. We talked about protein a lot, so maybe you want to track protein. But you’re just keeping it neutral. You’re just collecting data. You’re not judging yourself. So if you’re tracking steps, you’re not shooting for a certain amount. Or if you’re tracking calories, you’re not trying to restrict or anything. You’re just…
tracking what is and using it as a simple data point. So that’s the minimum today to just track one single thing. If you need tools for tracking, I’ve mentioned to you the couple of apps before that we have in the resources for journaling, for tracking things. One that I have not mentioned yet, if you’re going to use…
If you’re going to track things like protein or calories or things like that, an app is super helpful. mean, back in the old school days, we literally used to write it down and try to find ways to look up calories and stuff. It was a lot more challenging. Now it’s super easy. My favorite, one of the ones that people know a lot is my fitness pal, but I find that one to be very inaccurate, just not that good. Chronometer is amazing. I use the free version for years. I pay for it now because it’s that good. I love it. It’s not super expensive. But if you go to https://healnourishgrow.com/cronometer that’ll give you the link that gives you access to the app. Like I said, it’s a hundred percent free. You get really access to most things you need without ever having to pay anything. It’s just if you want more advanced tracking features like tracking. I think one of the advanced things is more like tracking your micronutrients kind of things, but for just everyday calorie tracking and things like that, it’s a great app and it’s super easy to use. Yeah, so one thing, whatever it is, pick that. That’s your habit for the day. It should be super simple as always.
Cheryl McColgan (02:17.922)
Hope you’re keeping track of these things in your tracker. If you ran across this and you’re not part of the challenge yet, just go to healnourishro.com slash habits and you can join at any time. It’ll set you on day one. And so whatever time of the year it is, whenever you find this, would still love to have you join. So that is it for day 11 and I will see you again tomorrow.
Cheryl McColgan discusses the habit for day 10 in the Healthy Habits Challenge, a simple 3 breath reset. Breathwork is a great tool for stress relief and attention.
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Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.414)
I’m Cheryl McColgan founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day 10 of the 30 day healthy habits challenge. So today is going to be a habit that I have been practicing for a really long time because it’s a little bit based in yoga, which if you know a little bit about my background, I’m a certified experienced yoga teacher, tons of hours teaching, have been doing yoga since… gosh this is…
tough to say, but like over 30 years now I picked it up while I was in college. But anyway, it’s about a breathing practice. And this one’s not a structured breathing practice. This is just to try this one time today. And that’s just to practice a three breath reset. So at some point during the day where you’re either tired or feeling a little stressed, or you’re having an interaction that is making you tense up, you’re simply going to take three deep breaths.
Now the one thing I want to teach you about this because there are a lot of structured breathing programs and they all have maybe slightly different purposes. There’s box breathing, there’s alternate nostril breathing, there’s a ton of different breathing practices. And we are going to talk about another one I think later in the series that’s for a different purpose. But really this is just a practice to just get you thinking about breathing. And the thing I just want to bring home is that the most
One of the more important parts of any breath practice, I think if you’re using it to calm down or to fight stress, which is what we’re trying to do with this one, and that is to extend the exhale slightly longer than the inhale. So if you inhale for a count of four, for example, you want to exhale for at least a count of five. And the reason that this works and there’s plenty of data on it, like you know, with this whole challenge, there’s always research and the links for those are in your tracker and emails.
But the slightly longer exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system. And that’s the part of your nervous system that’s for calm, that’s for rest and digest. And it’s the one that a lot of people really have trouble accessing. So just having that slightly longer exhale is a great way to do that. So today, like I said, one of those times you’re just going to do that slightly longer exhale.
Cheryl McColgan (02:18.487)
This is gonna cue your nervous system to be more calm and it’s gonna help with stress and impulsive decisions. So it’s particularly useful in situations maybe with your significant other or at work or with your children. Anytime you’re feeling a little frustrating, just take a moment, three deep breaths, slightly longer exhale, and then deal with whatever the situation is. So you might wanna use some kind of trigger moment today.
that makes you think of it. Like again, if we do this habit stacking thing, the thing that’s going to help you do it most easily. Now that’s most useful when you, it’s something that you want to accomplish every single day. And I certainly think taking this time, any time of day, doing it at a specific time is really good, but I think it’s really more useful even, like I said, in those little situations where you might have some stress, like before a meeting or when you’re driving in traffic or something like that, or just using it to really settle yourself down before bed, you could make it.
part of your bedtime ritual if you wanted to do that. So that’s today’s thing. Super easy. Just breathe. If you want to read the signs, make sure you’re signed up for the challenge. You’ll get all the links in the tracker and in the emails. And that’s it for today. I will see you again tomorrow. I was almost going say next week, but man, we’re only on day 10 here. So we got a lot to go.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the significance of prioritizing protein intake in meals, particularly as one ages. She emphasizes the benefits of starting meals with protein to enhance satiety, meet nutritional needs, and support muscle health. Cheryl explains the concept of anabolic resistance and the importance of leucine in protein synthesis, providing practical advice on how to incorporate more protein into daily meals. The discussion highlights the challenges of meeting protein requirements and offers strategies for achieving a balanced diet without feeling restricted.
Takeaways
Eating protein first can help you meet your protein needs.
Protein is highly satiating and can prevent overeating.
As we age, our protein absorption efficiency decreases.
Aim for 30-40 grams of protein per meal for muscle health.
Leucine is crucial for stimulating muscle protein synthesis.
Tracking protein intake can help ensure adequate consumption.
Eating protein first can change your overall eating habits.
It’s important to balance protein with carbohydrates and fats.
Consider adding a protein snack before bed for muscle recovery.
One meal a day focusing on protein can be a great start.
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Episode transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.524)
I’m Cheryl McColgan founder of Peel Nourish Grow, and welcome to day nine of the 30 Day Healthy Habit Challenge. So today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite things, one of my favorite hacks, if you want to call it a hack, and that is today’s habit, and that is to eat protein first at one meal. So you don’t have to do it every meal, just one meal today. It’s not about perfection. This is just about sequencing. So doing this one meal
totally counts, if all you do is that, you win today. The reason that you want to start with protein is because it really highly satiating, it increases fullness. And one of the things that I’ve been working on my protein intake, I’ve been tracking it for about the last five or six years now, where I’ve really been more focused on intentionally getting more protein each day. And even after all that time, if I am not
focused on it, I will tend to not get enough protein on any given day. So one of the things that eating protein first does for you is if you’re if you’re one of those people that they’ll say when they learn what their optimal amount of protein is, you’re like my gosh how would I eat that much protein it’s so difficult. Well it’s probably difficult because you’re eating other things first
that take up this, I always say when I’m talking about a salad or bread before meals, I’m like, no, that’s just gonna take up the space where the meat should be, right? So I always keep that in my mind. That’s how really I approach every meal is I know how much protein I’m supposed to get each meal. I get that out of the way, I put that on my plate, I weigh it out, and then I know that I’ve gotten that. And then I use carbohydrates and fats to fill in the energy calories after that. So that’s…
Really the main reason to do it is because protein is very satiating. Most people don’t get enough of it. And eating it first really allows you to make sure that you get it in. This is important for a few reasons. First of all, as we age, there’s this thing called anabolic resistance. So basically it means that the protein that we eat is not absorbed properly or might not be broken down effectively. I don’t know if they really know what the exact mechanism is, why that happens.
Cheryl McColgan (02:17.934)
But basically, it’s like if I eat 30 grams of protein as an 18-year-old person, that’s almost getting 100 % utilized in the body. Whereas if I eat 30 grams of protein as a 45, 55, 65-year-old person, maybe only 80 % of that gets broken down into amino acids. so especially as you get older, that getting the proper amount of protein is really important.
Unfortunately, what tends to happen, people’s appetite sometimes get less or over time or they just don’t eat as well as they get older and they just get less and less protein and that just creates a number of health problems. Sarcopenia is low muscle mass that can happen as you age without strength training and without the proper amount of protein. There’s also this other idea called the protein leverage hypothesis, which is basically that your body will keep seeking out.
eat until your protein needs are met. So if you are eating a lot of either processed foods or a lot of foods that might be good for you, but don’t contain a lot of protein, it tends to make you overeat because your body will still be telling you, no, I still need protein. I still need those amino acids. And so you just keep eating and eating until you get to that point. So that’s some of the reasons that it’s very important. And since we’re on the topic, I’ll just go ahead and talk about that. You know, you heard me mention 30 grams.
30 grams of protein is basically what’s required to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. again, if you’re an older person, you might need more like 35 to 40 grams per meal. the real key there is not necessarily the grams of protein, it’s the amount of leucine in the protein that stimulates muscle protein synthesis. And they say that that’s two to three grams of leucine required to start that process.
So again, as we get older, it might not be broken down as efficiently. So you really want to get like 35 to 40 every time you eat a meal. Every time you eat is an opportunity to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And for most people, even the smallest women, you need about 100 grams of protein a day. An easy way to figure this out and kind of what’s been going around in the health space and people that are focused on this work, people like Dr. Don Lehman that do this kind of literature about protein, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.
Cheryl McColgan (04:36.558)
is that so the minimum is about one gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So say you are a woman, you might have a few maybe your 10 or 20 pounds of weight, you have little weight to lose. And so whatever you weigh now, you feel like your ideal weight for your height is 150. Well, that’s the amount of protein you’d be trying to get in a day is 150 grams of protein. So for me, what that has meant is I’ve had to add a fourth
meal into my day, basically like an afternoon protein hit. Because I find it challenging to, number one, wake up and get something like 50 or 60 grams of protein. I mean, that would be ideal, but I just don’t have the appetite for that. So I always go for like 35 to 40 my first meal of the day. And then lunch again, it’s kind of hard to eat something that’s going to be that amount of protein. So it’s usually
lands around 40 to 50. And you can see how that’s still by the end of the day, if I’m shooting for 150 grams of protein, I’ve still got like 60 or 70 to eat and you don’t want to be eating ideally a giant meal before dinner. having that little afternoon protein and then the evening meal is kind of how it’s worked out for me. I’ve also had people talk or heard interviews where they talk about having, you know, a protein snack in the evening before bed is very muscle stimulating and just kind of
If you’re a person that’s working on your body composition, working on building muscle, working out a lot, maybe having, you know, that eight o’clock protein shake or something before you go to bed might be a good way to get that extra amount in. I did just mention protein shake. Ideally, that’s not what we’re leading with in this challenge. You’re eating a real food protein for your first part of your meal, and then you’re filling in with carbs and fats. Anyway, that is all the reasons why you want to start working on eating protein first.
And you’ll see that if you do that, it really changes the way you eat pretty naturally. So instead of having to restrict a lot of things or change a lot of what you eat, if you really just eat the protein first, you’ll find that the things, the rest of it kind of balances itself out pretty easily. And it also becomes very hard to overeat on protein because say you’re eating a chicken breast, you’re not really going to, you know, magically overeat chicken breast. It’s pretty hard to do.
Cheryl McColgan (06:51.106)
But we quite often magically overeat other things like that have that carbon fat combination. If you just start eating some chips or you know, those kinds of foods, bread or whatever it is, those are much easier to overeat for that reason. And also I think going back to the protein leverage thing, that’s probably why as well. So that was probably more than you wanted to know about protein, but I really wanted to make a good case for why eating protein first is a habit that you really should take on in your life. And
Hopefully you will maintain this one. I think doing it one meal a day at first is pretty dang easy. So maybe you carry that out for the rest of challenge, or again, maybe this is just one of those you try, you’re not sure it works for you, or maybe come back to it later. But for today, it’s just eat protein first at one meal. So that is it for now, and I will see you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan emphasizes the importance of daily movement, particularly through walking outdoors. She discusses the health benefits of connecting with nature, the accessibility of walking as an exercise, and the significance of discipline over motivation in maintaining a consistent exercise routine. Cheryl encourages listeners to take a 15-minute walk as part of their healthy habits challenge, highlighting the positive effects on mood and energy levels.
Takeaways
Walking outdoors connects you with nature.
Daily movement is essential for health.
Discipline is more important than motivation.
Walking is an accessible form of exercise.
Fresh air and sunshine benefit your well-being.
Getting outside can improve your mood.
Consistency in exercise leads to better health.
Small steps can lead to significant changes.
Enjoying the scenery can enhance your experience.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.174)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day eight of the 30 Day Healthy Habits Challenge. Today’s challenge is going to be something, you’ve already been doing movement every day as part of the challenge, but today I’m going to task you with taking a 15 minute walk. There’s specific reason that we wanna do a walk. So it doesn’t have to be any fast kind of walk, it doesn’t have to be a specific pace, but ideally I would like for you to walk outside.
And there’s a good reason for that. It is really a healthy and important thing to connect with nature on a daily basis. And I realize, you know, depending on what part of the country you live in right now, as I’m recording this, it is the end of December. And so it was about 25 degrees today here in the Midwest. And I realize it might not seem like the most pleasant thing to do, but if it’s cold, bundle up.
get outside if it’s too warm where you are, go earlier in the day where it’s cooler. Obviously be safe if there’s ice, if there’s an excessive amount of heat, maybe walk inside on the treadmill instead. And if you can’t walk outside for whatever reason and you don’t have a treadmill and you can’t go to the gym, then you’re just going to do whatever the movement you’ve been doing. So you’re still gonna keep your habit of daily movement.
But the walk outside is so great because you’ll get some fresh air, you’ll get sunshine, getting real sunshine on your eyeballs outside is so important for your circadian rhythm. It allows you to connect with nature, like I said, so just observing the trees. I’m looking out the trees outside my window right now, not in how many leaves, but just noticing the sights, being outside, breathing the fresh air. is so wonderful to actually get outside and get out of your office. Now,
For most of us, walking is pretty accessible. So just about the most accessible exercise that there is. Even people that are seriously deconditioned or very, very overweight can have small little walking snacks as part of their routine. And mostly people can handle this pretty well. It really supports heart health. So you’re doing cardiovascular work whenever you move, you’re making your heart pump harder. And I said, you know, there was no…
Cheryl McColgan (02:16.206)
speed or intensity kind of goal with this walk is just meant to be a stroll and get outdoors. But if you take on walk as kind of your normal daily movement activity, you can definitely make it a heart healthy activity if you go a little bit faster. And it’s really one of the it’s it’s just so like I said, it’s so accessible to everybody. It’s so easy. It’s free. You just walk outside your door and do it. And I realize
There are parts of the country where maybe it’s not so safe to walk for various reasons. Like don’t have sidewalks in my neighborhood, so that’s bit of a challenge. Here’s a tip for walking outside. If you don’t have sidewalks, you’re always supposed to walk against traffic, right? Because you want to be able to see the cars coming out, you know, so that you can easily jump to the side if needed. But, you know, and there might be, you know, maybe you live in an area that’s higher crime or something like that. So maybe it’s not as safe to walk outside, but you can possibly drive to a park or, you know, just take some time to get outside.
Ideally daily, but definitely weekly and I know that in cities it can be more challenging, but it’s definitely going to help with your energy. It’s going to help with your mood. It’s like I said helps heart health and it’s probably one of the easiest habits to repeat which makes it perfect for a discipline practice because you can almost always convince yourself to go for a walk if you have to convince yourself to go for a run or go to the gym and strength train or get in a cold pool to swim in the morning.
Those can all be very challenging, but just to go for a walk, I think most of us can convince ourselves to do that. I do have, since we’re talking about what’s more challenging, what’s easier or not easier for exercising, and I may or may not have mentioned this before because I think I told you guys that I, some of the recordings for whatever reason didn’t have sound. And so I may have mentioned this previously or I may not have. It may have been one of the recordings that are lost, but for years I just used this little trick for motivation or actually,
It’s a discipline trip more than motivation. Motivation, like I said, the whole reason we’re not talking about that this much in this challenge is because motivation comes and goes. I it’s great when you have it because it helps you get started on projects or started on a new exercise regime. But it quite often doesn’t help you maintain that. That’s where discipline comes in. Discipline is just doing the thing, right? So when I was a runner for 17 years, quite often there’d be many days I didn’t feel like doing. I didn’t particularly actually even like running, yet I did it because of the whole discipline thing. It’s one of the things I…
Cheryl McColgan (04:37.784)
have cultivated pretty well over the years. But it would be like a conversation with myself. If I really didn’t feel like it, I would just say, okay, well, just put on your running shoes, put on your outfit and go outside, you know, just get started for five minutes. And if you really don’t feel like you can come back in, I mean, you can convince or chew it, whatever it is, it’s the getting out the door or getting to the gym part. That’s the hardest part. Once you’re there, you’re gonna do something. I almost.
Guarantee it in all the years. I’ve tricked myself like this It has never ended up that I didn’t actually do something and I’d say 95 % of the time I did the whole Workout or routine or whatever it was I had planned so it might always been to the Perfect speed or the perfect intensity or anything like that, but I did it and that is Discipline that is all it is is just repeating it being consistent
Of course, there may be times where you need to honor your body and take time off and that’s totally fine. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about when you know you should do it, you set aside the time to do it and you just don’t want to. That’s just a little trick there. So anyway, I hope wherever you are that you are able to get outside and take a walk today. Like I said, 15 minutes. So it’s a little bit longer than the amount of movement that we’ve been doing. It’s not going to increase every day from here or anything like that. We know that that’s not what this challenge is about. It’s still going to be 10 minutes of movement a day. But I just wanted to challenge you on this one.
Get the outside, get that extra little five minutes outdoors, get your heart rate pumping a little bit, breathe in some fresh air and enjoy the scenery wherever you are. Like I said, my scenery right here, right now is not all that exciting, but there’s always things that you can find to observe once you get outside. And even it’s just noticing how the clouds look today, because it’s a dreary overcast day here in Cincinnati. But hope you enjoyed today’s challenge, today’s habit that we’re trying and I will see you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of reflecting and adjusting weekly habits to foster personal growth and discipline. She emphasizes that perfection is not necessary, and encourages listeners to integrate small habits into their daily lives. The conversation also highlights the significance of aligning habits with personal priorities and sharing wins and challenges with others for support.
TakeawaysYou don’t have to be perfect; just keep trying.
Reflecting on habits helps identify challenges and adjustments.
Completing a habit is a win, no matter how small.
Aligning daily habits with priorities simplifies decision-making.
Weekly evaluations can enhance personal growth and discipline.
Small adjustments can lead to significant improvements over time.
Sharing wins and challenges fosters community support.
Self-reflection is key to understanding personal resistance.
Tracking workouts can reveal patterns in energy and motivation.
Integrating reflection into weekly routines is beneficial.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
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Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.162)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day seven of the 30 day healthy habits challenge. So today you made it through a week. You’ve tried six new behaviors up to this point or maybe not so new, maybe you’ve tried them before, but you just haven’t integrated them into your everyday. And now it’s time for the weekly reset. Time to reflect and adjust because again, this is about learning the skill of discipline.
through habits. You don’t have to be perfect. You’re just need to get it done. And again, if you missed a day, it’s no problem. You just jump back in. You can do the habit the next day or just restart, pick up wherever you are. It’s not meant to be this crazy restrictive thing. I do think it’s fun, you know, to use the tractor to keep streaks going. These are such little small habits every day that it’s almost they’re too small to ignore. Like you kind of
have to do it because it’s like, I always notice if I have a bigger thing that I’m dreading, like a big project for work or going to the gym on a certain day where I’m not really feeling it. If I put it in the perspective of it’s a big long task, like it’s going to be an hour workout, it’s got it supposed to be a heavy leg day and thinking about all of those things that can definitely make you not want to do it. But if you put it more in the perspective of, okay, I don’t feel great today, but I’m just going to
work out for five minutes and if I really don’t feel it, I can quit that kind of thing. That will make it a lot more likely that you follow through. So that’s why it’s good to do these reflect and adjust evaluations of the week. If any resistance came up around doing any of these habits, I’d be surprised again, because they’re so small, but it could happen. It could just be got super busy one day and you just didn’t even feel like it was worth it. It seemed too silly or didn’t speak to you for whatever reason. This is the time to reflect on that.
and adjust and kind of just get some learning out of it about yourself and you know why are you resistant to certain things and just self-reflection basically. So what we’re going to do today is write down one win, one challenge, and one small adjustment for next week. Hopefully you can find one of each of those. Again it’s kind of like the gratitude practice sometimes it can be hard to think of at first or if you’re having a particular bad day but
Cheryl McColgan (02:25.774)
One win is any day that you completed the habit. That’s a win. If you completed all six of the habits, that’s a big win. What was one challenge? What was the one thing that or one habit that you kind of thought about that didn’t speak to you you didn’t want to do it or you tried it and it wasn’t for you or you tried and it was too hard, something like that. Uh, and then one small adjustment for what next week, what can you maybe do better? What can you incorporate more of?
The one thing I would encourage you to is to go back to the three priorities that you set for the beginning of the challenge and see if you were able to incorporate those in each day with the habit that came up. Could you tie it back to your priorities? So say your priorities were that you want to eat healthier and be more present with your family and whatever a third one is.
But could you take those daily habits that we tried and was there a way that you could integrate that into the things that your priorities because at the end of this that’s really what you’re learning to do is you want to identify your priorities and that that helps make each decision that you make every day a little easier because if it aligns with your priorities Then that’s something you should be doing if it’s something that doesn’t align with your priorities like you said you want to eat healthier, but you have this idea that you want to
you know, eat ice cream every day or something. I’m not saying ice cream is wrong. It’s just like maybe every day is not the greatest. But that doesn’t align with your overarching goal, right? Your overarching priorities. So it’s just something to look at in these times when you’re doing the evaluation or the reflect and adjust period. And that’s kind of at the end of every week, whether you’re doing this challenge or whether you’re doing a habits thing or not, it’s still a useful tool, this particular thing to kind of integrate on a
Every so often basis, I like to do it once a week, just kind of look at the wins for the week, look at the challenges, what’s a way to adjust, kind of working on that for myself right at the moment with my strength training program because I’m noticing, I’m way overdue for a deload, my body’s very tired, I’m trying to make it to some time when we go out of town to have a little break, but I’m adjusting now because I’m noticing that my body is really.
Cheryl McColgan (04:47.808)
not in a good place at the moment and so I’m having to adjust my plans but that comes from a reflection because I reflected back on the week reflected on kind of how I was doing with my workouts one of my habits has been to you know I always track the workout and I also make some commentary about how it went or what kind of day it was and I’m noticing just more really tired days more really dragging days more days where I am
not dreading it, but it’s just more challenging. And so I’m definitely noticing that, okay, maybe there’s my body’s telling me something here I need to reflect and adjust. So I would say work that in, and every week, no matter what you’re doing, this is a great habit in and of itself, right, to maybe look at in the future. So as always, the links for the research will be in the tracker. And I’d also love it if you’d hit reply on the email and tell me your wins.
from the week. would just like to hear them. think it’s fun. or share them in the comments below because we can just all cheer each other on with our wins. And you know, it’s not always, not always pleasant to publicly share your challenges, but if you’re so inclined or you want advice and you think other people might have a strategy that could help you pop that in the comments too. You just never know what kind of feedback you’re going to get when you, well, I will say YouTube tends to be
more aggressive with the feedback sometimes I’ve noticed that so you you can decide if you’re up for that or not. Would love to just hear your thoughts on week one in the comments and that’s it for today. I will see you again tomorrow. Take care.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of replacing unhealthy habits with healthier alternatives rather than restricting them completely. She emphasizes the ease of substitution in creating sustainable dietary changes and introduces the concept of mindfulness and tracking behaviors to facilitate change. The discussion is framed within the context of a 30-day healthy habits challenge, encouraging listeners to adopt small, manageable changes for long-term success.
TakeawaysSubstitution is easier than restriction for behavior change.
Small swaps can improve diet quality without drastic changes.
Mindfulness in tracking behaviors can lead to automatic changes.
Replacing unhealthy foods with healthier options enhances adherence.
Cutting out beloved foods can lead to a rebound effect.
Practicing discipline is key to forming new habits.
The challenge encourages starting changes immediately, not waiting for a specific time.
Mindful tracking can help in reducing alcohol consumption.
The goal is to create sustainable habits through gradual changes.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free
Drinking Ketones
Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life
Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow
Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
YouTube
TikTok
Amazon Store
The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.152)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal Nourish Grow and welcome to day six of your 30 day healthy habits challenge. So today we’re going to work on doing something that is not restrictive, but yet just replacing. So for example, this is just again, all about practicing discipline. And so instead of cutting something out completely, we’re just gonna do a swap. So one of the easier,
Examples I can think of for this is maybe you drink a sugary drink or soda every day. Instead, consider drinking a glass of water in place of that or replace it with something closer to a soda, which would be maybe a diet soda, sugar-free soda, something like that. So rather than just trying to ditch the habit completely, we’re going to do a replacement behavior.
And the reason this works is that substitution is just a lot easier than restriction, right? So small swaps can really improve your diet quality without having to do any crazy, really restrictive things. Like for example, keto, as you know, that that’s what I’ve done very strictly in the past. Right now, just so you know, I would still say I’m low carb, but I have kind of changed the way that I have been
eating over the last year because I’ve started strength training a lot more and I did a bodybuilding competition. And so my diet looked a little bit different than it has for the past seven years, but I’m definitely still low carb and go in and out of ketosis at times still, but much more carbs in my life. Right. So that’s the example is that when you do something like keto and you go all in at the beginning, you’re really doing a lot of restriction, but instead can you replace those?
And that’s really what it looks like for a healthy diet, no matter what kind of style of eating you choose, whether it’s just eating more whole foods or eating less sugar, whatever it is for you, making those adjustments in a sense that you’re replacing something rather than restricting it is a lot easier. So in the idea of like the keto diet, one of the things like so for example, carbs, let’s say potatoes well.
Cheryl McColgan (02:09.814)
instead of just getting rid of potatoes altogether, maybe replace it with something else that’s lower carb like cauliflower. Cauliflower is the solution for everything, right? So it’s just a replacement thing. And it also just create better adherence because if you try to cut everything out at once, and that’s really, again, what this whole challenge is all about is that year after year when I’ve talked to people or worked with people on doing new habits or New Year’s resolutions or goals for the new year,
people always tend to bite off more than they can chew because when it comes to the time of year, like if you happen to be doing this in January, I mean, I hope you pick it up anytime. Because like I said, it’s always for me, it’s like, okay, notice that you need some help with something and don’t wait till Monday, don’t wait till tomorrow, just start doing it now again. So you could start this challenge over any time that you need it. But really it’s…
Cheryl McColgan (03:28.281)
But really what it’s meant to do is get you thinking in the right direction and start trying little new things so that you can create bigger changes later if that’s your goal. Or maybe there’s something that you think you want to change in your life. So maybe you try this one little habit around that first and then you think, okay, well that’s really not the right way to approach it. Or maybe you don’t actually need to change that thing at all. Maybe you just need to replace some behavior. So anyway, I hope that gives you some sense of why we’re doing it this way.
But also in this particular one, like the restriction versus replacement, it’s just an easier behavior change. Because if you’re still going to have, here’s another example, if you need to cut down your coffee, right, or cut down your caffeine, instead of cutting out coffee completely, maybe you switch to decaf or maybe you switch to half-caf. You still get the taste, you still have the behavior, you still have the enjoyment of it, but without the thing that you’re trying to negatively impact. So hopefully that makes sense. Just doing these behaviors that
replace things rather than restricting them is a lot easier. It can also just make you if you if you’re working on diet in particular, I mentioned adherence like diet is probably the place where it really impacts the most. Because again, like cutting out those things that you love is eventually going to cause a rebound effect process possibly whereas if you put in something similar but healthier, it just makes that
behavior easier to repeat over time. And then you might find as you practice behavior longer and longer, it becomes more of a habit. Then maybe you cut down or cut back or cut out certain things because there are definitely certain things. And again, diets probably the best example, but there’s, there’s definitely things in your diet that just aren’t healthy and you’d be better off if you cut them out completely. And you probably say the same things about some lifestyle behaviors as well. So I think I may or may not have mentioned earlier in the challenge that
You know, another thing that people like to look at this time of year tends to be behaviors around alcohol. And I, in the past, had interviewed Ian, who’s the founder of Sunnyside, and he had reached out to me because they’re doing something this month. So their app is available year round. And it’s actually a really cool app because it’s kind of on the same vein. It’s not totally taking the behavior away or it’s not restricting. It’s just asking you to be more mindful and track things. And as you track things and become more mindful,
Cheryl McColgan (05:54.37)
sometimes your behavior changes automatically. And so around alcohol, they’re not saying don’t drink at all, but they’re just saying be more mindful and maybe eventually do replacements, do mocktails, do different kinds of beverages, or eventually start cutting back. But it’s the tracking and the mindfulness about it and that substitution behavior that makes it really useful. So anyway, I’ll make sure that is in the show notes as well because they are actually offering a totally free.
January program that you don’t even have to put your credit card in for. But anyway, the app is really awesome. And if that’s one of your behaviors that you’d like to do this substitution with, I would definitely recommend trying that app at some point. So hopefully this makes sense. That’s a pretty simple habit to try for a day. Just swap one thing. We’re just replacing or changing slightly. We’re not restricting. But just, again, that practice of being mindful around this and noticing what it is you might need to change, I think will be super helpful. So.
That is it for today. I will see you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the importance of developing a gratitude practice as a healthy habit. She emphasizes the challenges of recognizing positive aspects in life due to our brain’s natural tendency to focus on negatives. Cheryl shares personal anecdotes and practical tips for cultivating gratitude, including writing down daily appreciations and reflecting on small joys. She highlights the scientific benefits of gratitude for overall well-being, resilience, and stress management, encouraging listeners to adopt this simple yet impactful practice.
TakeawaysDeveloping a gratitude practice can be challenging but rewarding.
Our brains are wired to focus on negatives rather than positives.
Finding small joys in daily life can enhance our perspective.
Gratitude practices are backed by research supporting well-being.
Writing down what you’re grateful for can change your brain’s response.
Reflecting on your day can help reinforce gratitude.
Using a physical journal may enhance the gratitude experience.
Gratitude can improve resilience and stress management.
Small, manageable habits are key to success.
Consistency in practicing gratitude leads to lasting benefits.
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Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.07)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNursH Grow and welcome to day five of the Healthy Habits Challenge. So today is a habit that I’ve tried many times in the past. I haven’t always been able to get it to stick, but whenever I do it, I do find it really useful. And that is to develop a gratitude practice. But today, in the light of just, you we’re just doing small habits, manageable habits, we’re just gonna write one thing.
that we’re grateful for today. That’s it, one thing. And this is a challenge for some people because it’s really, you you might have a day where you think that there was nothing good to appreciate, and I hope you don’t have too many of those days. But what happens is our brain is kind of naturally wired to notice the negatives more than the positives. Our brain was evolved under this paradigm of like, there’s a lot of danger in the world. There’s animals and things that we had to watch out for and it’s a lot.
different nowadays, but our brains are still wired in that way. And so it tends to go to the negative things first and not notice the positive things in life. part of this habit is really changing the way that you look at everyday life and finding small joys. The way I like to look at finding things to be grateful for is it’s not always this grand thing. I mean, yes, every day we can be grateful for having a roof over our head or having a job that
pays us so that we can buy food and all those kinds of things. And those are probably the more obvious things that we’re grateful for. Or maybe your friend did something nice for you that day, or your husband or your spouse or your partner did something that you really appreciated. So those are all kind of easy things to think of to be grateful for. But I’ve started finding some things in my day where there’s just like these little moments of joy, and it’s something that just brings a smile to my face and…
you know, makes me think in a more positive way. So for example, the first time I recorded this, I lost some of the recordings, unfortunately. There was no sound for some reason. But anyway, I have this silly little sticker on my desk. And so if you’re not watching on YouTube, I’ll describe it to you. It’s just an alpine scene, retro with, it says, apres on it, like for apres ski. And this little silly thing.
Cheryl McColgan (02:18.988)
It just made me smile. was on Amazon looking for some Christmas things and I saw it and it’s just a sticker. So was very, very inexpensive and I bought it and it just brought me a little moment of joy. Now this doesn’t mean to say that it needs to be something that you buy because quite often it’s other things like I’ll notice a new flower comes out in our yard or something. I just take a moment to like really appreciate that and be grateful for it or trying to think of some other.
good examples or just appreciating a really good meal that you had or a good dish that you tried or, you know, just little things like that, something that you cooked, especially if somebody else made it for you, then it’s really something to be appreciated, right? So just finding those little joyful moments throughout your day can really help make this practice easier. And then if you decide again to take this on as a more serious
practice something that you’re going to maintain over time. And I do suggest that you try it because there’s plenty of research backing. As I said, with all the habits, there’s always something backing this up on why you want to do it. But this one, the research really shows that it just helps with your overall wellbeing. It helps again, train your brain to look for wins instead of always looking at the negative. And then a gratitude practice can also shift your attention to what’s working, which supports resilience and stress management.
And you know, stress management, who doesn’t need that, right? We could all use that. So just the fact that it improves overall wellbeing from this simple little practice of writing down what you’re grateful for each day. To me, it’s a no brainer. And I am really kind of mad at myself that I haven’t been better about taking on this practice more seriously over time. Now, I’d also say for this particular day that we’re just writing this one thing that we’re grateful for, I wanna encourage you to write it just
on a notepad or just hand a paper, write it instead of putting on your notes on your phone or instead of in your habit tracker, just because there is something very different about actually writing that affects your brain differently, I find. So just try that for today, actually writing it out. But you can also use, I’ve recommended a couple of apps for you to try that are either the habit trackers or journaling, that kind of thing. And you can, so you can also write it in your app. And if that makes it easier for you to do this practice.
Cheryl McColgan (04:38.39)
on a daily basis, then I would definitely use an app. But also a lot of people just like using an old school notebook or journal and just handwriting it down. the time that I was doing that for a while, I really did find that it shifted my perspective. It just made me feel a little more calm each day. So anyway, it’s an easy win. Just do it at the end of your day. That way can kind of take a moment to reflect on your day as well, which can often be a useful habit to have too.
And yeah, so that’s your goal for the day is to write down one thing that you’re grateful for. And as always, the show notes or the sorry, not the show notes, but the links are in the tracker and in your email. And so you can read about those studies that show how this gratitude practice works. And again, just as a reminder, those that’s always optional, but everyone you find one of these habits kind of speaks to you, that might be the time to dig in and read.
a little bit of the research or to do the journal prompt at the end of the day so you can really explore like why you think this would help you and how it’s helping you and that sort of thing. But those are all optional. Again, we’re trying to keep this simple and repeatable and small wins. So you just do your one thing, your habit, you write it down. It doesn’t take too much time at all. And yeah, so start there, stick to that. But always if you’re inspired to do more, that’s always encouraged too. So that’s it for today. I will chat with you again tomorrow. Have a great night. Bye bye.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan discusses the significance of establishing a wind down routine before bed to enhance sleep quality. She emphasizes the importance of calming activities, such as reading, warm baths, and reducing screen time, to prepare the body and mind for sleep. Cheryl also touches on the use of sleep supplements and tools to improve sleep, highlighting the critical role of good sleep in overall health and wellness.
TakeawaysCreate a simple wind down cue before bed.
Calm your brain and nervous system for better sleep.
Screen time at night is a poor habit for sleep.
Reading before bed can help you relax.
Warm baths signal your body to calm down.
Turning off bright lights aids in winding down.
Sleep is critical for health and longevity.
Good sleep supports weight loss and fat loss.
Consider a warm drink as part of your bedtime routine.
Engage with others about effective wind down routines.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.078)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNurshGrow and welcome to day four of your healthy habits challenge. Today’s habit is very simple, but it’s so powerful and it has to do with one of the things that I think is one of the most underappreciated aspects of health and that is sleep. And so the habit that we’re going to do today is to create a simple wind down cue before bed.
So what this does is basically gets you ready for sleep, starts to calm your brain, starts to calm your nervous system so that you can actually get in bed and go to sleep instead of getting in bed and staying wired for multiple minutes or even hours after that. Definitely something we want to avoid. So having this consistent wind down cue is exactly what it does. Cues your brain and your body to be ready for sleep and to start to calm down.
There’s any number of things that this could possibly be for you. One of the things that you will have heard from many people in the past, and this is so true, is that screen time at night is really a poor habit to have to get good sleep. So maybe your wind down cue is putting your phone in the other room and putting it on the charger before you get ready for bed.
That’s a great way to do that. It also cuts down on the blue light. So that will allow your body to produce melatonin, which gives you better sleep. But this cue is something you want to do consistently every day, just so that it gives again, your brain and your body that idea that it’s time to calm down. Another thing that people really like doing for this type of cue is to simply do some reading before bed.
And so again, not reading on a device like your computer or your phone, but maybe an old school book. I know that sounds crazy or the the Kindles now have, they don’t have any blue light coming off of them. And just reading is just very calming in the evening. It’ll put you right to sleep. Even books that you’re in love with and excited about. Sometimes it’s like, it just starts to get you very drowsy and you want to ideally do it in bed. as soon as you really start to get sleepy, you just put the book aside and go to sleep.
Cheryl McColgan (02:16.782)
Another one that’s great for bedtime is a warm bath. The whole reason that this works is warming up your body. And ideally you want to do it maybe an hour to an hour and a half before bed. But again, it’s a relaxing activity. It’s something that signals it’s time to calm down and get ready for sleep. But it also has a physiological response in the body where you warm up your body temperature a little bit. Then when you get out and it starts to come back down,
your body temperature coming back down actually makes you sleepy. So that’s another good one. But really any of these, can be anything that works for you. You just want it to be something that you can do on a consistent basis and that actually helps calm your nervous system. So it could also be, you know, a breathing exercise or some light stretching or, you know, anything like that, that’s going to make going to bed easier for your body. Another one is,
Turning off bright lights. So maybe your cue for your wind down is to go around your house and turn off all the lights and maybe you just have like a gentle Red light in the room or just dim lights in your room as you’re winding down But just doing those cues time after time eventually it gets your body to a place where It’s calm enough and it’s ready some other things that I use for sleep since we’re talking about sleep sometimes just a wind down cue is not enough for some people but
Again, I think if you practice it on a consistent basis, that’s going to change over time where it really does help you get to sleep. But there’s other things. There’s supplements you can take. mentioned melatonin. I actually wouldn’t recommend taking that on a regular basis because it does tend to make you feel groggy in the morning. In addition to that, it can also affect your own melatonin production over time. So that’s kind of not as recommended. But there’s plenty of sleep supplements. Sorry, I was losing my word there. Sleep supplements out there.
that I’ve tried, I’ve used a brand called Dream. I had a new one sent to me that was from, the company’s escaping me. It’s kind of a funny name, but I’ll link it in the show notes. So also that could be part of your ritual is if it’s both of these drinks are kind of like a hot cocoa that you drink at night that has magnesium, GABA, some other sleep inducing things in it. So that could be your ritual is to make your nice warm drink, go get in your bed, sit that, relax, and then.
Cheryl McColgan (04:38.434)
go to sleep. So that’s one of the tools that I tend to use a lot. And then I’ve also talked a lot about in the past that I use a bed cooling pad. So I’m menopausal age, unfortunately. And a few years ago, I started getting horrible night sweats where it just really interrupted my sleep. So I started using a cooling pad on my bed about five years ago. And now it is so hard for me to sleep without it because it actually not only cools you but warms you as well.
and can use it to like gently warm the bed as your, almost as your alarm clock. Instead of using a harsh alarm, it just starts to warm up your body and wake you up very naturally. So depending on where you are with sleep, this wind down cue is a great start. And that’s all we’re looking for in this challenge, right? Just trying some new little habit snacks that you can see if it works for you or you can see if it would do you good to add it on in the future.
But this is just the beginning. So sleep is such, like I said, such a critical and underappreciated thing for health, longevity, for weight loss even, helps with fat loss. I mean, there’s so many reasons why you want to get good sleep, but this is just a small way that you can get started. Start repeating this if it speaks to you. If you’re someone that has trouble with sleep, I highly recommend that you take this one on and keep it for the rest of the challenge and beyond, because it will only help you.
It may not be enough, like I said, but it is great stars. So some of those things that I mentioned, I’ll make sure I link them in the show notes. But for now, just create your simple wind down cue before bed. Try it out, see how you sleep and let me know in the comments if this works for you. If you already have a wind down routine, I’d love to hear about it because I think everybody wants to hear some good ideas if they can’t think of anything that works for them or speaks to them. So definitely let me know if you have any tips and we can share them with everybody else in the comments. OK.
See you again tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan emphasizes the significance of incorporating movement into daily life as part of a healthy habit challenge. She discusses the importance of discipline, consistency, and starting small with just 10 minutes of movement each day.
Cheryl highlights the benefits of exercise for both physical and mental health, including its effectiveness in combating depression and anxiety. She encourages listeners to find ways to make movement a habit and to build up their heart health gradually.
TakeawaysDiscipline is just repetition and consistency.
Start with small steps to build a habit.
Exercise can be as effective as medication for depression.
Aim for at least 10 minutes of movement daily.
Strength training twice a week is sufficient for health.
Consistency is key to maintaining healthy habits.
Find ways to make exercise enjoyable and engaging.
Track your progress to stay motivated.
Overcoming mental barriers is crucial for exercise.
Building heart health takes time and patience.
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.08)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNourishGrow and welcome to day three of the 30 day healthy habits challenge. Today we’re going to talk about movement. So even though you’ve already been doing that as a component of this challenge from day one, I just want to talk about the importance of it. Again, reminding you that discipline is just repetition and consistency. So even on days that we aren’t motivated to move quite often, just knowing that it’s a habit, making that commitment to discipline is enough to make it work.
And so today you’re just doing 10 minutes of movement. Maybe you’re trying something different than the other days that you’ve already moved in this challenge. That’s one thing I want to encourage you to do throughout the 30 days is you’re doing your 10 minutes of movement per day. Say you like, like I do have already a regimen where you lift weights a few times a week. I happen to be doing five, but whatever works for you actually based on the research, just two days a week of strength training is enough, but we’ll talk more about that at some other time.
But so for example, for me, I’m very bad about stretching and mobility. So that’s the kind of thing that I’m going to be doing for my 10 minutes a day for my movement. So I’m going to keep my regular thing that I’ve already been doing on a consistent basis. And I’m going to add that in through the 30 days. So the minimum counts, you don’t have to do more than 10, but just challenge yourself to do 10 minutes of whatever it does. So why this matters is obviously there’s so many components of health. And I think that everybody has pretty much heard all of these things at this point.
But for your heart health you need to get your heart rate up every day I think that the recommendation now that is being said is hundred and fifty minutes per week So we’re just doing ten minutes a day. We’re not quite there yet But what I want to do is again encourage you to start slowly. You don’t go from zero to a thousand Instantaneously, you know, we need to build up practice build up our heart health build up our heart strength to get to those longer
amounts of activity. And so if you’re a person that doesn’t move consistently on a daily basis now, setting yourself up for failure is what’s going to happen if you say, I’m going to walk for half an hour every single day when you’ve been doing nothing. It’s just too much. That’s the way that people, you know, get into these new year’s resolutions and don’t make it very long because they, bit off more than they can choose. So doing these small steps really helps. In addition,
Cheryl McColgan (02:22.912)
Exercise is actually more effective than antidepressants for depression. Yes, you heard me say that right. Why every doctor and every psychiatrist and every psychologist does not promote this. is in their literature. It is very clear that exercise is as effective as medication for depression and anxiety. Now, if you’re on this medication, I’m not telling you to get off. I’m not a doctor. I’m not saying that it doesn’t help you or that you don’t need any of those things. Nobody’s saying that.
But consider, especially for certain types of depression, that exercise is just as effective. Studies have shown this time and again. So if your medication is not working for you, or if you’ve had to add on medication because it doesn’t seem to be effective, consider that exercise might really be a great addition to your mental health and discuss that with your doctor. And like I said, there’ll be some research links in this right here. I can’t remember if those…
specifically were in this one because I could put that I could put in there probably 100 links for each of these habits if I really wanted to but I just wanted to keep it obviously brief so that you might actually look at them and read them but if this is something you’re interested in just go to pubmed.gov and type in exercise and depression or exercise and anxiety and you’ll just see a whole huge long list of research in this area. But the idea with the movement
is we want to show up still when motivation is low. Because like I said, we’re not always gonna be motivated every day, but we can practice discipline every day. And my trick, and I used to be a runner, I’m not anymore, but I ran consistently for 17 years and my knees gave out. And if I had to do it all over again, I never would have done that kind of exercise. If I would have strength trained when I was younger, more consistently, I would have just been so much more happier and my body would be so much better off for it.
But anyway, it was a practice of discipline and I did it whether I liked it or not. And what was really effective for me on days that I really didn’t want to go run, even though I was scheduled to go run, is I’d be like, okay, just put on your workout clothes and just go out for five minutes. And after five minutes, you still don’t really want to go, just come home. And I would mentally convince myself of that more times than I care to admit. And sure enough, I’d go out and I’d get started. you can guess probably the amount of times I turned around and game home.
Cheryl McColgan (04:45.304)
game home, that was like zero. I don’t, literally don’t think I ever did that once I started, once I got out the door. And so that’s another, just trick yourself. Sometimes it’s even just, I’m just going to put on my workout clothes and then see what happens. So, you know, just find ways to do that. Find ways to make it a habit. And again, this is a reason we’re starting with 10 minutes, cause it’s so small that you almost can’t.
Like you can’t convince yourself not to do it almost because it’s so little. It’s easy when I think of like, I think I got to go to the gym and I’m going to be resistance training for the next hour. That’s easy to convince myself out of. But if I convince myself, okay, I’m just going to go to the downstairs gym and I’ll just do a few things. And if I really don’t feel like it, then I just won’t finish again. That, that really never happens. The key is just getting yourself out the door or getting the shoes on or whatever it is with the movement you’re going to choose getting in that cold pool. Once you’re in there, you’re going to be fine. It’s just getting to that point.
So as always the links to those studies will be in the tracker for you and in the email and Be sure to check off your habits We want to keep that consistency going and keep that little gamification of you Making the checkmark having your list that up how many days in the road do you have a streak? Let’s just keep it all going. So have a great rest of your day and I will see you again tomorrow
For day two of the 30 day healthy habits challenge, Cheryl shares why hydration is so important and how to use this simple yet important habit to start your day.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.098)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan and welcome to day two of the 30 day healthy habits challenge. This one I’m really excited to share with you. It is something that I have been meaning to do for a long time. So I will be doing this throughout the challenge with you. And that is to drink a glass of water after waking. That is so simple and yet I don’t know, I never do it. Do you? So ideally you want to do this.
before you have your coffee, before you have anything else. I’m not telling you a very specific amount, but they make it a large glass of water. So in my world, I have this, actually I have it right here on my desk. It is empty. So it’s proof positive that I need to be drinking more water. But this is about 16 to 20 ounces in this glass. And that is what I like you to do before you do anything else. Now, if you happen to get this on the, you you get this in the morning, but more than likely,
You might have already had your coffee or you’re listening to this while you’re drinking your coffee. If that’s the case, like I said, this is easy peasy challenge, right? No big deal. Just try it tomorrow instead, along with your habit that’s going to come tomorrow. But if you’re hearing this in time, drink that glass of water before anything else and then you can move on. So why this is important. Even mild dehydration can affect your mood and attention.
And hydrating early in the day, it supports everything, energy, digestion, performance, you’re hydrating your cells. And one of the people that I interviewed before on the podcast, they were saying, ideally, you know, for the challenge, we’re drinking this kind of large glass right at the beginning of the day, but ideally, you want to be hydrating throughout your day, because you need that extra hydration for your cells on an ongoing basis, not just all at once. So as much as we hate those little Stanley cups and everything that people carry around,
If you can have one of those or have this glass of water on your desk and take a few sips like every few minutes, that’s really the ideal way to hydrate. And this is again, starting the day with a simple success. just gives you a good mindset for the entire day, knowing that you already had one small win and it’s just a great habit to start. So another thing you can do is you can set this habit up at night. So maybe you actually put a glass of water
Cheryl McColgan (02:14.754)
by your bed before you go to sleep. And that way when you wake up, you immediately drink that glass of water. This can also help if you’re like me, I take thyroid medication first thing in the morning and I have to wait 30 minutes before I can eat or do anything else anyway. So how I’m gonna approach this challenge is I always just, my thyroid pills are very, very small. So I always swallow them dry while I’m still in bed in the morning. But I’m gonna make it a point for this challenge to bring up a glass of water with me in the evening, put it next to my bed, put it right next to my thyroid pills.
And I’ll just do that all at once. So that’s also a little intro into what we call habit stacking, which we’ll be talking about throughout this challenge, but more specifically on one of the days. but basically all habit stacking is, is just take one thing that you already do consistently and then put another habit right with it. So for me, I am very good about always taking my thyroid medication in the morning, but I don’t have a glass of water next to it. And I generally don’t get out of bed to do it. So the way I’m going to make it easy on myself is to just put a glass of water next to the bed.
So anyway, it’s like I said, if you missed it this morning, try it tomorrow and then try it with the habit. That’s how kind of all these are. it’s for some reason, you don’t get the email until later in the day and you miss it, just do it the next day. They’re two simple habits. They don’t take any time at all. And so waiting until the next day is completely fine. So again, no need to be perfect. Just one glass. If you do a smaller glass than me, no judgment there. You can do whatever size works for you, but drink a glass of water. Okay. I will see you tomorrow.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan introduces the Healthy Habits Challenge, emphasizing the importance of choosing three focus areas for personal growth over the next 30 days.
She discusses the significance of daily movement, consistency, and mindfulness in forming new habits. The challenge encourages participants to track their progress and integrate meaningful habits into their daily lives, ultimately aiming to reduce overwhelm and enhance motivation.
TakeawaysChoose three focus areas for the next 30 days.
Daily movement should be at least 10 minutes.
Focus on what is meaningful to you.
Track your progress to stay motivated.
Customize the challenge to fit your lifestyle.
Reduce overwhelm by having clear priorities.
Practice discipline through repetition and consistency.
Integrate new habits into your daily routine.
Eliminate decision fatigue with focused goals.
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
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Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
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Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
YouTube
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Amazon Store
The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Episode transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.048)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Feel Nourish Grow and welcome to day one of the Healthy Habits Challenge. I’m really excited to get this started and kick this off with you. This, if you’re in 2026, this is the first year I’ve started this, starting on January 1st, but the awesome thing is it’s available anytime. So whenever you’re hearing this, this is your day one. So today is to choose your three focus areas.
We’re doing discipline as repetition as consistency. It is just something that you learn over time, but you do have to practice it. You don’t have to be perfect. You just need to do it. And so today’s habit won’t take you too long at all. You’re going to choose the three focus areas for the next 30 days and then write the smallest version of each one that still counts. And so this could be things for you. I mean, we have the daily movement, which is 10 minutes a day.
So if you already have a really regular exercise program, maybe you commit to adding one day a week of some new movement or maybe it’s a slightly longer movement or maybe your focus area is working on your spirituality or maybe it is mindfully drinking if you drink alcohol. I actually have some friends over at Sunnyside.
And they are doing a totally free challenge for this month too that focuses on just being more mindful around drinking. You don’t have to do a totally dry January. It can be kind of a semi dry January. But anyway, they are offering that for totally free. You don’t even have to put your credit card in. I’ve got a special link for that and I will make sure that that is in the show notes and down below for you if you’re on YouTube. So it could be that could be your focus area. It could be your relationships, focusing on your relationships.
taking more time to connect with people or to make sure that you communicate with certain people on a daily basis in a certain way. So really it’s just going to be whatever is meaningful to you. I want you to pick those three focus areas and the way that you’ll carry that throughout the challenge is ideally you’re going be tracking in some way. So I’ve designed a spreadsheet tracker for you and that is in the email. You’ll copy that and then you can use it to just check off the things you’re doing.
Cheryl McColgan (02:14.39)
You can also use it to make a note of what your three focus areas are. And so ideally, every day when you get the email and or watch the video or listen to the podcast, I want you to have those three focus areas in mind and see if there’s a way that you can integrate the habit that we’re trying into those focus areas so that it’s really meaningful to you. It won’t always work. There will be some of the habits that you’ll just be trying just to try and they won’t necessarily relate to your three areas of focus.
but you’re just going to be mindful on a daily basis of these focus areas and keep those as something in the back of your mind that you’re always trying to work towards. And if there’s any way that you can integrate it with the daily habit, then that’s even better. So this is all you have to do today, along with your 10 minutes of daily movement, because that’s going to be every single day. And this is any movement that works for you. There’s more explanation about it in the email, but it could be really anything canoeing, biking, running, walking, dancing, yoga.
just any kind of joyful movement, ideally something that gets your heart rate up just a little bit. So depending on where you are in your fitness journey, that can literally just be walking around the block or say, you know, that you’re a runner. Maybe you make a new habit around 30 days to do something slightly different with that, whether it’s increasing your speed or taking more days off. If that’s something that you need, I want you to really just honor your body, but you’re still going to move your body for 10 minutes every single day.
So if you’re already very, very active, that might look something more like on your day that’s supposed to be a rest day. Maybe it’s just some gentle stretching or mobility work. So really you’re going to customize this challenge so that it works exactly well for you. But anyway, starting with your focus areas, it just creates clear priorities throughout this 30 day challenge. It’s going to reduce overwhelm because you’re just going to focus on those three things right now, nothing else outside of that. That’s not to say that you don’t have other goals or other things that you want to prioritize in the future.
But for this 30 days, we just want to give clear focus to these three so we can really give those a chance to take hold. And this clarity is just, like I said, reduce your overwhelm. It’s going to eliminate decision fatigue because any time there’s a question, you just go back to those three priorities and you’re going to make that very clear in your mind that’ll help you make your decision. And so you just spend less time deciding and more time doing ideally with those high priorities in mind.
Cheryl McColgan (04:34.478)
It should also just take a little less mental energy when you know that those are your priorities and you’ve already decided that’s what you’re focused on for this 30 days should make everything a little bit easier. So I would also like you to consider if you’re a person that this kind of motivation works for you instead of just having it, know, on your phone in a tracker app and there’ll be some links in that first email for apps that I like and things that you can use. But it’s also nice to just maybe see it in the morning when you get up. So if you always
you know, go in the bathroom to get ready in the morning, maybe writing your three focus areas for the month on a sticky note and putting it on your mirror or making it your screen saver on your phone, just somewhere where you’re going to see it often enough that it keeps it high priority in your mind. And then also consider each day as you go through this challenge, you’re going to get the habit in the morning and your email and
Most of these, there should be plenty of time throughout the day to fit this in. Like I said, it only takes five to 15 minutes, but also just consider what your day looks like on a daily basis and maybe kind of mentally map out a time where you’re going to plan to do this habit. So maybe for you, it’s morning, lunch or evening, or maybe it’s a very specific time of the day. You could set a timer on your phone. Like usually when you have a little, maybe you have a little downtime, you set the timer and then that’s when you’ll do the habit for the day.
So that’s some ideas on just how to integrate it and make it easier. But like I said, today, every day is going to be a very simple habit. take five to 15 minutes. So identifying these three focus areas, I think for most people it will come to mind pretty quickly. But you can certainly take a little bit more time if you really want to mentally evaluate where you’ve been in your life lately and what three areas could use the most work. So this.
in theory could be the longest day of habits, but it’s going to set you up for success for the whole month. But for a lot of us, we kind of already know which areas we should be working on. And so coming up with those three might even only take you two to three minutes. So anyway, best of luck today. As always, if you’re having super challenges during this time and or you have questions about the program, most of these things should be pretty obvious. And some of the things are a little bit ambiguous on purpose so that it gives you some flexibility. So as long as you are making
Cheryl McColgan (06:57.462)
you know, having your three priorities, making those the thing that you’re going to focus on and then trying the one habit for the day. That’s really all that you need to do. So until tomorrow, good luck with the habits today and I will see you soon.
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan introduces Healthy Habits Foundations, the free 30 Day Healthy Habits Challenge created for anyone who is tired of starting over. Instead of relying on motivation or chasing perfection, this program helps you build discipline through small daily actions that fit real life.
Built around three pillars, movement, mindset, and consistency, the challenge takes just 5 to 15 minutes a day and includes a daily video or podcast, supportive emails, research links, journal prompts, and a tracker to help you stay consistent. It is not another weight loss challenge and it is not an all-or-nothing reset. If you miss a day, you do not fail, you simply begin again.
Cheryl explains why small habits are the foundation for bigger goals, how flexible daily movement can work even in a busy schedule, and why systems and repetition matter more than willpower. This is an anytime, evergreen challenge you can start whenever you need a reset.
Refined takeaways
How small habits become the foundation for bigger long-term goals
Why motivation fades and discipline is the skill that lasts
How 5 to 15 minutes a day can build real momentum
Why movement, mindset, and consistency are the foundation of the challenge
What participants get each day: audio or video, emails, research links, prompts, and a tracker
Why this is not a weight loss challenge or an all-or-nothing program
How flexible 10-minute daily movement can fit real life
Why missing a day does not mean starting over from scratch
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch on YouTube
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.184)
Hi everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNourishCrew. And today I wanted to chat with you about a new program that I’m starting. And it’s basically this time of year, know, everyone’s interested in making a lot of resolutions and starting new habits, but they’re really hard to maintain over time. And that’s where I really wanted to be able to help you and hopefully create a program that will actually help you meet your goals and make the challenges.
that you want to make this year. So what I’m starting is a 30 day healthy habits challenge. If you’re tired of starting over, this is going to be the program for you. Everybody starts the new year, you know, with a lot of motivation. And that is something that wanes over time quite often before even the end of January people have given up. But the challenge is to create something that you can maintain for the whole year, right? And that really comes down to discipline.
because while motivation may wax and wane, discipline is something that’s very real and it’s also something, a skill that you can actually train so that you will be better and better at it the more that you practice. And that’s what this program is all about. So building that skill over 30 days, it’s going to be small habits each day so we can learn to train that skill and it’s free. It’s totally free. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time because
habits and consistency and discipline are something that has been in my content for years now. And I’ve always wanted to do this and I can never just quite figure out a great way to deliver it and to make it make sense. But basically it’s built on three pillars. And this is how I wanted to challenge you with this because I think it’s habits that will sustain you for your whole life, obviously. And that is daily movement, mindset and consistency.
And so each day that we practice these short habits, it’s only going to take five to 15 minutes total each day, get a short video. And that’s why I’m starting this now, because this is the introduction, tell you all about it. And then there will also be audio on my podcast feed. And so if you are in a big rush and you are driving to work, you can still listen to the habit, learn the research behind it, learn a little bit about why we’re trying it. And you’ll be able to listen to that.
Cheryl McColgan (02:21.898)
on your daily movement, you’re taking walks or you’re biking or whatever it is you’re doing. So there’ll be the podcast feed. And then you also get an email that lays out the challenge for the day, gives you the research links. There’s a handy tracker. I’m suggesting some apps for tracking. Also, if you’d like to do that and make it completely digital. the habit tracker spreadsheet still works perfectly great too. So you don’t, if you want to keep it simple and old school, that’s totally fine. So what this is not, this is not another weight loss challenge.
This is not all or nothing like a lot of you have heard of or tried 75 hard. This is not about perfect. This is about just practicing consistency day after day. And if you miss a day, it doesn’t mean you have to start over. It doesn’t mean you failed. It just means that you start over again. And that is really what I have learned over the years. And what I when I practice my discipline, it’s not that I’m perfect all the time. It’s just that I always start over and I don’t wait till Monday. I don’t wait till the next day.
Once I realize that in the moment, I notice that and start again, right? That moment. And that’s the kind of practice that we’re going to be doing throughout this whole challenge. So your daily checklist will look something like this. You’ll either watch or listen to the day’s video. You’ll do the habit of the day. You’ll do your daily movement of 10 minutes. If you’re somebody that already exercises a whole lot more, this is already part of your lifestyle. Obviously you’re going to continue to do that, but I will challenge you to maybe make some
different kind of choices in your movement patterns. So if you’re a runner, let’s say, maybe challenging yourself to try some yoga or try some mobility work or strength training, if that’s not something that you do currently. So you’ll do the habit, you’ll do your movement and you’ll check these off in the tracker. Hopefully it’ll give you a great sense of accomplishment. It always does for me when I’m checking off things off my list. And then optional things.
are to do the journal prompts. So you’ll get a journal prompt each day and to read the PubMed link, because I don’t want you to just think I’m picking habits here at random. Obviously, a lot of these are based on my own personal experience, habits that I think are very, very helpful and contribute to your health. But the reason that we do these habits is because they’re based on research. So that there’s at least some…
Cheryl McColgan (04:36.43)
something behind it that why it’s good for you and you can read the study or not, or just read the abstract and read the conclusion just to get an idea. But basically, you can dig into this as much as you want. So if there’s a particular habit that really speaks to you when you try it, that might be the day where you take those items that were optional and add them in. And the reason I’m trying to keep this to five to 15 minutes is because we want the small wins here. You don’t want to take on something that’s so challenging that you set yourself
up for failure for the very beginning. Small habits build into big habits and you’ve got to take it one step day by day to get to these bigger habits that we have in mind for ourselves in the future. So it’s like you wouldn’t, you know, if you want to build a beautiful house, right, you’re not just going to get a bunch of two by fours and start nailing them together. You have no foundation. It won’t hold up over time. And so that’s the same.
thing that we can do here. We’re going to build the foundation and then later after you’ve built these small habits or found things that really help you on a daily basis, then you can tackle the bigger things and bigger goals and goals that are five-year goals, 10-year goals, that kind of thing. But it really starts with these everyday little habits. So we’re going to set up so that these systems help you beat willpower. You’re just going to do it every day and they’re so easy you almost can’t skip them. That’s what I like about them. You just return quickly to it if you missed one.
And there’s no shame, there’s no judgment. It’s just, we’re all human, right? We’re all gonna miss a day or we’re gonna have a day that’s so busy, but these are really small. So hopefully you’ll be able to do that. The movement is very flexible. It’s really whatever works for you. I like to say that find something that’s like a joyful movement that you can do once in a while. So for me, it’s like, you know, dancing around the kitchen while I’m cooking or something like that. That just makes me happy. Put on some good music. But then of course I have my strength training that I do and walking and all of that.
but you’re going to pick one that works for you. So if it’s hard to squeeze these things into work, it’s only 10 minutes. You might walk a little bit over your lunch break. You could walk five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night. And of course, if you can do more and want to do more and you have more time that day, please feel free. This is not, this is just the minimum. This is just getting you into the habit of moving your body every single day. And then we’re going to just realize that even on busy days, that’s where you fit in these little tiny things.
Cheryl McColgan (06:58.31)
So let’s see here. I want to make sure that I don’t miss anything. Okay, we’re not dieting. We’re not losing weight. You’ll have the tracker. So yeah, I think I covered all of the points. just was going through my notes just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. But I think that that gives you a good sense of what this challenge is about. If you don’t know me already and you come across this, you’re like, well, who is this that’s leading this challenge?
I have a whole about page over at my website, but basically my degree is in psychology. have some graduate training in psychology. I’m a registered, experienced yoga teacher. I’ve practiced yoga for over 20 years. I have been strength training now, consistent. I’ve done it my whole life, but really only gotten consistent the last three years. And so that’s been a really exciting thing for me as what I classify now as an older person. It’s so important to health. And so you’ll probably learn a little bit about that somewhere along in the challenge as well.
And then I’m also studying for my personal training certification. I don’t know if ever use it, but I’ve just been so into learning all the things around strength training that I thought, hey, why not? And then it’s something that I can share with you guys and hopefully, you know, give you some further information to benefit you and your goals. But yeah, so that’s a little bit about who I am. If you want to learn more and go over to the about page of my website and I am on stories daily and Instagram. And as we start this challenge, I’m to be starting at January 1st. I’m going to be doing it along with you.
A lot of you will be starting on January 1st is awesome, but the great thing about this is I’ve set it up to be evergreen content on the website. So anytime you go to the website and click and sign up, you can start the challenge that very next day. So it’s something also that if you get, like I said, there’s no off track. Hopefully you want to complete the 30 days and just if you miss a day, go again. But say you get busy and you kind of just give up on it, but you come to a time in your life again where you want to restart. You can always do that. It’ll be there for you to do 30 days.
at a time, anytime of year, because like I said, that’s what I always believe in. I don’t think you should wait. I think whenever you have the inkling to make a change, to start something, start it today, start it now. Just the only thing I will say is if you happen to find this before January 1st of 2026, I am in the process still of completing the content. At this point, it is Monday, December 29th. So hopefully it’s further along by the time you find this.
Cheryl McColgan (09:20.59)
and it should be available. But if for whatever reason it’s up and you sign up before January 1st, then you’re just going to have to wait a couple of days before you get started. So now the most important thing, if you’re listening on audio on the podcast feed to sign up, you’re going to go to healnourishgrow.com slash habits. And if you’re here on YouTube, the link will be down below. But yeah, I hope you join me. I think this should be fun.
Like I said, it is a challenge. It’s 30 days of consistency, but it is nothing that you can’t handle. And I think it’ll give you a lot of confidence and a lot of interest in learning more about discipline and practicing them on a daily basis. And it’s just like your muscles, the more you practice it, the stronger it gets. So let’s all get more disciplined in 2026 together. And I’d love to have you join me and help you meet your goals. anyway, until, if well, you’re listening to the podcast, I’m gonna say until tomorrow, I will see you soon.
Okay, thanks, bye.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Cheryl McColgan shares her holiday greetings and personal updates, discusses the importance of building habits for the new year, and introduces a 30-day habit challenge designed to help listeners create lasting changes in their lives.
She also highlights resources for a healthier new year, including a Quit Sugar summit and the significance of understanding macros in nutrition. Cheryl emphasizes the importance of small steps and invites listeners to join her on this journey towards better health and wellness.
Five Things You Need to Create Good Habits: https://youtu.be/8OVjrPu9UoM
Takeaways* The importance of building habits for the new year is discussed. * A 30-day habit challenge is introduced to help listeners create lasting changes. * The challenge focuses on small, manageable habits rather than overwhelming resolutions. * Listeners are encouraged to join the challenge and share it with friends. * Cheryl highlights the Quit Sugar Summit as a valuable resource for the new year. * Understanding macros is essential for nutrition and flexibility in diet plans. * Cheryl is creating a Macros 101 class for listeners. * The podcast emphasizes the significance of small steps in habit formation. * Listeners are invited to participate in the challenge and share their experiences.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
https://youtu.be/Gu77hsJN-g400:00 Holiday Greetings and Personal Updates
01:23 Building Habits for the New Year
04:03 Introducing the 30-Day Habit Challenge
06:58 Resources for the New Year: Quit Sugar Summit
08:36 Exploring Macros and Nutrition
11:42 Upcoming Content and Closing Thoughts
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nurse Ro podcast. If you can tell a little bit of difference in my voice, I’ve actually had a cold for a bit and I’m just now to the point where my voice is somewhat normal and I’m not sniffling and sneezing and being totally obnoxious. So I really wanted to go ahead and record this episode to share several things with you and to wish you happy holidays. Where I am right now in the US, it is currently Christmas Eve.
So I have actually still got a lot of things to do today. We’re actually having lasagna for dinner. The boys are both home for Christmas. So that is their request. So I’ll be making some homely lasagna tonight. And then tomorrow we will be enjoying a roast beast, which I always kind of laugh when I say that because it’s from the Grinch movie, I believe. I always call it the roast beast. So just a roasted.
Primed Rib Roast and yeah, so looking forward to sharing the holiday with my family and just catching up on some things quite honestly, because the last several weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind and with me not feeling as well, I’m behind on some things that I need to record and share with you. So we’ll just get right into it. The first thing I wanna talk about is building habits in the new year. So.
We’re getting ready to come into that time. And if you followed my content for a while, you’ve heard me talk about it before is whenever we come to this time of year, people make a lot of New Year’s resolutions. And typically what happens is by sometimes even before the end of January, people have already given up on their resolutions or they what usually happens actually is they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. They’ve made these kind of resolutions that are
just too big without taking the steps they need to do first to build up to that. And so I always like to encourage you to take small little steps towards habits. That’s really how you create lasting change. If you go to my YouTube channel, if you’re listening to this on audio, if you’re watching a video, you’re already on YouTube and I will try to link the video here if I can figure out how to do that. But I have a video on five things you need to create better habits. And that was covered by Authority Magazine.
think it’s maybe it was in 2019 or something like that. So this is certainly something that I have been focused on a long time in my content and in my own personal life, trying to create better habits, new habits. As I go through that the year, I really don’t wait until January. I’ll pick something up whenever it occurs to me that I really need it in my life. So right now I’ve got several things that I’m working on. A lot of it related to work.
But the one thing I kept thinking about this and I’ve thought about doing this for years and sharing this with you and it really wasn’t until this year where I was able to conceive of it in a way that I can bring it to fruition and really deliberate in a way that I think will be useful to everyone. It’s 100 % free. So I’m really excited about that because I just want to share information that will help you live a happier, healthier life. know, healers show has been around for I believe it’s going to be.
eight years this coming summer. I’ll have to go back and look when I actually launched it, but my about page that I wrote way back then is I’ve never changed it because it still just holds the same meaning to me what I want to share with people, how I want to help them be healthier, share information that’s based on the latest research. You know, I’ve certainly changed my mind about several things over the years and I think it’s important to be able to do that when presented with new information. So
Anyway, what this is all about, it’s a 30 day challenge, but it’s not the kind of challenge you’re thinking about the kind that you’ve tried before and you weren’t able to get through it was it’s too crazy or 75 hard, which is just an insane amount of things you have to do on a daily basis. And it really just sets people up for failure in my opinion, because in it’s well, I guess it’s named properly, right? 75 hard because it is very challenging. But this challenge is really all about creating better habits.
At very beginning of the challenge, you’ll set some intentions around things you might want to change. But really, every day is going to be a short podcast, a video, and an email that you get in your inbox. And it just gives you a small habit that you’re going to try that day. And it only takes about five to 15 minutes each day. One of the things is daily movement. you get to choose whatever it is that speaks to you.
what you know if it’s joyful movement you get bonus points for that maybe some kitchen dancing something but if you’re already on an exercise program it’s just going to have you you know you can make it into something that’s a little longer for you or maybe try a different thing for that 30 days but that’s one of the main components because i do believe that moving your body every day if you’re not in the habit of it brings more awareness around that and just committing to doing that you will feel so much better by the end of 30 days and if you’re already moving
you are going to get to try all these little habits that I have planned out for the 30 days. And if it’s something that speaks to you, once you try the habit, hopefully I’m thinking that you’ll try to implement it every day of the challenge. But if it didn’t speak to you, if it didn’t resonate or it’s something that you already do, you’re kind of just gonna leave that behind. You’re gonna take from this what you need from it.
And it’ll be, know, all of it has research links every day. So if you’re interested in spending more time on this particular habit, you can read about why it’s good for you or how long it might take to implement it, that sort of thing. So it’s really been a lot of work. And I actually, because of being a little bit sick, I haven’t recorded the rest of it at this point, but I got a little bit more to do. I’ve got the emails set up for the daily emails. And now it’s just a matter of recording the rest of the content.
so that when you are on that day with the habit, I’ll be right there with you. I’ll be talking about it. I’ll be sharing about how I use it in my daily life and maybe some more of the research. So it’ll be in an audio format where if you’re in the car going to work or something, like I said, the habit itself, whatever you’re gonna try is only gonna take five to 15 minutes for that day. But if it’s one of the habits that you’re more interested in, you’ll get to hear more about it and learn more about it. And hopefully it’s, you know, learn that it’s something that you could really use in your life and that might really help you. So.
That is a challenge. I would love for you to join me. Like I said, it’s a hundred percent free and you can just go sign up right now It’s a heal nourish grow comm slash habits So please please do this share it with your friends because you always are more successful creating new habits when you have friends involved You can talk about the different ones together. What’s what’s working for you? What’s not? It’s just it’s just more fun when you have more people involved. So
And you know, I always greatly appreciate it if you share the podcast or share my content with others, because that’s the easiest way that people find me. It is getting so much more challenging on the internet these days with AI to find people that resonate with you to find real people that are doing work in the space and in any space, really. It’ll be interesting to see really how that evolves over the next several years for sure. But
If you would share it, I’d be very grateful. HealNursePro.com slash habits. That’s how you sign up. The second thing I want to share with you, that’s another resource for the new year. It is a summit that I’ve been involved with in the past and they reached out to me and asked if I could share about it again. And I said, of course, because it’s something I really believe in. They always have great speakers. It’s another thing that’s 100 percent free. And that is the Quit Sugar Summit. And it’s not it’s interesting because even if you don’t want to totally remove sugar from your life or
If you already have a healthy relationship with sugar, doesn’t bother you. You don’t have diabetes, those sorts of things. The speakers are all just really excellent speakers in this health space. And I think whether you really want to quit sugar or not, you will still get some great knowledge from that and maybe get some tips and tricks and different things that you can, like I said, implement into the new year and just learn about. And so that is heelnourishgrow.com slash quit sugar summit. So super easy to sign up for that free as well. It starts, I believe, January 12th. So you’ve got a little bit of time, but
you go ahead and sign up for it now they’ll send you some reminders about when it’s going to start because you do need to watch it on the days that they send it out because that’s how they make the summit for free basically. So that content will be available on the day that it is registered to run and then after that unfortunately you won’t have access unless you choose to pay for it but it’s a really great way to get some free content watch the ones you can
or watch just the ones that you’re interested in, you’ll get the names of them beforehand. So that’s another great resource for the new year. And then the last thing that I’ll talk about today, I’m going to keep this relatively short because I’m sure that my voice is a little bit annoying with the hoarseness that I still have left from my little cold or whatever it was.
is that this is another resource that I’ve been wanting to create for a long time. And it really came to me when I was doing my contest prep for the bodybuilding shows and doing some serious dieting, which I still need to share all of that with you, kind of some lessons learned and some thoughts around that, because doing this at 52 and still being able to lose weight aggressively was really interesting. And I think it just goes to show you.
that it’s definitely possible. There just might be some things in your head that you have to get past a little bit or habits that you might need to change slightly to make that still available to you and your body. So if that happens to be a goal for you in the new year to lose weight or work on your relationship with food, have some content coming around that, but.
The one that I really want to create and I think is useful for anybody, no matter what your goal is, because it’s also useful if your goal is to build muscle or to gain weight, and that is macros. The power of macros. I have been tracking macros way back since when Spark people was still around. It has gone out of business a long time ago, but that was one of the first trackers before my fitness pal, before any of that. When I was back when I was a runner, I would often track my macros or any time that I needed to lose a couple pounds. That’s what I rely on.
And macros gives you so much more flexibility than a diet plan than a strict, you know, whether it’s a vegetarian diet or keto diet or Whole30 diet, it gives you so much more flexibility than any of those options, because you simply learn how to track your food and what it’s about. so that plan for that one is to kind of do a macros 101 class for you and just share
know, first of all, what are if you’re, I mean, at this point, I feel like everybody has heard this term, but I quite often realize that I’m a very, I’m in a very specific space where I read, listen to, consume this kind of content all the time. And it’s basically my work life, right? So it’s something that I’m very educated on. And so I kind of forget sometimes that there are people that don’t know some of these terms. And I’d be curious, comment below. If when I said macros, you knew immediately.
what it was and if you’re like, what the heck is this? Because I just be curious. I think most people do know at this point. But anyway, macros are fat, carbohydrates and protein. Alcohol is kind of considered a fourth macro in a way, and I will definitely talk about that in the macros 101 class. But I wanted to save that for when my voice is actually fully back and I’m not still stuffy so that it’s because it’s to be a long term, I think great piece of evergreen content and I want it to sound.
little bit better than I’m sounding right now if that’s possible. So that’s coming as well. So that’s kind of what’s been going on over here and the reason that I have been a little delayed. I do have an interview with a guest that is already prepped that will be coming up and it’s a really interesting guest that went through a lot of personal challenges and just kind of sharing some of her insights and ways that she was able to overcome those things and
some projects that she is personally working on to create some experiences for people that I think could be really interesting to a lot of my audience. And that is, you know, groups of women, and they kind of go out into nature into the wild and just learn skills around being outside and reconnecting with the outdoors. And so I’m really excited to share about that coming up too. But anyway, that is all I wanted to say for today. So again, if you could go
over and sign up for the challenge. It’s heelnourishgrow.com slash habits. And I hesitated to even call it a challenge because yeah, don’t I don’t honestly don’t think it will be too challenging. And that is the beauty of approaching habits in this way. And when you go, if you go listen to the thing, the five things you need to create healthy habits, it’s really about starting small and building on that. And you know,
doing things like habit stacking, you everybody, you brush your teeth every morning and every night, right? You always do that. So if you need to do anything, like take a new supplement or something, you know, putting it right next to your toothpaste, that’s a great way to do that. So habit stacking is also something that we’ll chat about in the challenge, but I really think it’s like a reset and it’s a way to try new things. So that’s how I’m looking at it. That’s how it’ll be approaching it with you. And again, I
you will sign up for that and join me share it with your friends and family so they can join you too and we’ll all get healthier in 2026. Like I said, I’ve definitely got some new goals and I’m working on some things for myself and I’m going to be doing each of these habits each of the days that they go out as well because I want to learn from it and I want to see you know which ones resonated with me or is there anything that I’m doing in my daily life that I should have shared that could have been a better habit to share with you to try.
So yeah, so we’ll all be doing it together and I’m really excited about like I said I thought about doing this a whole bunch in the past and I just haven’t found a way to deliver it and really Map it out the way that I have this time So I would love to have you along for the ride But anyway until next time which will hopefully be much sooner here now that I am well and back to recording and the other I think I mentioned with the challenge is there will be The audio
component, it’ll be like a special podcast episodes for a series for a while. And so if you’re catching this later, and you missed signing up for the challenge, once it’s out January 1, you can actually start it at any time. And the beauty is, I think you should be able to start it over as well. So if you really enjoyed it, you get off track for a little while you want to come back to it.
can always just start over the 30 days kind of like an evergreen thing so no matter when you hear this in the future this will be available to you. So that’s all for now and I hope you have happy happy holidays however you’re celebrating enjoy your time with friends and family and then let’s all get ready for 2026 and creating some new awesome habits so see you next
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan discusses strategies for maintaining wellness during the holiday season. She emphasizes the importance of setting realistic intentions, managing weight, coping with stress, making mindful eating and drinking choices, and balancing social obligations with self-care. Cheryl provides practical tips for navigating holiday challenges, including travel and family dynamics, while encouraging listeners to be intentional and mindful throughout the season.
You can find Cheryl’s previous episodes about avoiding holiday weight gain here.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Takeaways* The holidays can be stressful, and it’s important to plan ahead for wellness. * Setting intentions rather than big goals can help maintain focus during the holidays. * Protein intake is crucial for satiety and managing weight. * Eating to 80% fullness can prevent discomfort after meals. * Cortisol levels can rise due to holiday stress; managing stress is key. * Alcohol consumption should be mindful, as it can cloud judgment and lead to poor food choices. * The holidays should focus on nurturing relationships rather than just food and drink. * It’s okay to say no to social obligations to prioritize self-care. * Post-holiday, it’s important to return to normal routines quickly to avoid weight gain. * Mindfulness and intention are essential for a balanced holiday experience.
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https://youtu.be/1lgmn__CCgsEpisode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.038)
Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan, founder of Peel Nourish Row, and it has been a little while since I’ve been on the mic. I took an unexpected longer hiatus than I thought I would, and I’m just now getting around to starting to record again. And I really wanted to get on here and do this episode because the holidays are such a stressful time for everyone. It’s a time where people could use extra support, could use extra ideas about how to
de-stress, not gain weight during the holidays, and just find ways to support your wellness in this busy time of the season. So I’ve done another episode like this in the past, and I’ll be sure to link that in the show notes, but for this one I did map out a few bullet points to keep me on track. I’ve got my laptop here with that on it so that I can glance over there occasionally and remind myself of what I wanted to share with you today. But the first thing is this why this, what does holiday mean?
wellness even mean or why does it matter? Again, it’s a stressful time. We’re around family for some times that’s very exciting and sometimes it can be very stressful and there’s a lot of travel involved typically and a lot of extra events and cooking and things like that. So it can be just a time where there’s so much going on that you forget to actually take care of yourself. So planning ahead now so that you don’t have to recover from everything at the beginning of the year is a good plan.
And usually what I like to say during the holidays, I mean, if you’re a lot of people that listen to this podcast are interested in weight loss or fitness or health and wellness. If you’re trying to lose weight during the holidays, that can be particularly challenging. I think what would be a better goal for most people is to just maintain during the holidays and not gain extra weight that you then have to kind of backtrack from the progress that you’ve made throughout the year. So all that being said,
I think the good way to start with this is just to set some intentions around the holidays. So for example, just to be really mindful every time that you eat or, consistent movement or practicing on your sleep during the holidays to make sure that you stay on track with your wellness. So whatever that intention is, just making something specific enough that you know what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, but generally it’s not going to be any big goals during this time of the year.
Cheryl McColgan (02:24.606)
Just because it’s like I said a lot of extra stress a lot of extra things going on and so Setting really big goals around health and wellness this time of year can just be a way that sets you up for failure Which is not what we want want to go into the new year Thinking positive feeling positive and having every intention that way when we get to the new year We’re kind of set up in this place.
been mindful, we’ve been practicing taking care of ourselves and then once we get to the new year we can really focus on those bigger goals that you want for yourself and your wellness in 2026. So after you’ve set the intentions let’s address the first thing is weight. I actually looked this up before I got on here and most people gain anywhere between a pound to five pounds during the time period from Thanksgiving to the end of the year.
And while that can be also if your intention is to say enjoy time with family, eat really good foods, just nourish yourself and not to worry too much about weight gain, that is a perfectly acceptable intention as well. But if you want to think about, you know, maintaining your weight or not gaining weight during the holidays, then it’s important to kind of have a plan when you go into this. So the first thing, you know, I’m going to say is what we’re always very focused on here is the importance of protein.
Protein is a very satiating nutrient. There’s a lot of theories around about how your body will keep seeking out food if you’re not getting a proper protein intake. So that’s the first thing. So every time you sit down to a meal, plan on getting your protein in first, and then you can have a little bit more flexibility with the rest of your meal because you know that you’ve gotten your protein requirements out of the way. And then you can fill in after that with fats and carbohydrates. If you’re a carbohydrate eater, if you’re still trying to practice keto during the holidays, it is a time.
perhaps be just a little more flexible with that only because there’s going to be a lot of temptations there’s going to be a lot of things you want to try so again having that intention around that whether it’s taking a bite here or there or allowing yourself certain days of the week or a party or something like that to enjoy a few more carbs again just being really mindful and setting that intention so that you don’t kind of go off the rails with that stuff because some people one of the reasons they do a lower carb lifestyle is because they don’t have
Cheryl McColgan (04:40.728)
They don’t either feel good when they eat carbs or they have a relationship with them where when they eat too many carbs, it makes them hungrier and eat more. So if you know that you’re that person, you certainly don’t want to set yourself on this crazy path of that during the holidays by eating a lot of extra cookies or potatoes or candy or whatever it is you’re normally avoiding for the most part. So being really mindful about those choices and allowing them in in the quantities that make sense for you and your personal goals.
So the other thing is eating to 80 % fullness. Now this is something that we should be practicing pretty much all of the time if you’re doing an eating program where you’re doing just more of an intuitive eating kind of style. If you want to give yourself time for your brain to get the feeling of whether you’re actually full or not. So eating slowly, eating mindfully, chewing your food and stopping.
when you’re already starting to feel full because it takes a little while for your brain to catch up with your body. So if you’re already starting to feel full, chances are 20 minutes later, 30 minutes later, you’re gonna be, you might have that stuffed feeling, which a lot of people have after Thanksgiving meals. So just being really mindful of why you’re adjusting to take note of how you’re feeling if you’re starting to get full and shooting for that 80 % mark in that way.
If you go a little over, you’re not going to end up on the couch with your holding your stomach and just being miserable. You’ll probably end up in a much better place. Also, I have two thoughts on this. And again, it’s about knowing the kind of person you are. So there’s this idea of saving your calories for certain big meals and everything. And I think that that can work for some people, especially if you’re tracking your macros and you’re eating a meal that maybe you made or that it’s a simple meal like tracking a certain quantity of turkey, for example.
that’s very easy to track. So you can either save some calories for later, so not eating as much throughout the day so that you know when you have a big meal that you’re not going to go over your calorie allotment for the day. But again, it’s about knowing yourself. If in the past you’ve experienced that, for example, on Thanksgiving, you don’t eat most of the day or you just eat a very small breakfast and then you go totally overboard, you feel sick the rest of the night,
Cheryl McColgan (06:52.886)
You might be better off having two smaller meals earlier in the day, again, very protein forward. And maybe yes, okay, saving a little bit of your calories for that last final bigger meal, but not allowing yourself to get so ravenous that you just go off the rails when the meal comes. So again, knowing yourself here is the key to practicing this and to knowing which one will work best for you. So just give that some consideration before you go into those days where you know it’s going to be a bigger food day.
knowing your plan also is a big key here. So don’t wait until the last minute to kind of mentally prepare yourself for what’s going to happen. Have a plan when you go in at this point, you know, you’re listening to this, you’re not a five year old, you’re an adult, you’ve had many holiday meals, you know what your tendencies are. And so just again, set some intentions around how you want it to be different this year and how you’re going to approach things so that you end up with a successful holiday.
The next thing is holiday stress and cortisol. Cortisol is such a big trending topic right now. I’m just getting out of balance. And so the top triggers are in this scenario, probably family obligations or family relationships. So again, just setting your intention, kind of knowing how you approach these kinds of things, knowing the kind of stress that you might encounter.
And having some strategies ready to better deal with that. So for example, if you know that you get very overwhelmed once all your family’s around and all these things are happening, maybe make it your intention that you’re going to go for a walk after dinner or something like that. Or maybe just take some time for yourself to kind of regroup, calm down, do some deep breathing exercises, whatever it is that you feel is going to nourish you.
is you don’t have to spend eight hours in a row with the entire family doing all these activities that can be very, very stressful. again, knowing yourself and taking a little break away from that if you need to practice some breathing exercises, practice some ways to calm yourself and certainly getting into activity throughout the day. It’s a really nice way to accomplish that. I also find that there’s this idea.
Cheryl McColgan (09:02.127)
of the way that people communicate, you know, often at the holidays, it’s like everybody’s around the table and you’re really face to face and you’re, you’re catching up on things. Sometimes you’re talking about intense topics, but there’s this idea of, you know, conversing face to face, which is very intense and can be one way. And another thing where it’s more like a side by side interaction, like if you’re walking or you’re doing an activity, you’re not looking at each other, you’re still being able to communicate. You’re still being able to have time together, but it’s just not that really intense draining kind of thing.
So maybe thinking of some activities that you can do together as a family, or again, taking that little time for yourself away for a little bit can be a way to mitigate some of that stress. And then maintaining your routine. You’re not going to be able to maintain your routine probably perfectly over the holidays, but the more that you can stick to that, the more that you can stick to your routine about going to bed at a certain hour and doing a certain amount of exercise that you normally do, the less
that you deviate from that plan, the better you’ll feel throughout the holidays. Again, it’s going to require some flexibility. Things are going to, you know, not always go perfectly, but if you can stay to some kind of schedule and be consistent, that’s really going to help you a lot. Also, you don’t need to add a lot of extra stress to yourself during this time. So if it is more stress to get in your workout for that day, then it is to
mindfully skip a day and then do what you need to do, you’re going to actually lessen your cortisol doing that because if you still try to do all the things, workout, do all this, and then you have the extra stress on top of it, that might make you feel even more overwhelmed. So taking those breaks when you need it, being mindful, and not using that as an excuse to skip workouts or to skip taking care of yourself or to go to bed late every night, really try to find
much as possible, you know some people hate this word, but trying to find balance around that as much as possible is going to be really a key to having a great holiday season. And then the next thing is around healthy drinks and alcohol holidays. Whether you choose not to drink at all and that is certainly a trend now that I 100 % support because you know I’ve said it before
Cheryl McColgan (11:20.503)
And I’ll say it again, just for those you who may not have heard this, or you may not always have it in your awareness may not want to happen your awareness, I am sometimes guilty of that myself. But alcohol is a poison. There’s really no amount of it that is safe. And depending on who you are in your health, potential problems, it can be much worse for some people. So that’s definitely something to give some consideration to it increases your risk of cancer, it increases risk of
you basically everything negative can be traced back to consuming alcohol. Now, that all being said, many of us still choose to drink knowing the dangers and knowing the risks with that. And there is also an idea. So if you look at French culture or Italian culture, and people often call that out because those cultures drink primarily wine, but it’s not the Reservoir Troll. That’s kind of been debunked for a long time. It’s more about that they
use alcohol as a way to be together in community and to be very social and they don’t go overboard with it. So that’s probably at least part of the reason that we find in those populations that it doesn’t seem to be as detrimental to health. But again, all that being said, just make good choices around it. Be mindful of quantity, be mindful of very sugary drinks. just, it racks up the calories. So always choosing those beverages that might be on the slightly
healthier side for the lack of a better word for alcohol, but that would be things that are clear that don’t have a lot of additives, drinking organic wines whenever possible, taking a break in between to have a glass of water before you have the next one and really thinking about whether you even need the next one. There’s a great app for this that I’ve called out on the podcast before called Sunny Side and it just helps you track drinks. And if you do it in the moment as you’re doing it, it might really make you consider
Hey, do I need to go to this next one? Is that going to totally derail me? Because the other thing that happens when people drink alcohol is they tend to make less good decisions around food, right? They may say, well, forget it. just, you know, I’m going to have everything now because it clouds your judgment. And it also can, I think, make you hungrier when you’re having alcohol. So that’s just something to be thinking about too. And then so that’s the drinks part, the food part.
Cheryl McColgan (13:41.444)
What is your strategy around going to parties? Again, knowing yourself here is key. So if you go to a party, super hungry, or you’re just going to eat whatever’s available and it might not be the healthiest choices. Or do you choose to have a high protein, small meal before you go to a party so that you’re not as ravenous when you get there. And that makes it so much easier to only choose the things that are really appeal to you that feel worth it calorie wise that are a great taste. Because it really, the holidays should be
more about being in community with people and nurturing your relationships. And we make it so much about food and drink. And that is an amazing and fun part. mean, you know, this is coming from our recipe developers, when who loves to eat, who loves to cook. It’s kind of the way that I show my love and appreciation for people is to feed them and to cook for them. So I am again, I’m certainly not there’s no judgment around this. It is just trying to be mindful of decisions that you’re making when you’re in these social situations. And when you’re
parties in particular because the types of foods that tend to be there are not the most nourishing. So one thing you could try if this is you and you know you struggle with this is having a two-bite rule or something like that. So if there is a dish that you really want to try or something extra that’s there that is really looks appealing to you, just having two bites and then moving away from that for a while.
And again, so this is where eating a small meal before you go really helps because you’re not ravenous and then you just have a couple bites here and there. You’re focused on socializing and being with the people that you’re enjoying. And I think that can be a really great way to approach parties. Another scenario is when you again have these family gatherings, quite often you might be asked to bring a dish. So this is the perfect opportunity to bring something that you love, bring something that you know is healthy and nourishing for you or that
works for your particular diet or works for your particular goals. And most people, you know, enjoy trying new things too. So it can be, know, whatever it is, whatever dish it is that appeals to you. That way, you’ll know you’ll have something there that you like and that will be healthy for you. And then you get to share it with your friends as well. So that’s another way to approach the eating strategy. Then we have travel.
Cheryl McColgan (15:59.843)
wellness. So travel can be tricky because while there are much better options nowadays, airports tend to be very expensive. If you’re driving on the road, I almost feel like that’s actually better because almost every gas station now will have some healthier options, whether it’s meat sticks, jerky. Quite often in the gas station, I can find boiled eggs. In the refrigerated section, there’s always pickles and things like that. But another thing to do is just to pack
small meal with you when you’re traveling. you’re on the road or in a plane, you can make it work. I learned a lot about this this spring when I end up doing those bodybuilding competitions because you have to be so specific with your food during those times that I traveled multiple times with my own food that I prepared and made. So that is another way to handle that. And then also just making sure that you take breaks when you’re traveling as much as possible. So whether you’re in the car or on the road, take some time to stop.
get out of the car, move a little bit, just stop at a rest area if you’re driving or if you’re on the plane, making sure that you get up every hour or so, which can be, I know frustrating for seat mates and things like that, but you really just want to make sure, you know, there’s health reasons behind that too, because there’s that risk of clots when you’re on a plane. So just taking that little bit of time to get up, walk back to the back, even if you don’t have to go to the bathroom or something, just getting out of your seat for a little bit when you’re traveling on the plane can really
go long way into just making your body feel a little better when you finally are back on the ground again. And then there’s this idea too, during the holidays that we have to do it all. And I know I’m very guilty of this, but I will say the older I’ve gotten, the better I’ve gotten at managing this a little bit better. And that is, you you know the energy reserves that you have, you know the amount of energy it requires to be with certain people, you know the amount of energy it takes to be out of your house, go to an event.
be at a party, stay out late, all of those things. You don’t have to say yes to everything. I know this is really difficult for people, but I like to think of it like this. When I say no to certain things, I really am saying yes to certain other things. So for example, if I say no to a specific party, I’m saying yes to recharging myself to having that extra time to do a workout or cook for my family.
Cheryl McColgan (18:22.538)
or whatever it is, just it’s not a don’t think of it as no, think of it as a yes to something else. So that really helps me when I’m trying to manage those decisions. The other thing to note about that is you want to balance that idea with the holidays are a special time and it’s pretty limited. And it often involves people that might not be in town all the time, you only get to see once or twice a year.
And so just be mindful of that as well. You might have to expend a little bit of extra energy in one specific weekend or evening in order to accomplish, you know, seeing the people that you need to see and that you want to see while they’re in town and balancing that with again, your personal energy reserves and taking care of yourself. So the big word here, I guess that you’re noticing is balance, but it just requires being really mindful and having a plan.
So, you making the choice, whether it’s making the choice to drink alcohol or not drink alcohol or go to a specific party, you’re not going to specific party, whatever it is, you definitely want to have peace around it and you want it to be intentional. So there’s that word again. But just, you know, not just going with the flow so much and letting everything run over you during the holidays, I think is really what it boils down to. You want to every day just take a few minutes to…
of breathe and be like, okay, what’s going on today? What’s happening? Do I have this party? then you’re managing the rest of your schedule around that. So you can try to find as much balance as possible. And then after a big event, the next day can be quite tiring, right? So if you still happen to weigh yourself the next day, and you know, I’ve talked about this before, I personally have weighed myself every day for years and years and years. I have a fine relationship with a scale. I’m able to look at it as just data.
it is not a big deal for me. And I do think that over time that this has allowed me to maintain my weight because whenever you see it creeping up, you’re not suddenly surprised by that. You can see a trend over time and you give you more time to do something about it. Whereas the shorts amounts of times in my adult life, mainly when I was dating and, somebody’s house in the mornings and stuff when I didn’t have the opportunity to weigh, it starts to creep up on you.
Cheryl McColgan (20:34.574)
So for me personally, after an event, I would still weigh because it doesn’t bother me. If you’re the type of person where the scale really negatively affects your mood, you may not want to weigh yourself the day after event because what happens at events, you tend to get a lot more sodium than usual. You might not drink as much water. You might eat more carbs. There’s a number of reasons why you might wake up the next morning and see the scale be up three to five pounds.
Just know that that is not real weight. That is just water weight from the day before. And what you don’t want to do though is go through the whole entire holidays, not checking on that because that is when you are likely to possibly gain some weight. And since I mentioned the scale, will say this I’ve been using is for over a year now, the Hume BodyPod. It’s on some amazing sales right now with Black Friday and going into Christmas and going into the new year. They usually have a sale as well.
And I have a whole episode on it. know, the at home body composition scales are not perfect. Nobody will argue that they are. But this one is very comparable to a Dexascan, which is pretty much the gold standard for weight. And it keeps track of your body composition as well. So if you are working on gaining muscle or losing fat, things like that, the scale gives you a lot more data around that. If you’re interested in it, I love it. I’ve had it, like I said, I’ve been using it for over a year now. I have a great discount code that stacks on top of whatever sale.
is going on. So look for that in the show notes, but the link, if you just want to go to the link that will work and automatically apply the discount. is heelnourishgrow.com slash Hume, H-U-M-E. And you can check out that scale. if you want to, and again, like I said, it’s not perfect. had a whole episode on that to kind of tell you the things about it to be an awareness. If you start using it, you have to be super consistent with when and how you use it. And that will help you get the best data from it. But just keep in mind, it’s not perfect.
people have expectations around it that it’s going to be kind of this magical tool. But I have found it to really be an awesome, amazing asset in my wellness box. And again, when I go out for that kind of holiday thing, I will still weigh I will be aware though that it’s not going to be probably a number that I’m liking that I get on there. But then usually by the next day or two days later, drink a lot of water, go back to your normal thing, and your weight should be also back to normal as well. So
Cheryl McColgan (22:56.44)
Again, if you know they’re the kind of person that will freak you out, just wait a day or two before you get back on the scale. But I wouldn’t go the entire holiday season not weighing yourself. you only weighing yourself once a week has that same problem associated with it because of those fluctuations in your daily water weight. If you just have one data point for the week, it’s less likely to know if that is real or not. So that is one another reason to keep weighing consistently throughout the holiday season because
least three to four times a week is much better than only one. And then after the event, so the next day we just talked about the next day a little bit, I would rehydrate, have some electrolytes, make sure you have a protein heavy breakfast, and again just go back to normal after that. I think that’s where people really get off the rails during the holidays because they think of it, I had one bad meal, I’m putting air quotes around that if you’re not watching the video, but they have one bad meal.
And it kind of sends them in this spiral where they think, well, I already messed up. Might as well just wait and start again at the new year. No, you can have one awesome holiday meal one night out with friends, enjoying a party, something like that. And then the next day, you just simply go back to normal. Do everything the way that you always do. And you have a lot less likelihood of putting on a whole bunch of weight during the holidays. So I think that covered all of the points that I had in the document that I already had mapped.
out. Again, I had another episode like this where maybe I mentioned some other tools. I’m going to guess they’re pretty similar though. But it’s always good to revisit this year after year because you start to think of things in different ways. You start to have new tools at your disposal, new things that you learn personally that really work for you, new things that you’ve learned about yourself. So I always think it’s important to revisit these things each year and, you know, go into the holidays being very mindful and intentional so that we don’t get off the rails. So
Going forward I It was like I said, it’s just been procrastination central over here for me to get back on the mic and start recording the podcast again But now that we’ve broken the seal, hopefully it’s going to continue on the once-a-week basis that always has in the past I’m going to be doing something a little different at least for this Time period between now and the new year in that I will probably most likely be doing mostly solo
Cheryl McColgan (25:22.672)
episodes just because there’s a few topics that I’ve wanted to cover. I need to do a follow up on the whole bodybuilding situation that had competitions that happened this spring and summer and share with you some insights and some things and some new tools that I learned out of that as well as just a few topics that I think deserve some coverage and it would be easier for me to just put it out there myself.
As far as I did record one interview last week with somebody that I is more kind of a more unquote, I’m going to say again with the air quotes, but I’m going say kind of a normal person that is not a particular expert in a certain way, although that’s not really true because she’s like an Olympian and she has a new company that she’s working with women on.
outdoor skills and should be really, I think, entertaining for you guys. She’s also competed in bodybuilding and learned some lessons out of that that she shared with me in the interview. So I definitely have that one coming up here soon. And then in the meantime, if there are topics that you’d like me to cover or guests that you’d like to see the interviewed on the podcast, as always, please get in touch and let me know if you could leave a comment below.
Let me know what you found most useful about this particular episode and what strategies you will be using during the holidays. If I missed anything, I’d love it if you’d share in the comments anything that I missed or thoughts that you have on dealing with the holidays because I’m sure everyone else that sees it and reads it, you know, we all need all the help we can get during the stressful season. So I would love it if you could share that in the comments. But so that’s it for now. I will see you again next time. And hopefully, like I said, we will be back on
much more regular schedule going forward. So have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you soon.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, host Cheryl McColgan speaks with holistic nutritionist Meg Gage about her personal journey with acne and how it led her to help others. Meg discusses the multifaceted nature of acne, emphasizing the importance of mindset, gut health, and customized skincare approaches. She shares insights on how stress and limiting beliefs can impact skin health and offers practical tips for listeners to start their healing journey. The conversation highlights the need for a holistic approach to acne treatment, integrating mental, physical, and emotional well-being.
Connect with Meg to learn more at her website.
Takeaways* Everyone has the potential to heal acne, regardless of their past experiences. * Mindset is crucial in the healing process; negative beliefs can exacerbate skin issues. * The body communicates through symptoms, and understanding this can aid healing. * Gut health plays a significant role in skin conditions like acne. * Customized skincare is essential for effective acne treatment. * Stress management is vital for overall health and skin clarity.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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https://youtu.be/Hv7zOyux71EEpisode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01)
Hello everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Meg Gage. I hope I got that right, it’s spelled a little differently. And she has a really interesting health history. She’s a holistic nutritionist. She specializes actually in acne, I guess, prevention and treatment. And as you can see by her skin, I mean, it looks amazing here if you’re watching on video. So if you can’t see it, maybe pop over to YouTube.
Meg (00:08)
You did.
Cheryl McColgan (00:30)
But it wasn’t always this way Meg, right? So I’d love it if you could just start by sharing a little bit of your history, your health journey, and then we’ll eventually get into how you came to figure out like how to get rid of acne. So welcome.
Meg (00:45)
Thank you. Yeah, it’s quite the journey. feel anyone who becomes a healer always has quite their own story as to how they got there. But yeah, ever since I was five, I just dealt with multiple traumas and that kind of stress of living in prolonged kind of fight flight breathe since I was little showed up very physically for me in a lot of symptoms, one of which was long standing acne.
since I was 12 and others were chronic pain, chronic fatigue, a lot of misdiagnosed disease of like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. All the while at that point when I was 12 being put on hormonal birth control without any kind of questions asked, that’s just what we did back in those days. So, you without having many cycles of my own, I was just put on these synthetic hormones as well.
And kind of throughout dealing with major health issues over the years and a couple of car accidents and whiplash and PTSD and concussions, my acne was always such a consistent thing in the background. And when I came off hormonal birth control without any prep work or understanding that after a decade, this might have crazy impacts on my hormones when they try to kind of rebalance themselves, my acne exploded into very cystic hormonal
me all over my face, all over my back, all over my bum, very painful. And it really just started my quest in kind of the natural healing world. And for the next five years, I tried everything from, you know, naturopaths to nutritionists to Chinese medicine practitioners to herbalists to acupuncture, all in a quest kind of to heal my skin and nothing worked.
And it was a very frustrating journey. I was spending upwards of $30,000 on this. It felt like a full-time job, distress when you’re kind of putting 100 % of your effort into healing something for it not to work. And then just seeing so many practitioners that were telling you so many, so many varying things. And I just…
got to a point where I was like, need to do this myself. I need to listen to my own intuition. I need to take my power back. I feel like everyone’s just pulling me in 50 different directions and taking my money. So that’s when I became a holistic nutritionist and my mind was just blown. Once I actually learned about the body and how much could be impacting my skin, it just basically led me to my own healing journey of multiple root causes that I had lived with for my entire life.
And Geklo was kind of born very organically after that once I graduated because I was like, my gosh, if I can do this for myself, I want to do this for others and never have them go through what I went through. And also just becoming the practitioner I wanted throughout that journey, which was a really hard thing to find anyone who had been through debilitating acne or health issues and had that like understanding and validation component of what’s needed out of a practitioner at that time.
So yeah, I’ve been doing it nine years now and helped over 2,500 clients.
Cheryl McColgan (04:00)
That’s amazing. you know, I’m sure a lot of people can really relate to this story, because especially people that are in their teens and then into their early 20s, a lot of people really struggle with acne. you know, there’s so many, there’s so many things out there that people think are the reason and, you know, nutrition, think is certainly part of it. But, you know, as you know, and as you’ve come to find out, that’s not the whole story. So when you were originally being put on
hormonal birth control, which I think is really common and really unfortunate because it can have a lot of long term impacts on your future fertility and things like that. So I think people should really be digging into that further. And a lot of practitioners that’s still kind of their go to today. But after the hormonal birth control, were there any things where you thought, you know, that was helping a little or that seemed promising initially to you and then didn’t end up panning out?
Were there any of those things in there that did turn out to be a piece of the puzzle once you finally got it figured out?
Meg (05:02)
But the issue always is when you’re taking an either or approach, it never works, right? And that’s what was happening. So, okay, fine. I was seeing an atropath who was running Dutch tests and, obviously my results were coming back with cortisol and very, very common indications of living in fight flight breeze. So sure, that’s an answer. But if you’re giving a very stressed out person a million supplements that are super expensive and not getting to the root of the stress, and then
I’m going, they’re telling me nothing about skincare or they’re not doing anything from a support perspective. Of course it’s not going to work. Right? So by the same token, you’re seeing an aesthetician, people always go right to skincare, right? When they’re breaking out and they go see an aesthetician and they do chemical peels and lasers and all that. I was doing that on and off too. But again, there was no communication.
between the three modalities that I now do and have an understanding of the three things you need. You need mindset, you need rewiring of all the negative belief patterns, limiting beliefs, fears, to get yourself out of fight, flight, freeze and get your cortisol regulated. You need proper skincare, yes. And then you also need the internal root cause of like, what is your body trying to communicate with you? So without those, it just wasn’t a complete picture. So you would never really know what was working or not because you didn’t have all the pieces.
Do you know what mean? Like it just, never worked. So to me, it’s like, in either approach is just wasting a lot of money for someone with acne because those protocols are extremely expensive. But if you don’t have all three, you’re going to think it’s not working, right?
Cheryl McColgan (06:40)
So it sounds like from what you’re saying, I mean, it’s a multifactorial problem that we’re dealing with here, usually with acne. But would you say that the first thing, you mentioned mindset and you mentioned getting yourself out of stress. Would that be, for example, maybe one of the first things that you would address when you start working with somebody? Because I think stress affects so many things, not just acne, of course, but so many health problems, seems like, even if it didn’t clear your acne, that’d be an amazing place to start. So could you talk a little bit more
about that and how you start to help people get out of that fight flight mode.
Meg (07:15)
The root of the root of the root of everything for acne is your mindset. Like I stand by that 100%. It is always where I start with people because if you are telling yourself, I’ll always have acne, nothing works for me, that’s a script you’re printing out and your body’s gonna be like, okay, I’m gonna have more acne. I’m gonna get stuck in this state. So until we actually rewire that kind of subconscious pattern that people are having and you make your body feel
safe to heal. I don’t care how perfect your diet is. I don’t care how many supplements you’re taking. I don’t care how many expensive tests you’re doing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have that piece under control. And this is where I see people running into these walls, why they have these 10, 20-year acne journeys. And they say to me, without doubt, the number one thing on application is, well, I’ve tried it all. And I’m like, you haven’t tried it all. There’s something missing or else you’d be clear, right?
Right there is a limiting belief keeping you stuck in still and in this acne journey. Right? So the number one thing I do is a lot of subconscious reprogramming, eradicating the root of that fear, limiting belief, and really ensuring that your body can regulate on its own and not produce constant cortisol, which then it’s going to impact things like blood sugar and sex hormones and your gut and your liver. And it’s this like tornado impact.
And so yeah, it’s always where I start, 100%.
Cheryl McColgan (08:47)
And you have tips for people? Like, of course, you have programs, you have your website and then all these really great resources for people. But I’m thinking there’s probably people out there that have been on this journey and they’re thinking, yeah, I’ve heard they’re like what you’re just saying. Let me I’ve already tried it all. This isn’t going to work either. What makes this lady think, you know, I haven’t done all these things. If that’s where their heads at and they just need like some kind of taste of how things could be, where would you have them?
start in addressing the beliefs or the stress? Is there something that they can kind of do on their own so that they see like, yeah, Meg is kind of onto something here. Maybe I do trust her to move forward with this process.
Meg (09:24)
Me?
For sure. The first thing I would do is start to be conscious and make a list of every limiting thought you’re having in a day. Any negative thought you’re having. Because if you’ve got acne, that’s on a Rolodex multiple times a day. You catch yourself in the mirror, you hate what you see. What are you saying to yourself? What are you saying to yourself all day? How many cortisol spikes are you doing as soon as you wake up? In the morning is the first thing you do, touching your face, running to the mirror and crying at what you see because you have 10 new pimples or it didn’t magically, you know.
appear overnight or clear up overnight, make a list of exactly what you’re saying to yourself and then look at that list and be shocked that this is how you’re talking to yourself. And once you see that the actual like physical words, it really does usually show people like imagine you spoke to your daughter like this. Imagine you spoke to your best friend like this, you would never and you’re speaking to yourself like this.
30 times a day. Like that alone can just trigger how much power our words have. So I would try starting there and just kind of understanding and being aware of it. And then using something like a powerful affirmation tool, that’s the opposite of that of what you want to be saying to yourself and start repeating those instead. It’s almost like you have to catch it. It’s like if you think of that like mean girl on your shoulder who’s like constantly trying to bully you.
And sometimes I tell clients to visualize it like mine’s Val, she wears all black, she is nasty, she’s been around since I’ve been 12 and I’m like, Val, I don’t have time for you today, like out you go. But sometimes it helps with that, right? Of just like giving it a character. And you know, once we kind of replace those negative with positive thoughts, you will start to physically feel different in your body.
Cheryl McColgan (11:16)
I think you’re onto something with not just, I think it’s not only limiting beliefs in relation to acne, but really this could help people with their entire life. So once you’re in that mindset, yes, of course.
Meg (11:23)
everything. Yes, of course. It’s just that I do it specifically to acne. But yes, it’s a ripple effect.
Like this is why I work so much with mindset. Now it’s been such a huge shift in my projects over the last couple of years because it has a ripple effect. So when my clients see me, I’m like, okay, but what’s your like best, happiest, most aligned life, everything from finances to relationships to your career, all of that gets shifted with mind that works.
Cheryl McColgan (11:54)
Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that tip. And just for people out there who are so stuck in that, feel like initially, when people go into this kind of work, they might struggle to even find themselves a positive affirmation. So could you give an example of maybe maybe it’s one of yours? Or maybe it’s one an example that you love from one of your clients that they used to kind of make this shift and kind of repeatedly go back to to have like one in your back pocket that you know kind of will work.
Meg (12:17)
Yeah,
the biggest limiting belief I’ve seen across the board is worthiness. So I think starting with I am worthy, I am enough are huge, because that just does have a ricochet effect into every kind of area they’re not feeling good enough in. Right. And I think starting really simple is good as well getting familiar with with that feeling of like,
Oh my gosh. Like usually when you start that work, like when I did, I would have like this like, oh, reaction to saying a positive affirmation, like, oh, this is so foreign to be nice to myself. But the more that you do it, it’s like, I always explain like the brain is like a muscle that needs flexing, right? If you don’t go to the gym, you go three times and you walk out with a six pack. And the whole time you’re going to the gym as well. Your brain’s like, oh, I’m tired. It hurts. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t think we should go. Let’s just eat chips on the couch.
the same thing with your brain. Like it’s going to be refuting that process because it thinks it’s keeping you safe and you’ve been telling yourself that for years. So just like something very simple is where I would start with that.
Cheryl McColgan (13:11)
you
That’s a great tip. love when we can get guests with like tangible things like something that somebody can put into practice immediately today to start to really shift things in their lives. So that being said, mindset is the very base, base, base that you’re working with. After people start to kind of dig into that and start to do that work, it’s not only like, obviously you still need to cleanse your skin in a way that’s healthful and foods that you eat that will support.
Meg (13:46)
Yeah, of course.
Cheryl McColgan (13:50)
that journey. So what’s kind of your next level thing that you start to address once people start to get their mindset in order? What’s the next thing that you have them work?
Meg (13:58)
So the next thing is definitely clicking the symptoms into a puzzle piece of what your body’s trying to communicate with you. So I think the biggest thing women come to me and they say also is my body hates me. My body’s working against me. I have all these problems. It’s such a shift of like your body’s like on your team and is screaming at you to just listen and it’s trying to be like, hey, I’m here, I’m help.
I’m helping, I’m helping, please just listen to me instead of fighting against me and then we’re gonna heal. So I like to reconnect people back to their bodies and say that symptoms are an amazing tool because we get to heal it, right? So obviously there’s always a physical root cause of acne, acne doesn’t just show up out of nowhere, right? Like there’s something internally going on. The major ones I see are obviously cortisol, so stress hormone dysregulation, blood sugar dysregulation, a lot of gut.
stuff, so overgrowth, infections, just a lack of good bacteria. And you know what, it’s basic, the skin is an organ of elimination, right? So if there’s other systems that are backed up, usually I see the liver being really overburdened, the gut, sometimes the lymphatic system, it’s going to come out your skin, right? So we want to make sure we’re also bringing the body back into harmony and balance, but also having people kind of connect.
back with their bodies and listen to what it’s trying to communicate with because that’s the keys to the class a long term. Like I always want to give clients tools so that they’re not relying on me past the six month program. They have the tools for long term healing and success once they know how to kind of tap into their intuition and learn what their body’s trying to say to them.
Cheryl McColgan (15:42)
And do you find that you mentioned a few different things there as far as like liver support or you mentioned gut things, so maybe like a SIBO kind of situation, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Is there anything that you see kind of more consistently than others or is it really just a whole system across the board, all kinds of different things?
Meg (16:04)
It’s always cortisol. So the mindset and the physical symptoms are always tied for me. So the root of the root is always the cortisol piece, which is highly inflammatory, which then usually impacts the same systems every time because cortisol is like a master hormone, right? So in terms of gut stuff, I see a lot of H. pylori. I see a lot of…
Overgrowth of like opportunistic bacteria and just like a lack of good guys. Like those are definitely patterns that I see. And then yeah, like liver is a big one. I feel just with like our foods, our environments, microplastics, all the things, it’s really, really hard. You do your best, but we still just like have so much more exposure than we once did. And they got liver working really hard for us, you know?
Cheryl McColgan (16:54)
I definitely want to get more into the gut because that’s such a popular topic lately, but to stay on the liver for just a moment. Is there anything that you, any protocols that you found or any tools that people can use to, you you mentioned kind of overburden of toxins. So are there any tools to maybe support eliminating those toxins or reducing toxins? That’s one of my favorite topics in as far as like phthalates, parabens, plastics, you know, not going so crazy about it that you
Meg (17:19)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (17:22)
can’t eat or drink or put your hands on anything anymore, but at the same time, limiting the things that are easy enough to limit. So I’d love to hear your perspective on that and what things you kind of recommend in that arena.
Meg (17:34)
Yeah, I’m, listen, I never want to add more stress to people. So I always say do within your realm of reality and like what’s sustainable for you to do. And so of course, that is usually like household cleaning products, your food, stuff that you’re like, you know, I like perfumes and hair care and face care and all that stuff, right? Like all of the stuff that’s been like, add, add, add to your bucket until it’s overflowing.
So yeah, I feel like there’s so many alternatives out there at this point at any health food store that you go into. There’s really a healthy alternative for most things at this point. So I definitely reduce your toxic load as much as possible, but not stressing about it where you’re freaking out that you’re eating a plastic tray as a takeout. You know what I mean? I don’t want to toe the line too far. I’m not an extremist ever. I feel like that’s always super unhealthy.
just doing what you can to reduce that.
Cheryl McColgan (18:33)
Yeah, totally agree. you’re right. don’t want to get, know, because stress is such a component of it, you don’t want to start stressing out about things that for a lot of it, we can’t control. and one resource for people that I’ve mentioned in the past, I just want to throw it in here, since it’s relevant to what we just talked about is the environmental working group website. You can look for specific beauty products, haircare, skincare.
Meg (18:38)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (18:54)
face wash, all that kind of stuff and find which ones they have a certification that’s kind of like it’s the cleanest it can be. And then they also rate like from one to seven as far as one being closer to the best that you can get with no toxins and seven being like you probably want to avoid that.
You can also put in a list of ingredients if you can’t find the product in there. So I often do that. I’ll learn about a new beauty product on TikTok or whatever, because they’re all over the place all the time. And I’ll look at the ingredients, I’ll pop it in there. It’s like, nope, this is no good. Usually I find phthalates is the one that’s still really prevalent because that’s in just about every fragrance. So anyway, so that’s just a little resource for people out there.
Meg (19:17)
Yeah. yeah.
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (19:33)
So, okay, we’ve talked about the mindset. We’re starting to look at what’s in their environment. What’s kind of the next level? We haven’t talked about the obvious thing yet is how do you cleanse your skin? What do you do to take care of it? Is it like this 20 step Korean system that’s gotten so popular on social media or is it, should it be simple? I would love to hear.
Meg (19:47)
No.
Yeah, TikTok is, is I’m going to
tell you and I know anyone who has acne is on Acne Talk. Get off that right now. It is the number one thing I tell my clients like stop it. It is so wrong. It is so clickbaity. It is like mass influencer marketing. Like when I go on TikTok, it drives me wild because of the misinformation. So please be careful out there and only take advice from people that have certifications behind their name.
and have the education to be giving that advice. Otherwise it can get very scary. But skincare matters immensely. So first of all, acne type and skin type are gonna determine how to use certain products and the frequency to use certain products. I find as is just the world we live in, it’s just like two extremes and they talk shit about each other and there’s all this divide. I hope it’s okay that I swore.
but there’s the all natural camp. And then there’s, you know, the tretinoin and like the dermatologist route, right? So I am somewhere in the middle where skin barrier and hydration super, super important, but also exfoliation and keeping the pores clean and preventing new acne from coming in to play are important. In terms of what products and how to use them, it’s so entirely dependent on the person. So there’s different types of acne.
There is a non-inflamed acne, which is like the closed pomodones that like texture kind of thing, the kind of like flesh colored bumps. And then there’s more inflamed acne, right? So that’s what the pustules that come to a head, there’s cystic acne, which are more of the like nodular stuff that doesn’t really come to a head, it can last for months. So, you know, most people have a mix of both, and that’s going to inform the strategy that I’m going to give them in terms of exposing them to different products to again.
get that up and out, but then prevent through the product as well from it coming back.
Cheryl McColgan (21:48)
Now because people out there that have acne, there are definitely certain products that are marketed towards acne and I think there’s some basic ones that goes back to and I’ll, you know, age myself here but like the stridex pads and all of that kind of stuff that used to be popular.
Meg (22:00)
Yeah, yeah. Panoxil, proactive,
yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (22:03)
Yes. Proactive. Yeah, that was a huge one probably 15 years ago. Do any of those work? Or does it really just depend on the person and the type of acne? And is it worth experimenting with some of those? Or do you find for most people that’s just still not going to work?
Meg (22:08)
Yes.
No, you should never be using any of that stuff. Yeah, again, it has to be high quality product, no poor cloggers. And again, just ensuring that everything’s tailored to you. So this is the issue, right? Like people are buying stuff based off TikTok influencers and paid ads and stuff like that. And none of it’s tailored to them. So at the end of the day, the most important thing that you can take away from anything is that you need to have a customized approach.
through all three pillars to have long-term success. And otherwise you’re literally like throwing stuff at the wall, hoping something’s gonna stick and it’s not. And I say this because I went through that myself and that’s why I talk about that either or approach, right? That’s why it never worked is because I didn’t have one person in house that was doing everything for me based on the specifics of what my acne was telling me from skincare to mindset, to what my root causes were, right? So.
just buying these random products or going to Sephora and just like, you know, it had a good rating online, it’s never going to be enough, right? Like it has to be customized to you.
Cheryl McColgan (23:26)
that sense. And then what about, we never did go quite back to the gut part yet. So there’s a lot of information out there, obviously, about gut health. starting to be microbiome testing. One thing that’s really popular that a lot of people promote and think is a good thing are prebiotics or probiotics. What are your thoughts on that in relation to gut health?
Meg (23:50)
So yeah, gut health is, you know, it’s billion dollar industry these days, right? And we’re always getting sold new supplements and things. I think at the end of the day, I’m still going to say the same answer. It has to be customized to you. So I utilize a GI map in practice often. If there was any long standing digestive issues, I would rather just see exactly what’s going on through a stool sample and really, really get a clear picture of how to best heal that for you.
Otherwise, it’s kind of the same thing. You’re just trying out all these supplements that have claims that it’s going to make you feel better. And it can be literally lighting money on fire or making things worse if, depending on the gut infection or issues that you’re having. It’s always best with the gut to test, in my opinion. And I actually don’t feel that way about other tests. I just feel that way about the gut. And the reason for that is because the symptoms of the gut overlap for almost everything. Whereas
a hormonal symptom or a cortisol symptom, it’s very obvious to me based on their story and their journey and what’s going on with their cycles and their symptoms. like, this is exactly what I… I don’t need a Dutch test to tell me that. With the gut, the same person can have constipation and diarrhea and one person can have no good bacteria and three parasites. And the other person can have H. pylori and candida. And we would have no idea based alone on the symptoms of the gut.
Cheryl McColgan (25:18)
And in those ones that you just mentioned that are somewhat more common ones, H. pylori, SIBO, that kind of thing, when you’ve identified that they have a parasite or some of these things and you do some kind of healing protocol, do you find that in some cases that that really was the root of their acne problem and then it goes away just based on these gut symptoms? again, is it more like, okay, that was a big part of it, but they still might have some other things going on too?
Meg (25:44)
Big part of it, but it’s never just one thing in my nine years that I’ve seen. So definitely that’s like, again, to me, the guts, the foundation alongside cortisol and insulin. So it plays a huge part. But so this is a prime example. If someone went with acne and just saw a gut nutritionist and had this amazing protocol with them, but they were using the wrong skincare and they weren’t doing mindset work, they wouldn’t heal their skin and they would think, my God, it wasn’t my gut.
But it was a piece, it was one third, but we missed the other two. So that’s why it’s super important to make sure that you’re always taking all three into consideration at all times.
Cheryl McColgan (26:25)
Yeah, that makes sense. And with the gut stuff as well, how prevalent in people that are having acne issues, how prevalent do you find that they do have some kind of issue in their GIM map?
Meg (26:39)
Very, very, very, very. And it’s not surprising, right? Like we learn so much too, and there’s so much more coming out about the gut brain access too, right? Like how there’s just like a right connection with stress, right? So it’s anytime anyone’s had a long standing acne journey, they’re constantly stressed, their immune system down, their defenses are down, you know, and oftentimes too, then their diet suffers, they’re not exercising enough, like all these things that
kind of keep us in a healthier state, sometimes fall by the wayside just due to the sheer amount of stress that they’re doing. So it can be, yeah, a really common thing. mean, it’s easy to have digestive dysfunction just like the state or society. I’m pretty sure most people would come up with something on a GI map at this point in their lives, like especially in their 30s.
Cheryl McColgan (27:31)
Yeah, I’m really curious. I still haven’t done that yet to this point. So maybe I’ll find you afterwards. I’m sure it’d be very interesting. The one thing we haven’t talked about, you’ve mentioned insulin. You’ve mentioned blood sugar a couple of times. So we haven’t talked about diet yet. So I’d love to hear what your perspective on that is. Because back in the day, again, people kind of traditional wisdom or something about acne is it’s sugar, it’s chocolate. There are definitely things that are triggers. But what if you found actually works?
Meg (27:33)
You should.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (27:58)
And what recommendations do you have for people to do with their diet if they want to really focus on their skincare?
Meg (28:06)
Diet plays a little role. Food fear plays a massive role. So yes, this traditional, this narrative, I’m gonna call it a narrative story that’s been perpetuated for years and years and years, it’s perpetuated when I was in school and learned two pages about acne that was incorrect. So food doesn’t cause acne. You can have triggers to certain foods, often if you’ve got an allergy and intolerance or you’ve got like,
crazy inflammation in your gut where you just like you can’t handle it until you hear your gut. But it’s very different from saying if you have acne, you can’t eat sugar, dairy, gluten, you can’t have alcohol, can’t have coffee, you can’t live your life. Now the issue is that narrative is so rooted. And it’s the first thing people are going to come up on Google on TikTok on anything like that. They fear these foods. So they have an emotional connection with these foods that’s not healthy. And they also have a restrictive mentality that’s
very, very stressful. So they cut all these foods out, they’re stressed, they can’t go out and enjoy their lives, they can’t go on vacations. I have had stories from clients where like it’s heartbreaking. They go to a beautiful 10 course tasting dinner with their husbands work and like they don’t eat anything and they don’t go on vacations or they bring their own food. Like, you know, I remember doing that. I’d go to cottage weekends bringing my own little things of like healthy food.
And it wasn’t ever about the food. It was about how stressed I was. was telling myself, dairy breaks me out. I’m gonna get a pimple if I eat this cheese. Lo and behold, I got a pimple. Not because I ate a little cheese, because I told myself and I printed out that script and boom, my body was listening to me. So I love food. I’m a nutritionist. I very much believe in the power of anti-inflammatory diet and whole food and not processed food. But I also believe in living your life joyfully and so…
many things in our society revolve around food. And just because you have acne does not mean you shouldn’t enjoy your life to the fullest. So once we heal the body, you should be able to, unless there’s an intolerance or an allergy, you should be able to eat everything in moderation. I do a 70-30 approach to 70 % of like a whole foods diet and 30 % of like just eating what you want when you want it because you want to order the cheesecake after you had a beautiful meal with a girlfriend.
Cheryl McColgan (30:27)
So no specific, it sounds like no specific things to avoid. It’s more in line with your approach to mindset. Like once you kind of get that more holistic view, then you’re still trying to eat healthy most of the time, whatever healthy means, whatever healthy eating means to people, right? Because that’s a whole nother topic. But then allowing yourself some flexibility there so that you’re not creating that extra stress over food.
Meg (30:39)
Yeah.
Yeah, and I mean, 2500 clients, they’ve all been able to eat everything and they’ve got clear crystal clear skin now. So it is a testament to how much stress plays and these connections that we make in our mind to external things like and food, acne aside is an emotional thing. Like I had a client today that, you know, had a huge
kind of restrictive mentality with food and rationing mentality. And she was like, well, if I don’t ration my food, then I’ll swing the other way and binge eat. Like we have to remember how emotional food is with a lot of the conditioning that we’ve had too, just like, especially as women in society and like what we’re exposed to. So those pieces, they inform our relationships with this stuff too, right? So we want to make sure always it’s like a healthy, joyful connection, especially with something that’s supposed to nourish us and sustain us.
Cheryl McColgan (31:44)
Now, is somebody sitting there thinking now after hearing all that, they’re like, wow, this is a lot. I could try to do this on my own, but Meg’s got it figured out and she’s got a thing. She’s got, you mentioned you have like a six months program. So I’d love to hear how people work with you. What does the program look like and what is the success rate of people? Does it always take six months? Can it be shorter? Like kind of a picture about how healing might look going forward.
Meg (31:53)
I do, yes.
Yeah, so right now I do a six month one to one program. I find that amount of time is just usually what anyone needs for a proper healing journey. We meet for an hour, we do a deep dive into their acne journey, their health history, we go over, you know, their diet, we go over what they’re doing for stress management, what their skincare is. And then they’re with me for six months where I’m basically doing customized protocols for skincare mindset.
and obviously their internal root causes. So whatever we’re doing, if we have to run a GI map or we’re going right into a different phase of healing, ⁓ and they’re doing two week check-ins because you know, the body responds very differently for each person, right? So I’m always shifting everything based on what they’re updating me with updated pictures. We do kind of this three months zoom. ⁓ and it’s usually at the three month mark where
the colors back in their face, their eyes are brighter, they’re sitting up more confident, they’re like, wow, this is actually really working. So if I had to gauge for most people, it takes at least three months for people to really start to see significant shifts and start to believe like, okay, no, this is working. She was right. And I totally get it. mean, that’s, again, talk about a brain that needs flexing, right? Like it’s going to take three months of consistent work for that too.
And then, yeah, we just, again, it’s very different based on each person of what phase of healing we need to address for that person. We also will dig deeper into mindset for some people that have more of a limiting belief issue versus someone who is a little bit more on the just needs a GI map. So everyone’s a little bit different. If clients are following the protocol and they’re doing the mindset work, everyone heals.
Cheryl McColgan (34:01)
Amazing. So if people do want to look into this further and work with you, what’s the best way to get in touch? Where can they find you? Are you on social media? Tell us all that kind of good stuff.
Meg (34:09)
Yeah,
yeah, get glow method is my website, get glow method.com and then get glow method on Instagram as well. So my DMS are always open. We try to do lots of, you know, content just like we chatted about today. So yeah, we’d love to chat with anyone who who’s interested.
Cheryl McColgan (34:26)
Meg, thank you. This has been so informative today. I love how it dovetails with really just overall health. It makes perfect sense that this would help your skin if you just get your head right and work on being healthier overall. So before we go, any final thoughts, anything that we didn’t talk about that you’d like to mention, anything that came to mind like, I should have said this.
Meg (34:47)
I always like to just say to people like, you can heal. Like it doesn’t matter your backstory. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done so far. Like you 100 % can heal. I promise you, you’re not that anomaly that can’t be fixed. It’s really just about finding, you know, those, those puzzle pieces and putting them into place. And until you do that, just make sure that you’re like really compassionate to yourself. Cause you know, I know going through it, I’ve shepherded so many people through this journey. It’s,
It’s a really hard one to stay positive and to kind of believe in yourself and believe that there is like a happy ending for you too. But I truly, truly know that for everyone, there is an answer.
Cheryl McColgan (35:27)
Awesome. Well, Meg, thank you again so much for coming on today. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and take care and have a good rest of your day.
Meg (35:35)
Thank you.
In this conversation, Cheryl McColgan shares her journey of preparing for a NPC Fit Model bodybuilding competition at the age of 52. This episode is in vlog format and best viewed on YouTube although it’s still being released as an audio podcast. She discusses her training regimen, nutritional strategies, and the mental challenges she faces throughout the process.
Cheryl emphasizes the importance of protein intake, understanding ketosis, and the role of supplements in her routine. She also reflects on her daily activities, meal preparations, and the significance of maintaining a healthy body fat percentage while training for the fit model competition.
Takeaways* Challenging oneself can lead to personal growth. * Nutrition plays a crucial role in competition prep. * Understanding individual carbohydrate needs is essential. * Daily routines can help manage energy levels during prep. * Supplementation can enhance performance and recovery. * Protein intake should be prioritized for muscle synthesis. * Meal prep can simplify tracking macros. * Finding enjoyable foods can make dieting easier. * Maintaining a healthy body fat percentage is important for women. * It’s important to listen to your body during training.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWat2qgDcsEEpisode Transcript
New NPC Fit Model DivisionCheryl McColgan (00:00.504)
So I’m back a little later in the day here getting ready to make my dinner, but I realized when I started editing the video that I did not really set this up very well. So I wanna put this at the beginning. I am sharing with you a day in what I’ve been doing for the last almost 10 weeks now. And that is training, eating, losing fat for possibly competing in the fit model category in the NPC.
When I thought about this in the, well first of all, thinking about doing this at age 52 is quite daunting, never having been stepped on stage before in a bodybuilding competition. But if you wanna learn more about that thought process, I have another podcast that I did on that and I’ll link that down below. But basically, I’m still not 100 % certain that I’m.
to do it, but I’ve been training, eating, doing fat loss for last 10 weeks as if I am definitely going to do it. So it’s just a little scary and that’s the only reason I’m thinking about not doing it. I think it’ll be fun in a lot of ways. I think it would be a great experience and I’m all about
challenging myself and putting myself out of my comfort zone. So that’s why I started it. anyway, so this is kind of just my day, how I’ve been training, how I’ve been eating, bio hacks that I do, supplements that I use, all that kind of good stuff that will all be here in the video.
Yeah, I don’t normally do vlogs, so this is totally new format for me, but hopefully you’ll find it helpful or somewhat entertaining or maybe while you’re trying to get through your cardio, you’ll be watching this video, which is how I’ve been getting through a lot of my things that I’ve been doing over the last several weeks, listening to podcasts, watching videos, watching other people talk about their preps and things like that.
Cheryl McColgan (01:55.946)
So without further ado, let’s move on to my day. Hey everyone, good morning. This is going to be a totally different kind of video for me. I’ve never done one of these before, but I thought I would take you through a day in the life of prep. So you can see a little bit what it’s more about, get some of my feelings on it. Yesterday was a particularly difficult day. So we made it through, woke up this morning. Actually, the first thing I do in the morning that I did not video is get on the scale because that’s what you do
you’re tracking and I…
this morning, so despite yesterday being an awful day, we did have progress, at least in the sense of what the goal is right now, is moving that body fat down. So now, I’m just going to make some coffee, do some fasting cardio, which by the way, there’s still no great evidence that that’s that much better, but I have been doing that right now just to go ahead and push my first meal off a little bit, because when you’re in a cow
deficit especially for this long it gets to be quite monotonous a little challenging so the later I can eat that first meal the better so but first coffee and I do a pour over every morning so I’ll show you that. So here is my little coffee setup I’ve got I this is the Breville it’s actually a tea maker which I’ve had this for I don’t know 15 years now or something I’m obsessed with it it has a basket that goes in here to make the tea that actually
the handle in there like brings it up and down so that it puts it into the water and you can change the temperature for the different types of teas. You can see all the different ones. I just put it on custom to heat water. anyway, when it makes the tea, it heats it at the proper temperature. So if you have black tea is a different temperature than green tea. And then when it’s done brewing the handle here, it brings the basket back up so that it doesn’t steep too long. But anyway, delicious tea. But in the morning I use it to heat up the water for
Cheryl McColgan (03:57.072)
I have my burger grinder and then I have the pour-over so that’s what’s coming next.
Cheryl McColgan (04:13.646)
So ideally you’d be taking more creatine just before a workout and I do have a lift today but I find that sometimes I forget doing it pre-workout so I like to just do it in the morning first thing. Also, I’m very interested in creatine for its cognitive benefits other than just muscle building. So for me, I feel like just getting it during the day is more important than the exact timing so I’ll often just take it.
Right here in the morning just so I get it in and then I occasionally will also Right now my protocol is to take it before and after this so I will take it after for some reason I don’t have as much trouble remembering that but then I also put a little Taurine and hyaluronic acid in my coffee in the morning I haven’t been doing the collagen just because of extra calories, which you do have to be a little bit concerned about while you’re on a calorie
because it is getting plenty of protein right now, so I’m not doing that at the moment.
Okay, before coffee, just thought I’d share this with you because if you came to this channel for its original content, you may have been here because you wanted to try keto or had curiosity about the keto diet or being in ketosis. And so what I wanted to share is since I’ve been training more and doing this contest prep, I’ve actually been eating 100 carbs a day, which has been very different than what I’ve done in the past. But what I want to show you about that is that
truly being in ketosis if that’s your goal or
Cheryl McColgan (05:49.44)
eating what amount of carbs will allow you to get in that metabolic state is really different for everyone depending on your activity level and a variety of other factors. How long you’ve been doing it, that kind of thing, how easily your body goes in and out of ketosis if that’s truly your goal. So I just want to show you I have my ketone meter here and I thought we would check this this morning so that I can show you what that’s like now that I am in fact eating more carbs and for some people that want to have the benefits of ketosis but like having more carbs or miss their
This can be really useful information for you. So this will just be a really quick thing. Get the strip out here and put it into the meter and then we’ll go ahead and test it this morning.
meter and putting in the strip and breaking the feeder. I done this in quite a while but you know I always test I used to test all these things quite a lot so I have all of them so let’s go ahead and get this in here. So it takes a countdown of 10 to get the number and like I said I had about
yesterday. I’m waking up fast this morning.
and my ketone is reading at 0.9, which is a very therapeutic level of ketosis, despite the fact of eating plenty of carbs. Anyway, this is just a point of data to share with you. And then I’ve also been using my lumen. I test a lot of these things for my job, obviously. So I have the lumen. I’ve been using it occasionally. I actually used it the last three mornings, again, just out of curiosity. And what this tool does is it allows you, if you are a person that wants to check on your metabolic health, but be more flexible with the amount
Cheryl McColgan (07:34.547)
of carbs you have, actually directs you on a day-to-day basis of if you’re in fat burning mode, so kind of waking up in ketosis or not, and then how many carbs and different macronutrients you should plan for the rest of the day, depending on your goals. And so I’ve used that the last three mornings. It’s come up with fat burning every single morning. And it’s just an interesting tool again, especially if you’re looking for more flexibility in your diet. And like I said, I test some of these for my job, so it’s just kind of a curious thing for me. But definitely it’d be…
You know, being in ketosis despite eating a fair amount of carbs is definitely interesting information for a lot of people, especially way back in the day of keto. People were like, you know, if you had one little thing off, they were just thought ruined it and you’d have the keto police to come after you. It was quite a funny thing. But anyway, just for some extra information for you there.
So I’m definitely not used to a vlog format. We’ll see how this goes. But anyway, I came outside to enjoy my coffee before I go for my walk. It is rained last night. It’s about to rain again all day, but I have a break this morning so I can get that in. But I’m just going to enjoy this out here with the birds chirping for a few minutes and then we’ll get on the road for the cardio.
Cheryl McColgan (08:51.633)
workout outfit ever. I just have the same stuff I’ve had forever and I don’t typically try to wear fun things when I’m working out. I don’t know, I’m just fine with normal shorts or whatever but I have gotten a couple of little things lately from Amazon just to try to…
up my gym attire. This is one of the things I’m wearing today. I really like this a lot because for cardio it’s got pockets on the shorts that I can put my phone in when I’m out walking. I also have like a thing that attaches to my waistband that is not a fanny pack for carrying my phone which is quite useful because you can it’s magnets so you can attach it on any waistband that you have but whenever
It’s nice because it’s got the pocket for the phone. I’ll just show you the little outfit because it’s super comfortable.
and I really have been liking it but it’s just it’s a onesie kind of thing it’s got the built-in bra here’s the pockets and then this fun shirt that’s got like the fun back so anyway trying to look a little more presentable in my gym attire. So I found a new trail close by that’s been really great for doing all this extra cardio which I haven’t shared about that yet so right now my cardio is at 40
five minutes, four times a week, then I have twice a week, that’s 80 minutes that just turned on last week.
Cheryl McColgan (10:31.437)
And that’s because I’m getting towards the end here and we’re just trying to keep the scale moving. So as you know, all of this is for a very specific purpose. This is not like a long term thing. So it’s just planning for this specific event and that’s the goal. So that’s what we’re doing. But today is a 45 minute day and I just walk because I was a runner for 17 years and my knees do not get too happy about doing work.
aggressive things these days. I’m just happy to be able to walk and hike pain free. So I’m just walking fast has been enough to do what I’m supposed to do right now. So I’m about a third of the way through at the moment. And I was just trying to get this in before it rains. So we’ll check back with you when it is time for me to be finished with this and eat something.
kind of a lot. Keeping in mind that I test a lot of these for my work stuff. So some of them are things that I use for that reason. And then some of them I’ve added on prep, example, boron as something that my coach suggested. And when I looked at the purposes of that, does significantly help a little bit with fat loss, but also for maintaining bone.
a deficit, then I take this vitamin K2, that’s for heart health, and let’s see, my thyracin, that’s just thyroid support, and got another bottle in the cabinet and that, but that’s out. This one, urolithin A, this is for mitochondrial health and also to help with energy and strength, and it has some
research behind it that shows that you’ve got like 18 percent increase in strength over months. I’ve been taking this
Cheryl McColgan (12:33.201)
probably for a year now. it’s hard to say, but the one thing about supplements is you don’t know if you gained that much strength if you didn’t have it. So it’s kind of hard to tell, but I’ve definitely gained strength. Then I’ve also been taking fatty 15, which is an essential fatty acid that was discovered more recently. So it’s kind of a newer thing. And that’s one thing I’m testing out for.
just like I said for my job. And then I have the Methylgard Plus, and this is because I have the MTHR, MTHFR mutation, which basically means my body doesn’t methylate as well. And when I did some of my testing,
before I had a higher homocysteine level, which is bad for your heart health. And it’s something that happens when you have that gene mutation. So taking a methylated B vitamin helps your body methylate better, lowers homocysteine. And that’s definitely been the case since I’ve had it tested again since then. Then I have my vitality bits. So this has spirulina and corolla.
in it and those are good for energy and has super oxide dis-mutease in it which is again something that really helps with cellular function. So it can be a lot of pills but I just take them one at a time and then it’s finally on to eating. I almost forgot D3 that’s so critical because that is really helpful with fat loss and also just overall general health and something that most people are low
especially those of us that live further north and don’t get sun all winter. Okay, now for breakfast. This is actually one of my biggest diet hacks. I’ve said this before, making your food boring is really good for fat loss. It also just helps you, you know the same thing to make and to eat every day. It really just helps keep tracking simple. But I was eating this for a couple months actually before I started my fat loss thing. I’ve just kind of modified the quantity a little bit. So what I have been doing right now on
Cheryl McColgan (14:36.943)
Fat Loss Face is one egg and egg whites. So egg whites is 150 grams. These are just for my macros. Obviously your mileage may vary. fortunately I couldn’t find the one that I usually buy this time. So I’ve got something different, but it’s still just egg whites. guess I should shake that a little bit.
Cheryl McColgan (15:13.233)
and then a little salt and just whisk this up.
Cheryl McColgan (15:32.657)
So the egg whites and cottage cheese that I’m about to have in the breakfast or breaking the fast, the first meal of the day is about 30 to 35 calories, or 30 to 35 calories, 30 to 35 grams of protein. And I feel like this is a mistake that people make, especially when they’re on fat loss, because I see a lot of women in particular, smaller competitors, that will have meals that don’t get up to 30 grams of protein. And the reason I say that,
that is a big mistake, especially as we get older, is because what the research shows is it takes about 30 grams of protein to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. So every time you eat is an opportunity to stimulate that process of growing muscle. And as we get older, your body loses the ability to effectively kick in that process. It requires even a little bit more protein. And the real thing that you’re looking for is leucine. There’s like this thing, a theory called the leucine threshold for muscle protein synthesis. And so if you make sure you’re getting 30 to 35,
even up to 40 grams of protein in a meal. It can be more than that. This is just the minimum that you want to stimulate that process. So I really feel like you should focus on that. Again, I’ll see the macros sometimes for women having these meals and they’re like 20, 25 grams of protein and I just think that’s a huge mistake. So I always am at at least 30 in every meal, if not more. I really shoot for more like 35 now that I’m older.
it’s a bigger meal like at dinner sometimes it’s like up to 50, 60 grams of protein. Actually another recent study that’s shown that your body will keep using that protein for muscle protein synthesis. So we used to think that there was an upper level for that, but really it shows that your body can use even more protein. So don’t let that fool you or prevent you from actually doing a little more. It just all depends of course on what macros you’re actually trying to hit for your goals. So since we’re, you know, I mean that lost right.
now I’m keeping the protein level at about 130 to 150 every day. So I don’t have the opportunity to go too much over that threshold in each meal. But like I said, I definitely make sure I hit that minimum of 30. So I know most blogs, or most blogs like a day in life or whatever don’t go into as much educational part, but I really can’t help myself because you know that’s what I do here on this channel. So I try to never
Cheryl McColgan (17:57.107)
is an opportunity to share that information about protein synthesis because I just think it’s something that not everyone knows and you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your muscle building every single day whether you’re in a build mode or fat loss mode. So this meal cooks super quickly. I’m just about having my eggs perfectly done here.
And now we’re going to complete this by weighing out my cottage cheese. So like I said, with the macros trying to get to that protein map, it’s been one egg, 150 grams of egg whites and a hundred grams of cottage cheese. So that gets me to my protein goal for this meal.
And this is the very best cottage cheese ever. Good Culture is so hard to find. It’s sold out all the time. The backup that I found that has just and what I love about this is the ingredients are so clean. Skin milk, whole milk, sea salt, live cultures. That’s it. The one that I occasionally get as a backup that will be on sale at Whole Foods is this Nancy’s brand. And it’s also very clean. It’s actually organic, which I would prefer if Good Culture was as well. But all it’s got is
the organic milk, organic cream, salt and four lactic is actually like promoted as even a more probiotic kind of brand. So those are my favorites. And now we eat and especially since it’s a lower amount of food, I really like to be present with my food and savor it. So try not to eat while scrolling on your phone and all that kind of good stuff. It’s nice to just chill out for a moment.
appreciate your food. So one thing I’ve noticed about being on-prep is finding, you know, still things that you can have like that are little treats. And this is one of my favorite things I have almost every day is kind of my pre-workout. you might have been wondering.
Cheryl McColgan (19:57.873)
hey, where was the carbs in that last meal? That was just my first course of practice. This is the second course and this is where I get the carbs to then go do my workout. So these rice cakes I found are organic. There’s a lot, a surprising amount of garbage in rice cakes. When I looked at these in the grocery store, I couldn’t believe some of the ingredients, but these are super clean. It’s basically just like rice and salt. So I’ve been using those. The brand is, what’s the brand? Lindbergh.
Yeah, Lindbergh Organic. So anyway, those are great. And then I have this organic powdered peanut butter. And so again, for my macros that I’m working right now, works for me is about 10 grams of this. And wow, that turned out right on the button. And so then I just take this, put a little bit of water in here and stir it up. So that’s what that looks like once it’s stirred. And then the last thing is something
Cheryl McColgan (20:56.323)
And the last thing is something that I never had a lot on keto at all, which were bananas. They have a fair amount of carbs in them. So that was something I didn’t use very much for years. But with the peanut butter, it’s really a great flavor. So put the peanut butter on the rice cake and spread that out.
Then what I do is take now, because if you’re in prep, you don’t want to waste like a spot of any of your food that you’re allowed, right? So I take the bowl that the peanut butter was in and I put my banana and I usually, I do like half of a medium banana, which usually turns out to be like 40 to 50 grams of banana. So yeah, that’s right at 51. So that’s fine. And then I just chop up.
The banana and the rest of this little leftover peanut butter, so that I mix that around. I mean, this, when it’s done, this is like, it reminds me of such a little like dessert treat. It’s really nice and it’s just kind of the perfect amount of carbs for a pre-workout. Now that being said, I will say that I don’t notice like a huge amount of increased energy when I have carbs.
before working out because I think it’s just so many years of not having them that I’m pretty used to that but I can’t really tell that much of a difference so to me it wouldn’t matter maybe going back to less carbs but because I can still you know eat these have a few more and still eat toasts in the morning which is not the goal right now the goal right now is like fueling my body for training so I’m not too worried about it but in any case it is still interesting so now I put a little
drizzle of honey, usually just ends up being about four to five grams of honey. Because obviously you’re tracking all of this. And then here’s the best part, you gotta have salt on the top of it. So that is my little second course of breakfast and then we’re gonna go get the workout.
Cheryl McColgan (24:18.641)
So this is yet another biohacking thing that I do, the sunlight and sauna, which is amazing. Had it for over a year now and really good for heart health, great for recovery. So doing that here after the workout. Just completed another check mark, gotten the sauna for about 35 minutes and then going to give shower and then eat again.
So one of the things I’ve been enjoying for my midday meal is some Greek yogurt with berries. And because Greek yogurt has so much protein in it, I kind of cut back my protein serving of meat that goes with it. So right now I’ve got some chicken left that I already…
prepped the other day. So I’ll weigh that out and then the remainder of my protein for this midday meal will be the Greek yogurt and then some berries to go with it. All right, so you can see this is a good amount of yogurt and strawberries, very filling, very much of a treat. I put just like a little few drops of Stevia on there and then I’ll put about five grams or so of honey just to give this a little
sweetness and that will be the second part of my midday meal. Okay so right now it’s 12 40 just getting ready to eat the second part of my midday meal. The first part like I said was just a little bit of chicken breast that I had left and so I measured out the Greek yogurt to make sure that I got to the 30 grams of protein like I was describing to you before.
I’m at 700 calories for the day right now and still have two meals left. Usually I will go ahead and have like my snack in the afternoon, a low calorie thing, and then save the rest of the calories for dinner. But yeah, this is the point in the day. Like I’ve done my cardio, weightlifting’s already done, sauna, showered, and now get to do a big chunk of work this afternoon.
Training Program for NPC Fit ModelCheryl McColgan (26:25.905)
But what I started to say about this is this is the part of the day where I really am starting to drag. So even after I eat this, I’ll probably pretty low energy. And that’s why I like to do all of this in the morning for me. It works for my schedule, where it allows me to work a big chunk of the day later in the afternoon. But getting out of way in the morning when I actually have some energy after sleeping is really useful. know not every
the ability to do that. If you’re working in an office or something you’ve kind of got to go into the office early but just due to my schedule I’m able to do that and so that is one thing that has really made this whole training program and being in this much of a deficit doable for me. So yeah, so we’ll see how the rest of the day goes but there’s a few things left that I’ll share and then that’ll be the end of this day in the life.
So this literally might be the best part of my day during prep. I resisted this for such a long, long time, but…
got the Ninja creamy and it lives in this other. I make a low-fat version of ice cream that has protein powder and skim milk and it just makes me really really happy and it’s a way to get in 30 more grams of protein during the day so getting ready to make that now.
If you don’t have one of these, I do have a code for it. But anyway, super. So put it on there. Just turn it up, press that, put it on light ice cream, because that’s for ones that are ice here. And then when you hear this noise, you’ll see why it’s in the other room.
Cheryl McColgan (28:11.204)
So here’s the creamy in all its glory, this whole thing, 30 grams of protein and about 160 calories.
Okay, so time to make dinner and it’s Friday and my husband’s out of town and I decided that I wanted to have something that’s kind of a little treat for dinner since I’ve been doing nothing but eating chicken for the most part a lot. So I got a filet mignon, small four ounce filet that’s got about 230 calories. I think at this point I have something like 300 left I need to check.
So I need to figure out a little side to go with that that’s around 100 calories. So we’ll figure out what that is. And I think I have a few carbs left to play with as well. So I’m gonna get the steak started and figure out what I’m gonna have to go with it. So I had some tomatoes left over from the other day that I didn’t use. And of course that’s a great low calorie option.
that is healthy and delicious.
So just going to use those and I had a cucumber in the refrigerator as well. So that should get me pretty close to meeting my rest of my macros for the day. And you also got a little taste today of kind of if you’re doing macros rather than a meal plan, how you can use real foods that you actually like to meet your calorie and macronutrient goals, switch things
Cheryl McColgan (29:48.736)
out. So you don’t always have to do a meal plan. If you get good at this and I’ve been doing macros and tracking for years, this is pretty easy for me at this point. But if it’s something that you haven’t learned yet, it’s really useful if you’re doing something like this where you’re trying to meet certain calorie and nutrient goals for the day. So this, I had already weighed the tomatoes out.
was about 200 grams of tomatoes.
and I’ll weigh the cucumbers here.
So about 130 grams of cucumber. And then we’ll see if we’ve got room for anything else. So normally I would not do this, but I have just a little bit of calories and fat left. So I’m just gonna put this nice, high quality, extra virgin olive oil on there.
and that’s just two grams so not a lot that will add a little extra flavor. All right so that is Friday night dinner such that it is of course more salt.
Cheryl McColgan (31:01.85)
and going to eat this, enjoy it, and then I usually, and it’s six o’clock right now, so I’ve usually been just quitting eating by 5.30 or six. I do that for a few reasons. It’s really important for your brain health to digest your food before you go to bed and have a couple hours to do that. One of my doctors that I worked with at Wild Health was talking about that.
to Alzheimer’s and dementia. You don’t want to have food so close to when you sleep. I can’t remember the study or if I looked that up after we talked about it, but also just for me, my digestion is a little slow and so it really helps me sleep better if I quit eating early in the night. So this will be the final food of the day and then we’ll just do some wind down activities and it’ll be time for bed. So a couple other bio hacks I usually do before bed and I will…
share those with you so that you have a full picture of the day.
Okay, last thing before starting to relax for sleep is I have on my Pulsetto device, is something that is a Vegas nerve stimulator and it’s supposed to help with sleep, recovery, a whole bunch of things. I actually interviewed the founder of the device a while back. He’s a big biohacker himself and he discovered this technology, started using it and found that it
helped him so much. anyway, I’ve been using that just about every night for a little while. And of course I got my blue blockers on. So when I’m looking at the screen, it’s all red and it’s just telling my brain that it is time for sleep. So if you are going to be on devices in the evening, this is a good idea. It’s not perfect, but you know, if you’re going to do it, you might as well make it as least detrimental as possible. So anyway, that was my day in the life.
Cheryl McColgan (32:57.378)
of training for this crazy fit model thing. I don’t know if I said this before, but really the only reason I decided to seriously consider this was because they brought in the fit model category, which is not nearly as much muscle and theoretically you don’t have to be as conditioned, so not quite as low body fat. I mean, it’s still gonna be very low body fat, especially based on the winners that I’ve seen thus far, but it’s not the total extreme of bikini, which again,
my age and having just trained for a couple of years in this section of strength training, think that getting the muscle for bikini would be nearly impossible if I was actually going to do well. I mean it’s another thing if you just want to compete and be on stage and if that was the only category that there was, I probably wouldn’t be doing this at all. I don’t know maybe I still would have thought about it, but the fact that there’s this new fit model category that is much more appropriate for where I am both
in age, health, muscle mass, all that good stuff. That’s really the whole reason I decided to do this. anyway, I will keep you updated and this will be continuing for the near future. It’s pretty much a day by day thing. I mean, I think I mentioned in the caption in one of them, like the first several weeks of doing this process and really starting my fat loss.
was not that taxing on me. mean, was definitely, it’s all work and things that I do on a daily basis anyway, but doing it with a lot less food is definitely more challenging. But it really wasn’t until the last week or two where I started to have some days where I’m just.
seriously low energy and that’s because now my body fat is getting much lower. I started at a body fat that was already in the healthy range right at about 26 % higher than I really like to be. But because like again, I was doing this building phase, I just decided to go with that for a little while, but that’s not really where I’ve stayed for most of my life in the past. And then now as of my most recent Daxa, I’m down to around 15 or 16%. So that’s definitely a significant decrease.
Cheryl McColgan (35:09.92)
and it’s a level where your body is going to start, you know, finding you a little bit because for women, we have a critical need for body fat and because we’re, you know, designed to build little people in our bodies basically and so our bodies don’t like it when we start getting too low in body fat. So that’s definitely part of it but it’s not so low yet that it’s
dangerous or should be a significant impact to health or anything like that. anyway, for now, we’ll stay the course again. It’ll be, you know, like day by day decision making on how I’m doing and how I’m feeling about this whole thing. But for today, got through another day and actually felt pretty good today. Definitely tired, but did not have the crushing kind of day that I had a couple of days ago. I think part of it was I did a little refeed in between and I think that really helped a lot. So anyway, I hope you have a great night and I
see you next time!
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan shares her personal journey in health and wellness, focusing on the importance of muscle mass, protein intake, and the development of consistent habits. She discusses her experience with weightlifting, the potential of competitive bodybuilding, and the role of coaching in achieving fitness goals. Cheryl also addresses the challenges of fat loss and the daily commitment required to maintain a healthy lifestyle, emphasizing that it’s never too late to start lifting and pursue personal goals.
Episode mentioned: Motivation is Overrated: How to Crush Your Goals Without It
Takeaways* Every meal is an opportunity to stimulate muscle growth. * Optimal protein intake is crucial for muscle maintenance. * Building habits is more important than motivation. * It’s never too late to start lifting weights. * Diet fatigue can impact your commitment to goals. * Having a coach can provide accountability and guidance. * Setting specific goals helps maintain focus in fitness. * Muscle mass is vital for longevity and quality of life. * Transitioning to a new gym can reinvigorate your fitness journey. * Daily commitment is key to achieving health and wellness goals.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.806)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Row podcast. I am Cheryl McColgan, your host and founder of Heal Nourish Row. And my apologies for showing up on here looking a bit disheveled, but I just finished my basement workout. And so while this is on my mind, I thought I would get this recorded for you. So it’s something I’ve been wanting to share for a little while. And I actually started to record it yesterday, but it was such a weird day. I had gotten some crazy news and
It was just, I was not in good head space. So thought I’d revisit it today and try to put together my thoughts for you a little bit more coherently. But anyway, just in case you haven’t listened to previous episodes, I will give you some background here. So, you know, the whole channel and the whole podcast is focused on health and wellness, and that’s probably how you found it if you’re listening to this. But pretty much my whole life I’ve been involved in health and wellness in some way.
And over the years I have dabbled in lifting kind of on and off, but I’ve never gotten to stick until the last couple years here. I finally I’m over 50 now and I’m like, well, this whole push in social media and in education for older people about maintaining their muscle mass and how it really relates to longevity and just overall.
you know, however long you are going to live, living your life well, because you can function on your own when you have muscle. And it’s really an epidemic right now of sarcopenia, which is the lack of muscle mass as you get older, as well as obesity and many other things, but a lot of things that are just really preventing people from living well into their older years. And so having seen, you know,
various people over my life and having been blessed with still being healthy at this point after watching my dad battle cancer and things like that. I’m like, owe it to myself to really take this on and finally commit to maintaining my muscle. So that is what I’ve been working on the last several years. And it started with really just
Cheryl McColgan (02:10.913)
getting optimal protein and making that a big focus. And so if you’ve followed my content for a while, I’ve been talking about that just in case you have not heard this before. I want to make sure I put this out there. Every meal that you eat is an opportunity to stimulate muscle protein synthesis, which is the process by which your body maintains and builds muscle mass. And in order to stimulate that, you need about 30 grams at least of protein at each meal.
is that will include about three grams of leucine, which is thought to be the amino acid that really stimulates muscle building. And then as you get older, your body does not process protein as well. So you actually need a little bit more protein to stimulate that process. really as anyone over 35 to 40 years old, you should really be shooting for 35 to 40 grams of protein.
in each and every meal. Each time you eat protein, it’s really an opportunity to stimulate that, so don’t miss out. So that being said about protein, I really started getting onto that for myself about five years ago and really worked to get the optimal protein because I had been following some people and listening to people that even if you’re not lifting weights, that getting optimal protein really can help this process of maintaining your muscle and possibly even building some, depending on how long.
your body has maybe been without protein. So for example, I had a period in my life of about eight years where I was a vegetarian, which was probably a huge mistake. But during that time, I’m sure I was not getting enough protein. And so if you’ve had a period of your life where you haven’t been getting enough, then you might take some more time in building up this process of finally getting more optimal protein.
and your body will be like, I finally have the building blocks and maybe replace some of that muscle. So there’s a thought there, but really the best way to stimulate muscle is to lift heavy things. And like I said, it’s something I have dabbled with over the years on and off. I actually, when I was playing eighth grade basketball, we had a weight stack thing in my garage at home that my dad had always used. And when I was doing basketball, I lifted. And then when I played college golf, I was lifting and…
Cheryl McColgan (04:24.535)
at various points over the years. I remember even the pandemic, was still when the gyms were open, I was going to Planet Fitness then. And what happened, like always happened, was at some point I’d get injured. And then instead of keep on lifting and doing what I could do, I would just quit it. And I’ve always been, you know, hiking, walking, running. I was a runner for 17 years. So I’ve always been very active, but I’ve just never enjoyed being at the gym. I always would rather be outside or hiking or doing something like that or playing golf.
And so that’s kind of what I always relied on. But now that I, again, like I said, it’s such a priority now and it’s something that you have to be focused on if you don’t want to lose your muscle. And so about, it’s been about a year and nine months ago now that this is April of 2025, that I started going to the gym and really committed and I really have not missed anything since then. I’ve been very consistent. That is one of my…
gifts and as you know if you’ve listened to my previous content one of the things that I really focus on is creating new habits and once I personally get a habit kind of ingrained in me it’s it’s really then very easy for me to maintain it and that is one reason I always put out all these tips and information about creating habits because really you will and there’s a whole another podcast episode I’ll link it in the comments if I can remember that but
about discipline over motivation or just habits over motivation. You won’t always be motivated to work out or to do these things. So it’s really a matter of just making it become something that you do that’s integrated into your life. That’s a habit that you just do like brushing your teeth. You don’t skip it. So it’s not that I’m always motivated. And that’s actually why today was a great day to get on here and talk about this, because I am so
tired friends. I really just, I did not sleep well last night. I had so many wake ups. Like if I look at my aura thing, it’s like so many white spots where I was awake throughout the night. And I really just did not have the energy to do my workout today, but I did it anyway. So, so that’s the thing about being a habit is it just becomes something that you do. And so it was a struggle to get through it. It’s, not as fun when you have days like that and you go to do your workout.
Cheryl McColgan (06:46.607)
But it’s done, now it’s finished. And then I hopped right on here. So that’s why I’m looking a little disheveled, as I mentioned. But the thing I wanted to talk about is I’ve been kind of keeping this from, I haven’t been talking about it anywhere outside of my own house. And it’s something that has to do with being a competitive person. So I mentioned that I played college golf and I played sports in high school and I was a runner for 17 years.
So the point to all of that is to say that I’ve always had something that I was very competitive in and that I did as kind of a thing that kept me accountable. You even when I was a runner, I was never very fast or anything like that, but I would register for races and I would train for them and it would give me something to focus on. So sometimes if it was a 5K, maybe I’d be working on getting faster, doing some interval training, that sort of thing. Or if I was running a half marathon or a marathon, would…
be training to work on building up my distance and increasing my mileage over the week. So there was always something to focus on. Same, you know, with golf, always trying to get better, practicing, preparing for a tournament, that sort of thing. And since I had to quit running because of my knees, I haven’t had that now for many, many years. And since I got back into this, into weightlifting, it started making me think about
you know, having something like that with lifting. And the thing that is the only thing, there’s two things actually with lifting. You can do power lifting, which I don’t think I would be very good at that, number one, just because with my previous shoulder surgeries, you know, one of the power lifting exercises is the bench press, and that would be very stressful on my shoulders. So I don’t think that’s the best idea. And then it’s bench press, deadlift, and…
my goodness, squat, yes. So, and then you go to these tournaments and they add up your score and you weigh in for your class. And then that’s, so that’s a competitive thing. Or the second thing in bodybuilding is actually getting onto a stage, which is absolutely terrifying to think about, especially possibly doing it for the first time at the age of 52 years old. But that’s the other competitive thing that you can do with weightlifting.
Cheryl McColgan (09:05.879)
And so it’s kind of been in the back of my mind for a little while. It started, I started thinking about it. So I’ve been going through this process. I was injured a couple of years ago and had to wait until my body recovered from that before I could start lifting. you even though I said doing what I could do, I just waited until I could do lower body cause it was my knee. And so it was something where I could have only done upper body and I just couldn’t make myself go to the gym just for that, at that point, since I hadn’t been into it now since then I’ve, I’ve,
actually been injured since I started again and I’ve been able to maintain going to the gym just working around the injuries and but so what had happened with that is I did a DEXA scan at the beginning of that because I really wanted to see where I was as far as muscle mass and what I could build once I did start lifting and then quickly after getting that scan is when I got injured so I had to wait again to start and about six months later I got a second scan and I learned that I had lost like two
pounds of muscle mass and one of the interesting things about the dex is that actually shows you in what parts of your body you’d lost mass and because I had injured my knee, it was my lower body though had lost some muscle mass. So of course that was quite disheartening at the time but also the good news was I was going to get back into the gym and I was going to gain that back and so I started from that new point where I had lost that muscle mass.
And then about eight, nine months later, a year later, I got another one and I had been able to put on about seven pounds of lean mass during that time. So that was really exciting, especially at this age to know that it’s still possible. And if you focus on proper nutrition and lifting heavy, that you can still build. And especially that first year, there’s such a thing as newbie gains. I’ve talked about that on the podcast before. I wish I had really known that and been much more intentional during that timeframe, because then the longer you lift the less.
able that you are to put on more mass. So that first year that you start lifting is a really crucial time to sort of have a plan, take it seriously, optimize the amount of muscle that you can build during that time. So it’s really kind of a cool thing. But so I still did pretty well, I would say, even though it wasn’t as totally intentional. But then, you know, during that time, I was really just focused on healing, on eating really well, letting myself
Cheryl McColgan (11:25.266)
you know, since I knew I was building muscle and focused on that, I knew I was going to gain weight, which I did. And I just allowed myself to not think about that for once, just really focus on building and lifting and getting in that routine. And I knew at some point I would want to get back to more of a body fat level that I feel comfortable with and that made me feel good in my body. And in the fall, I kind of decided I was at that point. So I had been building, building, building for a while and I was ready to kind of loosen fat. And so…
Then I started to decide that I wanted to go to a new gym. I wanted to go to a gym that was like more of a small community, that was more focused on bodybuilding, that kind of thing, and just had some different equipment that wasn’t in your traditional commercial gym. Cause I think I mentioned like I went to Planet Fitness and they have the basics, but they don’t have some of the more interesting machines that you can get into like with squats and different kinds of leg presses and things like that. So I found a gym locally, that was a small gym.
that looked like it would have a great community, really cool owner, and started going in there in September. And the point of that is to tell you that this has been in my mind since September because I actually mentioned it to him because he asked me why I was switching gyms, what were my goals, and things like that. And I said that I had it in the back of my mind that maybe I might compete at some point, but I wasn’t sure. But that had been something that had crossed my mind for these reasons I said.
having something to work towards and having new goals in a thing that I’ve started to get involved in. And so that was September. And just around then I decided, you know, started to, we got back from vacation. I started to think about, you know, once you’re ready to lose that, obviously you have to be in a deficit. And while I wasn’t quite ready to make that full mental switch, I did just start kind of evaluating some of my choices.
and I’ve always eaten really healthy, but I was, you know, obviously eating an amount that allowed me to train a lot in that I had been slowly putting on weight to build the muscle. And so you have to cut back at that point. And that is a topic that I want to go into a little more deep dive on a different day, because it’s been several years now since I’ve been in a big fat loss phase. Actually, back when I wrote my book was probably the last time I did that, which was back. You know, I think it’s been twenty twenty now. This is it. If you’re
Cheryl McColgan (13:49.838)
not aware that this exists, the 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart. But so it had been quite a while since I’d done that. And it just being in this process has reminded me of a lot of things about fat loss and about weight loss that I want to share with you at some point. But I want to kind of save that for a separate episode and get through this thought process. So because I’ve always been so involved in nutrition myself and been a coach, I’ve never coached people with any kind of
training or anything like that, you know, wellness, health and wellness and weight loss certainly have done a lot of coaching in the past with that. And so I never had to coach myself. Didn’t feel like I needed it. Certainly for the nutrition and fat loss phase, I have a good handle on that, but where I could really use help is like training for specific things, you know.
if you are stepping on stage, depending on what division you’re in, there’s certain body parts that need more focus and stuff. So I knew that I probably needed some help with that. And then in addition, the great thing about having a coach is it gives you somebody to be accountable to. And it helps you set your goals and have a date in mind, a goal in mind, a show if that’s what you’re doing, something like that, or like I said, a running event. You have a date so you know what you’re working towards.
So I decided to get a coach and when I did that I did that in February and since then I’ve been in this serious fat loss mode and actually Did two more decks as we were back in Utah so I could use the same machine That I had been on since I started and I was really interested in doing that just to kind of see Where I was because I the last time I was there was when we sold the house Last summer and so it had been about eight months since then so I kind of just wanted to check in and see how I had done since then and then in addition
have a beginning point to this fat loss phase. And so while I was in Utah, I did that. And then at the end when we were leaving eight weeks later, I got another one. And so the fat loss and again, I’ll do this more in a separate episode. But basically what I was able to learn from the Dexa is that I had lost 10 pounds of fat and not lost any muscle. And if you go back to my other previous episode about the Dexa, there is a margin of error.
Cheryl McColgan (16:00.334)
in the DEXA measurements, but I try to be as consistent as possible when I do it same time in the morning, same level of hydration, all that kind of stuff. So I feel pretty confident that that’s fairly accurate. Usually, if you’re losing a lot of fat, you’re going to lose some muscle just by the way that the DEXA or any kind of machine like my fat loss scale that I love, the Hume that I talked about before, heelnourishro.com slash Hume.
you get a discount on top of the sale using my code and that has tracked really well using that scale with what I learned from the Dexa and that continues to be the case since I’ve been in this fat loss mode. Obviously scale weight is going down but in addition the fat loss and stuff is going down on the scale as well. So that’s a great tool and I’ve loved having that because again like I do these Dexes but having something
that really shows you on a day-to-day basis, a week-to-week basis, a trend of what you’re really working on. And again, the Hume Scale has also showed that while I’ve been losing weight, I’ve been maintaining muscle mass, and that is exactly what the DEXA said. So I feel really confident in that tool, that it’s fairly accurate when you use it the same way, like again, first thing in the morning after you go to the bathroom, same level of hydration before you drink of anything and do that every day. And you’re gonna get a trend that is accurate over time.
You know, day to day, there’s some little fluctuations. I’ve talked about that before, but overall it’s been a really great tool. But anyway, where was I with all this? So all that is to say, got a coach. It’s helped keep me accountable. I have been training and working on fat loss as if I’m going to do a competition. I still have not a hundred percent decided though. Again, it’s terrifying the thought of being on a stage in a bikini at this age.
But it has helped me having that in my mind, focus on this goal. Again, like train, eat, fat loss, as if I’m going to do it. And so I still haven’t decided. I finally just thought I would share this because I think no matter if I do it or not, it doesn’t matter. And no matter what other people think about it, I really don’t care because everybody’s gonna have an opinion. Everybody’s gonna have an opinion about a 50 year old woman doing something like this, right?
Cheryl McColgan (18:22.126)
And whether you think it’s a positive or whether you think it’s a negative, it doesn’t matter to me because in my head I’m going to do whatever it is I think is going to help me work towards my goals and share information that’s helpful for others and inspire people in some way. It’s never too late to get started with lifting. It’s never too late to possibly do something crazy like a bodybuilding competition. So we’ll see. I haven’t decided, but it’s in the back of my mind to…
targeting end of May, mid-June kind of timeframe. There’s a couple of competitions that are close enough that I don’t have to travel a long way to do it. But there’s definitely a lot involved with it that haven’t decided if I’m up for it, I guess, or if I want to keep pushing through this. Because the one thing I will say, and the one thing that I do want to address, like I said, in a further episode about fat loss is, regardless of how quickly
you move forward with the fat loss days, there’s diet fatigue and it’s is kicking in real hard right now. And without a goal in mind, it would be real easy to take a break and I can definitely do that because I started out at a healthy body weight to start with and you know the lower your body gets in body weight the less energy you have, you’re eating less of course so that gives you less energy.
So it’s definitely affecting me on a day-to-day basis more now than it did in the beginning. And so that’s definitely another consideration as well, because it’s not something I have to do. This is a choice. And this is all in the name of experimentation and a new experience and all that kind of good stuff. So I don’t want to make it a crazy thing if I decide at some point that I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to feel guilty about it. But by the same token, I also feel like I kind of want to.
push through because I want to, you know, I had this goal, I’m all about goals, I’m all about doing these crazy challenges over the years and stuff and so to me this is just another challenge that I’m doing and regardless, I have learned a lot in the process, I’ve learned a lot about myself, it’s reminded me of a lot of things about dieting and about weight loss that people really struggle with and some things and some…
Cheryl McColgan (20:41.834)
lessons and things that I’ve learned that I can share that I hopefully will help you if that’s something that you want to work on in the future. But yeah, I think that’s my update. I think that’s all I wanted to say about it for now. So I’m just over here. Really, at this point, it is a day by day process and a day by day decision. Yesterday and today have been very challenging.
you know, every day it’s just still like stick with the diet, stick with the plan, stick with the workouts and make it to bedtime, go to bed and wake up in the morning and then see if I can do it again. So that’s where I am at the moment. Definitely some days have been way easier than others. But yeah, I think sharing that is important to know because if you are on a weight loss journey or a fat loss journey or you would like to get healthier, just know that it’s definitely not easy. It takes time. It takes commitment.
It takes day-to-day decision-making that just keep you in line with your goals because you could really decide at any point, like I’m starving, I’m just gonna get something or eat more or whatever it is, but you just have to keep reminding yourself of why you’re doing it, your goals, your reasons, getting healthier, avoiding the things that have affected people in your family or your friends, and just take it one day at a time.
So that is the main lesson here today. And the title of the episode, I kind of already decided it’s going to be to compete or not to compete. I don’t know if I, you know, want opinions or need opinions. I don’t know if it’ll really affect my final decision in the end, but definitely if you have any commentary or advice or thoughts on this, feel free to drop in the comments below or shoot me an email and yeah.
I’m open to hearing it. I’m not saying I’ll necessarily follow your advice, whatever that might be. But yeah, it’s been an interesting process and it’s something that I’m glad that I took on mentally, even if I don’t follow it through the end. And if I do follow it through to the end, obviously I will bring you along for that journey and share kind of the final results and whatever comes out of all of that. So anyway, wherever you’re listening to this, whatever time of day is, hope you have a great rest of your day and
Cheryl McColgan (23:03.331)
I will see you again next time.
In this episode, host Cheryl McColgan interviews mental health professional Celeste Rains-Turk. She specializes in helping individuals improve their relationship with food and body image. Celeste shares her personal journey of overcoming disordered eating and how it inspired her to help others.
The conversation delves into the complexities of disordered eating, the impact of body positivity movements, and the importance of mindfulness in achieving a healthy relationship with food. Celeste emphasizes the need for a balanced approach to health and fitness, advocating for self-love while also recognizing the importance of caring for one’s body.
The episode concludes with practical strategies for changing food associations and fostering a healthier mindset around eating. Celeste shares insights on diet breaks, the impact of choices on long-term health, and offers resources for improving food relationships, including coaching programs and an upcoming wellness retreat.
Connect with Celeste and learn more about the upcoming retreat at celestial.fit and follow her on Instagram.
Takeaways* Many individuals struggle with their relationship with food and body image. * Disordered eating can often go undiagnosed due to its complex nature. * Mindfulness can significantly improve self-esteem and body image. * The body positivity movement has both positive and negative implications. * It’s essential to focus on health and longevity rather than just aesthetics. * Self-love should not lead to self-destructive behaviors. * A balanced approach to nutrition is key for long-term health. Understanding food relationships is crucial for emotional well-being. * The cycle of restriction and bingeing can be interrupted by trust in oneself. * The power of choice allows for healthier eating habits without guilt. * Diet breaks can provide mental relief and improve long-term results.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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https://youtu.be/vcAQRWNmSbsEpisode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.494)
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by the lovely and very smiley Celeste Rains-Turk and I am really excited to chat with her today because she is a mental health professional. She specifically deals a lot with helping people with their relationship with food, has so many free resources for that and so many programs. And in addition to that, she is a prolific podcaster and I’ve basically been pod-stalking her for the last two or three months.
Celeste Rains-Turk (00:07.45)
You
Cheryl McColgan (00:30.294)
I know a lot about Celeste, but now I’m going to share that with you guys, because I just think she is a really amazing source of information and really a light in the world of health and fitness. So Celeste, all that being said, welcome to the show. And could you just share with people a little bit about yourself? How did you become attracted to this mental health work and what lights you up about doing this kind of work?
Celeste Rains-Turk (00:53.403)
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I like your vocabulary usage. It’s great. So what I’ll start with what lights me up about this work because I think that lends insight into what got me into it. So what lights me up most about the work that I do is seeing people achieve something they didn’t think was possible. So a lot of the people that I work with, they come to me almost on a last hope, a last resort.
thinking is there any way I can actually heal my relationship with food and my body without sacrificing my fitness and physique goals? Because so many of them have been told by fitness professionals or mental health professionals that they cannot do both and I want them to know that they can. So it is incredibly rewarding for me to see them actually achieve that goal. That is amazing because they don’t expect to do that. Now, as far as what got me into it was I personally
Cheryl McColgan (01:32.974)
been pulled by.
Cheryl McColgan (01:37.998)
you
Cheryl McColgan (01:43.982)
That is amazing because they don’t expect to do that.
get to it was my first day of school in 2015 and prior to that I struggled with my relationship with food.
Celeste Rains-Turk (01:52.923)
started competing in 2015. And prior to that, I had struggled with my relationship with food and my body image. A lot of disordered eating pathways for me where I would force myself to work out after anything that I ate. I would restrict heavily if I ate off off plan. I would have like a free meal or cheat meal, but that was really more like a cheat day. And I would literally wake up from
Cheryl McColgan (02:02.426)
or needing pathways for me where I would force myself to work out after anything that I hate. I would restrict heavily if I hate office.
of free meal or cheap meal, but that was really more like a cheap day and I went to the grocery store.
Celeste Rains-Turk (02:22.647)
I would wake up at midnight just to eat until the midnight the next day. Like it was my all out binge fast. And I feel awful the next day to the point where I’d be doing things like drainage massages and then restricting food and trying to drink as much water as I couldn’t. My skin would feel like it was bruised. So I had seriously struggled with binge eating and
Cheryl McColgan (02:24.686)
just to eat until the midnight the next day like it was an all out binge fast. And I feel like on a diet where I’d be doing things like a drainage massage with my hands and then just drinking food and trying to drink as much water as I could and my skin would feel like it was bruised. So I had so much period from binge eating and arguing with pulling the other roast up because I engaged in compensatory behaviors.
Celeste Rains-Turk (02:48.121)
You could argue, believe me, a nervosa because I engaged in compensatory behaviors. And when I started the podcast in 2018, Confessions of a Bikini Pro, and I started talking to bikini competitors, I realized, my gosh, my message of build more than just a body is for bodybuilders. Why am I not serving this niche? And I launched my first program, which was a post-show blues program. I still have it. And I remember I got two people signed up and I was like, that’s it.
Cheryl McColgan (03:08.8)
And I.
Cheryl McColgan (03:13.806)
that we’re out to people’s like, that’s it.
Celeste Rains-Turk (03:16.091)
I’m gonna do it, it’s gonna be successful. Now granted, I had been running a business at that point three years as an online fitness coach, but I was so fascinated by the mindset behind things that I changed my degree from dietetics to psychology. And then in working on building my own psychology up and then having the podcast, I’m like, there’s so much more here that I can do that I’m not doing. And in 2018, I graduated with my bachelor’s in psychology.
Cheryl McColgan (03:21.422)
I’ve graduate three years as an online fitness coach, but I’m so excited to try the mindset behind things that I changed my degree from dietetics to psychology and then working on building my own psychology after this. There’s so much more here that I do that I’m not doing and it’s disgusting that I graduated from a bachelor’s in psychology. So I decided let’s apply this.
Celeste Rains-Turk (03:45.371)
So I decided let’s apply this because I put so much of my research efforts and so much of the work that I did in school to these concepts. And I started serving people in this niche and it really just took off. And I’m really glad that it did because now I’ve helped competitors globally to achieve a relationship with food that they’re happy with without actually giving up their competition goals. Or for those of them who did give up competing,
Cheryl McColgan (03:50.23)
I did.
And I started serving people at this stage and it really just took off and I’m really glad that it did because now I’ve helped competitors locally to achieve the relationships that they’re happy with without actually giving up their competition goals. most important thing about competing is that it was huge real change because they were forced to or felt that they had to because they were fighting at least with letting that go. So, that’s it.
Celeste Rains-Turk (04:11.707)
It was because they chose to not because they were forced to or felt that they had to it was because they were finally at peace with letting that go. So that’s the that’s the kind of stuff that lights me up and that’s what got me there really.
Cheryl McColgan (04:24.174)
Yeah, thank you so much for sharing your personal background, number one, because I think I quite often when I talk to people on here, I find most of the people that got into a certain kind of work has to do with some personal either struggle or passion that they had. And so that matches really well with what everything that you just said. And then the second thing that people might be thinking about listening to this interview, they’re maybe like, well, why are you talking to somebody that just works with competitors, you know, or bikini pros?
And it’s because I think the information that you have, like you mentioned your struggle when you were a young woman in high school and going into college, and that is not uncommon. I experienced it. I know others that have experienced it. To whatever degree it is, whether it’s a full-blown eating disorder or just body dysmorphia, and I say quote unquote, just body dysmorphia, but that is a very serious struggle as well for a lot of people.
I think the fact that you’ve primarily worked with competing bikini competitors isn’t your scope of knowledge because obviously this really applies to everyone. So I was so happy when you agreed to come on the show because I know it’s not exactly specifically competitor related. But I also have a little bit of a personal interest in that. anyway, all that being said, let’s just chat about a little bit just so people understand where you’re coming from.
Celeste Rains-Turk (05:34.84)
yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (05:52.256)
that I think your personal interest in how you kind of moved through that, is that what really allowed you to think that, these professionals that are in the tradition that think if you have any kind of disordered eating that you shouldn’t put, you know, obviously what you’re doing for competition, you’re doing some restriction, you’re doing a lot of exercising, you’re doing you’re changing your body composition in not just a, I need to lose 10 pounds kind of way, but in a very significant
structured way. And so somebody might say on the surface, I can see why they don’t think that’s a good idea. But what was it that clicked for you when you move through these things that you thought, wait, I don’t think they’re quite right. And I know I can help people do the same thing that I did.
Celeste Rains-Turk (06:35.611)
That’s a really great question. And I’ll even go back to your previous point. I have been honored to actually work with a lot of different types of teams, like even rock climbing teams, weight loss teams. So I serve a lot of people. The language your listeners might see on my website and stuff will be competitor geared, but I work with all sorts of people. So if someone’s listening to this and they end up going, wait, I could use that help. Feel free to reach out to me. Just know.
Cheryl McColgan (07:05.422)
know.
Celeste Rains-Turk (07:05.467)
Um, even if it’s, it looks like competitor language, I do help others as well. Um, and as far as how I came to that realization, well, when we look at a lot of mental conditions or disorders, we have to consider that it’s a disorder because it’s having a very negative impact on their daily life. And in considering
Cheryl McColgan (07:08.12)
Yeah.
Celeste Rains-Turk (07:32.665)
food relationship and body image, I got to thinking, well, a lot of people who compete in sports or who pursue a fitness goal, it’s actually having a very positive impact on their life. Interestingly, this is why a lot of times eating disorders go undiagnosed unless a family member brings somebody in for it or tells them, hey, you’ve got a problem or points it out because disordered eating is one of those things that can…
Cheryl McColgan (07:34.382)
Thank
Cheryl McColgan (07:40.088)
This poll is actually something very positive.
Cheryl McColgan (07:45.358)
A of times eating disorders to go undiagnosed unless a family member brings somebody in for it or tells them things about a problem points out because there’s a lot of that can impact on someone’s life but actually very negative. So goes, well, this is fine. It’s helping me eat, but no, it’s really not.
Celeste Rains-Turk (07:57.783)
appear to be creating a positive impact on someone’s life, but actually be very negative. So it’s interesting because the psyche goes, well, this is fine. It’s healthy for me, even though it’s really not. But what I realized was food is not really to blame for this, nor is the goal of the physique you’re going for. If we put all the blame on that, then that would mean there’s no other reason that these behaviors are happening.
Cheryl McColgan (08:27.662)
We have to take it a step further and go, is there a way to work through those goals?
Celeste Rains-Turk (08:27.929)
And that’s oftentimes not the case. We have to take it a step further and go, well, is there a way to pursue those goals and do so that it doesn’t trigger some sort of disordered eating or it doesn’t trigger you to feel a certain way about your body? And I think that people were implementing this all in approach, right? You’ve got to completely give up competing or you’ve got to completely immerse yourself into having any and all foods that you want. But when you do that,
Cheryl McColgan (08:40.206)
disorder eating or it doesn’t trigger you to feel hurt by your body. But take this all in approach, right? got to completely give up. You’ve got to completely immerse yourself in having any and all food that you want. You don’t actually get things like that to eat until what’s guiding your decisions.
Celeste Rains-Turk (08:57.731)
You don’t actually get the insight that you need into what’s guiding your decisions. You remove the possibility for learning and for mindfulness. If we can implement mindfulness, we’re also more likely to create a higher self-esteem. So when I was really stepping back and looking at this, I’m like, if someone says that you can’t do both, what they’re saying is this is all to blame for this.
It’s usually the intention behind what we’re doing. That’s to blame. I can tell you there are competitors who I’ve worked with and I mean, even other sports, but let’s, let’s say competitors. They have a very similar approach. Let’s say both of them are following macros. One of them’s feeling they’ve got a lot of flexibility. It’s been really helpful for them. It’s great. One of them feels it’s very restrictive. They’re still fixated on how much they can fit in their plan or not fit in their plan. Same plan.
Cheryl McColgan (09:38.636)
be able to that.
feeling like, wow, flexibility is really helpful, but it’s great. It feels very destructive. There’s still people who that they don’t know how much they can fit in the plant, they have not been in their plant. Same plant, different life then. So I put into charge the fact that the problem is not fixable with field plants, it’s not fixable with macro plants. It’s not fixable with an all-in approach.
Celeste Rains-Turk (09:54.501)
Different mindset. So that’s when I’m kind of coming to terms with the fact that the problem is not fixable with meal plans. It’s not fixable with macro plans. It’s not fixable with an all in approach. So what is the thing to be fixed or worked on? It’s going to be the mindset, the intention. And that’s what I really aim to help people with is create more mindfulness around how they view their body, how they view food.
Cheryl McColgan (10:10.958)
fixed or worked on, going to be the mindset, the intention. And that’s what really need to help with is create more mindfulness around how they view their body, how they view good, and make each other more reinforcing versus the product and getting caught up in that outcome. How will you wake them up? How you gotta look? How you’re supposed to eat? And instead be very attentive about every decision that was made.
Celeste Rains-Turk (10:23.033)
and making sure that we’re really reinforcing the process versus the product and getting caught up in that outcome of how much weight you have to lose, how you got to look, how you’re supposed to eat, and instead be very intentional about every decision that’s made.
Cheryl McColgan (10:40.83)
When you’re describing that, for some reason, it’s really making me think of putting it in a perspective of a non-competitor. Let’s just say it’s somebody that has personal physique goals. They just don’t feel good in their body. They’d like to lose some weight. Somehow, in the last several years, and I’m sure you’ve seen this trend as well on social media, but the whole body positivity movement, and it almost made it for a while there, that it definitely made me feel like in being in this space and stuff and being always kind of
concerned with my health for sure. But also just to be very frank, you know, I never felt good in my body if I started to get, you know, more weight on my body. And it was just a personal thing for me. I never judged other people that had more weight and if they were happy with it, I’m all for it. But it almost became a conversation that we couldn’t have. And so I would love to hear your perspective on that in relation to what you just said about mindset and how you kind of reconcile health and the kind of
need for feeling a certain way in your body and the need for even looking a certain way. I don’t know if I’m asking that quite right, but I think there’s a connection there that is interesting with mindset that I would love to hear you talk about.
Celeste Rains-Turk (11:54.105)
Definitely. Well, it’s interesting you say this because when I was looking for internship placement through my master’s in clinical mental health counseling, I thought I would go to an eating disorder clinic. I was very interested in this until I was invited to attend one of their like meetings with their staff. And I was really disappointed in the language that they use regarding like health at every size and that movement.
And I realized that me being a person who prioritizes her health and fitness, it was demonized and it could potentially be seen as triggering. And I thought, well, this is really unfortunate because there are people who deserve to be healthy, want to be healthy, want to be able to use their body. And now they’re being told that they can’t focus on that. They can’t prioritize that because then it means they don’t
Cheryl McColgan (12:27.209)
a person.
Cheryl McColgan (12:32.343)
in this.
Cheryl McColgan (12:37.778)
unfortunate because there are people who deserve…
Cheryl McColgan (12:46.382)
they’re being told that they can’t focus on them, they can’t find work to do, that it means they
Celeste Rains-Turk (12:52.257)
love and accept their body. At the surface level, health at every size seemed like a good healthy movement, right? You think, okay, any of us at any size can pursue health, but what it turned into was anyone at any size is healthy. Where is the evidence to back that? There isn’t evidence to back that. Sure, you have some outliers of people who are obese but incredibly capable of completing
Cheryl McColgan (12:55.435)
on this.
people like to help people a bit, right? They will pay any of us and it will be nice to help. But what it turned into was anyone and it will be nice to help.
Celeste Rains-Turk (13:21.603)
wonderful athletic feats, but are they healthy in all regards? No. And so when we look at this from a body image perspective, there’s a fine line between accepting and loving your body and
Cheryl McColgan (13:24.664)
But are they healthy in all regards? No. And so when we look at this from a body image, there’s a fine line between accepting and loving your body and…
Celeste Rains-Turk (13:40.67)
self-destruction. A lot of times the self-love movement gets blown out of proportion and it becomes self-destruction. Well, I love myself so I can eat whatever I want. But then you’re facing being pre-diabetic at the age of 32. And so what are we really promoting when we say that you don’t have to worry about your body? Now, should we be mindful of how we talk about it and how we promote it? Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (13:40.686)
A lot of times self-love movement gets blown out of proportion and it becomes self-destruction. Well, I love myself so I can eat whatever I want. But, you’re basically being pre-diabetic at the age of 32. And so we’re really promoting what we say that you don’t have to worry about your body. Now, should we be mindful of how we talk about it and how we promote it? Yes.
Celeste Rains-Turk (14:09.857)
It shouldn’t be, well, if you were less sweet, then you would be more admirable and more valuable and more loved and attractive. I don’t know that that’s the best language. I think that can actually be quite detrimental and harmful and why we see a lot of young women struggle and young men. But this is why I think a lot of them struggle is because it becomes connected to identity and worth. What we really need to be focused on is what is the value
Cheryl McColgan (14:10.249)
It shouldn’t be well, you’re less weight than you are at work or valuable or less attractive. I don’t know that that’s the best language. think that should be quite different from our own mind. see lot of young people struggle and young men, but this is they want to struggle because it becomes effective to identity and order. What we really need to be focused on is what is the value of
Celeste Rains-Turk (14:38.325)
of taking care of your body. If we really were to love ourselves, then naturally we would be inspired to care for ourselves. Similarly, if we think we are really, really intelligent, we’re going to be more likely to go after the difficult puzzle, the difficult crossword, the difficult seducule. We think we can manage that. Now, then you put someone over here who doesn’t see themselves that way. There might limit their potential.
Cheryl McColgan (14:39.822)
body, if we really were to love ourselves, then naturally we would be inspired to care for ourselves. Similarly, if we think we are really, really intelligent, we’re more likely to go after difficult puzzles, difficult crosses, difficult steps, difficult things where we can manage them. Now that you’ve put someone over here who doesn’t see themselves that way, they’re not living their potential.
Celeste Rains-Turk (15:06.725)
So this is why I think how we view ourselves, does matter and how we talk about health and how we talk about fitness matters because it’s gonna drive what someone ends up doing. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look better because let’s be honest, when someone feels comfortable and confident in their skin, they’re more likely to project the better version of themselves out into the world, the version God has called them to be. We are called to take care of our bodies.
Cheryl McColgan (15:08.334)
We view ourselves, it does matter, and how we talk about health and how we talk about fitness matters. Because it’s going to drive what that someone could do. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look better. Because, let’s be honest, when someone feels that they’re somewhere in their company and they’re sick, it’s likely to be objective thing. The better version of the health doctor in world, the version of God in the public, will be, we are called to take care of our bodies.
Celeste Rains-Turk (15:35.887)
Does that mean it should become our idol or vanity? No. But should we use it to glorify God? Should we use it to put our mission out into the world and be able to serve our kids and our family and the people we love and do a good job at work? Yes. Yes. So if our body’s impeding on our ability to fulfill our values in life, shouldn’t we address it? And then we are.
Cheryl McColgan (15:36.28)
Does that mean it should become our idol or fan base? No. But should we use it to glorify God? we use it to put our mission out into the world and be able to serve our kids and our family and the people we love and do a good job at work? Yes. So if our bodies can become our ability to fulfill our values in life, shouldn’t we address it?
Celeste Rains-Turk (16:04.303)
begging the questions versus forcing answers on people.
Cheryl McColgan (16:04.686)
I love so much the way that you think about this and talk about this. One of the reason I’m so excited to have you on here because it’s funny when I know I know not at all. I mean that was a better answer than you got into my brain and pulled it out of there. No, but I it’s just it’s so important for people to it’s
Celeste Rains-Turk (16:10.907)
Thank you.
I know sometimes I go on tangents, so I apologize.
Celeste Rains-Turk (16:25.623)
that’s awesome.
Cheryl McColgan (16:32.814)
And again, like I think it goes back to what I said about it, just how I felt in my body and what I was able to do and what I wanted to accomplish. Like I couldn’t accomplish the goals that I wanted in my life when I felt like that. And so, and I like the way that you said, you know, not about letting your body become an idol, but that we are, we should be called to care for ourselves. And so I think bringing that home, I would love to say,
If you have people that you’re working with that don’t have this great relationship with food, what’s the first kind of, mean, first of all, I think what you just said would be like a mind-blowingly good start to that conversation with the person. But how do you approach that with them? How do you get them thinking in that direction? Because we’ve had this health at all sizes thing and because we’ve had some of that stuff, how do you get them thinking in that way that you just described? What’s some of your first steps with a person that has this, let’s say,
You ever heard that saying like stinking thinking that has stinking thinking around food? Like how do you start to work on that with them?
Celeste Rains-Turk (17:29.691)
Mm-hmm.
Celeste Rains-Turk (17:35.237)
Well, that’s so true. First of all, I pose my questions to clients in a way that gets their insight and perspective without projecting mine. So instead of me saying something like, wouldn’t you like to be able to eat any and all foods? Like sure, for some people that might be true and that is a good question to ask at some point. But in my initial deep dives with
clients, I’m actually having them explore what is my ideal relationship with food? What’s my current relationship with food? What are the beliefs I have about different foods? I want to get a big picture of how they actually think. If I can understand what they know or believe about food and their body, I get immediate insight into what drives them, what was behind that drive.
Cheryl McColgan (18:12.492)
I want to get a picture of how they actually think. If I can understand what they
Cheryl McColgan (18:29.454)
into what drives them, or what drives maybe past experiences that led to that too. And then that allows me to create a conversation or communication with those people. We’ve the relationship with food. Right now, this is a relationship with food that you have. We identify what the gap is, and we’re able to start to see, oh, maybe these extreme expectable things I have of myself.
Celeste Rains-Turk (18:33.987)
maybe past experiences that led to that too. And then that allows me to create a conversation or communication that goes, okay, we see that you want this relationship with food. Right now, this is the relationship with food that you have. Now we identify what the gap is and they’re able to start to see, maybe these extreme expectations I have of myself are not great. yes, I’ve always identified as a dieter.
That’s why I only associate these foods or these choices with dieting. And if I’m not in diet or mentality, then it’s out the window. I recognize that I do label these foods as bad and these ones as good, even though I didn’t know that consciously before, I’m seeing that now because these foods scare me and these ones don’t. Or these foods I think I’m allowed to have on a diet and these ones I don’t. So by getting to how they attach expectations,
Cheryl McColgan (19:29.582)
So by getting to health day, attach expectations to an identity, I’ve been better able to unravel those expectations and decide what’s fair to expect given the outcome that I want, what’s unfair to expect from a longevity that I want. And you brought up real key factor there, think, longevity and overall like long-term health, which can often be at odds with some practices in the competitor world, which is a topic for a whole
Celeste Rains-Turk (19:32.795)
to an identity, I’m then better able to work with them to unravel those expectations and decide what’s fair to expect given the outcomes that I want, what’s unfair to expect given the longevity that I want.
Cheryl McColgan (19:58.286)
different podcasts. But if we’re focused on health and longevity, at some point, do you have the conversation about what they’re actually eating? Because we don’t want to say any foods are bad or good. Completely 100 % agree with that. And it’s actually funny because a lot of my content is around low carb keto approach. And there’s a lot of reason for that. I don’t want to go into a whole bunch of details. But the primary thing that I’ve always promoted and I’ve always believed in is just eat mostly whole foods.
Celeste Rains-Turk (19:59.163)
Hahaha
Cheryl McColgan (20:27.982)
And I think that that’s the most nourishing food that you can eat. So you have that on one side, you have creating some kind of balance in the middle. And then on the other side, you have people that are truly eating things that really aren’t food and that probably at some point should be addressed if their goal is health and longevity. And I always say, hey, it depends on your goals, right? Like for example, when you’re eating to fuel training, serious training, that’s a way different goal than eating to lose 20 pounds.
Anyway, I would love to have your thoughts on that. How do you or do you begin to approach that with people at some point given that their goal is health and longevity? Do you start to actually look at what they’re eating a little bit, even though we’re not calling it battered good? I would just love to hear your perspective.
Celeste Rains-Turk (21:12.545)
Yeah, what a great question. I love this conversation because a lot of the times people when they’re working with me, they’re like surprised when I tell them we’re going to do some exposure therapy with foods that would be considered not food. Do you know what I mean? Like let’s say Oreos or something or cookies. They’re like shocked, you know, and I’m like, okay, I’m not telling you that this has to become a normal part of your diet, nor am I promoting it being a normal part of your diet.
Cheryl McColgan (21:30.009)
Yeah.
Celeste Rains-Turk (21:42.425)
But the fact of the matter is most of these interactions you’ve had with this food have been associated with overeating or binge eating. If we can change the association you have with that food and we allow it to become a choice, you’re gonna be less likely to actually binge and overeat on it. So as.
Cheryl McColgan (21:53.838)
you have with that food and feed them. Like we need to actually binge and overeat on it.
Celeste Rains-Turk (22:04.399)
But naturally then, because we’ve practiced exposure and we’ve changed your association with that food, we’ve changed it from this is a food that’s scary and I binge on it and it’s bad for me to this is a food I can control myself around and I recognize how it makes me feel versus other foods and therefore if I want to have birthday cake at my son’s birthday party, it’s fine. I can trust myself to have that one and also I can have the other things that make me feel good there. I’m good with that versus it turning into a free for all.
Cheryl McColgan (22:06.752)
practices over.
Cheryl McColgan (22:11.799)
area that I made.
Cheryl McColgan (22:16.75)
and I recognize how it makes me feel versus other fans and therefore…
Cheryl McColgan (22:23.442)
Party
Celeste Rains-Turk (22:33.061)
So do we talk about what people are eating or do I have that conversation? Yes, because oftentimes clients are worried, well, I don’t want to put that food in my body. I don’t feel good eating sugar. And I’m like, of course you don’t feel good because usually when you eat sugar, you’re having way too much of it at once. So you don’t feel good. And then you get scared of it. And this cycle repeats because you restrict. then because you restrict, you’re basically telling yourself it’s okay to eat that way.
Cheryl McColgan (22:52.782)
So, you know. And then you can stay out of it and then like over-reduce it to something strict and then we can restrict your basic self-emotions and so on. then you do it again, and again, again. Then we interrupt that cycle. We say, okay, can trust myself in this good way. It’s very difficult. And then we expose hierarchy, which, that’s a little other explanation, but we make her out what’s the best way to expose it. We take it like the light of it, essentially. And then…
Celeste Rains-Turk (23:02.905)
and then you do it again and again and again. Instead we interrupt that cycle. We say, okay, I can trust myself with these foods by integrating them in an exposure hierarchy, which that’s a whole other explanation, but we figure out what’s the best way to expose them to it. We take it like a mental vitamin essentially. And then by the end of it, they’re like, I’m not even thinking about that cereal anymore. I don’t even care about the ice cream that’s in my fridge. So we’re not saying eat all the ice cream. We’re saying,
Cheryl McColgan (23:22.062)
at the end of it they’re like, oh I’m not even gonna like cow dung cereal. Oh, and I don’t even care about the ice cream, that’s a different fridge. So we’re not saying, you know what I’m saying, we’re that’s not even a food, whatever you want. Let’s explore the city. Even try to view that food so you’re less likely to go over it. See if it’s more likely to feel the good power to choose. If you have the power to choose, you can rise and howl with more light before the child that’s the nourishing option for yourself.
Celeste Rains-Turk (23:32.035)
Instead of doing an all in approach where you eat whatever you want, let’s do slow exposure that actually changes how you view that food so you’re less likely to over consume it and more likely to feel that you have the power to choose. When you have the power to choose, you would be surprised at how much more likely you are to choose the best, most nourishing option for yourself. But it’s when you restrict yourself and you tell yourself, no, no, no, you turn into that toddler who’s like.
Cheryl McColgan (23:53.644)
no?
Celeste Rains-Turk (23:56.045)
looking at the candy bowl like, okay, I really want it. And mom said to wait until I come back in the room and or you become the person in COVID who all the toilet paper is about to go out. So you buy all of it and you don’t need to and then you become fixated because anything we restrict, end up fixating on and we remove the restriction. We also remove the fixation. Therefore we remove the consumption.
Cheryl McColgan (24:07.726)
Wow.
Cheryl McColgan (24:14.894)
I love that. Yeah, no, I love that explanation. And it’s interesting because over the years, people have said that to me like, you can’t have that or something like that. I know you don’t like bread or something like like, no, I love bread.
Celeste Rains-Turk (24:33.123)
girl give me that bread i like sourdough put it in the air fryer cover it in real butter that’s money
Cheryl McColgan (24:39.894)
and a little salt on top too. So good. But anyway, I know. But so when I say that, I’m like, no, I just choose not to have that because, know, X, Y, Z, it’s, you know, I got to get in my protein for the day. I choose that because I know that that’s a priority for me. And other reasons I put it, I’ve always put it in the frame of choice. So I would love if you could share more about that, because I think that is such a
Celeste Rains-Turk (24:43.266)
speaking to me.
Cheryl McColgan (25:06.093)
powerful mindset shift and I’ve talked about it in the past, but I think it’s always awesome to hear it from somebody else’s mouth because you have a different way of saying things, you have different way of connecting with people. the power of choice, I think that is a hugely great topic in food.
Celeste Rains-Turk (25:22.203)
Definitely. mean, I, I know, Cheryl, I could go tomorrow and get a slice of pizza if I wanted to. And I wouldn’t binge. I’d be able to stop at one and I’d be able to move on. There’s so much power in knowing I could do that. So much power. There was a version of me that would have been like, I need to get the whole box and I got to eat all of it. And then since I already ate the pizza, now I to get the donuts and since I got the donuts, I’m going to eat this. And then tomorrow I’ll get back on it. I’ll be better. I’ll be better.
So there’s power in knowing you can choose to have something and not have it turn into a free for all. This is what then equips me to choose the most nourishing thing to my goals and to my body. So how I like to look at it is we want to make a choice that satisfies our goals and satisfies our values and satisfies nutrition. Sometimes fellowship, let’s say, or connection or culture.
Cheryl McColgan (26:01.009)
Great.
Cheryl McColgan (26:17.464)
Thank you.
Celeste Rains-Turk (26:20.513)
is going to be more fulfilled in that choice than say nutrient value. That’s okay. Similarly, me being deep in prep, I’m sacrificing some nutrient value for what? For an extreme physique. But will I continue that forever? No. Do I know that after this we’re going to be building up food again and I get to push that food up and we get to incorporate a variety? Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (26:22.164)
fulfilled in that choice that’s
Cheryl McColgan (26:36.906)
extreme disease but will I continue that forever? No. Do I know that after this we’re going to be building up food again? push that food up? a variety? Yes. What’s so beautiful about that is I get to choose how I will fill that. And so when I think about choice and think about choice is what creates your tomorrow. So what you’re choosing now is going to create what happens tomorrow.
Celeste Rains-Turk (26:48.889)
And what’s so beautiful about that is I get to choose how I fulfill that. And so when I think about choice, think about choice is what creates your tomorrow. So what you’re choosing now is going to create what happens tomorrow. And then when you are 80 years old and you look back on all the choices you’ve made every day, all the habits, food aside, any habit, that is what actually made up your life. So if we can take a zoom out approach like that.
Cheryl McColgan (27:11.666)
That is what actually made up your life.
Celeste Rains-Turk (27:18.627)
I think it can snap us into reality of, okay, this choice actually does matter. And sometimes the choice that matters more is my health and my nutrition and my longevity and my confidence and my, my energy. And sometimes the choice that matters is like I told a client yesterday, I’m like, why don’t you just have a pizza day with your family?
Cheryl McColgan (27:37.464)
Why have pizza day with your family?
Celeste Rains-Turk (27:42.755)
why? You know, like what is so wrong about that? What is so bad about doing that every once in a while? And if she would give herself the freedom to choose that, I don’t think she’d be thinking about it or wanting it as much. So choice to me is knowing there’s a lot of influential factors, all those choices will make up your life at the end of the day.
Cheryl McColgan (27:43.454)
you know?
Cheryl McColgan (27:57.039)
So, there’s a lot of influential factors and then all of them come to life at the end of the day. Yeah, and I think what you mentioned about the cultural and connection and other goals are arguably just as or maybe even more important in some situations. And I think, again, there’s that idea of finding balance. know, but when you were just describing PrEP, what occurred to me is like, OK, well, that’s, you know, that’s it’s basically an extreme diet.
But what I love about it is that there are some parameters around it. And think this is what happens to people that just get in the diet mentality. Like they quit having parameters. So whether it’s a date goal or a weight loss goal, like after I lose 10 pounds, maybe I just stay at maintenance for a while, something like that. In the book I had that I said something about, you know, take diet breaks and that the research behind diet breaks shows that people kind of lose the same amount of weight. But I think what they fail.
to realize is the psychological aspect of diet breaks. And I’ll just give you an example. Like I’ve been in a fat loss phase myself for several weeks now, and we just went to Cabo for the weekend. And so I did still track and I did still, you know, I was mindful of still getting my protein and stuff, but I, to me that mental break and that time away with my husband and you know, experiencing a new place and experiencing new food was more valuable.
Celeste Rains-Turk (29:06.126)
That’s awesome.
Cheryl McColgan (29:24.706)
than sticking to a strict diet for really what reason? For I’m healthy, I’m just having a physique goal. It’s because the goal is not as important as that. Does that make any sense? And I think some professionals miss that point with the diet break or with the stay at maintenance for a while and just quit dieting for a little bit. So I’d love to hear your perspective on that. Have you had people have success with that or does some people, is it just harder for them because they…
Celeste Rains-Turk (29:33.307)
Yeah.
Celeste Rains-Turk (29:37.035)
yeah, absolutely.
Cheryl McColgan (29:52.482)
they either kind of have an all or nothing mentality. I’d love to hear your experience with clients on that.
Celeste Rains-Turk (29:57.435)
That’s exactly what I was about to say. People are scared to do it because they associate dieting with extremes. so that pendulum swing from I’m dieting, so I’m here. The thought of even implementing a diet break is too much of a gray area because they’re like, well, if I’m not dieting, but I’m dieting, what am I doing? I might as well just go crazy. And then now I’ll diet harder. Extremes are very predictable for people, which is why they’re attractive. But when you go to Cabo and you only track maybe a little bit,
The outcome of that is unpredictable compared to if you have this strict data set that you manipulate it very perfectly and you would know exactly what happened. Two plus two equals four. So what people miss though is the gray area is where your life is going to be establishing like that longevity. The ability to like, I was on prep early prep. went on a cruise, brought my food scale and I did eat like
appropriately, but it was awesome that I could do that while on prep and weigh things out. And then my scale, I don’t know where it went, lost it. And I was like, but I trust myself enough. Like I can get through these last couple of days without issues. And in my improvement season, we went to Austria and I was like, I am not tracking. Like I have more important things to do here in Austria. Like I’m going to go hike mountains for five hours a day. Like that’s what we’re going to do. Or I’m going to hang out at the hotel at the spa. And that’s what I’m going to do. So.
Cheryl McColgan (31:00.301)
that well.
Cheryl McColgan (31:10.318)
And then my.
you.
Cheryl McColgan (31:20.378)
Right.
Celeste Rains-Turk (31:26.555)
Tracking wasn’t even on my radar then. And what that does is it shows me, and I think it will show others, psychologically, they can actually still achieve their goals, still feel good, and satisfy other life areas. And the world doesn’t stop. Their diet doesn’t stop. Their body keeps responding and probably responds even better. And then you’re more excited to get back at it or get into that zone again because
you’ve experienced this relief. And it wasn’t just a one day thing where you had a free for all and now you’re like, I feel so bad. I need to get back on track. It’s more like, okay, I really enjoyed that time away with my husband. I feel fulfilled and now, and I made choices that I feel really confident in. So this is no problem.
Cheryl McColgan (32:12.812)
Yeah, and I just for some reason, it’s really hard to transfer that to some people, but I think it is a more of a mindset thing. And I kind of feel like it goes back to that all or nothing, the extremes that you talked about, because I think you’re right. think people can wrap their head around that, but it’s maybe more difficult when you actually try to, you know, because there’s always a vacation. There’s always an event. There’s always a birthday. There’s always an opportunity to have drinks with friends at night. So and I think some of us have kind of
cracked the nut on this at least a little bit, how to figure out how to balance it. And then others, like, it just keeps repeating the cycle because there’s always that next excuse. Can you maybe speak to that and how you work with people to more easily find balance or to, I don’t know if you’d say it’s like mitigate the extremes a little bit. And with competitors, it kind of is extreme because there’ll be like prep, prep, prep, and then it’ll be build, build, build. And so it’s kind of like,
But in that way, that is kind of similar to the extreme. So I don’t know, do you kind of, do you feel where I’m going? I just love to hear your thoughts on it because I think, I think you’re really onto something there that it’s hard for, or it’s easier for people to understand the extremes, harder to understand this in between space.
Celeste Rains-Turk (33:12.579)
Yeah. Yeah.
Celeste Rains-Turk (33:25.295)
Definitely. Well, from a competitor standpoint, what’s strange is even in your improvement season, you’re still on, you know, you’re still tracking, you’re still being mindful of how much you’re eating and you’re focused on that. And maybe it’s not as strict. Maybe there’s some days where it’s more intuition behind it or there’s more flexibility, but there is still that level of, well, there is going to be a prep in the future. And when you’re in prep, there’s really, I mean,
There is no birthday cake, you know, there’s just not, unless you feel very confident in the cake that you bought or made and you can track it and you feel good about using your macros for it. Great. but oftentimes that’s not going to be the case. So this is what makes it difficult also for people to come out of prep because then they’re like, well, how do I start enjoying those things? Or I should only prep when it’s during the
Cheryl McColgan (34:10.488)
This is what makes you different.
Celeste Rains-Turk (34:21.803)
XYZ time of year because then I’m not dealing with the holidays and having to miss that. I’ve prepped through holidays so many times and generally speaking, like my coach is like, just enjoy your day. It’s not a big deal. You know, like it’s just eat normal and move on and check in and we’ll be good. But
Cheryl McColgan (34:33.901)
Bye.
Celeste Rains-Turk (34:42.393)
When you tell someone that who’s so used to associating results with dieting, that’s very scary. And that also highlights that many of them are too focused on the result and not on the process. So when we think about balance, I oftentimes will say, I believe balance is the sister of perfection and perfectionism disguises itself in the name of balance.
Cheryl McColgan (34:58.562)
now.
Cheryl McColgan (35:08.142)
there.
Celeste Rains-Turk (35:11.257)
Balance makes us believe that if you put all the things of our life on a scale, it will be like this. But sometimes it is gonna be like this and sometimes it’s gonna be like this. And technically this is balanced as well at times because maybe 20 % of your energy is going here and 80 % of your energy is going here. But that’s actually good for the circumstances of your life right now. Okay, your family members in the hospital and 20 % of your energy is going to food and movement.
Cheryl McColgan (35:32.568)
life.
Cheryl McColgan (35:36.525)
Thank
Celeste Rains-Turk (35:38.907)
80 % of your energy is going to that family member in the hospital. We’re not going to try to strive for 50-50 during a circumstance like that. So why do we expect that when we go on vacation or why do we expect that when we’re at a nice outing with family or friends or we go to even to a restaurant? You think that they’re going to weigh everything perfectly for you back there? No.
Cheryl McColgan (35:43.601)
We’re not going to try to strive for a 50 % or anything like that. So we don’t expect that when we go on vacation or why do we expect that when we’re out at night outing with family and friends. Or we go to even a restaurant and they put their middle weight on it.
Celeste Rains-Turk (36:03.147)
As far as like the extremes go, I think it generally just shows people are way too focused on the outcome, the outcome, the outcome. They don’t want to sacrifice the outcome. But what they miss is that if you don’t engage in some sort of flexibility and sometimes breaks or taking time away, then all you’re doing is sacrificing the long-term ability to maintain that outcome. We want to do
Cheryl McColgan (36:03.32)
you
Cheryl McColgan (36:13.422)
Thank
Cheryl McColgan (36:19.886)
great.
This is sacrifice equal to one.
Cheryl McColgan (36:29.102)
you
Celeste Rains-Turk (36:30.393)
the least amount of work to get the most amount of result, right? So if you have to extreme, extreme diet and remove everything else from your life in order to get a result, and then you pendulum swing back, was that really a successful approach? No, if you always have to say, gotta get back on track, the track is probably broken. So it’s better to say, what kind of track could I follow? What kind of plan could I follow? That allows me to push myself enough that
Cheryl McColgan (36:31.982)
to get the most out of the soul, right? So if you have to stream extreme diet, everything else will
that you can once we back. That really is a custom approach. know, always have to say I gotta get my butt tracked.
to say what kind of track I call them and what kind I call them. That allows me to push myself enough that I can’t go on helping them until the same day I’m fully into my new living, do some things. But also is it so challenging that I couldn’t see myself growing into saving and feeling good if I had a bad day? So…
Celeste Rains-Turk (36:58.371)
I gain more confidence and self-esteem and belief in my ability to do difficult things, but also isn’t so challenging that I couldn’t see myself growing and sustaining it or feeling good if I had a bad day. So it’s almost essential in my opinion to have time away from the extremes in order to then actually see results for your life long-term.
Cheryl McColgan (37:15.902)
and have time away from the constraints in order to then actually build life. Yeah, that was a, I love that thought process and I hope that that helps people think about in terms of, well, that we’re talking kind of more about dieting specifically there, but I think it kind of applies to your relationship to food as well because if you make good choices most of the time and this seems
kind of intuitive to most people, think. If you make good choices most of the time, you’re gonna probably get closer to your goals. If you make poor choices most of the time, you’re gonna be further away from your goals. So not to oversimplify it, I mean, it’s a simple concept, but it’s in practice pretty challenging, right? So Celeste, this has been so wonderful. And I know some of this conversation, some of it we talked about diet, some of it we talked about relationship to food.
Celeste Rains-Turk (37:55.419)
Right.
That’s good.
Cheryl McColgan (38:12.11)
But one of the things I love about your website is you have all of these great free resources that are talking about how to improve your relationship with food, how to make it more easy to reach your goals, whatever those are, whether it’s a physique goal, whether it’s a health and longevity goal. Can you share with people about some of your free resources? And then in addition, I know you also do some speaking, you have a book, just…
any ways that people can get the knowledge out of your brain and into their own.
Celeste Rains-Turk (38:42.133)
You’re so sweet. So celestial.fit that’s my website, www.celestial.fit. If you’re not on Instagram or Facebook, I post all my blog posts onto that website too. So if you prefer to stay off social media, you can read all the blogs there. As far as the free resources go, I have a free food relationship coaching series. It’s an eight day series. You will get a psycho educational video in your inbox every day, along with an entire workbook.
to work through the process and you can send me your work as you go and I will provide feedback. I give feedback to everybody on their stuff. I mean, I don’t know why I do that. It’s a very time consuming process with everything else I have going on. And sometimes I’m like, my gosh, but it’s great. love supporting people through that process. And then I have some other freebies. As you mentioned, I have a free mindless snacking workshop. That’s for anybody. I have a…
Cheryl McColgan (39:16.078)
Thank
Cheryl McColgan (39:37.102)
You’re welcome.
Celeste Rains-Turk (39:40.005)
free post-show blues coaching program if your competitor’s struggling with that. And then the podcast is lit on there. And my book is Believe Your Way to Badass. So I wrote that years and years ago now, but I highly recommend it if you’re looking for ways to change the way you think about yourself and allow that to change your behaviors. That’s a good book to start. And I have something in there called Operation Badass where I basically walk you through a process for…
Cheryl McColgan (39:42.574)
there.
Cheryl McColgan (39:57.495)
No.
Cheryl McColgan (40:06.094)
Thank
Celeste Rains-Turk (40:07.639)
goal setting that will allow you to, in the book, I say manifest what it is that you want for your reality. I would have maybe said that differently now, but I was 19 when I wrote it. yeah, visit www.celestial.fit. You’ll see everything there and you can contact me if that’s to come on your podcast and speak or it’s to come do a speaking engagement, whatever it is, ask a question. You can reach me there.
Cheryl McColgan (40:19.305)
You
Cheryl McColgan (40:35.67)
And you forgot to mention one other thing. See, I told you I was stalking you. But you said out that you’re having a wellness retreat for people that are into fitness and you only had a couple spots left. So maybe you stop that out there.
Celeste Rains-Turk (40:39.003)
Celeste Rains-Turk (40:44.195)
Yes!
my gosh. Yes. I’m so glad that you said that because literally someone just told me like, you should talk about this on the podcast that you go on and that you host because that’s how I found out about it. I’m like, duh. So yes, thank you. I am hosting a retreat August 1st through 4th this year, 2025 in Greenville, South Carolina. It’s going to be an intimate experience at my home. We’re going to have
I say we’re gonna have a private chef. My husband is the private chef, but he is actually, he went to school for culinary arts. So he’s gonna be doing a private chef experience for us. We’re gonna have a really fun time with workouts. Obviously there’s gonna be mental health workshops throughout the entire event. We’re gonna have like time for pool or pickleball or bachamel and relaxation as well. And then I have some surprise activities in store.
If you want more information on that, the best way to get in touch is by either social media or email. The contact information is on my website for that, or you can email celeste at celestial.fit. Let me know you’re interested in coming and I’ll send you all the information on how we do that. It’s for females only and females who are interested in fitness or competing.
Cheryl McColgan (42:02.796)
Awesome. Well, Celeste, thank you so much again for taking the time to do this today. I love the conversation. I could talk to you all day, but I want to be respectful of your time. So thank you so much, and I hope we stay in touch.
Celeste Rains-Turk (42:10.235)
Aww.
Thank you.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Dr. Chris Rhodes, a nutrition scientist, discusses his journey into the fields of longevity and fasting. He explains the significance of autophagy and shares his personal experiences with fasting.
Dr. Rhodes also introduces Mimio, a product designed to mimic the benefits of fasting at the molecular level, and discusses the clinical studies that support its efficacy. The conversation delves into the science behind Mimeo’s ingredients and their roles in promoting healthspan and longevity.
Visit Mimio to learn more and get an awesome discount!
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Takeaways* Fasting can activate longevity bio programs within our cells. * Autophagy is a crucial process for cellular health and longevity. * GLP-1 drugs like Ozembic may positively impact longevity pathways. * Mimeo is designed to mimic the benefits of fasting without actual fasting. * Clinical studies show Mimeo can improve metabolic health markers. * The formulation of Mimeo includes powerful anti-aging molecules. * Nicotinamide plays a key role in cellular energy and metabolism. * Using Mimeo can enhance the benefits of shorter fasting periods. * Maintaining a balance between mTOR activation and fasting pathways is essential for health.
https://youtu.be/CidbXEJcj3kEpisode transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.834)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast. I don’t even know the name of my own podcast. It’s loving my words today. But anyway, I’m really excited about today’s guest. I’m here with Dr. Chris Rhodes and he is a nutrition scientist. I’ll let him better describe himself, but you will have heard his full bio, of course, before this, but I always like to start out, Dr. Rhodes, with just having you kind of share in your own words, what brought you into this space? What made you passionate about
working with Mimeo Health and the technology there. Like what led you to this point?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (00:32.962)
Yeah, great question. Really happy to be here, Cheryl. Thanks for having me on.
really got me interested into the longevity space, the healthy aging space, and eventually the fasting space was coming out of college. I got my BS in biochemistry from Leroy LaMaria Mount University, but like a lot of college kids didn’t really know what I wanted to do there. So to try and figure that out, took an immunology fellowship at Stanford, just kind of pouring through all the research I could get my hands on going to all these seminars, and eventually came across the longevity research.
And I thought that was so fascinating because it was this thing that used to be relegated to myth and legend, right? It was like Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. And now it’s this very active, very rigorous area of scientific research with a ton of funding and a ton of companies and a ton of government and scientific attention on it. And it’s one of those things that helps with everything, right? If you can solve aging, then you can pretty much
also solve disease because by and large, most young folks don’t get disease. really see that aging is something that’s an underlying factor in every disease that happens. So if you can tackle these fundamental issues of aging at the cellular level and really slow that process down, then you can not only potentially enhance lifespan but also healthspan at the same time, which I think is what we’re all really going for, living our lives as well as possible and as best health as possible for as long
long as we can. When you’re in the healthy aging and longevity space, eventually you come across fasting because fasting is one of the only ways that we know of to reliably extend lifespan and health span helps to treat, prevent, or delay most major diseases. And the reason why that was so fascinating to me is because it does all of that without actually adding anything into the system, right? So it’s not this superfood or this wonder drug that’s doing all the work, but somehow fasting is
Dr. Chris Rhodes (02:36.742)
activating these dormant longevity bio programs that we already have inside of us at the cellular level, but just aren’t being activated on a daily basis, just aren’t turned on. And when that clicked for me, it actually made me mad because I was like, great, my body knows how to live to be 120 years old and in perfect health, but it’s just not doing it. And that’s what kind of catapulted me into the fasting research space. And what I was
doing for my PhD, which eventually became Mimeo.
Cheryl McColgan (03:11.586)
That’s a great background. Before we get into some of the science behind it and some of those other things, what’s going through my mind is knowing the timing from your bio and knowing a little bit about when you were in school. I would imagine that you probably had to be making some of these decisions about this when the Nobel Prize for autophagy was awarded. I believe that was 2016. That’s actually when I first ran across it. I had just found out that my dad had cancer.
And I started digging around and doing all this research and came across that, you know, the fact that this had been awarded the Nobel Prize and then just started reading more about autophagy and got, went down this whole rabbit hole. But I would love it if you could share with people from a more scientific perspective, you know, autophagy kind of means self-eating. And I think most people at this point have heard that term before. But if you can maybe describe some of the mechanisms there and
just to give people background before we kind of launch into the tech.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (04:09.56)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. yeah, autophagy does mean self-eating. And what that’s actually referring to is essentially our cellular cleanup and recycling mechanisms. So cells initiate autophagy, which is this process of these little what it’s called autophagosomes, these little tiny lysosome encapsulation particle things that go around and they’ll selectively absorb and digest and break down into their component parts.
these dysfunctional proteins, dysfunctional organelles, what I like to call cell junk. They’ll take that up, they’ll break it down, and then once it’s in, it’s like considerate of parts, it’s amino acids, it’s carbohydrates, it’s fats, it’s lipids. Then your cells will take all of that and then utilize it to create new functional organelles and new proteins. So it is this process of breaking down the damaged elements of a cell and then recycling them into
new nutrients into new energy sources into new organelles and proteins. So you kind of have a refreshed new cell on the inside anyway. So that’s kind of the process of autophagy at the cellular level. What that usually ends up meaning for an organismal level is that when you have enhanced autophagy, you typically have extended lifespan and health span as well. Because if you think about it from that context of a cell is constantly cleaning itself up, it’s recycling.
its parts, it’s got a lot of metabolic efficiency that’s happening, then that allows them to function better and then that leads to overall organismal health, which then of course leads to overall organismal longevity.
Cheryl McColgan (05:53.996)
Yeah, and I think originally, of course, like most research starts, usually starts in rodents or rats, is not always totally transferable to humans. But at the time when I was digging into it, there were definitely some human studies at that point. Since this is kind of what is in your day to day, I would love to hear kind of any new things that are going on in this space as far as longevity as it relates to fasting and…
Dr. Chris Rhodes (05:58.798)
course,
Cheryl McColgan (06:19.022)
I think I’m one of the previous interviews I heard with you, I think you were actually describing a study that you guys were doing on people to kind of test out some of these theories. But anyway, just anything new and exciting in the research world that you’re seeing that kind of is informing what you’re doing now with your research.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (06:38.124)
Yeah, it’s not necessarily informing what we do now with our research, although it kind of is because it’s unavoidable, right? But like the really big thing that’s happening in the health and longevity space right now is kind of how Ozembic is impacting everything and like the other GLP-1 drugs and agonists, right? Because yes, they have great effects on weight loss, but when you’re tackling things from a metabolic perspective, metabolism and longevity are super duper linked together, right? Usually when you’re looking at the cellular
pathways that impact longevity, they are also very much related to metabolism. Whether that’s mTOR, which is like, you know, pro-growth, pro-protein kind of pathway that leads to decreased lifespan and these pro-aging effects versus like AMP kinase, which is really, really associated with anti-aging properties, but is also kind of like your body’s lipid pathway.
modifier, you get to see how Ozembic is impacting not only the weight loss portion of it, but because it’s impacting things at the metabolic level, then you also see, all right, there’s a lot of reduced disease incidence. There’s a lot of reduced disease risk because we’re tackling this cellular metabolic processing that is intimately connected with the healthy aging and longevity pathways.
Cheryl McColgan (08:05.102)
Yeah, that’s pretty exciting. And I think obviously as time goes on and more and more people are using it, there’ll certainly have to be more research around that. And I know that there’s even new like second gen GLP ones that are being worked on. and so you’re saying if I’m understanding correctly that those are having a positive effect on longevity pathways.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (08:26.82)
Correct. So the reason why it was, and it could be, you know, the GLP ones could be really good for longevity in general is that one of the main reasons for disease progression and disease risk in general is, you know, overweight, obesity, all of these like chronic metabolic problems.
that Ozembic is really helping people to avoid. So by helping to kind of re-stabilize organismal metabolism, helping people lose weight, getting a better glucose levels, insulin levels, HPUNC levels, cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, all this fun stuff, then you’re really helping the underlying fundamental thing that’s driving a lot of this disease and this dysfunction that happens over time and helping to also, I think, slow
down the actual process of aging.
Cheryl McColgan (09:17.742)
So it could have the same excitement that maybe like metformin or rapamycin used to have as kind of not only being a weight loss thing, but something that can also promote longevity, it sounds like.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (09:27.456)
Right, exactly. And isn’t it funny how, you know, the best drugs that we have for longevity just also happen to affect the metabolic pathways, right? And so that’s why, that’s why like fasting is so interesting to me because fasting is of course all about affecting metabolic pathways and it does so at this enormous level. You have a, you have an entire shift in how we process food, how we, how we do cellular metabolism in a fed state.
Cheryl McColgan (09:36.799)
Yes, it is.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (09:57.422)
versus a prolonged fasting state. And that was kind of what we were studying during my PhD to actually develop the MIMEO formulation.
Cheryl McColgan (10:07.02)
Yeah, and how did you, so I’m assuming at some point, just as a personal aside before we jump into that, that you ran across this, did you experiment with this on yourself at all? So you could kind of see what would happen and how you would feel if you did some extended fasting?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (10:23.346)
yeah, definitely. So that’s, kind of got a little obsessed with it when I was, when I was at Stanford. You know, I started reading all the, reading all the papers, came across all the fasting research and I was like, that’s so amazing. At the time I was also learning how to do all of these immunological techniques to look at immune cells and their functionality and their survivability and their like reactivity, the autoimmune stimuli. So I thought to myself, well, I can fast and then I can take my blood and I can look at my
Cheryl McColgan (10:28.257)
You
Dr. Chris Rhodes (10:53.03)
and I can see what happens and I can confirm all of these amazing things that the literature says is happening. So that’s what I did. I started off small with like, right, I’ll skip breakfast, I’ll work my way up, I’ll get to a 24 hour fast, a 36 hour fast, and then beyond. And eventually I did an entire time course where I looked at what happened in my body during a 60 hour fast. And the…
I was taking my blood at all those different like time points at the zero hour, know, six hour, 12 hours, 16, 18, 24, 36, 48, 60. And you can see this progression of enhanced functionality within your, within my cells. I could see this happening. So they became, you know, less auto reactive. They became, I had much better cellular survival. They had much better stress resistance. had much better metabolic functioning.
And being able to see that in your own cells in something that you can do in just, you know, a couple of days is so powerful to like quantify itself, like scientist person, like I am. I just, I got very, I was like, this actually works for me. I’m going to do it. So I started doing this alternate day fasting regimen and I kept that up for about one and a half, two years. yeah, that like, was, it was really, really amazing. had like, I was very.
Cheryl McColgan (11:59.212)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (12:12.056)
No, well.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (12:16.966)
healthy, but at the same time, it has this big social drawback, right? Because you’re not going out to lunch with coworkers, right? You’re not having meals with your family. like when friends would ask me out on a fasting day, I would be like, okay, sure. Like, come and I’ll, you know, like awkwardly drink water while I walk. Right. And nobody wants that.
Cheryl McColgan (12:33.39)
Thank
Cheryl McColgan (12:37.655)
you
you
Dr. Chris Rhodes (12:41.604)
I got to the point where eventually my sister, we were on vacation and I was still like fasting actively. And she was like, you know, you’re going to live longer. You’re going to like, you’re going to be healthier. Right. But what is the point of living longer if you have to live less? And that was this kind of thing that was like very impactful for me. And I was like, she’s, she’s right. Like there’s, there’s gotta be a middle ground. There’s gotta be another way to do this. And so that’s again, kind of what catapulted me into developing Mimeo as a, as a fasting memetic.
because I was like, all right, is there a way that we can figure out what’s happening in the body during a fast and then recreate those effects on demand?
Cheryl McColgan (13:21.326)
So yeah, and I think that’s so brilliant because I’ve experimented with fasting a ton myself too, and I’ve actually kind of moved away from it for similar reasons as you. I still do some intermittent fasting, but the longer fast, like I had done a five day was the longest one I had ever done. And I just found it out, like the things that you mentioned, and then, you know, there’s always been a concern that maybe it promotes more muscle loss, things like that. And it’s just kind of, adds, now that I’m an older,
Dr. Chris Rhodes (13:36.045)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (13:50.488)
person and worried about keeping my muscle mass and staying strong so that I can be very functional into my older age. I’ve started to back away from it a little bit for that reason, even though there’s definitely arguments on both sides of whether that really happens. Because I think the process you described with the organelles, some people will say, well, your body’s not going to go after healthy, good tissue when there’s all this other stuff around to eat. I think it’s difficult. I’ve never seen anything convincing one way or the other where it convinced me to.
you know, keep doing it or not.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (14:21.41)
This is totally the thing and you get different effects from different
time courses of fasting, right? So like doing something like a five day fast, inevitably, inevitably, you’re going to lose a little bit of muscle along the way because if you’re not taking in food, your brain is an obligate glucose consumer. So it needs at least 50 % of its calories to come from carbohydrate and glucose specifically. even as you get into ketosis in the later stages of fasting, you know, 24 hours plus, you’re going to be
breaking down fat and the rest of your body, the rest of your organs, your muscles, your liver, all that fun stuff, they’re going to utilize the ketone bodies in order to survive. But your brain is going to at least have to utilize some of that glucose. Where that glucose is going to come from, because you’re not getting it from the diet, is from protein breakdown. Because that’s the only other pathway that we have in our body to generate glucose without getting it from food. So, you in order to keep your brain active and healthy and alive, you’re going to have to break down some protein.
and usually that’s going to come from muscles. Sometimes it’ll come from the organs themselves, which sounds, you know, like very, very terrible.
Cheryl McColgan (15:32.053)
Right.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (15:33.7)
But it’s actually okay because it’s another way that your body has this metabolic efficiency, right? Where it’s like, okay, if I don’t have a lot of food coming in, I have all these organs that take up a lot of energy, let’s just shrink them down a little bit so they don’t take up as much energy but still perform their tasks, right? But inevitably you will have some muscle breakdown at those later stages of fasting versus something like a 24-hour fast or a 36-hour fast where you’re still getting
into the true blue fasting metabolism, but you’re not so far into the process where you’re going to have significant muscle loss.
Cheryl McColgan (16:13.228)
Yeah, and I think that 36 hour is a big sweet spot. And I think I remember from one of your previous interviews that, and that’s based on my personal experience and also just things I’ve read, like you get a lot of the benefits and it’s not an extremely difficult amount of time for most people, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while. So how did you, how did you land on the fact that, you know, you started doing that, you realize all the benefits, you’re like, maybe we can make a pill out of this, right? Which is what we love to do in America.
How did that process go? What made you think that you could recreate it and kind of tap into the same pathways? There must have been something in the science that you thought, this is possible.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (16:50.38)
Yeah, so actually there wasn’t anything in the science at the time that kind of led me to think that that was possible. There were, you know, there were molecules out there already that were called Chloric Restriction Mimetics, right, that were designed or, you know, or called Chloric Restriction Mimetics because they had
Cheryl McColgan (16:53.174)
Yeah.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (17:06.378)
some kind of evidence of being able to activate a singular pathway that was associated with caloric restriction. like metformin is a very good example. Metformin is considered to be a calorie restriction pneumatic because it activates AMP kinase just like calorie restriction does. But what
no one was really doing at the time was doing that with the molecules that your body actually produces in that state, right? So it was always usually, you know, a plant compound or a drug compound or something, something like that, not trying to recreate the whole system with natural human molecules. But when we originally started, it wasn’t actually our mission to create a pill or, you know, develop Mimeo so much as it was just to, wanted to understand
what happens in the body during a fast. So what we did for that was we had 20 people come in, 10 men, 10 women to avoid a gender bias. We had them fast for 36 hours and looked at their before and after and did those same cellular functional metrics that I was doing on myself when I was at Stanford. And what we found was that when people fasted for 36 hours, there was a huge increase in their cellular functionality, just like we saw with me. They became more anti-inflammatory.
more antioxidant, they became more cardio protective. And to see that kind of change with a nutritional intervention over like basically just one day, right? Taking these young, healthy people and basically turning them into super people is really, really significant. You hardly ever see that happen. So we really wanted to figure out what is the difference between one state and the other that could be causing those beneficial effects to happen. So we did what’s called comprehensive
tabloid mix, basically looking at all of the small molecule components of the plasma. And what we found was that there were over 300 significant differences between a baseline state and a fasting state that could, you know, be responsible for inducing those changes. When we screened through those molecules, we were able to find around two dozen of those that had some kind of literature activity of already having these like bio activities, whether that was helping to enhance autophagy or create these
Dr. Chris Rhodes (19:23.81)
anti-inflammatory effects. And then when we screened through those molecules on our ex vivo modeling assays with the cells, we were basically able to show that there was this synergistic combination of four of them that could recreate all of these beneficial effects of fasting that we were seeing. then beyond that, because we were really interested in the longevity piece of it, we did a C. elegans lifespan extension analysis and saw that we could extend their
lifespan by 96 % just through supplementation with these four molecules. So that is ultimately what Mimeo is. It’s taking what the body naturally produces during a 36-hour fast and then just giving it back to people as a supplement. So you can recreate fasting at the molecular level and get those same benefits but without actually having to fast.
Cheryl McColgan (20:21.166)
Yeah, 96%. That’s pretty amazing. And just in case anybody out there doesn’t recognize the whole C. elegans thing, they’re worms, right? Quite often what you first do research on. so since then, I’m imagining, okay, you identified these molecules, you saw this amazing result on worms, on the C. elegans. Then did you decide, okay, we should, I mean, I’m sure you tested it out on yourself for sure, but did you do any kind of studies or?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (20:27.978)
Yeah, yeah, I’m milling nematodes.
Cheryl McColgan (20:47.65)
comparisons to fasting using the Mimeo product.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (20:52.132)
Yeah. So we, definitely looked at, um, you know, how does the lifespan extension with fasting compare to the lifespan extension with NIMEO. We were able to see that, you know, just an ordinary fasting actually had a 56 % lifespan extension from previous studies. And then that, you know, we were getting this 96 % extension with NIMEO. So that was very cool to see. We also looked at, um, like rapamycin and metformin and how those extend lifespan as well. And, know, uh, metformin can extend lifespan by around
36%, rapamycin can extend lifespan by around 19%. So when we saw that this natural combination of human molecules combined together could outperform these longevity drugs and then fasting in and of itself, we were like, OK, I think that we found something really interesting and powerful here. And then from there, we went on to do some pilot clinical studies to look at, all right.
let’s take this formulation, let’s do different dosages, let’s see how it’s absorbed, metabolized, if it appears in circulation, and if it has any short-term effects.
So in order to do that, we had people come in and ate a standardized breakfast alongside a placebo control. Then after a washout period, have those same people come back, eat that same standardized breakfast, but then with supplementation with the MIMEO formulation. And what we found there was that when people ate the breakfast with the placebo, they had this big loss of plasma functionality, which is really typical of the post-perandial state.
So you have all this metabolic chaos that’s coming into the system. You have this inflammatory effect that’s happening from taking in food. And so you get a big perturbation of the natural homeostasis. So they were pro-inflammatory in their plasma. They had less antioxidant ability. They were less cardio protective, as measured through cholesterol efflux capacity. And of course, their metabolic markers were really altered.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (22:58.688)
When they ate that same breakfast, but with supplementation with Mimeo, we found that we could not only prevent all of that loss of function that happened, but also add gains of function on top of that.
Cheryl McColgan (23:02.19)
with.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (23:13.346)
that mimicked what we saw when people were fasting. So instead of being pro-inflammatory, their plasma became anti-inflammatory and antioxidant and cardio protective. So that was kind of another big wake-up call for us where again, we’re taking a single dose and just looking at it a couple hours after ingestion and already seeing these big changes to plasma functionality and cellular functionality. And so after that, then we were like, all right.
we could actually turn this into a product and start immediately helping people and making an impact for both their metabolic health and then their longevity.
Cheryl McColgan (23:49.038)
Yeah, when it’s, mean, just one day, that’s amazing. Have you seen anything else as far as maybe either from your personal experience or studies of using it for a longer period of time, maybe things that you’ve observed or blood markers that changed kind of in a more permanent way for lack of a better way to ask that.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (24:06.218)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we did partner up with Mount Sinai to do some case studies there looking at longer term supplementation with the MIMIA formulation. And what we found was that eight weeks of supplementation, we could improve a lot of
know, these plasma blood marker metrics so we could include improved glucose levels, HbA1c levels, insulin levels, triglyceride levels, HDL, LDL ratio, and then actual total cholesterol levels as well, which is really great. And then we were also looking at biological age and found that we reduced biological age by two and a half years in just those eight weeks of supplementation. So that’s kind of, the big clinical
data that we have right now. We’re also currently doing a larger randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study looking at that same time course, eight weeks of supplementation in healthy overweight people with elevated HbA1c.
Cheryl McColgan (25:09.836)
Very cool. so where my brain’s going now, this may or may not make total sense, but I’m thinking about, you mentioned the mTOR pathway, which is kind of a growth and possibly longevity shortener. I mean, I’ve heard some conversations on that. You know, a lot of people like to argue for vegan or vegetarian, kind of use that pathway as a way to say that, you know, you’re activating it constantly when you’re eating meat. And so maybe that’s not so good. Or on the other hand, your body,
absolutely needs a certain amount of protein to maintain the muscle and all the processes. they’re always kind of, know, mTOR and AMPK, at least in my basic understand, they’re always kind of like balancing each other out a little bit or going back and forth between them. But I guess where my brain is going with this, so if you’re a person that is regularly strength training, and so you’re purposely trying to stomp on the mTOR and create growth, would taking something like this, because we talked about how the fasting could possibly, you know, impact that in some ways, is any concern around
Mimeo shutting off the ability for growth, that makes sense. I mean, I think you kind of know where I’m going with this, but.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (26:12.14)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying. And I would say that you don’t have to worry about it at all, to be honest, because the molecules in MIMU aren’t going to shut down.
muscle growth so much as they are going to promote these beneficial things at the same time. So that’s kind of the homeostasis and the balance that we’re trying to restore to the system. So when you think about what a typical western diet looks like, we’re almost constantly in a fed state because you have your three meals a day plus snacks.
And it takes around, you know, four to six hours after a meal for your body to properly digest everything, utilize it, incorporate it into cells and return back to its like natural homeostasis. But, you know, we eat almost every three hours, right? As part of a Western diet. So we’re never really coming out of that postprandial state. So you kind of have constant stimulation of mTOR and IGF-1 and insulin and glucose and all of these, you know, pro-aging metabolic pathways.
What Mimeo is really trying to do is to activate the fasting pathways at the same time to kind of restore this balance and this homeostasis that you wouldn’t otherwise experience during a day of eating. So it’s not that we’re tamping down mTOR, we’re just also co-activating the fasting pathways to give it a little bit more balance and to provide those beneficial effects.
Cheryl McColgan (27:37.283)
Yeah.
makes sense and that’s exactly the answer I was hoping to hear. Sometimes it’s dangerous when you have a little bit of understanding of some things but not the deeper level because in my mind that kind of means like oh well maybe that would counteract the other one but yeah I was hoping that that was
Dr. Chris Rhodes (27:56.034)
Yeah, what’s funny is that usually what we hear with people who are on Mimeo, especially older men, is that it actually really helps them with their strength training. They feel stronger, they can hit PRs better. One of the reasons why our
main investor invested in us was because he was trying out Mimeo. He had a cycling trip that he was going to do with his buddies and they had run this course before and he had been like they were in a race and he took Mimeo the day of the the day of the cycling trip, set a personal record for the actual course, said like he didn’t even have the soreness afterwards, beat out all of his buddies and he was like okay cool I’m hooked and then we had
Cheryl McColgan (28:32.214)
Done.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (28:34.244)
Exactly. We had Ben Greenfield too, who was like, you know, trying it out to see whether or not he liked it and found that he gained like eight pounds of muscle during the time that he was on Mimeo. So like not only is it not preventing muscle growth, it seems to be helping athletic performance.
Cheryl McColgan (28:51.662)
Yeah, I would imagine like the anti-inflammatory part of it would be useful because, you know, possibly getting rid of some muscle soreness or just making your body feel more ready to train could be a huge benefit.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (29:02.402)
Right, and then you have the NAD element to it as well. So the nicotinamide that’s in the formulation is helping to kind of stabilize cellular energy and put you more in that, you know, that fasted state where you can generate a lot of clean energy throughout the day.
Cheryl McColgan (29:18.892)
Yeah, very cool. Well, I think I think you’ve done an amazing job of really explaining how it works and some of the mechanisms involved without going too deep into the science of it. But is there anything that we didn’t talk about yet that you really just want to share with people about MIMIO or about the science behind it or about fasting? Just anything that we haven’t touched on that could be of interest to people.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (29:40.996)
Sure, yeah, I mean, don’t think that we’ve actually listed the ingredients in the formulation.
Cheryl McColgan (29:45.23)
There we go. That would be a good idea. An idea, apparently.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (29:50.254)
Four molecules that we identified from the data set were nicotinamide, spermidine, palmitoyl ethanolamide, PEA, and oleoil ethanolamide, OEA. And all of those things are kind of combining together to help more holistically recreate this bio program of fasting, activating these complementary pathways and producing these synergistic effects that are greater than the sum of their parts. But individually, they’re also big powerhouse anti-aging molecules
So we were talking about nicotinamide, is a broad spectrum NAD plus precursor. It’s actually the thing that your body will make nicotinamide riboside and NMN and NAD from. So you kind of get all of those pathways and all those benefits just from this one starting molecule, which is great. And then NAD plus is more or less how your body or how your cells sense their energy status.
there’s this thing called the NAD plus NADH ratio. If you have more NAD plus, then that’s a signal to your cells that there’s not a lot of energy around. So we should modify our cellular metabolism, modify our DNA methylation patterns, modify our protein transcription and translation to be more of this like fasting system. So the big axis that we’re looking at there is like the NAD plus CERT system. And of course, CERTs are, CERTuins are really
associated with healthy aging and prolonged lifespan. And so that’s kind of helping to put the cell in this state where it’s like really receptive to receiving these other fasting signals from the other molecules. So helping to kind of potentiate what everybody else is doing. And below that we have spermidine. Spermidine is a really well-known autophagy activator. So that’s kind of where you’re getting this like pro-autophagy effect from
from fasting in the memetic is Bermudians coming in and helping to promote that process.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (31:52.426)
and palmitoyl ethanolamide, PEA, is a really interesting molecule. It’s involved in the endocannabinoid system. It helps to stimulate CB1, CB2 receptors. So it’s kind of like your body’s natural CBD almost. It has cognition enhancing effects. It has mood elevation effects, but then also these really powerful anti-inflammatory effects as well, especially on neuroprotection and neuroinflammation. So it also has these cool elements of pain relief to it as well.
COX1 and 2 inhibitors, so not only like your body’s natural CBD, but also like your body’s natural ibuprofen. So those are like the big effects from the PEA, and discomfort relief, know, achy joints, muscles, things like that.
Cheryl McColgan (32:28.8)
Cool.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (32:38.37)
And then finally we have oleoil ethanolamide, OEA, that is involved in the gut brain access and is actually produced by the body during prolonged periods of fasting as a way to suppress appetite. So what happens with most people when they do prolonged fasting is that they eventually stop feeling hunger. And OEA, that elevation is kind of the reason behind that. So it’s operating in gut brain access to kind of stimulate, or sorry, suppress appetite, decrease
and stimulate satiety as well. But it’s also a PPAR-alpha activator, so helping to promote lipid metabolism and fat breakdown while sparing muscle cells at the same time. So all of these four things together are, you know, having broad spectrum.
effects on your cellular system or total body system and helping to kind of like give you not only those benefits when you’re eating, but also
Cheryl McColgan (33:29.496)
Thank
Cheryl McColgan (33:34.868)
Awesome.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (33:38.69)
to enhance shorter term fasts that you might be doing and kind of make them easier, right? The hunger suppression elements of the OEA with the mood enhancement and cognitive enhancement of the PEA and the energy side from the nicotinamide can really help people get through fasting a lot easier and accelerate their benefits.
Cheryl McColgan (33:58.606)
Yeah, that’s amazing. So would you in fact then recommend people do occasional fast still when they’re using this? It just kind of like you mentioned, it makes it easier. Are there additional effects on top of what it’s already doing if you fast in addition to taking the pills?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (34:14.914)
Yeah, that’s a question. We definitely say that Mimeo can be used as a fasting mimetic or as a fasting enhancer. That’s how I use Mimeo. So I still do like one meal a day, kind of like a 24 hour fasting cycle, because that’s what I find works really well with my lifestyle. But I like to take Mimeo in the morning as a way to, you know, just really get over, get over that initial hunger hump throughout the day.
Um, so I find it really helpful there. And then if anyone’s doing a fast, that’s less than 36 hours, the MIMEO formulation was designed to mimic the benefits of a 36 hour fast. So you can kind of, you know, help to accelerate your benefits there. Like specifically autophagy is a great example. Um, you know, you don’t really kick off autophagy in a fasting timeline until at least 24 hours without food. And in some cases we’ve seen, you know, 48 hours.
72 hours is how long it takes to really get to that maximal level of autophagy within the system. So if you’re doing fasts are shorter than that, this can really help to boost your fasting benefits at the same time. And the added bonus is that the molecules themselves will be a bit more effective because like we talked about before, when you’re taking them with food, we’re kind of like balancing out head pathways, whereas when you take them with your fasting,
you’re really just helping to enhance the activation of those beneficial effects.
Cheryl McColgan (35:41.868)
Yeah, love that. mean, this is making me, obviously I’ve known about your product for a while and I test out a lot of different products, right? As part of what I do for my job. So sometimes it’s like a little bit of a, you know, just money thing, really. You got to pick and choose your battles.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (35:56.654)
yeah, that’s true. Yeah, that’s so cool. There’s so much cool stuff out there. It’s hard to choose what’s right.
Cheryl McColgan (36:02.382)
But I would say just having heard again, and I said I’d heard you interviewed before, but the way that you put it today, I’m like, okay, I feel like this is something I can’t live without. So yes, you are. Okay, well, Dr. Rhodes, I just want to thank you again so much for joining us today. If anybody does want to check out the product, I do have a link for you guys attached to my website. So tealnursh.org.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (36:10.276)
There we go, I’m doing my job.
Cheryl McColgan (36:25.994)
And yeah, can read more. I looked at it again today, you can read more about the science and just kind of about the team, Dr. Chris Rhodes and a couple other doctors on the team and some other great people. So any where, if people want to find you personally or follow the work of MIMIO or any research or anything like that, are there any additional ways they can follow you besides the website or is that really the best way?
Dr. Chris Rhodes (36:47.714)
Yeah, the website for the Mimeo information, definitely get on our newsletter. You’ll get all of the latest stuff from us and then tips and tricks specifically for me. I also have a TikTok account. It’s at thatnutritiondoctor. So if you want to watch me scream about nutrition into my bathroom mirror, that’s a great place to do it.
Cheryl McColgan (37:10.156)
Yes, I can’t wait. I’ll link that in the show notes and everybody be sure that you go follow Chris on TikTok and read all about the fun and cool stuff they’re doing over at MIMEA. So thanks again, Dr. Rose. really appreciate it.
Dr. Chris Rhodes (37:21.624)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was such a great time.
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan interviews Vitalijus, co-founder of Pulsetto, discussing the importance of sleep, stress resilience, and the role of the vagus nerve in health optimization. Vitalijus shares his personal journey into biohacking, including a 200-night sleep experiment that revealed key insights into improving sleep quality. The conversation delves into the science behind stress resilience, the vagus nerve’s function, and how devices like Pulsetto can aid in relaxation and recovery. Vitalijus emphasizes the significance of personal experimentation in health and the growing importance of mental health in today’s world.
Read more about Pulsetto and purchase with our 15% off discount here or use code HEALNOURISHGROW15.
Takeaways* Vitalijus conducted a 200-night sleep experiment to improve his sleep. * Key factors for better sleep include darkness, temperature, and minimizing disturbances. * Stress is a major factor affecting sleep quality and melatonin production. * The vagus nerve plays a crucial role in connecting the brain to internal organs. * HRV (Heart Rate Variability) is a key metric for measuring stress resilience. * Biohacking allows for personal experimentation to find what works best for individual health. * Mental health is increasingly important in managing stress and overall well-being. * Using devices like Pulsetto can help activate the vagus nerve for relaxation. * Athletes can benefit from vagus nerve stimulation for recovery and performance. * Small changes in sleep habits can lead to significant improvements over time.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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https://youtu.be/YGxZvO67bLMEpisode transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.07)
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I’m joined by Vitalius and I got the first name going pretty good. I’m not even going to attempt the last name, so I’ll let him share that. And of course you will have heard it in the bio here prior to the recording. But welcome to the show today. We’re going to talk about all things kind of Vegas nerve, what that even is, why it’s relevant to you as a person out there listening to this. And Vitalius has a big interest in sleep and kind of a past with some
things where he was super into biohacking. this is really pretty interesting. So, Vitalius, all that being said, we start by you just sharing a little bit about yourself and your background in the biohacking? And I would love to really chat about that sleep experiment you did, because that was quite impressive what you did with that.
Vitalijus (00:45.603)
Yeah, so before I created Pulsetto, am one of the co-founders of this company. I was working in corporate world and basically in the sleep industry. I was working in different countries, in different locations and I was responsible for sleep products.
So naturally, sleep topic was always somewhere near, you know, but you know, one day I decided to go deeper to this topic. I had some issues with sleep also. So it was like, I was working in sleep industry, but at the same time I was sleeping bad, you know, I was working like a crazy for 16 hours and etc. And then when I was 29, I got panic attacks and Xanax and it was terrible experience.
Cheryl McColgan (01:10.178)
Yeah.
Vitalijus (01:34.605)
that I remember that I said, okay, I need to change something. And the starting point was sleep, yeah, because I was near this field and topic and etc. So what I did basically at that moment, I just took around 70 factors, which has some kind of scientific
publications, know, and etc. 70 things. I will explain what those things mean. And I took those things I just listed. And then, you know, I started this kind of 100 night experiment, which means that I took one thing from those 70 lists. Yeah. And then three evenings in a row, I consume this thing. And I was imagining my aura at that moment, was like, what users
It was not like a scientific study, but you know I saw some trends and how it’s affecting my trends and etc So the first thing what I tested it was kiwi as a fruit Don’t ask me why but there are some scientific studies which show that if you will eat kiwi before sleep You will sleep better
Cheryl McColgan (02:22.83)
It wasn’t bad.
Vitalijus (02:39.855)
Yeah, so I ate kiwi for three evenings in a row and I just wanted to understand is it really somehow improving my like sleep, friends and etc. So this was like a starting point. So this kind of things like a 70 things I tested during 200 nights basically. It was a lot of bullshit, sort of to say a lot of
To some point my wife in the beginning looked at me very crazy, for example because I turned the bulbs to the red light bulbs in the bedroom. Then I was surrounded by some specific flowers because there are some studies about some specific flowers that are cleaning the air etc. I was consuming
caffeine, three evenings in row, huge amount of caffeine. I just wanted to see how badly it’s affecting my sleep. I was consuming alcohol for three nights in a row. I was doing a lot of supplements, a lot of food things, a lot of bedroom changes, a lot of body changes, know, and et cetera. So from those 70 things, some of them was really nonsense, but some of them was really big game changers, you know, and…
And after this experiment, I realized that, you know, how better I can sleep. You know, because before I thought that, you know, okay, my sleep is like normal, something like that, you know, I have some issues. In general, I am sleeping better. But only when I started to test, you know, myself and I saw what kind of changes can make a big difference, you know, then I realized that it’s a big gap between normal and good. From good to great, you know.
And after those 200 nights, I really understand that you can improve your sleep very much and then it’s completely affecting your productivity. It’s completely affecting your energy levels, your sharper mind, etc. So this is how I went to biohacking. After sleep, was more topics. It was stress topics, was food topics, was physical activities. But sleep was the starting point of my journey to the biohacking.
Cheryl McColgan (04:45.166)
I absolutely love that you did. That sounds like something I would do. I haven’t done it yet, but that’s very interesting. When you were doing the 200 nights of the different things and doing three nights in a row, was there any specific thing that you tried that you could see like on your aura ring that it had a really big impact on either your HRV or your REM or your deep sleep? What was the thing that you found that was like, of like, whoa, this might be the thing?
Vitalijus (05:08.059)
So it was something like five big conclusions from my side. The first, I mean, let’s start from that there are game changes and there are nice to have things. A very good example of this is that, for example, you can read on Google somewhere that, for example, you need to eat pistachios, yeah, as a nut, because in pistachios you can find melatonin and melatonin is good for the sleep and et cetera. But I calculated.
You need to eat 400 grams of Piscata, 400 grams, which is already seems impossible in order that you will accumulate around 25 % of melatonin. What you can do naturally. So for example, two hours before sleep to reduce the light.
Cheryl McColgan (05:38.766)
Cheers.
Vitalijus (05:54.477)
makes the bigger difference on melatonin than 400 grams of pistachios. So this was one of the first conclusions that there are game changers like those two hours before sleep to maintain the darkness and etc. And there are nice things like
I don’t know, flowers, kiwi and etc. but they are not changing your sleep area. And basically I’m always saying to my friends or those people who are asking about sleep, so there are five things. First of all, the bedroom must be…
Good. So it means the darkness and the cooling effect is very important. Temperature around 18, 19 degrees and I saw a lot on my data. So whenever I dropped the temperature or whenever I was sleeping in the cooler room, know, automatically let’s say the level of deep sleep was increasing, you know. The darkness of the bedroom is also very, very important. So if you have some kind of light coming from the outside, you need to, I mean…
to cover completely the first is bedroom the second is the disturbances you need to minimize the bad things or maybe you don’t need to create new things but you just need to minimize bad things so one bad thing is the light very big game changer huge game changer even now for example in winter time with my wife we have tradition one day per week we are completely dark mode completely dark mode I mean
We have candles and then some kind of this real light, I mean, no lads, no nothing. Once per week, it’s a perfect, perfect, let’s say, day for the relaxation, for the switching off your mind completely and et cetera. So this is the one disturbance, caffeine and alcohol are two other disturbance. So you can reach a lot of improvement of sleep just…
Cheryl McColgan (07:27.342)
that.
Vitalijus (07:46.587)
Yes, cutting those disturbance just if you will do just this, know, it will be huge. The third point is is stress. Because it’s a huge antagonist of melatonin, which means that if you have higher level of stress, the evening you will not produce enough melatonin and then you know, you will have issues with stress. So stress is huge topic. There are a bunch of ways to reduce the stress.
Cheryl McColgan (08:04.878)
I don’t want to stress.
Cheryl McColgan (08:12.354)
without what makes a power.
Vitalijus (08:15.291)
Baby-stir stimulation is one of the ways, you but it’s not only one way, know, you have you can meditation, can breathe, can do cold showers, you can go to sauna, there are routines, know, what you can do. The fourth, you need to have routine. You’re like a three, two, four things what you’re doing before sleep. I have my own routine, it’s like a 10, three, two, one. It means that 10 hours before sleep, three hours, two hours, and one hour before sleep.
Cheryl McColgan (08:18.702)
Bye.
Cheryl McColgan (08:22.796)
Get out!
Cheryl McColgan (08:37.442)
Thank you.
Vitalijus (08:43.099)
So for example, 10 hours before sleep, I’m not consuming alcohol, caffeine. Three hours before sleep, I’m doing some physical activity, like just no need to run a marathon, but just walking and something. Two hours before sleep, I’m trying to be in the dark mode and then cooling the temperature of the room. In my case, I have climat, so I’m just decreasing the temperature of the room to 18, 19 degrees. And then one hour before sleep, some sleep.
Cheryl McColgan (08:57.152)
Cheryl McColgan (09:06.721)
Vitalijus (09:08.411)
doesn’t matter, or you will be able sit for five minutes or you will meditate for 20 minutes. mean, something that is related to the stress reduction. So this is the fourth, you need to have a routine and the fifth, the morning, basically routine, but basically it means that you need to get the sun light. I mean, this is one of the most important things in order to, to let’s say, maintain a good balance of the circadian rhythm, etc. So those five.
Cheryl McColgan (09:22.018)
you
Vitalijus (09:35.387)
are like game changes I saw in a lot of my data because after those during those two hundred nights I started to make stacks you know I just started to combine things and I saw huge improvements in sleep quality and sleep quantity you know for example if you’re combining let’s say the dark mode with let’s say some stress management you know exercises so but at least something from this five list if you will do
Cheryl McColgan (09:42.254)
you
Vitalijus (10:05.083)
you really can improve little bit, little bit, know, and etc. Because with sleep the most important thing that you don’t need to think that you need to improve drastically. For example, if you add 15 minutes every day to your duration of sleep, just 15 minutes longer you will sleep or 15 minutes earlier you will go to sleep. In one week, it’s more than two hours. So, I mean, this is the point that you don’t need to…
Cheryl McColgan (10:10.798)
.
Vitalijus (10:31.811)
make a revolution in your life and start to do those all five things. Just one thing from this five list, what I mentioned previously, can make this kind of small change and then this small change can accumulate to the big differences.
Cheryl McColgan (10:37.774)
you
Cheryl McColgan (10:44.814)
Yeah, those are some really amazing suggestions for sleep. I think that, you know, the fact that when people do it is interesting, like having the aura or a tool like that, where you can kind of see what changes you make really affect things. agree with you. One of the biggest things for me was, and I’m at the age where I was starting to, you know, get a lot of hot flashes and be sleeping really hot. And I got the cooling mattress, like the Oolar. There’s a couple of them. There’s like eight sleep. I have an affiliation with one of them, but man, getting that coolness.
in the room, like on the bed, that improved mine amazingly. So that one I think is one of the most important.
Vitalijus (11:18.511)
But this is the big happiness of being this biohacker, which means that you will test on yourself. Now, for example, in the last year, I test a lot with CGM, with the continuous glucose monitor. mean, also, you cannot imagine how many things you can test on yourself because this is very personal. I will eat banana and you will eat banana. Our glucose spice will be totally different because it depends on our genetic, on our gut brain, know, gut microflora, you know, and etc. So,
Cheryl McColgan (11:31.118)
Mm-hmm.
Vitalijus (11:49.091)
I mean, you can test a lot of things, you know, for example, I was consuming different carbohydrates on my empty stomach. I just wanted to see how, let’s say, how it’s affecting me in the long term of the glucose. I was eating like, I don’t know, this bread.
For me personally, example, is spiking glucose to such a huge amount of level and even after two hours the spice still exists at a very high level. So for me the rice is not good and this I know only from this biohacking.
testing and experimenting with myself, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not good for you. Yeah, because maybe it’s you are totally different, you know, and etc. So this is the greatness of the biohacking that you can use the tool like a CGM or like, I don’t know, or whatever, and to see the changes in the data, you know, on your personal data. So I think this is the most, you know, amazing thing.
Cheryl McColgan (12:45.804)
Yeah, totally agree. you so you mentioned that you were working at a very stressful corporate job and you mentioned stress is one of the things for sleep. And I think before we before I hit record, we were talking about something recently that you got into more release related to stress and also, you know, with using the pulsed set of how that can affect it. So I’d love it you could share a little bit more about what you’ve been learning about the stress part. And you have a specific name for it, I think.
Vitalijus (13:11.387)
Yeah, I mean the last three and a half years I’m quite deep in this topic is a stress resilience basically. For me the stress was always like this kind of mysterious thing, you know, because everybody blames stress. Yeah, everybody. I mean you’re bad at work, it’s stress. You have illness, it’s stress, you know. Everybody blames stress, yeah, but not so many can track it, can measure it, you know, can…
Cheryl McColgan (13:18.062)
Stress resilience.
Vitalijus (13:39.803)
somehow feel it, know, and etc. And for me, I am always this kind of person, you know, that what you cannot measure, cannot improve, you know, and you cannot control, you know, so I want to somehow to, so this is my big passion, you know, I want to somehow structure this distress and etc. And it’s quite a deep topic, it’s quite a young topic, you know, if you’re going
Because for example in case of sleep you have a lot of data a lot of studies right now and etc in case of stress resilience Basically, it’s a quite a new science for us. Basically what it means that you have like us like a muscle you can build it, you know Because you can’t avoid stressful situations. It’s impossible. Yeah, it will be more and more stressful situations But if you will have stronger the stress resilience, you will recover faster. Yeah
Because as a human being we are switching on between parasympathetic nervous system, means rest and digest, and this sympathetic nervous system, means flight and flight, and we are always switching, you know. Now the problem is that we are too many times per day. If previously, let’s say, we were in majority of time in those parasympathetic rest and digest, now we know 50 times we are going from those parasympathetic to sympathetic.
I know every bad message, every bad WhatsApp message, every Instagram story, every bad driver creates some kind of let’s say urgency, some kind of bad feelings for us and etc. And then it’s a big probability that we will be in this loop and then it will become the chronic stress. And the chronic stress is very bad for us because it’s creating like inflammation.
Cheryl McColgan (15:04.663)
I love it.
Cheryl McColgan (15:20.48)
Thanks for watching!
Vitalijus (15:22.221)
oxidative damage for our body and etc. So, if you have this strong stress muscle, then you will recover, then you will switch faster to the parasympathetic nervous system. So this is very important and you can measure the stress muscle. One of the metrics of the stress muscle is HRV. So the higher the HRV, basically the stronger muscle you have. So for example, if now, let’s say very roughly,
Cheryl McColgan (15:40.504)
Thank you.
Vitalijus (15:51.611)
If you have 50 HRV as a metric, you have like an average HRV. If you have like from 50 to 70, it’s already you have like a stronger muscle than every person. If you have above 70, you’re already, let’s say on the very good level, more than 90 elite. So it means, and also very important thing that you can train. So it means that you can improve by doing some specific exercises, some specific routines, techniques.
Cheryl McColgan (16:19.406)
you
Vitalijus (16:21.177)
you can improve the HRV, you know, and by improving HRV you will build the muscle. So it means that if you will have more stress, will respond faster, you will respond, you know, and you will recover faster. So this is the science in, I don’t know, in five minutes, but it’s much deeper, you know, of course, let me just try to simplify it.
Cheryl McColgan (16:27.798)
Awesome,
Cheryl McColgan (16:43.246)
Yeah, and in relation to stress, I think one of the nice things about tools like the Pulsado, for example, and for those of you that are just listening and we’re not watching on YouTube, if you can go to the video, you could actually see what it looks like. It’s kind of just a device with some electrodes on it it’s got a button where you turn it on. So it’s very simple, but it just goes around your neck and rests on the vagus nerve. And I guess what I love about tools like this is it can be very challenging to get somebody to meditate, for example, you know, to take the time to do that.
But what you do with this device, you just turn on the app, you put it on and it kind of does it for you. So to me, it’s kind of like a no brainer for people to try this and see if it has a good effect. And so I’ll just share with you that I only recently got it. And I did notice on my aura ring that the day that I did it, I can’t remember if it was the first or the second time, but I had some really amazing sleep stats that night, like much more REM and deep sleep than normal. And also just
more solid sleep. I can’t say for 100 % certainty that it was the full set because you never know, there’s always so many factors. I really think that something like this, if you have stats from yourself previously, and then if you got really consistent with it, did it for say like 30 days, something like that, you might be able to more accurately see if this is something that’s helping you. all that being said, I would love it if you would share a little bit about what the Vegas Nervous
Vitalijus (17:47.034)
Yeah, yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (18:08.64)
nerve is and why it’s related to stress and then how does a device like this, you know, help people affect the, you know, different outcomes.
Vitalijus (18:19.343)
Yeah, I will answer this question and then I will add that for example right now we have like a new feature on our app that you can connect your Aura or Apple Watch or whatever with our device and you can get the data.
of your heart rate, your heart rate variability, of your sleep, of your stress. And then you will see in the, this is our future. You will see that, for example, after the stimulation, how the heart rate is changing, you know, et cetera. And we will play with this data to create like a very personalized protocols that, for example, if you want to improve HRV, you need to do this specific protocol of Pulse Oto Plus, some behavior changes in case of, I don’t know, sleep or other behavioral things. And now, for example, we are working
with Aura because we see from our current customers who are connected to Aura with Rosetto that sleep latency is improving. It means that how fast you’re going to sleep. And this is one the problems of the people who have like issues with sleep because they are so stressful, know, can’t, they’re racing mind, not allowing them to go fast to sleep and then they’re like a
Cheryl McColgan (19:17.23)
Mm.
Vitalijus (19:31.343)
you know, challenges or they are waking up in the middle of the night and they cannot go to sleep anymore. So, but back to the vagus nerve topic. So the vagus nerve is like one of the longest, one of the unique nerves in our body. It connects basically the brain with internal organs. The uniqueness of this nerve that it has branches in every organ. Yeah. So every organ has some kind of branch of the vagus nerve. Basically it’s not like one cable. It’s not
Cheryl McColgan (19:59.98)
Okay.
Vitalijus (20:00.699)
You need to imagine the nerve is like a cable, yeah? It’s like a network with more than 200,000 fibers that has connections to the different organs and all that. And the brain communicates with the gut, with the organs, the vagus nerve. So for example, for the brain to understand our liver is producing good, you know, and performing good, let’s say.
Cheryl McColgan (20:16.02)
you
Vitalijus (20:29.967)
the liver sends a signal via vagus nerve that let’s say all those arcs of liver is okay and then the brain sends the signal that okay if it’s okay then for example you can reduce the heart rate you know please be blood pressure please be reducing etc so it’s always communicating if you have issues with the vagus nerve or it’s not so strong let’s say or the tone is very low then you have this kind of
Cheryl McColgan (20:32.302)
you
Vitalijus (20:58.619)
brain, then you have brain fog, then you have tiredness, you have miscommunication between those brain and organs, and then you have these kinds of blood issues, IBS, and etc. So this is basically damage or dysfunctional vagus nerve. One more time, HRV is one of the metrics which represents the strength of the vagus nerve, how fast you basically can switch the parasympathetic nervous system. So vagus nerve, when you’re activating it, basically
It’s switching on this parasympathetic nervous system, is for relaxation, for digestion, for cooling down yourself and etc. We’re targeting neck because on the neck side, on both sides of the neck, you have approximately 60 % of total fibers. You remember I said that vagus nerve is around 200,000 fibers of network, yeah, of those branches and etc. 60 % of them are on the neck area. That’s why we created this kind of…
Cheryl McColgan (21:29.87)
you
Cheryl McColgan (21:35.488)
you
Cheryl McColgan (21:55.086)
I don’t know if you can hear me, but that’s why I’m in the video. Bye.
Vitalijus (21:57.381)
device, which you need to put on the neck, you need to switch on the button, it’s connected to the app, and then we creating quite deep electric signal, which goes under the muscle to the nerve level. And basically in five to seven minutes, we are activating this nerve. And when this nerve is activated, you’re switching on this parasympathetic nervous system and then all the parameters are going down. So let’s say blood pressure is decreasing a little bit, heart rate is decreasing a little bit.
Cheryl McColgan (22:04.846)
you
Cheryl McColgan (22:15.864)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (22:21.038)
you
Cheryl McColgan (22:26.498)
Thank you.
Vitalijus (22:27.675)
HRV is increasing because it’s also one of the metrics of the relaxation of those stress resilience and etc. It seems simple, yeah, electricity goes under the muscle to the nerve. Where is the biggest, let’s say, now our work and laboratory work that if you are activating different, different vagus nerve fibers are responsible for different things.
Cheryl McColgan (22:35.596)
you
Cheryl McColgan (22:44.622)
Oh, I was walking. Walking? Yeah.
you
Vitalijus (22:56.175)
from those 200,000, you know, some of the fibers are responsible for parasympathetic nervous system. Yeah, this heart rate drop and et cetera. Some of the fibers when you are switching on, they’re increasing the level of acetylcholine, very important neurotransmitter who is participating in inflammation management, you know, and migraine, for example, acetylcholine improves the level of nitric oxide, which is like a, you know, very important factor for the migraine. And that’s why
Cheryl McColgan (22:57.71)
you
Cheryl McColgan (23:15.916)
Thank you.
you
Vitalijus (23:25.093)
There are lot of studies about vagus nerve stimulation on migraines, vagus nerve stimulation and inflammation. Some of the fibers that are responsible for gut brain access and those kinds of things like IBS and etc. So different fibers have different role on your body. Now, scientifically, this is the point that with specific electric signal like a voltage, amplitude, pulse wave and pulse width, we are trying to activate different levels of the vagus nerve fiber. So this…
Cheryl McColgan (23:32.071)
Bye.
Vitalijus (23:52.827)
seems simple product, but in reality, I mean, where we want to go, we want to have like 20 different programs on the product. And whenever you have issues with IBS, you’re just switching one product. If you have issues with migraine, you’re switching other product. I mean, you don’t need to wear like 20 devices. It will be one device, but with the different signals, who will tackle different fibers for the different benefits of health.
Cheryl McColgan (24:17.838)
you
Vitalijus (24:21.243)
So this is where we are going, know, and this is our like the biggest challenges and biggest issues right now and like experiments, tests, scientific studies, you know, and et cetera.
Cheryl McColgan (24:24.738)
Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (24:31.886)
Yeah, when I was first exploring the device, I actually went on PubMed and was looking at vagus nerve stimulation and kind of what things that they were addressing with it. I definitely saw migraine come up in some of the gut things that you mentioned. But when you were doing the research for this device and now you’ve been so immersed in it now for years, what are some other than what you’ve already mentioned, what are some other conditions besides stress, migraine, and IBS that there’s good
data for or that you even have anecdotal evidence for helping a different situation.
Vitalijus (25:04.315)
Cognitive performance, a lot of data about cognitive performance, memory especially. a lot of studies with army, military guys in this topic. For example, if you have sleepless night, so no sleep and it’s like very typical situation in combat situation in army, then you have a lot of mistakes because of those cognitive issues. But then if you are doing
after sleepless nights, vagus nerve stimulation, you’re reducing mystic level very much. So this is a lot of studies in this case, blood pressure, but not in all cases, but it’s also part of the parasympathetic nervous system, because when you are in this parasympathetic, everything goes down, blood pressure goes down, the muscles are relaxing, the heart rate goes down, etc.
quite a lot of studies of blood pressure that you can really regulate the blood pressure. Now there is one device, vagus nerve stimulator, which basically can treat arthritis, inflammation-related disease. Still it’s implantable device, it’s not like we have like a not implantable device, but they already have FDA approval for arthritis, which is, I mean,
Cheryl McColgan (26:12.185)
Bye.
Thanks.
Vitalijus (26:31.141)
huge problem and etc. Migraine and cluster head pains, cluster head pains like a 10x migraine is even stronger, know, and etc. My wife, she has cluster head pains and this was the reason why I dig deeper in this topic five, six years ago, you know. So this is the topic. Now, for example, Lithuania, we are running a huge clinical study about
Cheryl McColgan (26:48.238)
you
Vitalijus (26:59.003)
the thoracic nervous system activation, we are even measuring the cortisol level of the hair, because it’s one of the best metrics to know, because there is a cortisol in the hair and you can measure before and after the hair levels of cortisol and etc. But here, still on the main topic of the thoracic nervous system. But for example, PTSD, also a lot of studies also with military, especially ex-veterans.
Cheryl McColgan (27:02.178)
you
Cheryl McColgan (27:07.862)
and then we support.
Cheryl McColgan (27:18.21)
Facebook.
Vitalijus (27:28.667)
and the people who have PTSD in general. It’s related for a sympathetic nervous system, but it’s a little bit different topic. So PTSD and vagus nerve also quite a big amount right now coming on public field.
Cheryl McColgan (27:32.782)
you
Cheryl McColgan (27:39.598)
you
Cheryl McColgan (27:46.862)
Well, that’s pretty exciting. I think, you know, on the underlying part of all of that is if you get better sleep, pretty much any condition that you have will be improved. So I think just that in and of itself is pretty amazing. When you are sharing this device with family, friends, and I know that there’s like a specific protocol and on the app, you can choose stress or pain relief or whatever. And you said there’s some other features coming, but what are your recommendations for people to use this? Like, is there,
Is there anything like, don’t use it more than three times a day, or using it once a day is optimal, or does it depend on the condition? How would you suggest that people most effectively use the device?
Vitalijus (28:24.027)
At least once per day, perfectly would be twice per day, five to seven minutes per stimulation. There are different timing things for the stimulation, but like I said, five to seven minutes is enough to activate the vagus nerve based on our studies. So you can do it, for example, before sleep, just one hour, 30 minutes before sleep, just to put like a first five, seven, and then…
or in the morning or even you have this kind of stressful before the stressful event. Yeah, we have, I don’t know, stressful meeting or you’re going on stage or you’re going to the dentistry, you know, to, to, I mean, I’m just saying my customer cases, yeah, where they are.
Cheryl McColgan (29:06.381)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (29:11.523)
Yeah, right.
Vitalijus (29:12.475)
the pool set and there are a lot of cases that for example one professional poker player is using before the game because he is full of stress so I mean in the morning and in the evening five to seven minutes the good part that it’s hands-free so you can multitask I mean
Cheryl McColgan (29:19.65)
Nice.
Vitalijus (29:32.963)
You can do whatever you want, can watch TV, can scroll the telephone, you can… I mean, at this moment I’m personally working with lot of sport players, so usually they are doing also before sleep, because they have big issues with sleep after especially games and etc. So they are using when they are in the… know, doing some procedures like…
stretching or putting the legs in the cold, they’re just using it as a tool and then scrolling and just relaxing and etc. So the same with you, before sleep, whenever you watch TV, just can five minutes to put the device and just try to wind down and relax.
Cheryl McColgan (30:18.476)
I’m glad you mentioned the sports performance because I actually was on the website prior to meeting me. did this just before our meeting, not because I thought this was going to be a stressful meeting, because I saw you say that you should be using it one to two hours after training, which I did today. And so can you share a little bit about why for athletes this is useful? So for example, you do a weight training session and then I came home and I ate my protein, ate my lunch, whatever. And then I used this, I pressed the pain.
setting on the thing because that’s what you recommended. And can you explain like why that’s useful after training, how it helps recovery?
Vitalijus (30:53.733)
So basically what now we are looking at, there are three situations when the sport people are using the Pulsator. Basically two and the third is 50-50. So before sleep, especially after the games, they have big issues. Typical sleep time is 3 a.m. After the games, it’s like a typical professional sport.
Cheryl McColgan (31:09.326)
Mmm.
Vitalijus (31:12.891)
a player due to many reasons they are going to sleep 3 a.m. So for them it’s a big factor, especially if the next day is the training already and they have just five hours of sleep or four hours of sleep. Then before the competition, but not always because they are very superstitious and they have their own routines. But especially those who have very stressful things, but it’s 50-50. Some trainers don’t want that they will
Cheryl McColgan (31:33.112)
Yeah.
Vitalijus (31:42.827)
relax so much because there’s some trainers want that they will go to the fight and flight you know
Cheryl McColgan (31:46.894)
Mm-hmm.
Vitalijus (31:48.175)
They need accelerator, they don’t need to So some trainers don’t want that they will use it for before the game or competition because they want this kind of adrenaline mode, etc. So it’s like I said, 50-50. And then the next is in the morning after very hard training because usually what we see from the sport people that HRV, one of the metrics of this recovery and etc. drops around 40%.
percent after very hard like if you have benchmark I don’t know you’re
Average base RV is like a 100. Let’s imagine that after a very hard training or competition, it drops minimum to 60, like a 40, percentage, which is huge, which means that you are not fully recovered, which means that you are not super stress resilient. It means that you are very sensitive, you know, which means that you can be affected with a lot of those mini stressors and etc. So with varying pull set up, they’re trying to decrease the level of drop. It’s not like a, it’s not a magic stick, you know, you cannot
expect that after hard training you will remain on 100 HRV. But from our data you can decrease the droplets from 40 to 20, something like that, which is still quite significant. So basically the main idea is to control the HRV because it’s really decreasing after hard physical activity.
Cheryl McColgan (33:18.988)
Yeah, that’s amazing. I love so many good use cases for this. And I love that you were able to like really share with people kind of your personal experience, because I think often when people create a device like this, it’s often out of some kind of personal thing that happened to them, right? Like you said, your wife has migraines, so that was very helpful. And you’d been under a lot of stress of not sleeping well. So I love that you were able to find something and then bring it to market that can really help everyone.
So all that being said, would love it if there are any final thoughts that you have or anything that you’d like to share that we haven’t already addressed, either in relation to biohacking or the device.
Vitalijus (33:56.685)
I’m always saying, probably I want to say two things. First of all, really experiment with yourself. I think this is the uniqueness of biohacking that you can do on yourself. You’re very personal, very unique human being. You have your own, I don’t know, glucose spike, your own sleep metrics and et cetera. So I think this is the important that you experiment.
which means that you will take care of yourself. And this is the second point that you really need to take care of yourself, especially of your mental health. For example, me personally, it was a period of time last month, my typical average week, like a working hour a week was 70 hours per week. It’s huge. So, I mean, with this kind of huge…
know, workload, it’s very, it’s very, it’s it’s very possible that you will burn out. Yeah. So I understand this, and I’m taking care of myself a lot about the stress resilience, mental health, and et cetera. Pulsetto is the part of their routine, but it’s not like a, like I said, it’s not a magic still. I’m really spending a lot of time on my mental health, you know, just to recover, to have good sleep.
good nutrition, know, I’m taking care a lot about high intensive interval training. I am doing like a, like a self awareness, know, with thoughts, you know, kind of activity is decreasing my energy levels, what kind of activity is increasing my level, energy levels. I’m doing some parasympathetic nervous system. It means I’m taking care of myself, you know? So I think this is the very, very important, doesn’t matter if you are like a mom, you know.
Cheryl McColgan (35:37.225)
Bye.
Vitalijus (35:46.519)
or you are just a random person, need to take care of your mental health because nowadays, you know, it will be more and more stressors, more epidemic, wars, other, other health situations. So mental health is becoming, you know, more and more important. So take care of your mental
Cheryl McColgan (36:06.05)
Yes, amazing advice. Thank you so much again for joining us today and sharing all your knowledge and your passion for biohacking and for creating this device. hopefully we will see more from the future about this, the studies that you’re doing. for the final thing, if anybody wants to check this out, I created a link and it’s heelnorshgrow.com forage slash pulseto. So super easy to find and
said, you go to the website. There’s a special section for athletes where Vitalius speaks about some of the benefits. Then you can also just find out all the information there. Thanks again. I really appreciate it.
Vitalijus (36:42.757)
Thanks, thank you very much.
In this episode, Dr. Lloyd Glauberman shares his journey into psychology and hypnotherapy, discussing the importance of sleep, the obesity epidemic, and introduces the concept of lifestyle intelligence. He emphasizes the need for tailored approaches to behavior change and the innovative tools available for personal development, including his app that combines storytelling and hypnosis.
Connect with Dr. Glauberman through his website and you can download his app on the Apple store with a free 30 day trial.
Watch on YouTube
https://https://youtu.be/QO3fjKBAnycDisclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Takeaways* Hypnosis is a common state we experience daily, often without realizing it. * Sleep is crucial for cognitive function and emotional regulation. * The obesity epidemic is influenced by lifestyle choices and sleep deprivation. * Lifestyle intelligence is about understanding and improving our health behaviors. * Self-esteem has shifted from real-life interactions to social media validation. * Hypnosis can be effective when tailored to individual needs. * The brain cleans itself during sleep, highlighting its importance for health. * Healthy behavior skills should be integrated into early education.
Show Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.038)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Lloyd Globberman, but he has generously said that I should call him Lloyd during the show. but just so you know, he is a doctor. Of course you heard that in his official bio, but Lloyd, I’d really love if you could share with the audience now, just in your own words, what got you into this line of work and what got you interested in helping people with their health and wellness?
Lloyd Glauberman (00:25.712)
I stumbled into the profession of psychology after I graduated from college. And at the time, in addition to being in college, I played drums in a rock and roll band. And like everybody else, I wanted to be a rock star. However, as the fact that we’re talking right now just lets everybody know that never happened. So I had to figure out something else. And it was during that time when Vietnam War was still in.
Cheryl McColgan (00:39.82)
Of course!
Cheryl McColgan (00:46.606)
you
Lloyd Glauberman (00:55.322)
in play and the only way to avoid being involved with that in an appropriate fashion was to work for the government in the health professions in some kind of way. And I stumbled across a job at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which was a psychiatric facility for residents of Harvard. So it was an up-tempo, really smart bunch of folks kind of thing. And so I walked in, off the street,
went upstairs to the person who was in charge of personnel and I said, you by chance don’t have any jobs available, do you? For people who might want to begin a career. And they said, did you graduate college? And I said, yeah, seven days ago. They said, fine. When can you start? What? do mean, when can I start? I’m not even sitting down in your office. I said, are you actually hiring me right now? She said,
Yeah, you look like you can do the job. Monday. Okay. That started my career, that bizarre set of circumstances. So I get there and I am now a psychiatric aid helping deal with and support people who have severe emotional problems, obviously, because they’ve been hospitalized. And I was getting very nice feedback from the staff, from the nurses who had been there for decades, from the psychiatric residents. said, you know, you should go into the business. Hence.
I did. I started applying to graduate school. I got married early. My wife and I moved to California and I bumbled and stumbled through the whole process and finally got my doctorate from Syracuse in 1976. Came to New York, took the licensing exam and here we are decades later and I’m still involved in the business and it’s still enjoyable even though I’m a new
Cheryl McColgan (02:48.13)
That’s an amazing story. it’s funny actually how much we have in common because people that have listened to the podcast before might know that my background is in psychology. And I did go to graduate school for psychology as well, but I did not finish, unlike you. And also wanted to be a rock star, played the saxophone for many years.
Lloyd Glauberman (03:06.132)
Well, we have a lot in common. Welcome to those who didn’t make it.
Cheryl McColgan (03:14.478)
What a wild and wonderful world of health and wellness. But I think obviously the fact that you’re still excited about it and still coming out with new things even further along in your career is really amazing. And one of the things that caught my eye when your team reached out was that you also work with hypnotherapy. And that’s something, a topic that I’ve never covered on the show before. It’s not something that I’ve ever really looked deeply into.
Lloyd Glauberman (03:35.529)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (03:42.07)
other than the old movies where the guys wavin’ the clock in front of the face or something. That is about the extent of my knowledge. So I’d love it if you would just share with me and the audience what exactly is hypnotherapy and then how have you been using it to help people change their behaviors?
Lloyd Glauberman (03:58.226)
In a variety of different ways, I’ll go through my own understanding of it. mean, hypnosis is one of those magical terms, right? I mean, when you say somebody is in hypnotherapy as opposed to psychotherapy, like I’m doing CBT, you know, I’m doing hypnosis, ooh, you get that kind of thing. People don’t realize that trance is something that we are in and out of all day long.
But because it’s so commonplace and we’re so used to it, we don’t call it hypnosis. We just call it, for instance, daydreaming. Have you ever been in a really deep daydream when somebody’s calling your name one, two, three times and you finally hear it and go, realize they had called you by your name three times and you didn’t hear it? That’s a hypnotic trance state, but it’s not called that.
Cheryl McColgan (04:50.348)
Absolutely.
Lloyd Glauberman (04:56.018)
Then, because nobody’s talking to you to go deeper and deeper, you’re just doing it on your own, right? People don’t realize how much life is in and out of trance. Another commonplace experience, you’re listening to music and suddenly a tune pops up from your high school years, one of your favorite years, right? And suddenly your mind kind of goes back in time and is beginning to relive that moment. In hypnosis,
That’s called age regression. But when you’re listening to it by yourself, you don’t call it anything, you’re just in the past and enjoying that moment of thinking about something that occurred back. All of those experiences that occur in hypnosis are wired into us and occur all the time. We’re little bits and pieces of audio voices in our head floating in and out of consciousness. And sometimes we don’t realize that it’s happening. The next thing…
We’re feeling kind of strange because we didn’t notice that we started talking to ourselves and denigrating ourselves because other things are going on. You didn’t pay much attention. All of that is a self hypnotic thing. So, so much of hypnosis is experiences that we’re having, but because it doesn’t have the aura of somebody on stage telling somebody to bark like a dog, you know what I mean? And then doing it, right? Cause we think about it, mind control, power and that kind of thing. It’s not like hypnosis.
can’t be useful, of course it can be, but it has to be understood in the context of everything else that goes on in our minds. These are skills that we all have, but we don’t know that. So the whole idea is to generate ways to introduce information to people so they will somehow store it and use it. One of the more interesting ways of doing hypnosis is called conversational hypnosis.
Cheryl McColgan (06:37.23)
Yeah.
Lloyd Glauberman (06:53.936)
It’s you’re talking to somebody and you’ll be talking at a certain pace like I’m talking right now. And then you’ll pause and speak a little bit slower and say a few words about how wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to solve that problem that you’re having. And maybe some point you got that change in pace and noticing how words get marked out. Anybody who does hypnosis really well knows how to mark out words to the listener.
in a way that tends not to bring attention to them. Because the whole idea is get around the conscious mind so you can hear things without knowing it, so you can respond in a positive way at the right times, in the right places, and with the right people. So some people who are hearing people. Yeah, yeah, we know more than we realize.
Cheryl McColgan (07:40.248)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s a description that’s not as woo woo as I would have expected. And one question to clarify something that you said earlier before we kind of move on with, you know, how you use that to help people. Cause I do have a couple of questions around that, but the thing that came to mind when you were describing how we all may have experienced this before or have this skill. it, so I think a lot of people that listen to this might be familiar with kind of flow state, like artists and
Lloyd Glauberman (07:47.058)
It’s alright.
Cheryl McColgan (08:09.898)
sports people and golfers and that kind of thing. When you were describing that, I immediately thought of flow state because you’re kind of in a subconscious state for lack of a better term. Maybe you can describe it better. Would you say that that’s similar to hypnosis or is that sort of a different phenomenon?
Lloyd Glauberman (08:28.34)
That’s a very productive trance state. You’re not in everyday consciousness. Your focus is completely different and it’s focused on one particular set of skills or data, visual data that you’re dealing with, or auditory data, right? And yeah, that’s a very productive self, not a hypnotic trance state, but in a trance state that’s productive and focused. yeah.
Athletes talk about that all the time. Musicians talk about, you disengage from the rest of the world. It’s you and what’s happening. Yeah, altered states of consciousness. That’s one type.
Cheryl McColgan (09:06.526)
Okay, so people are familiar with that as well. So I just think it helps color how they can better understand it. So, excuse me, when you use it with people, one of the things that came to mind when you were describing it, I’m sure ideally it’s probably better if you know the specific situation that the person is dealing with and maybe know some of their past, because I think you could tie in things in that kind of conversational thing. But is it also possible that say somebody’s interested in losing weight, could they use
Lloyd Glauberman (09:11.006)
Okay.
Lloyd Glauberman (09:27.753)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (09:36.246)
something that’s just geared towards that topic and have it still work for them? Or is it really just better if it’s very specific to the individual?
Lloyd Glauberman (09:43.636)
If you’re trying to help somebody lose weight, you have to kind of figure out what the structure of their experience is and what the problems are, because not everybody has the same set of issues, right? So if you can understand based on what they’re telling you, what it is, as you listen to them describe their relationship to food, when, how much, who’s around them, what might happen that’s negative if they lose weight, because a lot of times people
Don’t want people consciously want to lose weight, but they’re worried about the kinds of things that would be expected of them if they did. I mean, this may be an overgeneralization, but I’ve worked with women who the issue of what will happen if I lose all this weight and have to deal with all that attention I am now going to get. Do I have the skills to be able to essentially say no when I need to?
if somebody’s hitting on me, or am I going to allow myself to be taken advantage of because I don’t have that internal resource to be able to control my environment? So I’ll play it safe and I’ll keep the extra weight on. That’s one particular problem. Not everybody’s going to have that problem, but I’ve seen it enough to know that that can be profound. And most people aren’t aware of that.
Cheryl McColgan (11:03.384)
Yes.
No, that makes a lot of sense. kind of was in my mind, I thought it should be more tailored to the person in this situation for that reason. But then yet you do see occasionally, you know, just random things on the internet, like, you know, hypnotize yourself and lose weight in 30 days. In fact, I’ve seen this, you know, at type of ad on Instagram. And so that’s one reason why, you know, when I had the opportunity to talk to you, I really wanted to, you know, bring that out so that people don’t get to try to use tools that might not work very well for them when they could.
maybe go to a professional or have something that’s more tailored to their situation, if that makes sense.
Lloyd Glauberman (11:41.28)
Hypnosis can be very useful when the problem is kind of circumscribed in the sense it’s sitting nearby itself and you have a competent hypnotist therapist who knows how to use this and can establish rapport prior to the actual hypnotic induction taking place.
Cheryl McColgan (12:01.932)
Yeah, that makes sense. And you, so we mentioned, you know, weight loss, cause that’s a popular topic on this show. I know that you have some thoughts around the obesity epidemic and maybe kind of what’s driving it and what tools that you have that might help people with that. Can you add a little more color around, you know, just your overall thoughts on what’s going on in the world with that right now? Cause there’s a lot of new interesting things like the GLP ones on top of it and everything.
Lloyd Glauberman (12:28.062)
Well, it’s interesting, obviously. These drugs can be useful. The problem is, what’s the message being sent? The message is, your behavior is now an illness. So how is this going to spread out even farther in terms of other kinds of things, right? Right now, lifestyle is destroying the culture.
Correct? People are spending a lot of time not moving, looking at screens. They’re looking, excuse me, they’re looking at screens for longer periods of time impacting their sleep. So less sleep, less movement. Gary, that’s a petri dish for obesity because…
The one thing that’s never spoken about as much as other aspects of sleep deprivation is it amps up appetite. Why? Because the brain is tired and the brain needs food. So the brain says, hello, we’re hungry. Not really, but I have to make you believe you’re hungry because I need energy because it’s two o’clock in the morning and we’re still doing Instagram. So what are we going to do? We need something to eat.
So much of that is the reason why the obesity epidemic is as it is, coupled with inactivity. So you’ve got kids growing up now, but I mean, 12.2 million high school kids have to get to school by eight o’clock. Think about that. What time do you think the average high school kid goes to bed? Midnight? Midnight in the early years?
Cheryl McColgan (14:15.304)
I’ve always thought that was crazy.
Cheryl McColgan (14:21.154)
I know based on ours, midnight or 1.
Lloyd Glauberman (14:24.306)
Right. So the probability is they need a lot of sleep because that’s the time when they’re in a growth spurt. They need like nine hours sleep. How much did they get? Probably five hours sleep. So day in, day out, in, week out, they are chronically sleep deprived and they’re not moving very much. That’s why the obesity numbers are creeping towards 50 % by the end of the decade. Now that’s going to be impacted by these drugs because
But half the country is going to be on these drugs at that point because people are going to just assume, I don’t have to worry. I will just do this instead of taking good care of myself. all those taking good care of yourself things is just more than weight. It’s brain development. It’s all the other health related issues. So we are right now in the midst of a disaster and nobody’s doing enough to deal with those aspects of it.
Cheryl McColgan (15:20.856)
Yeah, not even, not even just that. think on top of that, guess my, cause I think for a lot of people, it can be absolutely life-changing. I’ve heard a lot of stories where people are using it in conjunction with strength training and getting their habits right. And they finally get that, you know, I guess for a lot of people, and I feel pretty fortunate. I don’t think I’ve ever had to experience this that much, but just the constant food thoughts and, and over, over exaggerated hunger from
I could sleep and all the things that you’re saying that the drug actually quiets that and then they can kind of work on some of these things a little better than they could before.
Lloyd Glauberman (15:57.076)
If that’s the case and they end up doing that, then they will need the drug less than before, because they’ll get their body into that place and they’ll say, okay, why not test the waters and see whether I can do this?
Cheryl McColgan (16:10.126)
Yeah, it’s my hope that there are doctors using it in that way and helping patients towards that kind of thing. But I know it’s a lot of it’s like you’re saying, it’s kind of just going to be this bandaid where people take it, they don’t work on changing the behaviors. And then, you know, they’re stuck with this lifelong thing that they have to use that may or may not have long-term effects for just, you know, it has been used for a while, but I think it’s still too short to really know.
if it has an impact on longevity or other things.
Lloyd Glauberman (16:42.356)
I know this from my own experience, because I’ve been on both ends of the continuum. And I had one of those shock, embarrassing moments when somebody said to me, when they hadn’t seen me in a while, this goes back, early 1970s. So I’m a couple years out of college and…
They came over for dinner in Los Angeles, where we had just moved. Hey, Lloyd, let’s have dinner. I haven’t seen you in seven years. Fine. First thing out of his mouth was, man, did you gain weight? And I’m still thinking to myself, it occurred so slowly that it was invisible. And I think a lot of people have that experience. After a while, you just look at yourself and you look at yourself and incremental changes. After a while, you don’t notice anything has happened.
Cheryl McColgan (17:14.082)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (17:18.285)
you
Lloyd Glauberman (17:35.058)
Well, that moment changed my life forever because I never wanted to hear that. So I went through a whole metamorphosis and slowly began to do all the other things that occurred in the seventies as people realized how important exercise was and diet and all those things. So I got addicted to the good things. So, but, I know what it is to be a whole lot bigger than I was supposed to be. So I understand. And then my belief is, okay, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Well, that’s the difference.
And you really want people to take more responsibility than they typically want to take. The drugs are great, but not as many people should be taking them as publicly are taking them. And you’ve got to build in healthy behavior skills into the school system. That has to be critical. Part of the way to do that is in early childhood education, elementary school education, get an educational publisher to publish a bunch of books on all the typical
stuff that kids have to learn, but use lifestyle themes as well in there. So when there’s a story about a little kid who’s walking around town, you find that, yes, and he walked three miles that day and he felt really good about doing that and use math to talk about calories. Calories are what we burn. Okay, let’s do some math problems with calories. So while you’re in your early childhood education,
Cheryl McColgan (18:49.294)
you
Lloyd Glauberman (18:59.496)
You learn about all those lifestyle areas that are important and therefore have it be woven into the fabric of the way you think and hopefully the way you behave because you learn what you’re supposed to be doing. So we need.
Cheryl McColgan (19:13.164)
Love that. You need to send Kennedy a tweet about that or something.
Lloyd Glauberman (19:16.66)
We need an educational publisher to do that, and that can be done relatively easily. Storylines with health behavior woven into the fabric so kids read about it all the time and they get used to it. All the language. Once you get the language in there, then you’re home free. Then they’ll understand.
Cheryl McColgan (19:38.092)
Yeah, that’s an amazing idea. Love that. Hopefully somebody that matters will hear that. So now that we don’t have that, unfortunately right now, so there are so many adults that have not been exposed to that. They get different messages through the media, whether it’s these GOP ones or if they just don’t feel like they have the time or the energy to focus on their habits. But I know one of the things that you help people with a lot is behavior change.
Lloyd Glauberman (19:42.238)
from.
Cheryl McColgan (20:02.418)
And so I’d love to hear how you work with adults on these things when they’re working on implementing new healthy behaviors. What are some of your best tips and ways that you get people to make these changes and make them sustainable and actually make them stick? Because that’s definitely a big area of interest of mine. So I’m always interested in hearing other ideas about that.
Lloyd Glauberman (20:22.824)
Well, lots of times people don’t have all the information that they need. So I always begin with, what’s the most important thing that you do? And people will pause and they’ll say something, right? And I’ll say, nope. The most important thing you do is sleep. And there’s a quizzical look on most people’s faces when you say that because it’s
Sleep is this magical thing, except you don’t remember any of it, except bits and pieces of a dream. But when you start talking to people and letting them know what actually happens while they sleep, they begin to understand how important it is. And I remember 2017, there was a piece of research that came out that I thought after I read what it was about, that it would go viral through the culture.
I was wrong. It didn’t happen at all. So I’m taking it upon myself to tell everybody if they missed it. And that is while you sleep, your brain cleans itself. Now think about that. I mean, the image of a dirty brain had never occurred to me before I read that research article. So what happens? You sleep. At a moment in time, the spaces between
the cells open up and cerebrospinal fluid pours into your brain and you get a dishwasher effect occur. Now, when you realize that if you don’t get enough sleep over time, it’s like a car, you don’t change the oil, gunk builds up. So when you start thinking about things like Alzheimer’s disease is
a potential outcome of something like that, you get people’s attention. When you present the idea that, if you don’t sleep well, your cognitive functioning is a little bit fuzzy, right? So your IQ isn’t going to be functioning as well. You get a little bit grouchy when you’re sleep deprived, right? And all your emotional intelligence skills, they don’t show up either, right? So you get all of these dysfunctional things happening as a consequence of this one behavior.
Lloyd Glauberman (22:50.164)
that is that essential. Then you can expand outward and talk about other things, but you need to get people’s attention as to what’s most important. You don’t get enough sleep, you’re not gonna exercise as much. You have to do these things. The core things will create the foundation for you being as bright as you can be and you being as emotionally in control as you want to be.
Cheryl McColgan (23:03.278)
Thank
Lloyd Glauberman (23:16.712)
And I’m sure everybody listening right now is thinking about a time when, whoops, I got a little bit too angry as a consequence of sleep deprivation for a while. Because we all know those things. So my job is to remind them of the basics and then reinforce all the changes that they make, albeit limited at times. Anything you do to make a change, especially when it comes to increasing your sleep. And if you can get an extra cycle every night, you have no idea how beneficial that can be.
Sleep cycle symptoms in about 45 minutes in a way.
Cheryl McColgan (23:44.919)
Yeah.
I’m so glad you brought that one up because I think it’s easy in this space to just assume that everybody knows about the glimtatic system at this point and that they need to sleep well for brain health, but not everybody knows that, just people in this space do. So I hope that people that are out there that are listening to this might be either reminded of this if you have heard it before, or I hammer on sleep all the time because also related, you said your emotional intelligence, all of those things, hunger.
signals are higher when you don’t sleep and so it affects your weight. It affects pretty much every area of your life. So that’s an amazing first practical tip is work on your sleep. Any things that you’ve learned over the years for people that struggle to get good sleep, do you think it’s mostly that they’re on their devices or doing things during the day that don’t allow them to relax at night or are there other factors?
Lloyd Glauberman (24:41.86)
I think most people who have trouble sleeping, well, having trouble sleeping and not getting enough sleep are not synonymous. Because you have some people who just get addicted to Instagram and all the other kinds of stuff that’s available to them. We used to have something called self-esteem, right? Where how you felt about yourself was basically,
dictated by the kinds of interactions that you had with other people, face to face, in one-on-ones with people, in groups, how you interacted and became an individual in the context of socially related events. Well, over time, things have changed. And this is my riff on words a little bit, so afford me a little bit of levity for the moment.
Self-esteem has now morphed into self-esteem. The experience of oneself is now the artificial creation that exists on the internet. Right? Now, I have very low self-esteem because I don’t appear on the internet at all. So I realized, Lord, you have now have low self-esteem. You can’t interact with anybody anymore because you’re not up there. Okay, what can I tell you? But that’s what’s happened.
Cheryl McColgan (26:00.163)
Yeah.
Lloyd Glauberman (26:09.724)
Self-esteem has been replaced by our experience of ourselves artificially created, the image that we have. And that has, that’s completely and totally detrimental to one’s life, but it’s addictive. People love to see things that they write out there. They love images of themselves. They love having a whole bunch of followers. That’s can be, that’s a drug. And that’s one of the reasons people are doing that kind of thing, which is not.
particularly useful to themselves in their own personal development. But once they get hooked into it, don’t, especially if they grow up with it, that’s the reality that they have. So you got high school kids right now, the image that they’ve created outside in the world is that who they think they are. Strange places.
Cheryl McColgan (26:59.148)
It really, it really is. I have this conversation quite often because we have kids that are, you know, 20 and 17 and, know, I think a lot of their beliefs about the world and to your point themselves are highly related to social media and what they see, what they think everyone else is doing all the time when they’re actually not, you know, or how much money anybody has when it’s actually not, you know, it’s just a very interesting concept.
Well, all that being said, think that you so obviously people have a variety of issues to work on these days, social media just being one. What are some of the tools that you’ve created? I think you have a really interesting thing that you just brought to light. Was it maybe psychology today? Speaking of writing, I think you’re one of those publications you’re writing for, but you introduced this idea of lifestyle intelligence. I’d love to hear more about that concept and how you use it to help people.
Lloyd Glauberman (27:58.558)
Well, we’ve been talking about that. And it’s my belief that our foundational intelligence is what we were born with. An infant never overeats or decides not to move, right, or sleep, right? Infants know exactly what they want. If you try to continue feeding an infant, they’ll push the breast away.
They understand what their needs are. Those needs are slowly undermined over time by the combination of the culture at large and homes, right? What we eat in our home. We are taught. Families are kind of like groups under a hypnotic trance.
where what you see and what you hear and all the experiences, after a while, it’s a blur and you don’t have a sense of exactly what’s going on, but something is happening and you’re being impacted by it. Like I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I had no idea what appetite actually was. But my mom loved to see me eat. Loved it. It made her feel good. I’d come home from school. She said,
Would you like a snack? I don’t know. What do you got? There’s some salami in the refrigerator. You might need to make yourself a sandwich. All right. That’s 3.30. When did I eat dinner? 6.30. Was I hungry? Of course not. Did I eat? Sure. It was dinner time. That whole thing is a trance state. So you’ve got the family trance. You have the cultural trance. By the time somebody graduates high school, they’re hypnotized by the lifestyle that they’ve had and the multiple levels of.
Right? You don’t know what’s happening. All you know is that you’re going along for the ride. Right? That’s what we have most of the time. Until you stop, pause and reflect and realize this is not a good thing for me. I got to make some changes. By the way, one of the things that I found out along the way as I was learning how to do things is that the most
Cheryl McColgan (30:03.566)
you
Cheryl McColgan (30:18.87)
you
Lloyd Glauberman (30:20.5)
powerful, interesting state of consciousness we have is that little glimmer of opening up to learning in between waking and sleep. Now, we’ve all experienced moments of being in between where get a dreamlike thing has gone on and you say, wow, this is really strange. And the next thing you know, it’s morning because you
Right? Because it doesn’t last very long, maybe a couple of minutes. That in-between state called the hypnagogic state is an incredibly powerful learning state. The problem is you’re not there for very long. So how can something be structured to do that, to help you learn? Well, I came across an interesting hypnotic induction called
Cheryl McColgan (31:09.39)
you
Lloyd Glauberman (31:20.082)
the dual induction. It’s rarely used because you need two people, two hypnotists working simultaneously with one subject, where both of them speak simultaneously.
You have this look on your face that goes, this is weird.
Cheryl McColgan (31:40.666)
Well, I’m just trying to imagine that. At first, my first thought was thinking about the poor therapist trying to talk at the same time as the other one was talking. I don’t know if I could do that.
Lloyd Glauberman (31:49.586)
Well, they scripted it. Okay. And I’m looking at this, watching this going, what in the world is going on here? But then I noticed that while I’m listening, I’m going into this strange hypnotic state. And I said to myself, this is an interesting technique to get people into that state. Is there another way to do it without needing two people? And I said to myself, figure out.
how to do this. This goes backwards, quite a ways into the eighties, where audio tape was the way people were listening to music. So I said to myself, I gotta figure out a way to put this on audio tape. So I figured the best way to do it was to use storytelling. So I figured out a way to be able to present hypnotic suggestions using my voice twice, one in each ear. So you hear stories.
Cheryl McColgan (32:44.238)
Mm.
Lloyd Glauberman (32:47.054)
And they’re interesting fairy tales too, but you don’t hear most of them because you’re floating away. But that hypnagogic state, you can keep people there. There for like 15 minutes. And while they’re there, they pick up suggestions for changing thinking, feeling, sensing and behaving. Do you like that little riff I did there? You like that?
Cheryl McColgan (33:12.014)
Yeah, like it a lot.
Lloyd Glauberman (33:13.766)
You had that look on your face and said, hey, this sounds pretty cool. OK, I can go with this.
Cheryl McColgan (33:17.846)
Yeah.
So I’m imagining, so you were able to do this on audio right left, and I’m sure there’s something interesting with the brain sides and how this works too.
Lloyd Glauberman (33:25.62)
Mm-hmm.
Lloyd Glauberman (33:29.82)
No. Well, think Chris, the stories of Chris cross halfway through. So at one point and I, I was lucky enough to be able to rent a. A microphone that was three dimensional. Okay. So that it sounded as if people were surrounding you, not coming out of the headphones. So you had that.
creating the experience of the presence of others while you’re listening. So it kind of made everything very dramatic, very impactful, as well as entertaining. So stories, I mean, we are stories. I mean, we all know that. That’s the most important thing people need to realize about their lives. First and foremost, we are the storytelling creatures because we are stories.
Cheryl McColgan (34:17.016)
Yeah.
Lloyd Glauberman (34:27.144)
From the time we were about four years old on, when our brain developed enough, we would come home and tell what we did in kindergarten, right? Or in school. That telling of a story, that’s the foundational fabric of our life. We’re storytellers. That’s who we are.
Cheryl McColgan (34:37.772)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (34:48.908)
That’s so cool. gotta I’m gonna try to go searching for this taper. You can send me a link or something, so I would love to experience this. before we. Awesome.
Lloyd Glauberman (34:57.042)
I’ll send you a bunch of stuff because I have whole bunch of these stuff for various kinds of problems in addition to the issues that we’ve been talking about.
Cheryl McColgan (35:08.8)
And so are any of these things that you just described, so we haven’t mentioned yet that you have this really cool app that’s out now. Are any of those types of things in the app or can you just describe what the app is and how people use it? Is it audio? Is it visuals? Is it habits? What’s the whole deal?
Lloyd Glauberman (35:24.67)
First, all of these, of what I just described, the audio material, is on the app. That’s the secondary part of the app because that’s what you, you basically use it as a stress management behavioral change initiator. All right, that does the heavy lifting. The rest of the app is me talking directly to you every day for three minutes, outlining.
a specific piece of taking good care of yourself, why it’s important, how to go about doing it. So we combine all the different levels of consciousness in the app. So everything is stimulated, allowing you to utilize all your capacities in ways that can help you make the changes you want to make. It’s a creative process. Have a good one.
Cheryl McColgan (36:13.102)
So it sounds like really anyone can use that with whether, cause I mean, who doesn’t need stress relief pretty much.
Lloyd Glauberman (36:20.468)
And you can test drive it for a couple of weeks and that costs you anything. So if you like it, that’s fine. If you don’t like it, okay, that’s fine too. But it’s interesting stuff. And it’s called lifestyle intelligence, LQ, because that’s what it’s all about.
Cheryl McColgan (36:25.654)
Amazing.
Cheryl McColgan (36:30.094)
And can you?
Cheryl McColgan (36:37.262)
Right. And when you were piloting this or testing it on people, can you share maybe some of the types of things that people were using it for and what kind of things they experienced after having used the app for a while? Because I think, you know, there’s so many apps nowadays for so many different things. And I think even getting people sometimes to try something, even when it’s free for a couple of weeks can be a little daunting. Oh, it’s just another like I’ve downloaded a million of these apps that are like kind of.
to not to do lists, but something like that, you know, and I get in it and I’m like, that’s not what I wanted at all, or it’s not what I expected. So I think it’d be great if you could just share kind of what they could use it for and what they might experience if they start using it.
Lloyd Glauberman (37:19.166)
Well, the audio material is, there’s a variety of areas of it. There is a weight loss program which utilizes that. There is a self-esteem program. There’s a time management program, procrastination program, breaking through creative blocks, procrastination, time management. It covers virtually all the kinds of issues that people are.
dealing with and want to improve on. Okay, and all within the structure of that, what’s called the dual induction storytelling format. By the way, there are actually three stories on every one of those tracks. The lead story about a person with a problem who meets a magical character or an interesting situation. And then from there, there’s a pause and then the two stories start up. They play for 15 minutes. Then it comes back to the lead story where you hear that
The main character has learned new thoughts, new feelings, et cetera. But it covers, there’s so many different topics that are there and available, all within this framework. And every one of these programs will relax you. So there’s the stress management automatically built into this thing. I want each of the brainwave states to be stimulated. Beta, which is the state that we’re in right now, cognitively focused learning.
Alpha, the relaxed state, the most meditative state that people go after. Theta, what we were just talking about before, the in-between magical learning state. And then delta, sleep, to maximize that. So we want all the brainwave states to be involved here. And I think people will find it interesting and took up most of my life doing this stuff, figuring out, figuring this stuff out because I didn’t begin with
Cheryl McColgan (39:13.24)
I’m sure.
Lloyd Glauberman (39:16.84)
I’ve this clue that it’s about anything that I’m talking to you about now. I mean, that just evolved over time and it was nice. I learned something. Okay, time to share.
Cheryl McColgan (39:26.894)
That’s awesome. Well, this has been so wonderful and I did learn a ton today. Can you, for kind of last words, can you share with people where they can best find you? You said you’re not too involved with all the social stuff, but where they can best find you on the internet and if they want to download the app. And of course I’ll link this in the show notes.
Lloyd Glauberman (39:49.191)
There’s lifestyleintelligencelq.com. That would be the app. I’m talking to you. I will tell you all about it. It’ll be a variation of what you and I talked about. And that’s pretty much it. And you can always communicate with me through the app if there’s any questions or stuff like that.
Cheryl McColgan (40:06.542)
Awesome. And I think you also mentioned before we started recording that you have a virtual practice as well as a practice in Manhattan. Maybe just a quick word on that.
Lloyd Glauberman (40:15.012)
I’m in my office three days a week and I do virtual the other three days. So my practice is full and I’m, yeah, I like working with people. I like talking. Actually, as you can see, I can’t shut up, Sal away.
Cheryl McColgan (40:28.398)
Amazing. Well, thank you so much. Again, I’ll link to all this in the show notes. If you have further questions or want to get in touch with Dr. Glauberman, all the information will be there. So again, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time.
Lloyd Glauberman (40:41.724)
My pleasure, I enjoyed being here. Thank you.
Updated August 1, 2026
I got the Hume Body Pod back in 2024 for one reason. I wanted to know if an at-home scale could tell me what a DEXA scan tells me, without the drive, the expense, the appointment and the radiation. So I did the obvious thing, I got DEXA scans and I compared them, side by side, to what the Hume Pod told me on the same mornings. This full Hume Body Pod review is built on those numbers, plus years of daily use as a perimenopausal woman who strength trains five days a week.
The short version is that it was more accurate than I expected for the number I care about most, my overall body fat percentage and slightly less accurate for individual body parts. Here is exactly what I found. (If you want the full podcast conversation behind this review, the transcript is tucked at the bottom of this page.)
Table of Contents-Click to Expand Quick Verdict: Hume Body Pod * Is the Hume Body Pod Accurate? My DEXA Comparison * How the Hume Body Pod Works * What the Research Says About BIA Accuracy * Where It Was Accurate and Where It Missed * Hume Body Pod vs DEXA vs Other Scales * Price and Is the Hume Body Pod Worth It * How to Get Accurate Readings * Hume Pod vs Hume Band: Which Do You Need * My Verdict * Podcast Episode and Transcript Quick Verdict: Hume Body PodMy Rating: 4.6 / 5*
Best for: Tracking your body composition trend at home between DEXA scans.
What it gets right: My whole-body fat percentage landed within about 2 points of DEXA, weight was within about 2.6 pounds and lean mass within about 3 pounds. Day-to-day it was consistent, which is what makes a trend usable.
Where it falls short: Segmental readings, especially leg fat, were off by roughly 37 percent versus DEXA. Like any bioimpedance device, single readings move with your hydration.
Price: 229 dollars (regularly 352), with an optional Hume Plus membership at 9.99 dollars a month. There is a 45-day money-back guarantee, so you can test it against your own routine and return it if the numbers do not hold up for you.
Check the current Hume Body Pod price here and use code HEALNOURISHGROW at checkout for an extra discount that stacks on their sales.
Prefer to watch? Here is my hands-on test of the Hume Body Pod, including how I ran the DEXA comparison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb4NKuS–ekMedical disclaimer: I am a NASM certified personal trainer, not a physician. Body composition tools are for general wellness tracking and are not diagnostic. Talk to your doctor before making decisions based on any at-home measurement.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Is the Hume Body Pod Accurate? My DEXA ComparisonDEXA is the reference standard most people compare consumer scales against, so that is what I used. On a DEXA morning I stepped on the Hume Pod first, then went and got scanned, so the two measurements happened within the same window on the same day. Here is how the whole-body numbers compared on one of those matched days.
| Whole-body metric | DEXA | Hume Body Pod (same morning) | Difference | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Weight | 153.9 lb | 156.5 lb | +2.6 lb | | Body fat percentage | 26.1% | 24.0% | 2.1 points lower (about 8%) | | Fat mass | 40.1 lb | 37.5 lb | 2.6 lb lower | | Lean mass | 107.7 lb | 110.7 lb | 3.0 lb higher |
For a home BIA scale, that is close. A two point body fat gap is well within what I expected and the Hume leaned slightly lean-flattering rather than wildly off. Now the honest part. When I looked at individual body parts, the picture changed, and it changed most in my legs.
| Segment (fat) | DEXA | Hume Body Pod | Difference | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Right arm fat | 2.2 lb | 2.2 lb | 0% | | Left arm fat | 2.3 lb | 2.2 lb | about 4% lower | | Trunk fat | 17.6 lb | 19.2 lb | about 9% higher | | Right leg fat | 7.8 lb | 4.9 lb | about 37% lower | | Left leg fat | 8.1 lb | 5.1 lb | about 37% lower |
My arms were nearly perfect and my legs were the weak spot. That matters if you are buying this to track limb-level fat and it matters less if, like me, you mostly want a reliable whole-body number you can watch over time. One more caveat I want to be upfront about. This is my body, an n of 1. My results do not guarantee yours. Your hydration, your build and your training will shift the numbers. That is exactly why I like that Hume offers a 45-day money-back window, because the only way to know how it reads on you is to test it on you.
How the Hume Body Pod WorksThe Hume Body Pod is a smart scale with eight electrodes, four under your feet and four in a handheld bar you hold out in front of you. It sends a tiny, harmless electrical current through your body and measures how that current is slowed down. Fat, muscle and water each resist the current differently, so the device uses that resistance, plus your height, age and sex, to estimate body fat, lean mass and more than 40 other metrics. This is called bioelectrical impedance analysis, or BIA.
The important thing to understand is that BIA does not measure fat directly. It estimates it from an equation. That is not a knock on Hume specifically, it is true of every impedance scale, and it is why the technology behind the number matters more than the marketing around it.
What the Research Says About BIA AccuracyMy single comparison lines up neatly with what the research already tells us about bioimpedance and the research is more encouraging than the internet gives it credit for. A 2023 validation study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition tested wearable BIA devices against DEXA and found that, after a systematic correction, they produced stable, reliable and accurate body composition estimates, with precision that was comparable to but a bit lower than lab equipment. The catch was that you need a few more repeat measurements than DEXA to be confident a change is real. In other words, BIA is good at trends when you measure consistently.
A 2024 study in Clinical Medicine Insights: Endocrinology and Diabetes put it even more plainly. Comparing BIA to DEXA for fat mass, the researchers found BIA accurate at the group level and less accurate for any single individual reading, but precise and reliable for tracking a person’s progress over time. That is the whole story of a scale like this. Do not obsess over one number, watch the direction it moves over time.
And before anyone treats DEXA as flawless, it is worth knowing that even DEXA has quirks at the limb level. Research in the journal Obesity on premenopausal women found DEXA itself can underestimate thigh fat and that thigh fat was the one measurement most affected by hydration. So my 37 percent leg fat gap is partly the Hume estimating and partly two different methods disagreeing in exactly the region where they are both known to be least certain.
Hume Body Pod Review: Where It Was Accurate and Where It MissedPulling my data and the research together, here is my honest read on where the Hume Body Pod earns its place and where you should not lean on it.
Trust it for: your whole-body fat percentage trend, your weight and your total lean mass, as long as you weigh in under the same conditions each time. Mine tracked within about two points of DEXA on fat percentage and stayed consistent day to day, which is what makes a trend line usable.
Be skeptical of: individual body part readings, especially legs and any single absolute number taken on a day when your hydration is off. If you weigh in dehydrated after a hard training day, or bloated, the number will move even if your actual fat did not. This is not a Hume flaw, it is physics, and it applies to every bioimpedance scale on the market.
Hume Body Pod vs DEXA vs Other ScalesTo put the Hume in context, here is how it stacks up against a clinical DEXA scan and two of the smart scales people cross-shop it with.
| Method | How it measures | Best for | Rough cost | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | DEXA scan | X-ray absorptiometry | The most accurate single snapshot and segmental detail | Around 100 to 150 dollars per scan (varies widely by region) | | Hume Body Pod | 8-electrode BIA (hands and feet) | Frequent at-home whole-body trend tracking | 229 dollars, optional 9.99/mo | | Withings Body Comp | Foot-to-foot BIA | Simple daily weigh-ins with an ecosystem app | Around 200 dollars | | InBody (clinic) | Multi-frequency BIA | Gym or clinic spot checks with a technician | Free to 50 dollars per scan |
The Hume’s edge over a foot-to-foot scale like the Withings is the handheld bar, which adds upper-body electrodes and gives it a more complete circuit than feet alone. Its edge over DEXA is not accuracy, it is access. You can step on it every morning for the price of roughly two DEXA scans.
Price and Is the Hume Body Pod Worth ItThe Hume Body Pod runs 229 dollars, down from a 352 dollar list price. The app works for free, but the fuller experience, with coaching, nutrition tracking and weekly reports, sits behind Hume Plus at 9.99 dollars a month. You do not need the subscription to get your body composition numbers, so factor it in only if you want the extra guidance.
Here is the cost math that made it make sense for me. A single DEXA scan near me runs about 150 dollars and to track a trend properly you want a scan every few months. Two or three DEXA scans a year and you are already at or past the price of the Hume, which you can step on daily. If your goal is watching your body composition move as you train and eat, the Pod pays for itself quickly as a between-scans tool. I still get an occasional DEXA to recalibrate my expectations, then let the Hume fill in the daily picture.
The reason I feel comfortable recommending you try it is the 45-day money-back guarantee. You can buy it, weigh in against your own routine for several weeks and send it back for a full refund if the readings do not hold up for you. That is about as risk-free as body composition tech gets. Use code HEALNOURISHGROW at checkout for an extra discount on top of any current sale.
How to Get Accurate ReadingsBecause BIA moves with hydration, consistency is what turns a noisy number into a useful trend. The research on wearable BIA is clear that repeat measurements under stable conditions are what let you trust a change. Here is the routine that kept my readings steady.
- Weigh in first thing in the morning, after using the bathroom and before eating or drinking.
- Measure barefoot with dry hands and feet, standing on the same surface each time.
- Keep the handheld bar at the same height and posture every reading.
- Watch the weekly and monthly averages in the app, not the single daily number.
- Do not compare a reading taken after a hard workout or a salty meal to a normal-hydration day.
Hume Pod vs Hume Band: Which Do You NeedHume makes two very different products and people mix them up constantly. The Body Pod is the scale in this review, built for body composition. The Hume Band is a wearable that tracks daily activity, sleep and recovery metrics on your wrist. They answer different questions. If you want to know what your body is made of, that is the Pod. If you want to know how your body is functioning day to day, that is the Band. I use both and wrote a full Hume Band review here, plus a Hume Band vs Whoop comparison if you are choosing a wearable.
My VerdictThe Hume Body Pod did the job I bought it for. It tracked my whole-body fat percentage within about two points of DEXA and gave me a steady daily number I could actually build a trend on. It was less accurate for my legs, and like every bioimpedance scale it moves with hydration, so I would not treat any single reading as gospel. But as a way to watch my body composition change between DEXA scans, without the appointment and the cost each time, it earned its spot on my bathroom floor. That is why it lands at 4.6 out of 5 for me.
This is my data on my body, an n of 1. The only way to know how it reads on you is to test it, and the 45-day guarantee means you can do that without real risk. Try the Hume Body Pod here and run your own comparison.
Podcast Episode and TranscriptI talked through this whole comparison on the podcast (27:24). Press play on the video above, or expand the full transcript if you would rather read it.
Read the full podcast transcript-Click to ExpandCheryl McColgan (00:01.262)
Hey everyone, welcome to the HealNursery podcast. Today I am going to discuss a product that I’ve been using for a while and this will be a little bit different of a podcast episode, although it will weave in some of the tools that I’ve used over the years to be consistent. And one of those things is the simple body scale. So I’m one of those weirdos that I weigh every single day. I just look at it as data.
And I really feel like over the years, this is what’s helped me be really consistent and not gain or lose too much weight in any one given time. I know a lot of people are not very excited about using a scale or having daily weigh-ins, but I really do think it’s a valuable tool if you’re a person that can just treat it as data and not allow whatever the number on the scale says to wreck your day, basically.
Because body weight is so dependent really on just day-to-day hydration, whether or not you had a salty meal the night before, that sort of thing. And so what I’ve noticed over the years is that literally my weight can fluctuate within a week of anywhere from a pound or almost the same every day all the way up to a five pound difference, just depending again, mainly on hydration. if you can look at it that you know,
People will often say this and it drives me nuts. I gained three pounds this week or I gained three pounds yesterday and it’s like you really didn’t. You didn’t gain three pounds of fat overnight. You probably just ate something really salty the day before. So what’s really important is more the idea of tracking your weight over time and looking for trends and having the ability to have a weekly average or something like that with your weight.
So you really just want to look at it as data and not let whatever that number is on any given day rule your world. The other reason that we need to be concerned about body weight and why just a regular scale is not all that useful is because there’s never been a really great way to track your body composition using a regular scale. So your regular scale just tells you your weight. It doesn’t tell you anything about how much percent fat you have or how much muscle you have.
Cheryl McColgan (02:22.606)
or anything like that. as I’ve been going through my little weightlifting consistency thing over the last 18 months, you know, it’s been a big goal of mine to put on more muscle. so oftentimes what has happened on the scale, and I can track this because I’ve gotten several decks of scans over time when I was making this a new goal of mine, is that, for example, in a six month period, even though I’d been working out really consistently and
doing a lot of things that should have affected my weight. If I was looking at my weight as just the number on the scale, after six months, my weight was exactly the same. It was crazy. And if you didn’t have some kind of tool like a dexter or whatever, you might’ve thought, I didn’t make any progress at all. And it would really be easy to get discouraged. But what actually happened in that amount of time is that I had put on three pounds of muscle and lost three pounds of fat at the same time.
which is really amazing. Yet with a traditional scale, all you’d get on the scale is that you were exactly the same. And so that can be really defeating. And so one of the tools, and I’ve talked about this over before, that I’ve used over the years is a body fat scale. And they use bioelectrical impedance to send electrical current through your body. And basically the way that it works is that your muscle holds a lot more water than fat. it,
the electrical signal passes through it. I always get this little confused, but it’s either it passes through it more quickly or less quickly than that. And that’s how they tell the difference. And so then using some kind of calculation and algorithm, they’re able to predict your body fat and your muscle mass based on that electrical signal. Now, when these first came out, they were not very consistent at all, but I’ve always been an early adopter and I’ve always been involved in the health and wellness space for a really long time.
So I had one of the first ones that came out, a bioelectrical impedance scale. based on, know, I think I had my first, like I had a hydrostatic, which is where you actually immerse yourself in water. And this used to be the gold standard of body composition, you get immersed in water to do your body fat. And I had had the scale at the same time. So I knew.
Cheryl McColgan (04:43.286)
that the scale was really off. But what has always been good for is trends because what it will do relatively well is track over time, are you losing fat, gaining fat, losing muscle, gaining muscle. So in that way, it was kind of useful. then it still is just acts like a regular scale and tells you you’re right every day. So the first one I had probably 15 years ago or whenever those first came out, not that great, but had it for years. And then probably about
five years ago, I’d say I invested in a new one. was a withings and it was definitely better and had some other little features that I really liked. Like it had a cardiovascular health number that was based on, there’s this other thing that it can measure with the electrical current and kind of tell you the ideas if your vessels are flowing more openly or more closed and kind of just give you some indicator of cardiovascular health. So I really liked the withings scale for that.
had that for several years. Also knew that based on DEXA that it wasn’t really very accurate in comparison what the body fat actually was. And so then I had the opportunity to try the Hume Health Field. I’m just going to show it to you. Here it is. And if you’ll notice my background in the room right now, I’m in a different spot because I’m actually out in Utah snowboarding for two months. And so I actually brought this with me. So that should tell you something. Number one, I did want to finally
do this review. But number two, like I said, it’s really important for me to stand track. have some other body composition goals this year that I’m working on and I didn’t want to go for like nine weeks without this tool. So the fact that I carried it with me in my luggage should tell you that I at least think it is pretty good. that is the, you know, this is the upshot of the review is that I do like it a lot, but I’m going to tell you kind of some of the downsides to it, the upsides to it, what I found it to be.
in relation to dexics, and had two dexes, well three dexes actually, since I’ve had this, and since I’ve been using it, but what I really wanted to do, so I could do this review for you guys, is to take my measurement with this Hume scale at home, and then immediately not changing my hydration or anything like that, going directly to my dexa and getting those numbers so that I could compare them.
Cheryl McColgan (07:03.904)
And so that’s what I’ve done. so again, here’s the scale. And so what’s different about this when it has this thing that pulls out, this is that you put your hands on it while you’re standing on this scale so that it has more points of contact with your skin to do the bioelectrical impedance. And if you go to a gym that has an in-body, that’s the same technology. And a lot of people think that in-body is pretty good. So you’re getting a technology now years later that is vastly better. It’s still not perfect, but then
Dexa is not really perfect either. When you get a Dexa scan, every different machine has a little bit different measurements. And you can tell this because when you see the document that I have where I have the Dexa scans that I was getting in Utah on the scanner there, and then the different Dexas that I was getting when I got back to Ohio, a different scanner gives you different numbers. And it’s not that your body composition.
magically change overnight, it’s that each individual machine, number one, they have two different algorithms that they use on the DEXA to calculate body fat. so it really depends on which one they use. And I learned about this because when I went to the new DEXA in Ohio, I had told him I had been getting them before and he said, Oh, do you know what formula they used? And I said, no. And he said, well, there’s two different ones and it can give you a different results. So the main thing is once you
start using a DEXA is just try to go to the same facility in the same machine every time that’ll give you the most consistency. And then know that if you go to a different one, I actually had one too at a conference a few years ago and that the machine gave me kind of some different numbers at the time too. So there’s nothing that’s going to be perfect. And so even a DEXA scanner has a margin of error every time that you’re on it. And so based on hydration, based on the margin of error, you’re getting something
like a variance of five to 10 % in any given set of readings. And so it’s just important to keep that in mind. So again, with any of these tools, what you’re looking for is change over time and you’re trying to be as consistent as possible with when you weigh. So typically what I do with either the DEXA or just when I get on the scale in the morning, I get up, first of all, I at night, you know, I have a kind of a routine of
Cheryl McColgan (09:23.66)
when I’m drinking before bed and things like that, it’s not perfect. They don’t always cut it off at the same time every night. So that can cause some variance. But basically, you know, after I go to bed, I don’t drink anything in the middle of the night ever really, unless I am just like desperately needing some for some reason. But so I’ll wake up, I’ll go to the bathroom, get on the scale. Ideally, you want to be naked because you want the variance of the clothes being involved every time. And, you know, put my hands on the electrodes and
stand on the scale, get the reading, and then I go on with my day, have my coffee, drink my morning glass of water, all that kind of good stuff. So, and it’s consistent as you be with the same time every morning. If you were really good about your hydration and you kind of really drink almost the same thing every single day, like keep track of your ounces of water, like we all should be doing better about, I’m actually working on that myself right now.
but then in cutting it off at the same time every night and then getting up at the same time every morning and getting that review on the scale, that is going to give you the most consistent results. When I can tell big variance on the scale is when I’m dehydrated or conversely, if I had a really salty meal or something like that the night before or went out the night before. So for example, dehydration, if you drink alcohol, you might notice that it dehydrates you. And so anytime we had a night where we’d go out and say, have some wine with dinner, something like that.
or we had wine with dinner at home. Actually, that’s a better example because the level of salt in the food is totally normal and everything like that. So what I would find on a night after having wine, I’d wake up and the scale would be down sometimes as much as two to three pounds just because of the dehydration caused by alcohol. Conversely, if I go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant or really any restaurant, but they use a lot more salt, there’s often ingredients that my body’s not necessarily used to.
And then what will usually happen on a night like that, I might wake up and get on the scale and my weight is off another two or three pounds in the up direction. So number one, again, no reason to panic. You didn’t magically gain three pounds of fat overnight, but what you will notice is that your scale, if you’re using one of these bio, any bioelectric impedance scale, because of the hydration levels is how it reads your body fat and your muscle mass.
Cheryl McColgan (11:40.462)
you will notice that those wildly fluctuate too. So for example, you might be going along during a week, you ate at home every night, you’re doing well, blah, blah. Everything’s the same and all the readings will be very, very similar throughout that whole week until you have one of those days where something was different and boom, you might see your muscle mass suddenly drop way down. And it’s nice because the app, and I’ll just show you this right now, pull it up so that you can see what I’m talking about, but it does a graph and you can do it by day, or month. And so,
For example, if I put it on week, you’ll see that, you know, obviously there’s some fluctuations day to day in that. And let me scan back and see if I can find any other big, well, that’s for the week ones, but the daily ones, like I said, is where you’ll see quite often some big variants. So this is why you track over a week, because you can see sometimes it’s really consistent when I’m, you know, eating at home and having level of hydration and then boom, it might pop up because I went out or something.
or levels of hydration change. So that looks like that on every single one of these. That was weight, and I’ll pop over to here to lean mass. You can see here was a big spike in lean mass. I didn’t magically gain more lean mass overnight. But you can see if you’re tracking over time, and let me pop over to the month view. So then you can see that that’s where it’s important. You want to get those trends. So you can see that my weight has been trending down over the last several months.
working on that purposely. And that gives you a glimpse of the app too. It’s really nice because it breaks it down into weight, body fat percentage, muscle mass, fat mass. It does it by each arm and each leg, just like Dexa will tell you how much you’ve gained or lost mass in each body part. so I think I’m to the point now where you can see it’s not perfect. And again, I described the Dexa, it’s not perfect either. But according to Hume, their results show that they correlate with the amount
2 % of DEXA in general. And they did some studies on that. And then I also pulled up a more recent study on bioelectrical impedance. And it just talked about the variance even in the clinical level setting of these tools. So no tools would be perfect, but I do and have found it to be very useful and useful for tracking. So what I did for this video, and if you’re listening to this on the podcast, you might want to pop over to the show notes and just take a look. I put this all.
Cheryl McColgan (14:06.102)
in a spreadsheet. You know, kind of geeky like that if you know me. Anyway, I want to just compare the readings that I got the day that I got the DEXA in the morning that I stepped on the Hume scale and compare them for you. So I’m going to attempt I’ve never done this before, but I should be able to share a window in my computer. And so if you’re watching on YouTube, you’ll be able to see that. So I’m going to share the spreadsheet.
that I created and this will be in the show notes a link to this document. So hopefully this is showing up correctly right now and that you can see it. But you’ll notice I highlighted some of things in yellow there. And what I observed is that the thing that the scale is most accurate on compared to Dexa is the lean mass. And this is actually pretty cool because that’s really what I’ve been working towards the last.
You know, going on two years now and just trying like prioritizing protein. I’ve been doing that for a couple of years before I started lifting. And then now since I have been consistently lifting for the past 18 months, this has been something I have really wanted to work on is, you know, increasing that lean mass. And it’s for all the reasons that I’ve talked about in many podcasts before just aging well, keeping up your strength, being able to do the things that you want to do daily in life. is.
absolutely improved my snowboarding ability. I noticed a pretty big difference on the mountain in my leg strength and how my legs feel after a day in the deep house. So it’s been pretty cool to experience that. But you’ll see if you look at some of these numbers that if you look at the DEXA number that I got, like for example, the right arm lean on this September DEXA was 5.6 and then the Hume said it was 6.2 and then
This was actually one of the biggest differences here. But then you’ll see the right leg, 17.5, Hume said 19. I find that the Hume in general overestimates a little bit on the lean mass and underestimates a little bit on the fat. That might be a marketing ploy, maybe just to make you feel a little better about yourself. But you know, when I calculated the percent change and I’m…
Cheryl McColgan (16:19.182)
Fairly sure that I did this right. We’re looking at anywhere between 2 % to 10 % variance. There’s one thing I noticed on the trunk fat and trunk lean on the app. For some reason, it’s not reporting the right numbers anymore. The trunk lean should be in the 50s, and one of them, it’s coming out on the Hume is like 19 in the app. So I think that’s just an app glitch. I actually did submit a ticket to the developers so that they know about that.
If you want to look at this further, have three tabs that has three different DEXAs and the results of the Hume. So you can look at that a little closer if you’re interested in this kind of thing. So I’m just going to go ahead and stop that for now. But what I observed, the trends over time are accurate. So if it was saying that I was losing body fat on the DEXA, which I did, it was also showing that I lost body fat on the Hume.
And like I said, the body parts specific ones are fairly close to what the Dexa was reading. And again, there’s always these variances, so not too worried about it. I’m more just interested in tracking these things over time. And you know, it’s the best tool that we have for an at home way to track these things right now. So even though it’s not perfect, I find it’s really useful. I’ve been enjoying it. It’s kept me more consistent. It’s definitely interesting to look at all that data each morning when I get up and
particularly now that I’ve used it for several months. Like I said, the day-to-day things, can’t really put any stock in that. The weekly trends, yes, you can see that because you’ll see, I lost a little weight or might have lost a little fat this week. But then the monthly ones are really where you’re going to see it. And that’s why I wanted to wait until, like I said, now it’s been six months that I’ve been using it because if I just use it for the first month or something, I’m not really going to be able to know if it is accurately tracking the trends because that’s just not enough data yet.
And so I think it’ll be interesting to just keep using this over time because then I can see, okay, if I get ready to do the thing that I’ve been thinking about as a goal this year, and I’m not quite ready to announce it yet, but there should be a pretty big difference in some of those numbers. And so I’ll be able to more closely track that. And if I go through with this, I will definitely do another report a few months down the road so you can see those new numbers and how.
Cheryl McColgan (18:41.9)
they changed on the Hume compared to the Dexa, because they’ll get another Dexa at the beginning and end of this process, so I can see how things went. anyway, the other thing about it is because I have ended up liking it and using it and wanted to be involved with this and use it and test it out, I did get a code with them.
And so if you go to healnourishgrow.com slash humehealth, you get an additional percentage off. And whenever it’s on sale, like right now it’s on sale. If you happen to be watching this when it first comes out, is on sale 35 % off for Valentine’s Day. Well, my code stacks on top of that. So that’s pretty awesome. And it always stacks on top of it as far as, you know, unless they change that at some point in the future. But right now, if you use my code, healnourishgrow, or just go to that link that I said, it’ll automatically put the code in. And so whatever the sale price is, you get more off on top of that.
So if you have any specific questions about it, please make sure you reach out to me or leave it in the comments below. If you came to my channel, by the way, on YouTube, because you were looking for a view for Hume Health, I hope you’ll subscribe and stay with me. I talk about all things health and wellness here. I have great guests on the podcast. We talk about all kinds of random health and wellness kind of things. And if you subscribe and support the channel, that’s really the best thing you can do to support it is subscribe.
the more popular it is, the more people find it, the more I can get good guests and share more of this kind of information with you. So I would really appreciate that. Hit the like button, all that good stuff, leave a review on iTunes. And yeah, so I hope this was helpful. I will also have in the show notes, I’m going to actually write out some of these points in an article to support this video. And there might be more details there. might link, well, for example, I’ll link, there’s a study, a screenshot.
linked in the spreadsheet that I was just showing you that is from a recent 2025 study by a Dutch group talking about dexas and their accuracy, or sorry, bioelectrical impedance scales and their accuracy. And then I’ll also probably add in there one about the dexa accuracy and some of the limitations of that. if you listen to people in this space that are really focused on muscle health, for example, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon,
Cheryl McColgan (21:01.55)
You know, none of the tools that we have right now to measure body composition are all that great. And she’s been saying that for quite a while now. So, but this is the best we have. And so if you’re a person, if you are working on body composition things, trying to lose weight, one thing I would caution if you’re trying to lose weight, you know, you want to lose fat, you don’t want to lose muscle mass. So that’s one important thing to track on this. That’s one thing that people have been struggling with when they decide to use GLP-1s is a lot of people
lose muscle mass on that. if you’re just losing weight in general, even if you’re not losing weight loss, that’s a really common thing because you have to. And this is the other thing we always talk about here, right? Prioritize protein, especially when you’re doing a fat loss day. So you want to shoot for one gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So for example, if you are, say you’re a woman who’s about average height, five foot five, something like that, and you weigh 160, but your ideal weight is 100.
30, then you’d for at least 130 grams of protein a day and you go a little above that. If also, if you are strength training on a regular basis, doing that quite a lot, you might want to go even for a little more than that or at least the high end of that range. So anytime you’re in a fat loss phase, weight loss phase, eat more protein, it helps protect your muscle mass and also lift some weights while you’re trying to lose weight. will protect your muscle mass. I suspect there’s some studies, even if you’re not lifting
quote unquote, super heavy, you’re trying to stimulate your muscles to know that you need them and you need them to stick around. So when you’re in a calorie deficit, you don’t want your body deciding to break down the muscles because you’re not being used. So anything you can do to stimulate muscle growth, muscle protein synthesis, the other thing is eating at least 30 grams of protein every single meal that you eat so that you stimulate muscle protein synthesis. anyway, again, this,
video was meant to be mainly a review, but also throwing those things in, obviously, that we always talk about here so that if you are working on fat loss, that you will not make some of the mistakes that really hurt people in their endeavors to do that. So again, hope you enjoyed this. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions about the human health scale. I’ll still be over here using it every day either way. And I would love to hear your experiences too. Have you tried it? Are you looking at getting it?
Cheryl McColgan (23:27.086)
What are your thoughts? you already have one of these kind of scales? Because like I said, this is definitely the best one I’ve ever owned up to this point. It’s a lot more consistent. It’s a lot more close in the numbers to the actual body fat and the lean mass percentages, all that kind of stuff. Again, it’s not perfect, but pretty much the best we have for at home right now. So anyway, take care and I will talk to you again soon.
Frequently Asked QuestionsIs the Hume Body Pod accurate?In my testing it was accurate for whole-body metrics and less accurate for individual body parts. My body fat percentage read within about 2 points of DEXA and weight within about 2.6 pounds, but my leg fat was off by roughly 37 percent. Research backs this pattern: bioimpedance is reliable for tracking your trend over time and less precise for any single absolute reading.
How does the Hume Body Pod work?It is an 8-electrode bioelectrical impedance (BIA) scale. Four electrodes sit under your feet and four are in a handheld bar. It passes a small, safe current through your body and uses the resistance it meets, along with your height, age and sex, to estimate body fat, lean mass and 40-plus other metrics.
Is the Hume Body Pod accurate for women?As a lean, perimenopausal woman who strength trains, my whole-body fat percentage tracked within about 2 points of DEXA, so it worked well for me for trend tracking. Because it is an n of 1, I would not promise it reads the same on you. The 45-day money-back guarantee lets you test it on your own body and return it if it does not hold up.
How much does the Hume Body Pod cost?It is 229 dollars, down from a 352 dollar list price. The app is free to use, and an optional Hume Plus membership with coaching and nutrition tracking is 9.99 dollars a month. You do not need the subscription to see your body composition numbers.
Is the Hume Body Pod worth it?If you want to track your body composition trend at home between DEXA scans, yes. Two or three DEXA scans a year cost about the same as the Pod, which you can step on daily. With a 45-day money-back guarantee you can try it risk-free and return it if it does not fit your routine.
Is Hume Health legit?Yes. Hume Health is a real company selling body composition and wearable products, and the Body Pod uses standard 8-electrode BIA technology. My own DEXA comparison confirmed its whole-body numbers were in a believable range rather than marketing fiction.
Hume Body Pod vs DEXA: how different are they?DEXA is the more accurate single snapshot, especially for individual body parts. The Hume trades some accuracy for access: you can measure every morning at home for roughly the cost of two to five DEXA scans. In my data the whole-body numbers were close and the leg-level numbers diverged.
Do you need the Hume Plus subscription?No. Your core body composition metrics work without it. Hume Plus at 9.99 dollars a month adds coaching, nutrition tracking and weekly reports, so it is only worth it if you want that extra guidance.
Hume Pod vs Hume Band: which should I get?They do different jobs. The Body Pod is a scale for body composition. The Hume Band is a wrist wearable for activity, sleep and recovery. Get the Pod to track what your body is made of, and the Band to track how it is functioning day to day.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Cheryl McColgan discusses how to stay on track with your 2025 goals, emphasizing the importance of consistency over motivation. She shares strategies for creating manageable goals, habit stacking, and balancing commitments to ensure success.
Cheryl also highlights the significance of time management, mental tricks for habit formation and the value of rewarding progress. Personal reflections and life updates provide a relatable context for her insights. I
She also shares her experiences and insights from a recent vacation, focusing on travel challenges, dietary choices, and fitness management. She discusses the importance of maintaining an active lifestyle while traveling, the balance between indulgence and health and the significance of consistency in fitness routines.
Takeaways
- Motivation can fluctuate; focus on building habits instead.
- Consistency and commitment are key to achieving goals.
- Start with small, manageable goals to avoid overwhelm.
- Habit stacking can help integrate new habits into your routine.
- Evaluate your goals to ensure they are realistic and achievable.
- Balance your commitments to avoid setting yourself up for failure.
- Investing in time-saving solutions can enhance your wellness journey.
- Sleep is crucial for recovery and overall health.
- Use mental tricks to overcome resistance to starting workouts.
- Reward yourself for progress to maintain motivation. Baggage capacity issues can disrupt travel plans.
- Consistency in diet and exercise is key to health.
- Listening to your body is crucial for injury management.
- Aging affects fitness goals and recovery time.
- Balance indulgence with healthy choices while traveling.
https://youtu.be/PJxtI424RhwEpisode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.134)
Hello everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. And also happy 2025. I don’t think I’ve gotten to officially say that even though there has been an episode out this year. Anyway, today I just wanted to chat with you about how to stay on track with your 2025 goals. A lot of people set New Year’s resolutions or even if you don’t set a strict resolution, there might be some things that you are trying to work on in the new year and
this is one of my favorite topics because I feel like everybody thinks they want to wait until they get motivated to do something. motivation waxes and wanes. And I speak to this 100 % from experience because over the years, my motivation in area of health and wellness has been lacking. But that doesn’t prevent me from doing the things I know I need to do and that I should do.
And that’s because I think motivation is really overrated. It’s more about creating your habits and then having just consistency and commitment over motivation. And that’s really what will help get you to your goals. And one of the things that I find and I haven’t been doing much coaching lately. I’m actually thinking about opening that up again. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, please get in touch and let me know. You can just email me at
info at heelnourishrow.com. But one of the things that I’ve noticed in the past, and I’ve heard many, many other coaches and people in the wellness space say this, that the thing that people kind of get hung up on the most, particularly with New Year’s resolutions, is that they try to bite off way more than they can chew. And so what happens is for maybe the first couple weeks of the year, you stick with whatever your new routine is. I’m going to eat right, I’m going to exercise four times a week, I’m going to
drink more water, all this. And so you might stay with it for a couple of weeks, but it all becomes very overwhelming. And so instead of moving forward, you just feel overwhelmed and you kind of quit altogether and not taking any of those habits where if you do some things like habit stacking, and I’ll talk more about what that is shortly, habit stacking, starting really small, making small manageable goals, taking one goal at a time. instead of
Cheryl McColgan (02:23.318)
exercise, eat different, drink water, maybe it’s just pick one of those to start with, not all at the same time, because time, time goes on. You have weeks, you know, if we’re all lucky, we have weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years of time to create these new habits. And what happens is getting the first one solidified or getting one in your routine where you’re committed and you’re, you know, doing that one again, and it becomes just a routine to you. don’t even think about it like brushing your teeth.
those are the best habits because then that goes on autopilot and then that’s the perfect time to then start another small habit that you can do over time. if your commitment and your goals have already waned, I’d like to invite you right now, know, the New Year’s a great time, of course, because it’s just kind of what’s traditional and what people are used to. But really any day, not a Monday, can be a Tuesday, can be a Wednesday, it can be a Thursday, any day, any week, any month.
is a time to start something new. And so if you’re already starting to wane on some of your New Year’s resolutions and you hadn’t given them this much thought before, maybe evaluate, did you take on too much at once? Maybe that’s really what’s preventing you from being consistent in these new habits. Or did you set a goal that’s just very unrealistic? That’s a thing too. I mean, starting to go from a diet where, say you’re eating the standard American diet, you’re eating out a lot, you’re eating a lot of fast food.
And then your goal for the new year was, well, I’m just gonna eat all whole foods. Well, that’s a very daunting task. They’re very different from one another. So it might be best to just start with, okay, most days I’m going to make better choices. And you do want it to be measurable. So for example, maybe it’s if you’re eating a lot of fast food, you might set your goal to, I’m only gonna eat fast food four days a week, if you’re at five days a week now. So starting small like that. And then do that for a week or two.
and then take it down even more and make this transition more gradual over time. Because especially with food too, if food or a different way of eating is one of your goals, if you’ve eaten a lot of highly palatable processed food, the food scientists are smart. They design the food, they engineer the food to make you want more and crave more of it. And there’s this perfect combination of salt and sugar.
Cheryl McColgan (04:42.624)
and fat and things that make it just so stimulating to your brain. It’s a big dopamine hit. And so if you go from having that every single day of the week, going to what’s going to seem in your mind, maybe bland food if you’re eating whole foods and you maybe you’re not the best or maybe you’re not used to making things at home. And so the taste difference is going to be so significantly different that not only are you going to, you’re going to lose out on some of those hits. So that’s going to make you feel not as good in making these good choices.
And it’s also just going to be such difference in taste that initially that it might be just a challenge. If you slowly over time, you’ll have a lot more success hitting that goal. And then also keep in mind kind of the 80-20 rule. So in many things, maybe it’s your diet, maybe 80 % of the time as whole foods, maybe 20%, you get some treats or have some things that are more processed 80-20 in that way. Also 80-20 in your consistency. None of this can be perfect.
100 % of the time every day of the week. And so give yourself some grace. If you make a little mistake or something didn’t go as you planned on one day, or even in one hour, the next hour, the next day, the next week is a chance to do it. The only thing I would say about that is don’t wait. Just recognize that, okay, that wasn’t the best choice I made for lunch there. I had fast food. I said I wasn’t going to do that. But now for dinner, I’m going to make a better choice. I’m going to eat more healthy food for tonight.
And then tomorrow I’ll honor my commitment to whatever that goal was for that day. So don’t let it get away from you just because one meal, one time, one week, one day, one hour you messed up, that doesn’t give you license to just ditch it all, right? So it’s okay. Just give yourself grace and then reset your intention to make it better in the next choice, in the next choice. And so in that way, if you can make those good choices about 80 % of the time,
or better, you’re going to be so much better off than where you are now. So let go of perfection, let good enough be good enough, and just move forward with your goals that way. So think that’s one way to really start thinking that will allow you some breathing room so that you can create one new habit at a time. You you can work on more than one thing at once. You’ve just, you’ve got to know yourself and you’ve got to know your level of overwhelm.
Cheryl McColgan (07:03.822)
And you’ve got to know how difficult the thing is that you are changing. So for example, if you’re rehauling your diet overall, that’s a pretty big goal that might take a lot of your decision making capacity and willpower and things like that. So that might mean that other goals need to be put on hold. As an alternative, if one of your main goals is you’re already working out three days a week and you’ve committed to do four days a week now, that’s not as big of a jump.
that’s probably going to be a relatively easy goal in terms of, you know, keeping your commitment and actually being successful with that. So taking on another goal on top of that one might not be as taxing. So not only do you want to create balance within each individual goal, you want to try to create balance within your overall goals and your life goals and also matching it to, you know, what’s realistic in your life. Maybe the reason you’ve been successful and consistent.
with working out three days a week is because that’s really what your schedule allows and what your time allows based on your other commitments. Going to that fourth day a week, it could be a case where your lifestyle or your time commitments just literally don’t allow for that. So in that case, you might be setting yourself up for failure. So it’s also interesting to note those things too. Like, yes, maybe we’d all like to work out four or five days a week in a perfect world where we have…
help with the kids and our house is clean and we don’t have to cook and our job is not stressful and we don’t have to be there very much. So that would be the perfect scenario where yes, you probably could take on that goal to exercise more days a week. But if you are like most people and you have a full-time job and you have kids at home and you manage your own house and you have to clean your house and cook and shovel the driveway, like if you can see the…
Reason the lighting in here is kind of funny today if you are watching this on video is I’m in the Midwest in Ohio, if you don’t know that already. And we had a huge amount of snow. It’s been about a week and a half ago now. And it’s been the most snow that we’ve had like since the 70s. It was kind of crazy. there’s still and it’s been so cold. So there’s still tons of snow outside. So while it is very dreary today and cloudy, whatever light there is out there is kind of bouncing around and it’s making.
Cheryl McColgan (09:19.662)
the contrast here in the recording area not look like it normally does. So anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, but to get back to the goal setting and the things that you’re doing with your diet and with your exercise, if your life is already full of a lot of commitments and a lot of time commitments, then adding more time commitment on top of that is probably not gonna be as successful.
So maybe in that sense, you look at that goal and maybe you turn it into being more effective with the time that you do have to work out. So maybe you plan better so that you can take less time in between tasks in the gym, or you can do what I recently did and we invested in a home gym in part because I was going to the gym consistently and I didn’t mind that much, but the commute is no joke. It definitely takes more time.
So it was taking me probably a total of, and I did up my days to four days a week. So every time I would go to the gym, it was taking me 20 to 25 minutes to drive there in each direction. And then just time getting over, you’re probably talking an hour out of your day that’s just wasted. Now, I tend not to waste my time in the car, I always listen to podcasts. So that’s another good tip is to kind of.
You know, there’s certain things you can multitask and that is my time whenever I am in the car to keep up to speed with the thought leaders in the health and wellness space and to listen to podcasts. And then, you know, my time when I’m working on my recovery and I’m in the sauna, I have the model. And if you haven’t checked this out before, if that’s something you’ve ever thought of doing, I mean, it is literally one of the best in the world we’ve made in our health and
I you know, one of the reasons that we wanted to do that was if you are a regular listener of the podcast, you might remember an update from December of what is this? So this is twenty five. Let me think about this December twenty three. Yeah. December twenty three where my husband had open heart surgery and three blockages replaced. And so part of the thing with sauna is it is very good for
Cheryl McColgan (11:34.954)
Heart conditions heart patients it kind of mimics exercise and not to say he is also obviously exercising too But it was just like one of those things that we could like hey if we can do this It would be great to have in the house because not always a sister with recovery But it is really good for health purposes for him and he has a very high stress job So anything that we can do to get him to relax is well worth it But anyway, if you haven’t checked that out the one that I ended up with it’s non-toxic. We have another
podcast episode about it here. I’ll put that in the show notes where we interviewed the founder of Sunlighten. And so the link is heel nourish grow slash Sunlighten. And if you go to that, you can read more about their saunas and why they are better than others on the market. And you know, more about benefits about
Cheryl McColgan (12:34.562)
more about the benefits of that and why you may want to consider it. But anyway, so doing those things that can add time and sometimes there’s an exchange of time for money, right? So like I was starting to say before, we did invest in the because it’s becoming very apparent with my husband’s work schedule that it was just going to be.
very, very difficult for him to create a schedule where he could be consistent and get in the exercise they needed to build some muscle back up after the surgery and that kind of thing. And our both our kids play high school and college sports at a very high level. And so whenever they are back home during the summer, they’re always training and they had actually wanted this, you know, something like this before. So it really made sense for our whole family.
And again, you’re trading time for money, right? If you can afford to do that. So we put in a home gym in the basement and I’ve been absolutely loving it. It has given me, like I said, four hours back to my week where I can do other things and focus on other work. So that’s been wonderful. And Peter’s been going down there. He has started using it. So that’s all incredible, incredible, and just really fortunate that we were able to do that. So if that’s a possibility in your life,
trying to save that time wherever you can so that you can put in more effort to your wellness goals, whether it’s exercise, whether it’s cooking, whether it’s meditation and relax time and recovery time, because that is so underrated and so important. know, if it’s just getting, and I say just, but even as just getting back your sleep, you know, getting up that extra hour early in the morning to drive to the gym or something like that, you might be losing out on sleep that you really, need.
not only for recovery, just for your overall health and wellbeing. Like sleep, you’ve heard me say it before, is literally one of the most important pillars of health. And so, you know, doing anything that you can to protect those things, protect your time wherever you can, it’s gonna help you reach your goals more easily too. Another thing with exercise and being more effective is to, again, multitask. So you could do things like listen to…
Cheryl McColgan (14:50.604)
Maybe take a call for work while you’re on a walking pad or having the standup desk like I used to have and I could write and slowly walk at the same time. So pairing those things up as much as you can. And then within the gym, know, number one, finding a gym if it’s possible, it’s not super busy because when machines are taken up, that definitely slows you down. Also doing things like super sets. So for example, working to opposing muscle groups, whether it’s working an upper body and a lower body muscle, or maybe it’s opposing like your biceps.
and triceps are opposing so you could work your biceps and then go right into triceps and you’re working a different muscle so you’re not wasting time resting in between. say wasting time, it’s not wasted but if you’re looking for the most time effective kind of workout, supersetting is a great way to do that. And there’s been some research recently that’s really showing that supersets don’t impact muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy gains.
So you can do separate super sets as long as you’re not getting too winded or anything like that and you’ll still get the same benefits. So that’s just some thoughts. I I’ve done one of these episodes or written in articles about this over the years about creating new habits anytime. It’s not just about, it’s about anytime you create a habit. Think about it, kind of tricks to get you into things. Another trick if you’re,
So, again, it’s not about, for me, it’s not about motivation, because I’m quite often not motivated to, especially lifting weights. You know, I’ve talked about this. It’s like, I know I need to do it. I know it’s very important, but I’ve just never loved it. I’m enjoying it more, to be honest now, but it’s just never been a thing where I’m going to be highly motivated to go lift weights. Now it’s just become something that I do because it’s a habit. It’s kind of a non-negotiable, so I don’t even think about it as much anymore. Even when I don’t want to, I just go.
And my biggest trick around that, whether it’s any kind of workout, and this over the years, this goes back to the many, many years when I was a runner, did that for 17 years, like 25 to 30 miles a week, which is why my knees are awful now and I can’t run anymore. Man, if I could get those years back, I would just lift instead. I’ve talked about that before too, but anyway, my trick for that is, is always just put on your workout clothes, or if you were going to a gym,
Cheryl McColgan (17:11.47)
say you’re so exhausted, whatever, you’re like, I only have to go there, I only have to go for five minutes, and if I’m still super tired, I can just leave. It’s like you gotta trick yourself, and as dumb as that is, it works every time. Or I’m just gonna put on my running clothes, and I’ll go outside, and I’ll walk for five minutes, and if I still feel terrible, I’m just gonna come in. I literally, in 17 years of tricking myself like that, never came in. As long as I could get out the door, then it was on, it was fine.
So just using those little mental tricks. Another thing that people like to use and that is effective for some people is to give yourself intermittent rewards for your goals and for habit changes. So for example, say you, you know, your new thing is you’re going to work out three times a week and for three weeks in a row, you hit those three days a week. Well, then maybe it’s time for a treat and that could be, you know, it’s different things for different people. And also again, based on
money, your treat could be just a long bath. Your treat could make your partner watch the children or something like that. they do it. Or maybe it’s a Starbucks drink that you don’t normally get that’s really fancy and just makes you feel indulgent. So just giving yourself some kind of intermittent reward and say your goal is something like, I’m gonna lose a hundred pounds. Well, that’s a big daunting goal, right? So,
Cheryl McColgan (19:06.926)
So what you may want to do with that is to make intermittent smaller goals to reward yourself. So say you hit the first 10 pounds, maybe it’s a new workout outfit or a new pair of pants, or after you hit 15 pounds, it’s a nice dinner out or something that just, you know, whatever it is that’s meaningful to you and that’s a reward for you. It can be monetary, can be non-monetary, it can be food related, it can be non-food related, it could be a vacation.
It could be something simple like just giving yourself an hour to read in peace. So it doesn’t have to be this grand or expensive thing, but it’s just setting yourself in the mindset that you’re going to get this reward and it’s something that you crave and look forward to. And then useful also in just giving yourself that little dopamine hit, that little reward for actually sticking to your commitments and for, you know, doing this good for yourself for creating a new habit. So that’s kind of all of the, mean, there’s
a million other things that we could talk about in relationship to this. And, you know, if you have specific questions around anything I said or want some elaboration or some other examples, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you on that or address it in a future episode. But there’s just so many things that you can do to set yourself up for success. And that’s what’s really important in the beginning, because the creating a habit is the most challenging part.
Once you’ve created it, like brushing your teeth every morning and every night, it’s like you do it without thinking. And that’s the beauty of habits. It doesn’t require motivation. It doesn’t require thought. It doesn’t require anything basically, but it just being in your routine. So for a lot of people, another little hint is for these things, whether it’s drinking water or working out, those kinds of things, put it on your calendar. Make yourself a reminder that pops up on your phone or whatever on your computer screen. If you have meetings,
or making an example like every 30 is my time to work out whatever it is just make it kind of the easiest you can so that it just is it’s almost harder to skip than it is to just do the thing and get it off your mind and get it off your to-do list right so that’s kind of all the things about on your goals again if there’s more clarification or other topics that you’d like to hear about in this let me know because
Cheryl McColgan (21:32.77)
You know, one of the things with podcasts, at least I used to be every single week and it’s just become over time. To be quite honest, it’s kind of just, it’s just depressing when you’re putting things out there and you don’t, know, if you don’t hear from people, of course everybody’s busy and not everybody has time to comment or things like that. But you know, honestly, the biggest thing that you can do to support this content, this podcast, if you’ve been enjoying the content, if you enjoy what I do,
The easiest way to support it is so simple. And it’s really to just share this, like send a link to your friend that you think that might enjoy this or send an email or a text or whatever it is, just be like, hey, I was thinking you might like this, the show or this content. And whether they do or not, whether they ever listen, it’s like that really is just helping get that energy out in the world. And then also leaving a review. If you can go to iTunes and leave a review.
It just helps more people find it. The more podcasts have reviews, the more the people are talking about it or sharing it or listening to it, it helps the algorithm ranks. Everything’s about the algorithm now. It doesn’t matter how good of content you have. If it’s not getting seen, then it becomes just, it’s out there in the ether and nobody knows about it and nobody’s benefiting from it. So it makes it more challenging. It makes it more challenging to get really good guests as well. if you’re not a super popular…
podcast, you might not get the guests that you’re interested in interviewing and then passing on that knowledge to you. So that’s really the way that you can help me and I would so much appreciate it if you would do any of those little items. And yeah, so then I’ll just give you a quick life update. For some reason, those episodes seem to do really well when they’re totally focused on that. And it’s been a while since I’ve done this. So and it does relate to habits and goals.
and staying consistent because I’ve talked about this with how to stay on track when you go on vacation, for example. So I just got back from a week, well, about nine days in Europe, snowboarding. And it’s really exciting because it was the first snowboarding of the year for me, since we don’t live.
Cheryl McColgan (23:42.734)
Utah anymore, I can’t just walk out my back door and go snowboarding. So we went for this one and this was a vacation. It’ll be a little different upcoming here because I am going to go spend some time in Utah over the winter and we’re just living and working there for a couple months. And so that will be like life as usual, but this was definitely more of a vacation. And of course, you know, being in Europe was around all the good cheese and all the good wine.
and all the good different foods that we don’t normally have. so we visited Italy, Switzerland and Austria, three of my favorite places over there to snowboard. And one unfortunate thing did happen though, and this is not related to health and wellness, other than the fact that it definitely affected my mental state was that we were in Cincinnati and we for the first time put air tags in our bags.
so we could kind of know where our boards were and stuff and I’ve been reading a lot that there’s more theft of snowboards and stuff on the mountain now and skis which is really unfortunate because you just usually go into the lodge you know when you think about it you take off your board you leave it outside and it’s like you’re always there when you come back thankfully and you don’t have think about that but apparently just the times that we’re living in it’s becoming more common for these things to get stolen.
So I decided to put air tags on the boards. And it’s also great for when we travel with them so that we can know where they are. And whether this is karma or whether this was just good that I did it this time so that we had this benefit, we’re in the plane on Cincinnati, our bags were loaded. It said it on the Delta app that the bags were on the plane. And then when we were getting on the plane, it was interesting because it was a small commuter plane to go to JFK.
And they were saying, we don’t have any more room for bags. We’ve got to figure this out, blah, blah, blah. When we were walking onto the jetway and the person taking the gate tagged bags was talking about this. So they were definitely having baggage capacity issues. Now I used to travel a ton for work and we still travel a fair amount now. So I have good status with Delta and I have priority tag on my bag, which is just not, I don’t know if they actually pay attention to this. I’m gonna say no after this experience because.
Cheryl McColgan (25:56.45)
What they did was our bags, our snowboard bags were on the plane. And you think about this, you wait all year for this. You look forward to it, you save for vacation, you think about it, it’s very exciting. And you the snowboards for us is a big component of our vacation. So they were on the plane. And then they weren’t. Because of that scenario with the bag, for whatever reason, they decided to take those off the plane and then quote unquote, expedited them. So instead of going Cincinnati and JFK, JFK to…
Zurich, sorry, I had to think about where we flew into. We just won layover and we always avoid Charles de Gaulle for that reason with snowboards because baggage goes missing there quite easily. I don’t know what it is. It’s like the black hole of the universe for baggage. But so then they took the bags off our plane and quote unquote expedited them going to Detroit and then to Amsterdam and then to Zurich. Well, lo and behold, they did not arrive in Zurich.
with us. Theoretically, they would have arrived a half an hour after we got there on this other flight. Well, somehow the bags I think they what was it they got stuck in Detroit for a little while and they never got on the plane in Detroit and we had the bag tags so we could like watch this the whole time. It’s quite entertaining if you get over the fact of them not being there. And so yeah, so anyway, four days later, we finally get our snowboards and
That was the trip. anyway, so that’s totally an aside from what I wanted to talk about with the food and the diet and those kind of things over there. And I did already. We just finally got back. So then on the way back, we had another problem where the flight, missed a connection. We had to spend overnight in JFK. So that was really fun, too. Got back a day later than we anticipated. But so I did already weigh myself since I got back. I’m not totally back to, you know, travel as a lot of things as like bloating. It’s probably extra salt from things you’re not used to.
But I got on the scale the very first morning back and I was the same as when I left. And that has been a pretty consistent thing for me over the years on vacations and I think for a couple of reasons. First reason is probably because we take very active vacations. So we generally are hiking or snowboarding or walking around the city all day. never, I mean, this is for good or for bad. I’m not really sure which.
Cheryl McColgan (28:20.174)
But we never really take a relaxing vacation. Like we don’t have beach vacations where we just down and drink margaritas and go to the spa or anything like that. It’s always a very active vacation. So I think that helps. And then the second thing is I do indulge on vacation. So for example, we had plenty of wine. Of course you’re in Italy. That’s going to be a thing. And at least for I haven’t totally given up drinking yet. So that’s still on the menu for me. I, you know, I do go debate back and forth about that because, you know, it’s definitely not good for you.
For the most part, it’s a neurotoxin. It’s carcinogenic. There’s a million negatives of alcohol for sure. But then there are the slight positives, the social aspect, the relaxation aspect, and they haven’t quite figured out, like for example, how in some countries they have this consumption of these things and they don’t seem to have the same incidence of issues with it that we do. So anyway, all that being said, we did have, so we had wine. I ate a lot.
of cheese, Switzerland is amazing for cheese and so is Italy. We ate pizza in Italy one of the times which you if you know this over the years it’s definitely morphed and I’ve always been a whole foods diet based person but strictly in ketosis these days not every single day in ketosis. I’ve definitely added a few more carbs to experiment with that in relation to lifting and I haven’t noticed a huge difference to be honest like putting
more carbs before the lifts and stuff. I haven’t been able to totally correlate that. And there’s plenty of lifters and people in the keto space that stay keto, don’t use extra carbs around their workouts and that’s totally fine. But it’s just something I’ve decided to experiment with just because my metabolic health is very good. I don’t have the same concerns as when I started keto back in the day, which is 2017. So quite a while back now. And also I just think
Even people I’ve coached that they’re getting into keto or getting started with keto, you do, I think there’s a good amount of time to be strict in the beginning so that you can truly get into ketosis so that you can adjust your body to learn how to burn fat. Because most of us have not had that experience as a fat burner. We’re just constant carbs. And so your body just knows how to burn carbs and not fat. And then the opposite can happen too over time if you’ve been
Cheryl McColgan (30:40.972)
you know, if you’d been doing keto for a long time and in ketosis for a long time, your body can kind of lose the ability to efficiently burn carbs as well. So it’s kind of good to make in and out of that a little bit to some degree. But after you’ve had that first, you know, four months or so where you’re strict, you’re definitely in ketosis, your body is fat adapted, then after that, you should occasionally, if you want to, if you don’t have a gluten,
a severe gluten intolerance or you’re not celiac disease, things like that. If you want to have a good bread on occasion, keto substitutes for bread. And I can tell you this because I’m a recipe developer too. I’ve made keto substitutes for a lot of things, but I can tell you the two things that there are no good substitute for and that is pasta and bread. The keto versions of those.
you’re just it’s never going to taste the same. It’s not going to taste 90 % as good as how it tastes 80 % as good. And so again, back to this 80 20 thing in the moderation. I think if there’s a particular food that you’re craving and it’s just amazing, for example, pizza in Italy, pizza in Italy is like, I don’t eat pizza any other time, quite honestly, because here to me, it just like makes me feel horrible and tastes gross. And it’s just not very good. but man.
having it in Italy and having a really well prepared pizza. my goodness. So all that’s to say, you know, I definitely had a lot of things that I typically wouldn’t eat. I definitely found days where I was not meeting my protein goals. It’s just you can you can do it there. But you know, part of it’s being on the mountain. Part of it is
the planning part of it is the fact that we were moving around a lot and so we were eating out every single meal. We didn’t have a place to prepare meals. So that definitely makes getting the protein goals that we have for optimizing health a little more challenging. I did bring protein bars and some protein drinks with me. But then also that’s the other thing when you’re on the mountains, like, well, do I want to add, I don’t want to add these in and then feel bad or bloated or worse by adding these things in.
Cheryl McColgan (32:54.434)
So it’s just, a balancing act and eating out over there, part of the reason it’s more expensive, for example, in Switzerland is they actually pay their servers and wait staff salaries and healthcare and things like that. So it’s more expensive. And yeah, so to get like, say you wanted to get like a meat dish, it would definitely be more expensive because typically, especially on the mountain too, the cheap things are the pizza and the pasta.
If you want to actually get one of the few meat dishes that they have, they’re probably twice as much in cost. So it was just, you know, it a balancing act of all of those things. But the thing is being consistent, that’s the whole point of this. So I don’t eat every meal like a complete crazy person when I go on vacation. I for the most part, I eat the way I normally eat here with the slight deviations of the things I mentioned more cheese than I would normally eat because the cheese is amazing and all the breakfast buffet for the in
For the most part, when you have the hotel room there, the breakfast is included and it’s not a breakfast like when you go to the Fairfield Inn or something that’s got cereal and bagels and pancakes or something like that. They have generally a meat tray, a cheese tray. They’ll almost always have scrambled eggs. They do the cute thing where they have the eggs. They have the like eight little containers for whole eggs and you put it in and you set your timer and you get the little cute.
thing that holds the egg and you tap the top and you open it up and you have your little, you know, your one little boiled egg or whatever. That’s very typical for that to be on that breakfast buffet as well. And then of course some croissants, they’re big into their sweets for breakfast, always like little cakes out there, croissants, that kind of thing. But so for the most part, I have breakfast, I’d have what I would normally have. I’d have some eggs, I’d have some of the meat, I’d have the good cheese, and I’m not counting anything or like, really worried about it, anything like that.
just eating so that I’m satiated enough to make it to my nice meal on the mountain, because that’s the other thing that they have that’s amazing. There are all these restaurants on the mountain. It is nothing like the experience of skiing in the US and the things that we have on the mountain to eat. Typically here at the top of the mountain, the very top, there will be kind of a cafeteria style restaurant. And that’s generally what you’ll find. If there is a halfway one on the mountains, it’ll be something like that.
Cheryl McColgan (35:16.646)
But over there, there’s like legitimate fine dining restaurants on the mountain and they’re just unbelievably amazing. It’s hard to want to miss out on though. So eating a breakfast that would just, you know, last long enough, nothing super big and then you go have this amazing lunch on the mountain is kind of like, you know, the other thing that might add to that is that you’re eating your probably biggest meal in the middle of the day.
and then having a lighter dinner, which is kind of something we always say to do here, but in the American culture, it’s not really what happens. Dinner is usually our biggest meal. So I think that’s kind of flip-flopping that around there too. I have something to do with it, but mainly just being consistent 80 % of the time, eating the same things I normally eat, the other 20 % eating maybe some things that are treats or that I wouldn’t normally have like we tiramisu, which is amazing. Yeah, so just like that. So just finding that balance.
But anyway, the whole point of that is, again, like I said, I did get on the scale, I did not gain anything. And you know, I have the Hume Health Scale now, so it’s heelnurserow.com slash Hume. They still have it on sale. I did a before and after, like three months of testing the scale. It’s really the best at home body fat scale I’ve ever used. And I’ve been using them now for probably 20 years. Almost as long as that technology has existed, I’ve had a bathroom scale that does that.
And for the most part, they’re just awful. They’re not very accurate at all. They don’t really track beyond broad trends. This one has been very spot on, very close to what I got the Dexa at the beginning and the end. was like literally tracked that pretty much perfectly. So I’ve been super happy with it. And it didn’t show any significant, you know, muscle loss or fat gain or anything like that. Just kind of the same weight, kind of the same stats as when I left. So
To me, that just speaks to being consistent, staying active, and that’s about it. It sounds simple, but it depends on where you are and kind of what you’re used to doing on vacation. But for me, it’s very simple and it just balances out. Just don’t overeat. Don’t excess every single meal. Have one meal a day where you have some things you wouldn’t normally have or once a day when you wouldn’t normally do it, and it should all.
Cheryl McColgan (37:33.934)
theoretically balance out, at least it usually does for me. So I would say try that. If you haven’t tried that in the past, definitely be active while you’re on vacation. Give yourself the treats, but balance that out with being reasonable. Like I gave you the example breakfast, kind of just ate like I normally do and maybe slightly less just so I have room for that good lunch. And then that’s it. So that’s kind of a life update on top of that. Still strength training. I’ve been fighting a couple of injuries.
Right before I left, I’ve been following Mike Isertel. I think I mentioned him on a previous video that I talked about lifting. And I was trying an exercise that was new to me. The week before we were leaving, stupidly, probably when you’re going to snowboard trips, not the time to try a new exercise. But I was really excited to try it because I thought, OK, I think I’m finally strong enough to do this because what it is, it’s a Smith bar, kind of like a Bulgarian split swap. you’re kind of.
your, let me think about this front foot elevated front foot elevated. And then you’re really like just only using your front leg, like not even really using the back foot for stability. I was bringing my back leg up at the same time. So really just making that step with one leg and the weight are which my Smith machine is not counter weighted. So it’s like without any weights on it, it’s 35 or 40 pounds to do that. And this is on one leg and I’d gotten up to 50 pounds.
on my Bulgarian split squats. And so I was thinking, okay, I think I’m strong enough to do this now, no problem. Because I watched them train some people, women with this exercise and none of them had any weights on the Smith bar. So, and these are all people that are pretty serious lifters. And so anyway, I was talking to my right leg was definitely easier. It’s a little stronger, although muscle wise, it appears they’re about the same now. Like the one I had the injury on the left one a couple years ago and it hit was behind.
but I’ve caught up my strength and definitely my muscle mass is the same on my left leg, but I think the strength is still a little behind. And so when I went to my left side to do it, I can’t remember if I did a couple first, but about, you know, somewhere in between, I went to step up on the next one. I was like, so that hamstring attachment, you know, right at the top of your hamstring, right where your meets your glutes. And it was thankfully, it was just a little pull. And as soon as I felt it, it was like, Ooh,
Cheryl McColgan (39:56.406)
Yeah, it still hurts once I stopped doing the movement. So I knew to just like chill out with that. So that pretty much I did do my two lower body workouts the following the week before we were leaving. I did the two lower, but I had to modify a lot and didn’t do that one again for sure, but modified a lot. And so it still was painful for the whole. But it was it took a big hike one day because the board bags were gone.
up a mountain, probably 45 minutes trail. And it was definitely sore more than usual the next day. But it wasn’t enough to stop me from doing anything, thankfully. So I caught it in time and lesson learned about that. Because the other thing that I learned was that I’ve been pressing since, well, at least since our last trip in September, from September to end of December.
I hadn’t taken any rest weeks. hadn’t deloaded. And my body was definitely feeling like towards the end of December, beginning of January, I was like, I knew I needed a break, that my body needed a break. I was like, oh, I’m just going to press through the trip because then I’m going to have 10 whole days off and I’ll be, you know, off quote unquote, when I’m hiking. But like different, like not like not weight training. And so I was just like trying to make it through. And I think also contributed to this injury that
I really needed to listen to my body. mean, gosh, 51. You would think that I would finally get that through my thick skull. I’m much better at it now, but I still have these little lapses. So lesson learned, when you’re feeling your body needs a deload, just do it. Take a little break. You need it. It’s going to only give you more strength going. It’s like a thing for me to push through that.
Cheryl McColgan (41:51.252)
that I’ve been fighting is I’ve had tendonitis in my right elbow now for started this summer it got a lot worse September October enough I went to the doctor I got PT I got dry needling I did soft on it it got a lot better but again I’m still doing my upper upper body stuff with modifications and trip because then I’ll have you know days off for it to heal
So that, it’s a little sore today because I did do upper body yesterday. I did upper and lower yesterday. because this week was kind of funky in the trip. I’m going to do it again tomorrow. And then next week I should be back to my regular schedule. But it’s a little sore. But overall, I think it is getting better. It’s not preventing me too much from doing a lot of stuff, especially now that I’m using the VersaGrips.
raising motion, you know, that you when you’re holding weights and pulling and pushing and all that stuff, it does kind of crank up that area of tendonitis of tennis elbow. so so having the VersaGrips so I can kind of like just barely like grips actually hold it on. I’ll have to squeeze the bars. And so that’s definitely been helping. In addition, I kind of ditched all focused bicep work for right now while that’s flared up because you’re still getting bicep work from a lot of other things.
So, bring it
I did have my right knee act up as well. this is and these are all the tendonitis has been a long time since so when I used to golf all the time I had that but that’s been probably 15 years since I’ve had a flare of my tennis elbow and then the knees are just on and off constantly. They’ve been I mean honestly they’ve been wonderful for probably 18 months now that I haven’t really had a problem with either one until
Cheryl McColgan (43:55.406)
just this time where I think I, like I said, I pressed it too much. And then I think probably the factor with the right one, the conditions were not great. There was not a lot of snow and I’m kind of fighting that injury in the front leg. so, and also my back leg is the one that I push with. My right leg is the one you skate with when your foot’s not in the binding. So there’s a number of factors there. I think I just tweaked it a little bit. It feels a lot better today. I again,
did work lower body yesterday too, just modified that a bit, wore my knee sleeves and did everything that didn’t hurt. And actually I felt like it kind of almost loosened it up a little bit yesterday, but man, I was in bed last night, both things were hurting pretty bad, but got up this morning and that’s all feeling better and hoping good night’s sleep, rest day today. I’m hoping I wake up tomorrow and that both are significantly better.
But yeah, so just managing that, you in the past what I probably would have done, especially if I hadn’t been already lifting now for, I don’t know what it’s been, it’s been at least a year and six months, something like that. It’s by far the longest, most consistent I’ve ever been with that. But in the past when I’d have these things crop up, I’d have an injury flare up or something, I would just stop completely. Like what, if it was a lower body injury, I wouldn’t do upper body. I wouldn’t do, I just wouldn’t do anything. I’d just stop, I’d go on my walk like that. But I would quit lifting.
And so what’s been different for me in this whole process is just really being committed to doing it for a long-term thing. Cause now I think I finally got into the age where I can’t ignore it anymore. And if I want to be healthy and strong in later years, I know this is what I need to do. So that’s really driving me. And so now it’s, I think before I always just thought I had time, you know, I have time to get, get more muscle at some other point. But now I realized, okay, I’m kind of out of time for that process. And so I’m just modifying.
and noticing things as they crop up. Again, taking more rest days if I need to, that’s totally fine. But also just balancing that with honoring this commitment. So when you have injuries and stuff, you do need to listen to your body. And again, I just messed that up pretty bad. Didn’t really.
Cheryl McColgan (46:10.87)
I just want to get to where I was, but keeping in mind that I’ve got the next two months that I want to snowboard. So if I do need to reduce my training to let this injury heal, I’m totally fine to do that. I’ve got it in my brain. Me right now, priority is to have strong days outside on the mountain and safe days because my injury is not acting up. And if,
Lifting is exacerbating that and then I’m going to just chill out. So that’s the plan. And you know, if you find all that interesting or not, I do think it’s interesting to hear with how other people deal with that stuff, because I think in particular, especially at a very high level, they’ve accessed all this technology and these things that can really help them get better more quickly. Not all of us have access to that.
And then in addition, that’s their life, right? So they’re dedicated, their recovery is dedicated, everything they do is dedicated to healing that thing. And that’s how so many of them get back to what they’re doing more quickly. Because they do have access to all this, they’re focused on their recovery, they don’t have anything else to focus on. Whereas if you’re kind of a quote unquote normal person who has an injury and you don’t have the time to do all those extra things or the money or the access to technologies like
PRP or injections or like I said, I did do the dry needling that was very helpful in this scenario for this injury. it’s, you know, find ways to balance that we can’t compare ourselves to athletes where that is their sole job and they’re 30 years younger, 20 years younger than us, that kind of thing. You know, it just takes older bodies longer to repair. It takes older bodies longer to gain muscle. I that’s just where we are now, unfortunately. And even though I’m still like
20 in my head. And I think this is where this gets me in trouble sometimes as far as wanting to amp things up and just really going for things of physical goals or this like lifting stuff and getting more into it. So just have to really remind myself of where I actually am and how while my brain might still be 20, my brain is definitely not and I’ve got to be a little bit more careful with those things. So
Cheryl McColgan (48:28.694)
So as you’re going into your goals, this is another very good reason to take it slow and to just give yourself some time to adjust and to change.
overboard with it. anyway, hope some of that was useful to you. there’s content that you want to hear more about or that you’d like to hear about, definitely shoot me an email. Put it in comments below or do put in comments. And live sharing goes a long way to help the podcast do better in the ratings. So until next time, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, rest of your day, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing and stay in touch.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Cheryl interviews Kerry Mann, who shares his transformative journey of losing 100 pounds and overcoming severe health issues through dietary changes.
Kerry discusses his struggles with depression, anxiety, and various health conditions, and how he discovered the ketogenic and later the carnivore diet, which significantly improved his mental and physical health.
Kerry also shares his documentary that aims to highlight the healing power of a proper human diet and the stories of others who have experienced similar transformations.
Find Kerry at https://healinghumanity.movie/ and @homesteadhow on social media and YouTube.
Takeaways
- Kerry lost 100 pounds and overcame depression and anxiety.
- The ketogenic diet and later carnivore, was life-changing for Kerry.
- Kerry is passionate about sharing his story through a documentary.
- He emphasizes the importance of diet in mental health.
- Kerry’s documentary features real stories of transformation and benefits of the “proper human diet.”
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/PUwAE9wIz5sEpisode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.952)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Carrie Mann and he has a really amazing story that includes a hundred pounds of weight loss and he is now working on a documentary and I just think he has a really interesting background so I was really excited to share his story with you. So welcome Carrie and if we could get started by you just sharing. First of all, don’t think I said in that like how you ended up.
losing the weight and it’s kind of a thing that is very popular right now. I think that a lot of people have heard about. So when it gets to that point, I would love to have you share how you found that and why that ended up working for you. So welcome, Carrie.
Kerry (00:42.586)
Thank you so much Cheryl, I appreciate it. Yeah, I’m down 100 pounds since my heaviest, overcame all sorts of health issues. For me, I actually, found the ketogenic diet maybe 10 or 15 years ago and it was kind of life changing for me back then. It was the only thing that had really worked for me. I had depression, I had anxiety, I was diagnosed with IBS.
I sleep apnea. I went in for a sleep study and I had to get a CPAP machine. My stomach was just always hurting. No matter what I would eat, I tried many different types of diets, low FODMAP, plant-based diet, and my stomach was always bothering me. I ended up having a couple of kidney stones a few years ago. had my gallbladder was kind of borderline and the doctor was like, you could take it out or you could leave it. And I said, I have so many stomach issues. Let’s take the gallbladder out.
And then like two years after that, I lost my appendix. It burst on the operating room table. Could have killed me. Like, thankfully I went in for the hospital. I was actually thinking I was having another kidney stone, but I went in just before they were going to do surgery on the appendix, it burst. And just had a whole bunch of health issues. I had arthritis in my foot. They said it was gout and it hurt so bad I could barely walk on it.
And then amongst all that my weight just kept going up the biggest issue for me was mental health depression and anxiety for 10 or 15 years. I tried every antidepressant anti-anxiety medicine and Just never got better for me the medication Sort of made me feel like a zombie I kind of felt numb to it But I I just didn’t feel like myself and the really deep dark depression kind of never went away
But when I found keto, which was 10 or 15 years ago, I was watching a documentary on Netflix and I learned about keto for the first time and I tried it. It was the only thing that ever touched my depression. I noticed like, I feel a little better. I feel different. It was a whoa moment. I’m like, I feel different than I have with any of this other medication. And I started losing some weight and I probably lost more weight on a
Kerry (02:54.106)
decent ketogenic diet than I have doing any other sort of dieting my entire life and I’ve literally tried every diet. I just couldn’t maintain it with keto. I remember at one point I lost about 60 pounds and my wife did too and I started exercising and we’re feeling so good. We have a picture of my wife and myself and I remember saying, I will never gain this weight back. Like I’ve figured it out now. And I think it was like three or four months later I gained all the weight back and then some.
I would do keto and then I would try to go back to eating in moderation which for me is like moderating an addiction to carbohydrates and I could never do it and I would end up gaining the weight back but long story short I found carnivore diet which is sounds crazy I know it sounded crazy to me it sounds crazy to a lot of people really what it is is just a very strict ketogenic diet I heard about it from a YouTube video from this guy he said I’m gonna do this carnivore diet for 90 days
and my wife and I were watching him on YouTube and I’m like that’s crazy like you can’t eat only meat you’re gonna have a heart attack you’re gonna clog your arteries
But on the flip side, the guy’s story, he was overweight. He had depression. He had IBS. He had all of the issues that I had. And I knew when he was talking about it, I knew the science of a ketogenic diet. I’m like, that will work. That’s just a strict ketogenic diet, but there’s no way you could just eat meat and sustain it. long story short, I noticed that the video was two years old on YouTube. And so I was watching with my wife. said kind of cynically, I’m like, there’s no way this guy is still eating meat. Like let’s fast forward. Let’s go watch his most
most recent video and I did that you couldn’t even recognize him he lost all of his weight he had a big smile on his face he was talking like his IBS was gone his mood had improved his depression had gone away and that was really what opened my eyes I still in my brain I’m like this guy’s an outlier he’s crazy that’s not gonna work for everyone and then I did a ton of research I found Dr. Ken Berry on YouTube
Kerry (04:56.928)
Talking about carnivore diet. I probably watched a thousand of his videos and Then I found dr. Philip Ovedia who’s a heart surgeon that’s been eating carnivore for about ten years He’s performed like 4,000 heart surgeries. I’m like, wow a heart surgeons doing carnivore and then I found Dr. Anthony Chaffee who’s a neurosurgeon. He’s literally done brain surgery on people I heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan and he had done the lion diet, which is a stricter version of carnivore
and he said he was off all of his antidepressant medication and he stopped snoring the first week and I was snoring and I was on antidepressant medications and I’m like all of these really smart people I’m like I shouldn’t do carnivore because these smart people are doing it but it is worth further investigation it would be foolish of me to just be like that’s just crazy I can’t do it when all these other people are doing it and
one other thing I forgot to mention. The biggest issue besides my depression was about seven years ago. I was at home and I got really dizzy. I stood up and my face was numb. My fingers were tingling. I was confused. My wife was asking me what was going on. I couldn’t tell her what was happening. She called 911.
and I spent the next five days in the stroke unit. had a TIA mini stroke in my late 30s and they did all these tests on me. Thankfully, I had a couple of symptoms that lasted a while like vertigo and numbness and I went to physical therapy for that, but it wasn’t like a full blown stroke. So I didn’t have anything like permanent paralysis, but they did all these tests. They’re like, you’re 37. Like, why do you have all of these health issues? What’s wrong with you? And they tested my heart and they said you have
congestive heart failure. Your ejection fraction is 44. Your heart, what that means is for those that don’t know, your heart doesn’t keep up with the needs of your body. It’s not pumping enough blood. That’s why you’re getting fatigued and tired. They said it’s probably a downstream effect of my sleep apnea. That puts a lot of pressure on the heart. It probably didn’t help that I was a hundred pounds heavier than I should have been. That puts a lot of extra pressure on the heart too. So all of those things were what was happening.
Kerry (07:07.576)
So when I saw Dr. Ovedia, a heart surgeon, that was one of my biggest concerns. like, I can’t, I can’t eat meat. Even after seeing Dr. Barry and some of these other ones, that’s going to clog my arteries. That’s going to give me a heart attack. And then I heard Dr. Philip Ovedia talking about it. And I really started digging into some more research around.
the heart and cholesterol and a lot of stuff that I have learned we have been misled on that even like major institutions have reversed but sort of the mainstream narrative is you eat meat you clog your arteries There’s a lot of misconceptions there. So long story short or maybe a little too long. Sorry. I tend to rant a little I Decided I what else do I have to lose? I’m I’m so sick. I have all of these issues I said I’m gonna just do an elimination diet. I didn’t tell myself I’m gonna eat meat only I said I’m gonna
Cheryl McColgan (07:41.988)
Bye.
Kerry (07:54.722)
I’m just gonna eat meat. Like that was all that was left. Some people would argue, what about vegetables? And I actually did that for about a year. I did a strict ketogenic plant-based diet. I had just a tiny bit of protein, but it was salad for lunch, salad for dinner, all low carb. It didn’t help me for a year. I still had IBS. I still had depression. And now everybody’s different, so I’m not saying this forever.
But for me that did not help me So yeah, I decided I’m gonna do this elimination diet for 30 days. I’m gonna do carnivore diet I went out I went shopping I bought a bunch of meat and I started from there
Cheryl McColgan (08:36.654)
So you’d said you’d found keto a long time ago and that it helped with your depression, but then you’d kind of go off of it and then kind of go back to eating in moderation. What do you think it is about now having gone to the carnivore diet that you’re able to stay with that? Is it just the effects are so much greater that you feel so good that you don’t want to mess it up or is it like…
keto is almost like the training wheels for a more restrictive diet? Or do you have any sense of why you’re able now to stay on this better than you were on keto? Because you could argue that, know, carnivore is even more strict than keto. So why is it that you’re able to stay with this one, do you think?
Kerry (09:20.086)
Yeah, that is a wonderful question. I’m really glad you asked that because it was an epiphany I had a while in. So when I started this carnivore friends, family, my wife, they’re like, here he goes again. This is the 47th diet, but this is the real one now, right? This bad crazy thing he’s going to do is working.
Cheryl McColgan (09:32.676)
You
Kerry (09:39.268)
The difference for me from keto to carnivore was I was always trying to moderate an addiction. When I started doing carnivore, I realized I am addicted to carbohydrates. I’m addicted to sugar.
and I can’t moderate them at all. And I would do it many times, would do keto really, really strict, like 20 carbs or less a day. And then every now and then I’ll say, I’m just gonna have a couple raspberries. I count them all out and make sure like the carbohydrates were low and all that stuff every single time. It was just like, I’d get a little bit of that.
I since learned like, you know, even if you eat things that don’t have sugar in them, if they have carbohydrates in them, they break down in the blood as glucose. And if something breaks down in my blood as glucose, half an hour later, I’m like, I need more of that. I need more of that. And I look at it as more of an addiction for me in particular. I’m just speaking for myself because everyone’s different, but it’s like, if I was addicted to cocaine or alcohol,
I would never do that and then, it’s Saturday, I’m gonna have a little beer now. I’m gonna have a little cocaine because I did good all week. That was the biggest difference for me. And I guess the second part real quick was…
all of the other diets I did and I did all of them. literally did all of them. Keto was the best by far the closest but counting calories, Weight Watchers, all of those things. They always felt forced. They always felt like I just got to get through this. I’m going to lose 30 pounds and then I can go back to moderation. I could go back to doing this. When I started doing carnivore, it felt forced for maybe two or three weeks until I adapted. And then it was like a switch went off and something changed for me where it’s like I’m no longer eating food for
Kerry (11:17.038)
I’m eating food for sustenance and I really, I really enjoy a fatty ribeye, like a big steak. I love it, but it’s it’s it’s different than before. It’s not an addiction like before. It’s more of an appreciation. So that was one of the, that was the biggest thing for me that was different. And still I’m, I’m on day 600 almost. I’m about a week away from 600 days now.
I have no cravings and it’s the most natural thing in the world. Even at day 600, there are so many times where I have to remind myself to eat. And when I was doing keto, I would get that every now and then, but I’d add a little carbs and then I’d be hungry again and I’d be hungry again. The blood sugar on carnivore is just perfectly leveled. And I guess the last thing I’ll say real quick, you kind of mentioned this in your question, I had a very deep…
Why for doing this? mean, I was begging, praying to God, like, give me something because my depression was just so hopeless. And he gave it to me like this changed my depression and my it’s
I would have given anything in the whole world just to have a baseline. I used to get so jealous of people when I was in the deepest depression. like, man, I wish I could just be normal like that person. And this took me on the opposite end of whatever hopeless is in terms of depression. I’m not just at a baseline. Like I am just full of gratitude. I’m thankful, grateful, blessed. Like I want for nothing. It’s just
It’s incredible the mind shift change on carnivore. So like for that reason alone, it has been such a game changer. And then I always show people this, but I guess for those watching, for those listening, I’m holding up a container of pills. This was about 15 to 20 medications I was on at one time and I’m on zero now. It took a while for me to do that on carnivore and I did it responsibly through my doctors and weaned off, but.
Kerry (13:08.662)
Not being on any medications has been a big game changer for me too. But I have so many important whys that I don’t want to change. But the biggest reason is it just, feels so natural. feel incredible that I haven’t changed or even struggled on it.
Cheryl McColgan (13:23.31)
That’s amazing. And I want to make sure that I mentioned this resource for people since that you mentioned that depression was one of the biggest things. I’m sure you’re familiar at this point with Dr. Chris Palmer. And he wrote a book called Brain Energy. I’ll put the link in the show notes. But what Carrie is experiencing on this diet is not an isolated instance. so Chris Palmer is a Harvard educated doctor. He is doing all this research around using
ketogenic and know, carnivore is kind of a subset of the ketogenic diet, but to use that to treat really serious depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, things that were not amenable to any other treatments have gotten exponentially better by changing the diet. And so if you’ve never heard of this before, I just wanted to put his name out there and mention the book so that if you’re first of all, don’t, you know, obviously don’t go off your medication or do anything without talking to your doctor.
But I do think exploring this diet brain connection is really worthwhile, especially if you have not had success on the antidepressant medicines that we have, because it’s very common that they don’t work for people, unfortunately. They only work in, I think at last stat I heard was something like maybe 30 % of cases, but most people don’t get full relief from their depression just by drugs. So anyway, I just wanted to make sure I put that resource out there for people.
And then my follow up question for you, Carrie, is, you you mentioned the heart component because you’d already had issues with your heart in the past. Before you went on this diet and you said people were already calling you crazy and all of this, did you do any of your blood markers before you started carnivore? And is that something that you continually follow? I’d just be really curious to hear what your experience with that has been.
Kerry (15:11.15)
Yes, so I was to the doctor so much before this, so I had blood work done. The biggest thing I had was the, I had a heart echo done before doing carnivore, not because I was doing carnivore. I had just had a couple done because I have had a lifelong irregular heartbeat since birth and highly erratic to the point every time I’d go to the doctor, you know, the nurse will take your blood pressure. They’ll check your heart every single time. They’re like, do you realize you have an irregular heartbeat? And every single time I’m like,
Yes, it’s in my notes and you guys tell me this every single time and I’ve worn probably 20 different heart monitors. remember in kindergarten I’d wear these big vests and then in the last couple years it was just like this little thing but to always check my heart.
So I had that done, cholesterol, blood work, had most of that stuff done as well. One of the craziest things, so six months into carnivore I had all my blood work done and everything looked excellent. The only thing that was elevated was my total cholesterol number, but there’s a lot of misconceptions with that as well. I’ve actually talked to Dr. Philip Ovedia now.
who was my inspiration initially, I’ve since interviewed him for the documentary we’re working on, but he talks about cholesterol and it’s not the quantity of your cholesterol, it’s the quality. That’s what Dr. Ovadia talks about as a heart surgeon and you can do an advanced lipid panel to see if you have like the dense particles or the puffy particles and there’s a big difference, there’s a lot of science into it when…
A lot of people just like, what’s the total number? So my total number was up, but when you actually dig into the quality of it, it’s excellent. In fact, all of my markers are better now on carnivore than they’ve been my entire life. My blood pressure is like 120 over 80. The craziest thing is this, and everything I’m telling you right now is verifiable in my medical records, which I’ve shared on my YouTube channel and we’re sharing in the documentary. Anybody that wants to see it, because people just, they don’t even believe me when I first started talking about this.
Kerry (17:04.956)
one year into carnivore, went to the doctor because I’m like, I want to check up this congestive heart failure. When they diagnosed me with that, ejection fraction 44, congestive heart failure, it’s really scary. am I going to die? What does that mean? Heart failures. What they told me was it’s chronic. Heart failure is chronic. And they said the best you’re going to be able to do, Carrie, is keep it the same, but it’s probably going to get worse. You’re not going to get any better from this. But I’m
one year on the carnivore I felt like I could run a marathon and prior to this I would stand up and I would get dizzy and I’m like I just this feels so much better and then my wife and I were watching a movie at home kind of laying down and she had her head on my chest and she said your heart is beating normally for the first time and my wife and I have been together since age 14 she’s been to many of my appointments and I’m like
You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not a doctor. There’s like, there’s no way I went to Walgreens and I bought a stethoscope and I listened to it. I’m like, my goodness, this sounds normal to me. And I felt so much better. So long story short, I’m like, I’m going to go into the cardiologist first time. All of these appointments I’ve had throughout my whole life on carnivore. I wasn’t sick at all that whole first year. I wasn’t sick at all. Didn’t need to to the doctor for anything. But I’m like, just want to check this out. They set me up for a heart echo. They checked my heart.
And my ejection fraction is 65, which is normal. For a lot of people out there, I thought, why isn’t it a hundred? I want a hundred. It doesn’t get to a hundred. would die. 65 is perfect. So my irregular heartbeat is the other thing. So I reverse a congestive heart failure and my irregular heartbeat that my wife checked, then had, they checked it in the echo and the cardiologist checked it. The nurse checked it. Normal, normal, normal. For the first time in 43 years, my heartbeat is normal.
Cheryl McColgan (18:31.863)
You
Kerry (18:52.654)
which that almost blows my mind more than the congestive heart failure. I’ve heard of people like have temporary irregular heartbeats, but since birth I’ve had it and it’s completely normal now. It’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s crazy. Some of this just blows my mind.
I talked to Dr. Philip Ovede about it. like, how is this possible? And he said, well, there’s a couple of things. The heart performs much more efficiently while in ketosis. When your body is burning fat for fuel instead of sugar, the heart and the brain perform more efficiently. But he hadn’t heard of cases like this. It’s really uncharted territory. People that get congestive heart failure don’t normally go, I’m going to only eat meat now. So it’s kind of a rare thing. But he also said, you lost a bunch of weight that first year. right now I’m down 100 pounds since my heaviest.
Cheryl McColgan (19:31.2)
All
Kerry (19:38.974)
a lot less stress on your heart and then also I took some electrolytes on carnivore, like some magnesium and things like that and he said that could help as well so it could be a couple factors but he’s like it’s basically it’s uncharted territory. The last thing I’ll say real quick I announced this on my YouTube channel I had a ton of responses and I have had dozens of people tell me the same thing that they’ve either reversed their congestive heart failure or their irregular heartbeat.
I know it’s all anecdotal and it’s not real science, a lot of people coming out of the woodwork saying similar results. it’s kind of interesting.
Cheryl McColgan (20:15.374)
Yeah, that’s amazing. And I hope that you have the ability to get some of those people on your documentary as well, because that’s really interesting evidence. mean, like you said, it’s not a controlled study or anything, but you can’t deny, and especially when this is something that you’ve had your entire life, and then you get this change from a diet. I mean, that’s almost like a legitimate miracle, honestly.
Kerry (20:38.372)
Yeah, I mean, I tell people it really saved my life. Like I was, it was so hopeless there at the end and
within the first 30 days of me doing carnivore, I stopped snoring almost right away. The depression anxiety took a while longer, but three weeks in I had this, whoa, what is going on? Like I feel my mood is better. The depression wasn’t completely gone, but, and then the IBS within a couple of weeks, my stomach, at one point I said to my wife, I’m like, I can’t feel my stomach. Like what is going on? There’s always been this weight or this pressure there and it was just completely gone. And,
Yeah, was just so excited from there and then I started doing more research and hearing more people sharing similar results.
Cheryl McColgan (21:22.318)
So what would you say to someone, somebody that’s out there that’s hearing this, maybe they’ve had depression now or in the past, maybe they feel like they would feel better if they lost some weight. What advice would you have for them having gone through this process and having been someone that has tried every diet out there, what would be your advice to how to get started?
Kerry (21:43.896)
I love your question. This is the biggest reason I’m so passionate about this. was hopelessly depressed and I thought it was something wrong with me. There’s just, it’s a fluke, it’s a genetic issue, it’s a chemical imbalance, it’s hormones. I don’t know. It’s just, there’s something wrong with me that I’m always going to be depressed. And sadly, I think there’s a lot of things that happen in healthcare that do that. They almost put the blame on us or it’s a fluke or we don’t know. And then you go, it’s hopeless then because you’re never going to treat the root cause of the problem.
I don’t believe anyone is hopeless or they have from what I’ve heard. you mentioned Chris Palmer. He’s incredible. Absolutely incredible. The work he’s done. There’s also Dr. Georgia Ede. She recently came up with a book, change your diet, change your mind. And it’s speaking about a lot of the same stuff and expanding on what Chris Palmer talked about. So many instances of people overcoming horrible depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. It’s, like,
It’s at the early stages because it’s kind of a new area, but it’s happening on just a huge scale right now. So my advice for people would be just try this. You don’t have to be hopeless. And carnivore sounds crazy.
But what I’ve realized afterwards is what I am doing is returning to what is natural for humans as close as possible. As humanity, we’ve gotten so far away from what is natural. The 60,000 products in the grocery store, that’s a new phenomenon. Like being able to go on your phone and just tap and have food here.
The foods that we’re eating now, it’s crazy. Some of it’s starting to come out now, but people argue like even vegetables. When you look at vegetables now versus 50 years ago, they have one seventh the nutrients they did 50 years ago. Plus you have pesticides, plus you have glyphosate. Even on organic vegetables, 60 % of those have glyphosate on them. 60 % of them, and glyphosate is an antibiotic. So…
Kerry (23:36.47)
We have escaped so far from what is natural. My advice for people that are hopeless with depression
try this. spent 15 years on so many different SSRIs and antidepressant medications and I would have given anything for just an additional tool in the toolbox that would have given me hope and I’m telling you like this is what it is and it’s not just me. I have interviewed hundreds of people that have done a carnivore diet both for my documentary and YouTube and almost every single one of them had some component of mental health issues. Some of them had major depressive disorders, bipolar, almost all
of them though have brain fog, anxiety, and every single one of them has noticeable improvements or complete reversal or remission of depression, anxiety when they eat a proper human diet.
The encouraging thing is for a lot of people, it happens within three weeks to a month. Not everyone, it’s different, but there’s a lot of people within three weeks. So I always tell people, if you’re suffering this bad, 30 days goes by so quick. You’re going to go by your whole life. It’s such a shame to me that most people are going to go through their whole lives never feeling the way I feel right now because…
Cheryl McColgan (24:36.59)
Man.
Kerry (24:44.408)
It’s absolutely incredible when that brain fog lifts the depression’s gone. anxiety is gone. The energy goes up. But when that brain fog lifts, you can’t see the fog while you’re in the fog. And a lot of people watching this are like, I got a little bit of brain fog. I’m here to tell you, have no idea how bad that brain fog is until you get out of it. It’s not just myself saying that I’ve it from probably a hundred other people saying it as well. So
Cheryl McColgan (25:08.356)
Yeah, and I would agree. I’ve shared this on my channels before, but I had depression on and off my whole adult life was on different antidepressants. None of them really ever worked. Fortunately, it wasn’t a super severe depression or anything like that, but it was always there with me. And it was like, like I said, on and off, I’d try different things, it would never work. And it wasn’t until I went keto.
that I really noticed a significant difference. And ever since I keto in 2017, I haven’t been on any antidepressant medication since. And that’s not to say, know, every time there’s times in your life where things are going on and things shift. And it’s not to say you never feel sad again or you never get depressed for a short amount of time, but it’s not the same thing as what we’re talking about as being like, you’re depressed enough that you need to go on medication.
So yeah, I would totally agree with you and we’re not the only ones out there. There’s plenty of people that have had this experience and I think the more that people talk about it and the people that actually somebody that you know in real life that knows you and has seen the experience of you changing from how you were, you know, for the last 20 years of your life to how you are today, Carrie. It’s like they’ve got to just have no question in their mind that this is what promoted such a huge change. So I’m guessing like you,
You went through this transformation and not only like weight, but the mood and everything else and your IBS. And I just feel like you want to shout it to the world. So I’m guessing that that’s how you got started with this documentary. And I’d love to hear who you’ve been talking to. I know you’ve got Dr. Ken Berry. You mentioned the iFixHearts guy.
Who else have you been talking to and what’s kind of your goal with the documentary? What do you hope to accomplish and who else do need to talk to in case anybody hears this and wants to tell their story to you?
Kerry (27:00.292)
Yeah.
It was day 67 of carnivore for me. said, we need a documentary about this because this is powerful. did a video on my YouTube channel on day 30, my 30 day update, and it just kind of went crazy. which was great, but the comments I was getting, it was like, I had comments from people in their sixties, seventies, eighties. They’re like, I’ve been doing carnivore for five years. I’m thriving. And they’re telling me all of these things, overcoming depression. And my worry was though, Dr. Barry and some of these other guys, they’re doing a great job on YouTube, I’m like, YouTube’s such
a small subset of the population. learned about keto through a Netflix documentary years ago. So I’m like, we need a, we need a documentary on carnivore. There’s a lot on keto that are very good. And so I just announced it rather foolishly actually, cause I’ve never done a documentary before. and actually it was, it was sort of my idea and my daughter, my daughter, Emma, my wife and I have triplets plus one and my daughter, Emma was vegan for five years and she decided to completely switch from vegan to carnivore.
I didn’t force her, didn’t even tell I never thought she would even do it, she was just suffering. And she came up with this shirt, it was called Compassionate Carnivore, because she’s vegan for compassionate reasons. She’ll only eat meat if it’s compassionately raised, we get a lot of our stuff from our neighbor. It’s grass-fed, grass-finished, the cow is a good, no feedlots, nothing like that. So I said, you’re a compassionate carnivore, she made this shirt, we were gonna sell the shirt, and I’m like…
I don’t feel right profiting off of this. feel like I was so sick for so long because of greed sort of run amok. And I was like, maybe we could use the money from the shirt to do a documentary. That was how it sort of started. And it just went crazy from there. just, like, let me just try Dr. Ken Berry. This guy’s a bestselling author. He’s got 3 million subscribers. There’s no way he’s going to talk to me. Let me see if I, if I’ll just email him or whatever. it was amazing how accessible these people were. guess they saw my story too. And they saw that I had lost a bunch of weight and overcame depression, but
Kerry (28:52.17)
Dr. Chafee was the first one I reached out to I went on YouTube video with him and I just said I don’t want to put you on the spot Dr. Chafee, but I want to do this documentary I need an expert in it. He said a hundred percent. I’m in and then
Shortly after I was, connected with Dr. Barry and I did the same thing and he’s like, I’m in and these guys have been just incredible. So after that, Dr. Philip Ovedia, then Dr. Sean Baker, who was the original, he wrote the book, Carnivore. He was on Joe Rogan. I’ve since met him and interviewed him and actually he lifted me up like a little baby cause he’s like a bodybuilder. We did a little thumbnail picture. Me and my buddy, Adam lifted him up and it wasn’t as easy as him lifting us up, but.
Yeah, we’ve got Dr. Philip Lovadia, the heart surgeon, Dr. Georgia Ede. I’d love to get Dr. Chris Palmer in there as well, but Georgia Ede is incredible. She’s a Harvard trained psychiatrist. She’s been doing this for 25 years. In fact, just last week I was down in Florida and we filmed her.
The biggest reason I wanted to do the documentary was mental health and depression. It’s just was such a game changer for me. was so hopeless. I’ve learned that it’s helped so many other people. Initially, it was going to be let’s do a carnivore diet documentary.
it’s no longer it is since changed its carnivore even the name the name is healing humanity the power of a proper human diet what i have learned is i am healing and doing so well because i returned to what is natural for humans as crazy as that sounds i believe eating beef ruminant beef grass-fed grass finish of beef has like a multi-chamber stomach of its eating grass as glyphosate or pesticides on it most of that is processed out so given the sixty thousand options i feel like i am eating as natural as possible but
Kerry (30:34.126)
Besides the food we’re eating, it’s like sitting under fluorescent lights all day, staring at screens. We’re doing things that are so unnatural for humans. that’s really what I’m advocating for in the documentary is returning to what is natural mainly through diet, but also our other everyday activities. It’s mostly carnivore, but we have a woman that had stage four cancer and she did fasting and she used a strict ketogenic plant-based diet and she had really good success with that. So for me, I’m not like, it’s not
us against them or anything. It’s just returning to what is natural. We also, the last thing I’ll say real quick is we have Tammy Peterson, Jordan Peterson’s wife.
She had stage four cancer and she’s been carnivore for like six years. It turns out she’s been watching my YouTube videos, which just completely blows my mind. She emailed me and said she wanted to have me on her podcast. And then in turn I said, I would love to have you in our documentary. You overcame stage four terminal cancer. She was told she’s gonna die and she’s been in remission for years now. She attributes that to prayer in the carnivore diet because she’s starving the cancer of glucose and she was doing some fasting I think as well, but.
Long story short, she agreed to be in the documentary, so we’re filming her in January. And her husband, Jordan Peterson, watched our little teaser trailer with her and tweeted it out. This was just a couple, like two months ago, tweeted it out, which just blows my mind. So we’re filming Tammy Peterson. We have a couple more people to film, but the whole purpose of the documentary, real quick, because I even think I mentioned this, is we’re following real individuals over a year that are doing a carnivore diet, proper human diet.
to overcome various health issues. One of them has obesity, one of them has cancer, one of them has horrible depression. We’re gonna check in in the beginning and then a year later and then in the middle we have a bunch of other shorter stories and then all of these good doctors like Dr. Berry and Dr. Chafee and so on.
Cheryl McColgan (32:28.876)
Yeah, sounds amazing. I can’t wait for this to come out. if there’s any way, anything I can do at all, I don’t have a huge audience, but I would be happy to promote it in any way that I can. So, Carrie, that being said, when do you anticipate the documentary coming out? And in the meantime, where can people sign up to like be on a mailing list or something so that they know when the documentary is live? How can they follow you? Where are the best places to visit you online?
Kerry (32:57.572)
We’re hoping to launch the documentary in the middle of next year, summertime. the reason it’s kind of taking so long is cause we’re following a couple of those people for a year and some of them haven’t quite hit a year yet. And yeah, if you want to learn more, here’s the interesting thing. So we’re doing the documentary, healing humanity.
We have had so many incredible stories come through that I’m like, this documentary is going to be nine hours. How do I cut this out? Like, how do I not share this story? So we’ve decided we’re going to also do a series afterwards. And I’m really excited about the series because we’re to have a whole series on just cancer, a whole series on just type two diabetes, a whole series on depression.
So whatever your issue is, can watch that series. It’ll be specific doctors and experts and individuals that overcame those things in that series. I believe this is going to go on forever. It’s like, it’s my passion in life now. I don’t imagine I’ll ever stop doing this. The series will probably have seasons. So if people want to share their story, they can do that. Or if they want to support our documentary, it’s completely crowdfunded. We don’t have any bias. A lot of documentaries nowadays are sponsored by Beyond Meat or some pharmaceutical or some bias. Ours has been completely crowdfunded.
Cheryl McColgan (34:00.43)
Right.
Kerry (34:03.13)
funded I’ve been doing live streams we did a 24-hour live stream so the website is healing humanity dot movie you can go there to register if you want to share your story to sort of follow along we have a separate YouTube channel for that if you’re interested in donating and supporting what we’re doing we like sell the shirts and every penny we get from the shirts the donations that it goes a hundred percent to the documentary I’m not taking a salary I spent thousands of dollars my own money I want to do this all as a
a passion project. just want to do something where there doesn’t have to be profit or money involved. Cause like I said, I feel like that is why I was so sick for so long was kind of greed run amok sort of thing. So yeah, healing humanity.movie is the website and we have a little teaser trailer on there. If you click on the little about us that, that’s the one that Jordan Peterson tweeted out. If anyone wants to watch that trailer.
Cheryl McColgan (34:52.26)
Yeah, amazing. And you also mentioned you have a YouTube channel, of course, so people should follow you there as well. that something with Homestead, right?
Kerry (34:59.246)
Yeah, it’s a little unusual. it’s called Homestead How, H-O-W. I’ve been homesteading for years and doing YouTube and then I found Carnivore. Now I just do Carnivore videos, but I have hundreds of interviews on there. In fact, just yesterday I interviewed Dr. Ken Berry again for the second or third time. That one’s not quite live yet, but I do lots of Carnivore interviews and have the good doctors on and live streams and things like that. So that one’s Homestead How.
Cheryl McColgan (35:24.164)
Well, Keri, it was so nice hearing about your story today and I am going to thoroughly enjoy following you now myself now that I know about your story and know about your passion and your work. I just love it when people take something like this that has improved their life so much and start sharing it with others. And that’s kind of how my little podcast and situation got started as well. So I really appreciate that. But anyway, thanks for taking the time to share your story today and I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of you.
Kerry (35:53.412)
Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, host Cheryl McColgan interviews Ian Anderson, founder of the Sunnyside app, which focuses on alcohol moderation and mindfulness. Ian shares his personal journey, including his family’s struggles with alcohol, and discusses the impact of the pandemic on drinking habits.
The conversation highlights the importance of harm reduction and the shift in understanding alcohol use and recovery. Ian explains how Sunnyside works as a tool for individuals looking to build healthier relationships with alcohol. Ian discusses the evolution of Sunnyside, an app designed to help users moderate their alcohol consumption. He emphasizes the importance of personalization, gradual change, and the power of tracking drinking habits.
The discussion also covers the upcoming Dry January initiative, which aims to provide inclusive challenges for users looking to cut back on alcohol. Ian highlights the benefits of using Sunnyside, including improved mental health, better sleep, and financial savings, while encouraging listeners to join the community for support and guidance.
Go to HealNourishGrow.com/sunnyside to join the free Dryish/Dry January Challenge. You can choose to go fully dry, dry on weekdays or any number of other custom options! Follow Sunnyside on Instagram here.
Takeaways* The pandemic increased awareness of alcohol health issues. * Harm reduction is a crucial approach to alcohol use. * AA has a low success rate for long-term recovery. * The definition of recovery has evolved to include moderation. * Many people want to drink less but don’t know how. * Tracking alcohol consumption can lead to healthier habits. * Sunnyside aims to be a supportive tool for change. * Understanding alcohol’s health effects can empower better choices. * Personalization is key; users set their own goals and track progress. * Gradual reduction in alcohol consumption is more effective than immediate cessation. * Tracking drinks helps create conscious interference and awareness. * Dry January offers various challenges to accommodate different user preferences. * Community support enhances the experience of moderating alcohol consumption. * Sunnyside provides a safe, anonymous space for users to seek help. * The app encourages users to reflect on their drinking patterns and triggers. * Sunnyside aims to create lasting behavior change, not just temporary fixes.
Watch on YouTube:
Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.814)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Ian Anderson and this conversation has been a long time coming. He is the founder of Sunnyside, which is a really awesome app that I’ve been checking out for the last couple of years, because you know I like to bring you guys all the things that will help you in your health and wellness journey. But we’re going to save that for little while because Ian has a really interesting backstory and an interesting, I think, perspective on how he created this product to really help people.
And so Ian, I’d love for you to share some of that now, maybe first talk a little bit about your professional background and then like what led you to create this product.
Ian Andersen (00:37.766)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Cheryl, thanks for having me on the podcast. Like you said, it’s been a long time coming. I’m glad we finally got to make this happen. And it’s always a pleasure just to be able to meet new audiences and offer, you know, my personal story and whatever wisdom I can offer around alcohol health. It’s something that’s really important to me. So.
The product is Sunnyside and it’s an alcohol moderation and mindfulness app. So we will get to that, but I’ll tell you a little bit about my story and how it led me to create this product that tens of thousands of people are using. So professional background, I was born and raised in California.
And I went to school at UC Santa Cruz and studied sort of information systems management. So like kind of the blend of technology and business. I started my career out in web development, which isn’t that exciting. This was many years ago, but I was having a blast at the time. And I kind of weaseled my way into marketing and learned how to help position products to help keep consumers find what they needed.
Fast forward many years later, I started working, I had the opportunity to work at a mobile app company called Mile IQ, which did mileage tracking for people that drove for work, which was pretty neat because we were helping people get their biggest tax deductions. I met some people there that were really instrumental in helping me kind of navigate the business world at that point. They were startup founders and that sort of gave me some of the early.
skills or at least confidence that I needed to branch out and start Sunnyside. So I call myself a sort of marketing generalist by trade and at Sunnyside I lead marketing and growth along with many other things. We wear a lot of hats because we’re still a small company where I call us like a medium-sized startup at this point. We’re based in California technically but we have employees all over the world.
Cheryl McColgan (02:45.166)
Yeah, and it’s such a, you’ve done a great job with the marketing part because I’ll just share, I came across this. I think during, I think it might’ve been my first thought during the pandemic. I don’t know what year you started, but I think there was a little push during that time because especially in my health and wellness space, you know, it really started to blow up on social media, how much additional trouble people were having with their drinking habits during the pandemic and how that really increased during that time. And then fast forward kind of to today.
Ian Andersen (02:49.127)
Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (03:14.882)
the last year or two years, mean, Andrew Huberman, he’s a huge podcast and a lot of other people have really been bringing this idea about alcohol health to the forefront. And I think it’s caused a lot of people to really start looking at their behaviors and just noticing, you know, if it’s really serving them and kind of looking for tools to help them along, to make them either more mindful, which is, think is one of the great things about your app. It’s not necessarily like quit it all together.
But it might just be like, hey, you’re going out for the night and normally you might go a little crazy with your friends and have five or six drinks, but it’s kind of just touching base with you to remind you to just be more mindful and be in the moment and make good choices. So I think it’s a very interesting product in that regard and really useful for this new push into the wellness space about alcohol is a poison. The previous episode I had on alcohol, we mentioned that it’s a neurotoxin. There’s really
Ian Andersen (03:46.609)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (04:10.87)
not a lot going for it other than the social aspects that a lot of people do find relaxation in those things in it. But I do think it’s just great that you’re bringing this idea to be more mindful about it to the forefront and just offering more education in the space about drinking habits. Just so if you make the you know what you’re getting into, I guess, is kind of part of the point.
Ian Andersen (04:31.632)
Yeah, absolutely. You said a lot of great stuff there. I first want to recognize that the Andrew Huberman podcast on alcohol was, I had already been digging into alcohol for two years before that came out and I was still blown away. So I think I like to think of Sunnyside as an essential tool in your toolkit for building healthier habits around alcohol. But I think it’s best when used in a combination with something else in your life, whether it’s an additional
piece of education, like a really great podcast or a therapist, or maybe even just connecting with a friend on the idea. Because alcohol is the way that it integrates into our lives is very personal and sometimes feels complex. So Sunnyside, we like to think of ourselves as the front door for anyone looking to make a change when it comes to alcohol, whether they plan to eventually quit, or maybe just try to find
moderation with alcohol in their lives. We want to be the place where tens of thousands and eventually millions of people start making that change on their alcohol health journey. And we will provide all the tools and sort of programming to help you build that healthy relationship. I’d love to get into more detail when the time is right, but we can talk about like how we actually make that happen.
Yeah, I just wanted to recognize Huberman was a great podcast for me as well. I was pretty blown away and I would I’m still a mindful drinker myself Or rather a drink I still drink alcohol way less now especially since starting Sunnyside and one of the main things for me aside from all the things that we built within Sunnyside is Simply educating myself more about how alcohol actually works. You mentioned that it’s a poison, but it’s also true that it has these sort of
tendencies and addictive qualities that make you seek out more after you start. And one of the biggest learnings for me was to understand that I wasn’t sort of going to be an exception to the rule when it came to alcohol, that because when I drank, I wanted to drink more, that that was actually alcohol doing exactly what it was supposed to do on me. And it almost made me feel like I had more power understanding that knowledge when it came to moderating my own alcohol use.
Ian Andersen (06:47.95)
I should also say, Cheryl, that we did actually start in 2020 right at beginning of the pandemic. And it absolutely was not because we were trying to take advantage of that moment. It was totally coincidental. My co-
Cheryl McColgan (06:52.59)
You
Cheryl McColgan (07:00.358)
You don’t just suddenly magically have a company go live in three days, right? mean, this was a long time in the works, I’m sure.
Ian Andersen (07:04.133)
No.
Absolutely. We actually started cooking things up in 2019, the initial ideas and the initial product. And then in 2020, everything just kind of lined up for us as a business. It was really a good year, but also for us to be able to be there for people that needed to moderate their drinking at a time when adults were drinking more than almost ever at the beginning of the pandemic. It was just a really nice way that everything lined up.
Cheryl McColgan (07:35.874)
Yeah, and so to get back to, and like you said, we’ll talk more about how the product works and how it’s useful and all that kind of good stuff a little bit later. with most founders that I talk to, I people that have listened to this podcast before know that I love hearing the backstory because I think it shows you that for the most part, people don’t start a company to make a lot of money, right? I mean, you hope that you make money, you hope you make a living at it, but people start something like this podcast or Heal Nurture or whatever it is because they have a passion.
Ian Andersen (07:41.585)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (08:04.856)
for what they’re doing. So I would love to hear what in your world kind of was the impetus to want to do something like this to help people with alcohol use.
Ian Andersen (08:14.694)
Yeah, thanks for asking. It’s a bit of a heavy story, but I think it’s one that a lot of people can relate to. I’m an identical twin. And several years after my twin and I were born in sort of Northern California, my mom and my dad both took to drinking heavier than they ever had. When I was a young child, let’s just say it’s around five years old, because it’s all pretty murky.
Cheryl McColgan (08:25.697)
Ian Andersen (08:40.78)
And my dad was a carpenter and he got into a daily ritual where he would start drinking beer after work. This went from the way he explained it from a beer a night to six beers a night to 12 beers a night pretty quickly. And this was happening at a time when my parents were starting to sort of lose interest in each other, if you will. And they had a rocky relationship for most of my childhood.
So my dad also started coupling his drinking with some other drugs on the job site. And so I just learned about this recently. So there were some pretty vicious cycles going on there. My mom, on the other hand, she was a very private drinker and she actually, she would literally go into her room, sober and come out totally drunk. And these were very traumatizing events in my childhood. I think one of the things that probably saved my…
sanity in my life was having a twin. There’s a lot of probably psychology and stuff to study around that, but I was very blessed to have be able to have my twin and I like create a support system and a comfort system for ourselves. So my parents started growing apart and their drinking started getting worse around seven or so things started getting really bad with my mom and my dad decided to go to to stop drinking altogether and he went cold turkey through the AA route. So I have
all of the highest respect for AA as a path for people that need to seek sobriety. And I don’t know if he ever hit like what you would call a rock bottom or anything like that. That’s kind of a tricky term anyway, but what his rock bottom was, was realizing that if he didn’t make a change, that my brother and I would probably end up in foster care. So he actually left the household and found sobriety through the support of AA. While my mom unfortunately didn’t find
Her way out of her disease, you know, we call that alcoholism at the time these days It’s more commonly known as a alcohol use disorder Regardless, she was highly addicted to alcohol and it was a very very destructive path for her so my dad eventually got my brother and I out of the house after he got sober we moved to Novato, California Marin County and Unfortunately after not seeing my mom for two years. She died from liver failure due to alcohol and so her path was one of sort of
Ian Andersen (11:05.254)
Deepening self-destruction when it came to alcohol and my dad’s was a path of finding sobriety because he decided that he wanted to live a healthier life and I I believe one thing I’ve reflected on a lot since starting Sunnyside is at that time there weren’t digital apps to help my mom and dad find Take the first step to finding a healthier relationship to alcohol. It was still very much the all-or-nothing approach around AA
you know, if you want to stop drinking or cut back on your drinking, you go to AA. Otherwise, you’re perfectly healthy. And I’m sure I’m paraphrasing that slightly wrong, but we do know that today with harm reduction having been studied for multiple decades as an approach to moderation, that there are lot of additional options out there when it comes to people wanting to make a change with their relationship to alcohol.
Cheryl McColgan (11:57.708)
I think you’re really accurate on that just to interject really quickly because my minor is actually in addiction studies. this is like 25, 20 ago at this point. And at that time really AA was still the best and only option. And it was either kind of like you’re an alcoholic and you’re going to AA and you have to completely stop or you have a…
Ian Andersen (12:01.126)
Yeah, of course.
Ian Andersen (12:05.36)
Amazing.
Cheryl McColgan (12:25.544)
social relationship with alcohol and you’re totally fine. And there was kind of nothing in between at that point, at least that’s how I remember it. So I think you’re totally spot on with that. And so anyway, you’re saying about the harm reduction studies now, I’m sure you’ve taken a deep dive into all this now that you’ve gotten the app out there.
Ian Andersen (12:40.722)
I still sometimes feel a bit like an imposter when it comes to these things. You you’ve studied addiction, but I’ve had the pleasure to talk to a lot of people, especially customers. I’ve talked to some experts in the space, so I’m getting more informed as time goes on. But one of the first people we talked to was Andrew Tytarsky, who’s been studying harm reduction mostly in alcohol for three decades. And he is probably one of those sort of like…
forefathers of that movement and he’s actually seen sort of a pushback against harm reduction when it comes to alcohol to lately a major acceptance to the harm reduction approach when it comes to alcohol. And just to touch on what you said, this is something that I’m deeply passionate about is where AA plays in all of this. My dad went to AA and it saved his life and it saved my life potentially, but AA ultimately has, I believe like a 9 % success rate.
And the other thing that AA did for my father was he was an alcoholic until he died. Last year he passed away, unfortunately. And he, thank you, he’s still identified as an alcoholic because AA indoctrinated that into him. And even though he was 30 years sober and it just created this really tough life for him to accept.
And I don’t think he was an alcoholic for 30 years before he passed away. I think he was an amazing person that sort of beat a rough patch when it came to alcohol. And the harm reduction approach says that actually it’s really interesting, the National Institute of Alcoholism and Addiction, it’s the NIAAA, I always get it slightly wrong.
A couple of years ago, they updated their definition of recovery to remove the requirement of abstinence from the definition of recovery. But they did say that you have to stop heavy drinking patterns and that you have to seek out support and you have to basically work on identifying internal issues. So the fact that they sort of quote, still allow
Ian Andersen (14:56.838)
Drinking in the definition of recovery, this is a major change in the understanding of how alcohol and addiction impacts people and how people can sort of be recovered from a rough patch with drinking or even years of overdoing it. So that is the crux of the Sunnyside’s approach is using a scientific sort of formula based in harm reduction, based in the work that our advisors do to make sure we’re on the right track.
to help people find balance and also find other solutions within their lives around how they can find balance with alcohol.
Cheryl McColgan (15:37.858)
Yeah, it’s interesting that, again, I think that the pandemic helped bring some of this to the forefront. But even prior to that, it’s kind of this an interesting social acceptance, I think, of these. Like if you’ll look on TikTok or Instagram or anything, there’s this kind of like this mommy wine culture. I’m sure you’ve run across this in your work where it’s really or, you know, taking your Stanley Cup to your kids games full of booze or just these kind of really
Ian Andersen (15:43.036)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Andersen (15:58.128)
Yeah, absolutely.
Cheryl McColgan (16:07.136)
interesting things in our society that were really never really acceptable before and somehow now they’ve become this and I think it’s becoming a contributing to factor to why people are starting to behave the way that they behave and I’ll even say you know just in my social circle and friend group and something stuff it is I mean by the definition of how many drinks per night or per week or whatever is acceptable
I would say widely in my social circle that that does not follow it whatsoever. is far more drinking than that. And these even are among people that are into health and wellness and taking care of themselves in so many other ways. And yet it has become acceptable for some reason to do this. And I think, again, a lot of it has to do with poor coping skills and people kind of leaned on that.
during the pandemic and are now realizing, okay, the world is back to normal. I can go outside again. I can use the other things I was using to cope, but then they’ve found themselves in this place with alcohol that is no longer really a healthy relationship. So being said, think maybe it’s a good spot to bring in how this actually works. Because again, I said, I found it during that time. I was reading these articles, always doing research. And I thought, well, this is a cool tool. I want to check this out.
Ian Andersen (17:05.83)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Andersen (17:15.346)
Sorry.
Ian Andersen (17:21.733)
Uh-huh.
Cheryl McColgan (17:27.438)
So think at the time, like when you first launched, you had a free trial and maybe that still exists too. Yeah, and I’ll just go ahead and say this now for people, just in case you don’t get there, but heelnourishgrow.com slash Sunnyside is the link where you can go and find the app and get that free trial. But then I just found it so useful because I was using it for myself to be more mindful. I had just gone through my dad’s, I was a donor for his bone marrow transplant and I was
Ian Andersen (17:30.692)
Yeah, it does, yeah, yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (17:56.632)
traveling during the pandemic and you know, I’m worried that I’m bringing something home to my family every time I’m on a plane and it was just really stressful and I found myself in a place where I was definitely drinking more wine at night and yeah, so I got the free trial. I found it useful, paid for it, kept using it, liked it so much that I wanted to become an affiliate because I do think it really helps people and I would love to like just go into a little bit how you explain to people how it works.
Ian Andersen (17:59.346)
Bye.
Ian Andersen (18:25.19)
Yeah, I’m gonna sort of connect a couple of dots here. You said a lot, there’s so much to unpack in 30 or 45 minutes on this topic. Okay, so the pandemic was a shock to a lot of people. And I think a lot of people found themselves drinking more, even not realizing they were drinking more initially and not understanding why they were drinking more. And there were just these underlying stressors that…
Help that sort of caused us to lean into the thing that would help us sort of decrease anxiety at the end of the night. We, believe most of us know that alcohol actually increases anxiety, but for a drink, for one drink, it can help decrease anxiety. When you get to two or three drinks, it starts to impact your sleep and recovery and cause more anxiety the next day. I found myself drinking more than I expected at the beginning of the pandemic too. I’m sort of like a…
I like to quantify my behaviors. I got the, I got the, I love it. And I, I was, we were locked inside and I was using my Peloton and yet I found myself drinking quite a bit at the beginning of the pandemic and, kind of wondering why that was happening. But I think as we sort of get some space from the pandemic, we can all realize that it was sort of just shocking to us. And, parents out there were having different stressors. everyone kind of had their own reasons.
Cheryl McColgan (19:25.804)
Yeah, all the things.
Huh!
Ian Andersen (19:53.126)
So with that said, when we look at the data, 49 % of people that drink in the US want to drink less. And that’s been sort of corroborated by multiple studies. Yet only about 10 % of those, and it might actually be less than that, actually do something to make change and to take the first step to drink less in their lives. So 50 % want to drink less.
and only 10 % actually do something about it. I think this is still because most people, there’s still so much stigma in a black and white approach to alcohol. think if I walking down the street and I asked somebody, if you were to cut back on drinking, you’re drinking, what would you do? I think that most common answer would probably be still something like AA. And then I would say, well, would you do AA? And they would say, no, because I’m not an alcoholic. So it just creates this cyclical problematic
understanding of what we’re supposed to do when we want to cut back. What we’re trying to do at Sunnyside, and let me tell you a little bit about how this started. My co-founder, Nick, was in Mexico with his wife about five or six years ago. He now has a couple of kids, so this was like pre-kids. They were doing a little hiatus in Mexico, and they found themselves enjoying their time off and having wine almost every day. And him being sort of a quantified health nut as well,
wanted to see if there was an app that would help him track his drinks and plan his drinks. And when he found nothing out there, he realized that there might be an opportunity here. Like how can this, how can all of the apps out there focus on alcohol be all about sobriety and tracking your sobriety streaks? Because that’s really what was out there. So he set out to build the first version of Sunnyside. And it was just, it was a text message system that him and his wife could use.
for themselves. So he understood how to, he works in marketing too, and he understood how to build a two-way SMS little platform. And he found it really kind of effective and fun. now his wife and him and his wife were on this vacation, but now they were like using this tool that he made to plan their drinks every week over text message and track their drinks. And he found that this is actually creating behavior change within him and his wife to a point that was,
Ian Andersen (22:18.3)
kind of profound. So he started sharing this little text message program. It wasn’t even an app at the time with his friends and they kind of liked it too. And they kind of all saw this. Of course there were the early rumblings like friends would kind of tease us for like, you’re trying to make us quit drinking. And what we really want to emphasize to people is that my co-founder and I still enjoy alcohol. We are just way more mindful about it now, especially as we get older. And that’s what we’re trying to do is introduce new ways of.
Cheryl McColgan (22:33.71)
Yeah.
Ian Andersen (22:46.866)
tracking and planning and quantifying alcohol in your life so that it doesn’t become sort of a slippery slope issue. We track everything else, right? We track our running and our calories. We track our sleep. And yet we have this sort of mental pushback against tracking alcohol. But in reality, alcohol has, well, here’s the right way to put it. Drinking less alcohol has a positive impact on almost nearly every area of your health.
So you don’t have to quit to see the benefits of drinking less. And that’s the thesis on which we started building Sunnyside. So my co-founder came to me and asked if I’d be interested in talking about this idea. He then learned about my family history with alcohol. And I learned that he also has two parents that are in recovery from alcoholism, having gone through AA for 30 years. So it was something that we really connected on. And what we did from there was
set out to make, turn this into an actual business. we’re in California and we decided to, to start making it happen. The fast forward about four years later, we’ve really matured the product significantly. It’s not just an SMS text message system anymore. It has an Android app. has an iOS app. And when you sign up for Sunnyside, I’ll start getting into just kind of the how it works now.
The first thing that we do, and this is very common with apps like Noom or Calm, we collect a bit of personal information upfront. We ask you about your goals, your motivations. We ask you about your baseline drinking behaviors, and it’s all private and anonymous. And from there, we’re able to kind of personalize your experience using Sunnyside because it wants us to feel like a really one-on-one interaction. We want it to feel like we’re creating plans specifically for you. We also ask you if your goal is to ultimately quit drinking or…
cut back on your drinking. And regardless, whichever one you choose, Sunnyside does not bring you down to zero drinks on day one. Our goal is to find a gradual path of decreasing your drinks over time. And if you’re on a moderation, if your goal is moderation, we’re gonna try to bring you down to the CDC recommendations, which is no more than, I feel like I’m gonna mess this up right now. 14 drinks a week for men and I think seven drinks a week.
Cheryl McColgan (25:10.424)
think it’s seven, yeah.
Ian Andersen (25:11.388)
For women, yeah, thank you. I’m getting mixed up with the binge drinking ones, which are a little bit different. So yeah, 14 for men and seven for women. We should caveat though that there’s a lot of studies saying that those guidelines might be outdated. Canada recently updated its recommendations to one drink a week. And a lot of science is coming out now saying that no amount of alcohol is healthy. So we’re not here to demonize alcohol. Our job is to simply, I would say, help you reach these recommended guidelines from the CDC and avoid…
Like bringing yourself down slowly to a nice new baseline with a system of habits in place that work is much better than leaving your sort of drinking patterns unregulated to where they might slowly build up over time because alcohol is one of those substances that’s really easy for it to just stack over time. If you don’t pay attention to it mindfully, it can get there for a lot of people. So we want to make sure that you kind of put a system in place of moderation, tools, best practices and education.
so that you keep yourself healthy for the longest amount of time possible. So after the signup, the main sort of tenets of Sunnyside are tracking and planning. So every Sunday we offer a suggested plan for you for the week ahead. We’re not condoning drinking, but we’re looking at your previous patterns and recommending a slight decrease week over week over week. The longer you stay with Sunnyside, obviously the better. And then tracking drinks is really a powerful habit.
that we help you build. And you can track your drinks in the app. You can track them over text message. Excuse me. You can track them in real time or you can track them the day after. And there’s absolutely science behind the act of tracking your drinks. It creates sort of a, what we call a conscious interference. If you’re doing it in real time, it helps you pause and understand and kind of evaluate if you really want that next drink. I’ve also found that our customers will say that tracking their drinks they thought might’ve been kind of silly.
or simple, but it turns out to be the most profound thing they’ve ever done when it comes to changing their behavior around alcohol. And before starting Sunnyside, I was tracking my drinks in an Excel spreadsheet and it was profound. helped me sort of map patterns over time for one, as a kind of a quantitative person, I liked to see things going down, but it also helped me start to correlate increases in drinking to things like stress, work,
Ian Andersen (27:36.978)
other behaviors and patterns in my life so that I could start to undo those correlations and start to be more proactive about how I could live a healthier life.
Cheryl McColgan (27:47.526)
one thing and I don’t know maybe I’ve missed it somehow because I haven’t been using the app in the same way lately but I think it’d be really and maybe it’s probably in there and I just don’t know so I want to ask the question if there’s a way to tag like for example Thanksgiving week like obviously Thanksgiving you feel like you’re around family it’s a festive time you might be extra stressed there’s a number of things happening there like if you can tag
Ian Andersen (27:58.125)
No, well.
Ian Andersen (28:08.914)
you
Cheryl McColgan (28:10.476)
Was it a party? Was it a night alone where I was stressed? Is there something in there like that and I’ve just missed it? Or is that a nice idea for a future upgrade? Okay.
Ian Andersen (28:18.874)
It’s a little bit of both, I would say. We actually just introduce notes, which is a way that you can, when you’re tracking your drinks for the previous day, you can add a little note in there. So that’s the most direct way that we have it at this point. We have a little bit of work to do to make that searchable and sort of mappable in a longer period of time. And we also have those, the ability that when you type in those notes, you can send them to a coach.
so that the coach can respond to you and offer you sort of a real human touch when it comes to support. Great idea though, we will work on that. I will say, sort of in relation to that, we’re working on a complete revamp of our analytics and progress tab. So it’s one of those things that…
Cheryl McColgan (28:51.406)
you
Ian Andersen (29:02.148)
A lot of people have been telling us needs to improve. And I think a lot of people don’t realize how much they’ll use it once we have made it way better. And that’s actually going out into beta like as we speak. So we’re hoping that within a month or two, we have a fully refreshed analytics tab on the app. I don’t know about you, but like my whoop analytics are killer. I look at those every morning and with sunny side, we don’t want to, we don’t want people to like obsess about.
Cheryl McColgan (29:25.154)
Yep, same.
Ian Andersen (29:29.924)
alcohol because sometimes that can feel triggering to people. But we want to surface just the right data so that it’s motivating them on a daily basis to keep their quantities down and their healthy streaks alive. So we have some room to improve there and I think we’re going to crush it in the next couple of months.
Cheryl McColgan (29:48.088)
Well, that might be one of those questions you ask at the beginning, like, are you a data nerd or not? Because I will say one of the other things that’s been a great behavior modifier for me is the aura ring. And I just got my note. I think it was today that said I’ve been on it for two years, actually. And what I observe and people will know this if they’ve heard the Huberman podcast or if they’ve dug into a little bit, there’s like so many negative effects of alcohol, especially when you have it excessively. But one of the main ones is how much it affects your sleep.
Ian Andersen (29:53.208)
Orderly.
Ian Andersen (29:59.537)
Yes.
Ian Andersen (30:03.612)
Cool.
Cheryl McColgan (30:16.11)
And so I will notice on nights that I drink even, I mean, one is usually okay. But if I have two or more, my HRV, it’s like my, the ring thinks I’m dead, basically, it’s so bad. so it’s like, it’s like that is a really motivating thing to see. So that with being more mindful, because I think one of the things that you mentioned that I just want to call out for when people go to the link and they try the service is that I think it’s most effective when you track in real time.
Ian Andersen (30:29.095)
Thank
Ian Andersen (30:33.447)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (30:46.38)
And it’s kind of fun because you can just send like a little cocktail emoji on the text thread. And then it kind of gives you a message like, hey, think about whether you really need to have another one or something. Whereas I feel like if I wait until the next day, I kind of just do whatever I want, whether it’s one or three. And, you know, I’m not having that cognitive intervention. And I think that that’s really the main point. And maybe also sending text at like seven or eight o’clock at night. I think sometimes when I get the text, it’s either too early or too late to like have an effect.
Ian Andersen (30:46.842)
Nice.
Ian Andersen (30:50.192)
Yeah, you can.
Ian Andersen (31:15.302)
Yeah. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (31:16.416)
on my behavior. But anyway, that’s just a Cheryl thing that might not be for everybody. But it’s just kind of interesting because I think the most effective behavior interventions are when you can catch yourself in the act kind of like a dog or something. You know, got to like get it right then.
Ian Andersen (31:27.068)
I like that. I totally love that. I totally appreciate that. First of I just want to say you can actually adjust the timing of the messages now in your settings. Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (31:37.174)
Aha, so I need to do that. Okay, that’s good to know. And see, this is good, because when people try it, they’ll know that they can change these things. Where I’ve just been using it for so long, I kind of forget to even go in there and see what’s new.
Ian Andersen (31:43.377)
Yeah.
Ian Andersen (31:47.17)
Absolutely. I also find that tracking drinks in real time is more beneficial for me. But I also have a tendency that to not
to try to like avoid it. So I think that tracking in real time can feel like a challenge for a lot of people. But to your point, if you can get that habit ingrained, it really will start to make change because you’ll become more conscious of the drinks that you’re having. And we do want you to do that at Sunnyside. We know that that’s actually the more scientific route is to track in real time. It creates that conscious interference. Although like you can’t always do that if you’re out at a party or something, you don’t. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (32:23.916)
Especially if you’re trying to be mindful, like be in the moment with your friends or something when you’re doing that. there is a little bit of a conflict there. But anyway, maybe there’s something else.
Ian Andersen (32:28.049)
Yes.
Ian Andersen (32:32.628)
but and I mean to that point, there’s so many strategies we can talk about about being mindful in the moment, such as rotating with non-alcoholic drinks. It’s the most simple thing. But probably my favorite when going into a social situation, I’m just going to drop this little nugget here, is to not have an alcoholic drink first. It sounds so simple, but when everyone else goes to order the first drink or pour the first drink, just don’t have alcohol.
Cheryl McColgan (32:42.542)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Andersen (33:01.218)
and let that first non-alcoholic drink just settle for 30, 40 minutes and take a chance to mindfully settle into the party or the vibe that you’re in and…
It really changes the game in terms of feeling like I’m speaking for myself here because I have this sort of tendency of chasing the next drink. Cause once alcohol gets in my system, I’m like, okay, let’s go. Like, let’s get more alcohol. But if I can slow that down and kind of observe the world around me a little bit more, I might even decide just to not drink after that because a lot of us have a drink because of social anxiety, whether we think we do or not, it helps us settle into that situation. And if you don’t have a drink while everyone else is,
you’ll realize you don’t really need that drink because everyone will start kind of vibing around you. that’s the one thing that I like it a lot. It’s like a little mini challenge. And if you decide you still want to have a drink after that, you haven’t really lost any time. You can still make it happen.
Cheryl McColgan (33:51.275)
Wow, love that tip.
Cheryl McColgan (33:59.758)
Yeah, I love it. Speaking of time, before we run out of time, I really would love to get to the part where you have this thing coming up in January, because when this airs, it will be in December, people will start thinking about New Year’s resolutions, and dry January has become such a thing that I’m sure that that will be on some people’s minds. So could you share how you guys are kind of celebrating January with your app?
Ian Andersen (34:05.158)
Yeah.
Ian Andersen (34:14.267)
Awesome.
Ian Andersen (34:20.945)
Yeah.
Ian Andersen (34:25.744)
Yeah, this time went by really fast. Absolutely.
Cheryl McColgan (34:28.406)
I have idea, I’ll have to have you back.
Ian Andersen (34:31.014)
I mean, yeah, there’s so much to dig into here and we can spend a whole 45 minutes on techniques, we could spend time on science in the future, but yes, dry January. So let me start by saying that 75 % of US adults will partake in dry January in one way or another. That’s what the last couple of years of surveys have said. And a lot of people are saying that because they’re like, yeah, I’m gonna cut back a little bit or I’m gonna…
track my drinks in a spreadsheet. And I think most people say I’m going to do dry January and they fall off. And from what we’ve seen, people fall off around the day seven or day 10, just because you get to that first weekend and motivation starts lacking and it just becomes stressful. What we offer at Sunnyside is a system for doing dry January. So we call it our challenge and it changes the way that you start with Sunnyside. Normally what we would do is take your data and then propose a plan of sort of diminishing drinks over time.
with the dry January challenge, you get to go right into a preset template of like a commitment for yourself. So the cool thing that we do at Sunnyside is we call it dry-ish January. And we want to offer you four or five different challenges that you can choose. The first is going fully dry. 32, I want to make sure I get this right, about 32 % of people that have done our challenges choose the fully dry path.
The reason that’s so interesting is because a full 68 % actually opt to do the non-fully dry paths. And to me, this shows that when we talk about dry January as a dry challenge, that’s actually excluding so many people from even trying a challenge in January. What we want to do is make dryish January feel super inclusive to anybody that has an inkling that they might want to drink a little bit less. We’ll provide you a fully dry challenge if you want. We’ll provide you
a where you can cut your drinks back by 50%, by 30%. There’s a challenge to only drink on Friday and Saturday night. We call that like the work night challenge. And then you can fully customize. And by doing this, we opened the top of the funnel as big as possible for people that want to make change. And we actually studied about 30,000 participants in our Dry Ice January challenge in the past. And we found that it didn’t matter which challenge you signed up for. You still saw a significant decrease in your drinking.
Ian Andersen (36:52.506)
over the course of that month. And that’s the crux of this is like, if you think that you want to make a change around your alcohol and you think that January might be the right time to do it, come join us for the sunny side, dryest January challenge. And you won’t be disappointed because we’re not going to pressure you to quit. We’re going to hold your hand. We’re going to give you tracking and planning tools. We’re going to give you a lively community where you can get support and have a little bit of fun chit chatting with people. And we also have real human coaches, but I just want to say it’s totally optional.
A lot of people don’t want to chat with other humans around alcohol and that’s fine. And it’s also anonymous and discreet. So like you’re not going to see anybody that you know in this community. Also, Sunnyside has a 15 day free trial, which you will get for signing up for Dry Ice January. And after that, the subscription is only $99 a year. We do encourage you to try the annual plan, but if you want quarterly or monthly, just message your coach and we’ll make the switch for you. So.
For less than the cost of one drink per month, one or two drinks per month, we will help you save money, live a healthier life, cut out some calories, improve your sleep, and never pressure you to quit drinking. So that’s the promise of Sunnyside. And we expect a huge number of people to start in January, and we’d love to have as many people as possible join.
Cheryl McColgan (38:11.222)
And two of those things that you just mentioned are especially relevant to this audience because a lot of people come to HealNursery around like weight loss kinds of things. And that is one of the things that I noticed around when I can’t, think you’ve always had this in there maybe with the app was it would say how many calories you’ve saved by not drinking that week. So if you’re looking to lose weight in the new year, cutting back on your alcohol is one really simple way to facilitate that process. You mentioned good sleep. What was the third thing? I lost it.
Ian Andersen (38:18.961)
Okay.
Ian Andersen (38:27.91)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ian Andersen (38:41.382)
Well, I have a whole list here. Yeah, yeah. So exactly. We have a customer that saved $23,000 on cutting back on alcohol after like two years of using Sunnyside. So once you get into it, the savings are real. I also want to say like people’s experience in much improved mental health and physical health as well. And I think mental health is one of the really important topic to me and probably you and a lot of other folks.
Cheryl McColgan (38:41.856)
was another really good one. Save money, save money. I mean, everybody wants to save money. That’s one of the better things too. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (38:56.344)
Wow.
Ian Andersen (39:11.282)
So you will experience a huge wealth of benefits from taking a step back from your drinking. And one of the coolest stats we have from this survey is that 92 % of participants, no, it’s even, higher than that. I think it was like 96 % said that they are going to continue using Sunnyside into February. So we want to make sure it’s not just a flash in the pan challenge where you slingshot back to your old habits. We want to make sure you put a lasting system in place.
Cheryl McColgan (39:42.144)
And like I said, I mean, I don’t know, I’d have to go back and look when I first signed up, but I’ve used it for at least two years, if not three or four, because I first, like I said, became aware of it during the pandemic. So I think it’s a super awesome tool. I love that you created this. I love how much you’re helping people with this. And yeah, thanks again for coming today. And so again, for the free trial, go to heelnourishgrow.com slash Sunnyside.
Ian Andersen (39:48.562)
Awesome.
Cheryl McColgan (40:06.074)
of final words of wisdom or do you have a personal social account where people can follow along with your fun times or any other links you want to mention?
Ian Andersen (40:12.178)
I wish I had time for that. You can follow us on Instagram or visit HealNourishgGrow.com/sunnyside. My personal bit of wisdom is if you, like you know if you should be seeking a healthy relationship without alcohol and if you’re feeling that inside of you, it’s not as scary as it sounds. We at Sunnyside will help you take baby steps.
And we’re going to do it in such a kind way that I think you’re going to really appreciate having, having this like digital anonymous approach. So if you’re feeling it inside and this, this podcast is resonating with you. Come sign up. It’s our, it’s our passion and we’d love to have you join the community.
Cheryl McColgan (40:56.908)
Awesome. All right, thanks again so much and I hope to chat again with you in the future.
Ian Andersen (41:00.732)
Thanks so much, Cheryl.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Cheryl McColgan speaks with Guy Odishaw about the challenges faced by children in the school system. They discuss the impact of technology on children’s behavior, the rising incidence of ADHD, and the importance of regulating the brain to improve outcomes.
Guy shares insights into innovative approaches to brain health, including the use of neuromodulation devices that help solve dysregulation in the brain, ultimately aiming to enhance focus and learning in children. Guy discusses the importance of moderating dysregulation in children to improve their learning outcomes. He highlights the positive effects of audio visual entrainment in educational settings, sharing success stories from schools that have implemented this technology.
The conversation also addresses the challenges of sustaining such programs and the need for passionate advocates to drive change. Additionally, Guy explains how families can access this technology for home use and emphasizes the importance of integrating it into daily routines for maximum benefit.
Find Guy at Cerebralfit.com
Takeaways* The school system is facing overwhelming challenges post-pandemic. * Teachers are often left without adequate resources to manage classroom behavior. * The rise in ADHD diagnoses is linked to various factors, including technology. * Dopamine regulation is crucial for children’s behavior and learning. * Neuromodulation devices can help regulate brain function effectively. * Parents and teachers can benefit from brain regulation techniques. * Simple interventions can lead to significant improvements in children’s focus and learning. Regulating dysregulation can significantly enhance learning outcomes. * Audio visual entrainment has shown positive results in educational settings. * Anxiety reduction leads to improved self-esteem and performance in students. * Integrating technology into daily life can enhance its effectiveness. * The rental program allows families to try the technology before purchasing. * Positive changes in schools can lead to a more engaged classroom environment. * Teachers’ stress levels decrease when students are well-regulated. * The device can benefit multiple users in a household.
Watch on YouTube
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.826)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Guy Otishaw. Easy for me to say, right? It should be easy to say because this is the third time that you’ve been on this show and happy to have you back. Before we get into the topic of the day, Guy, can you just share with everybody, I’ve read your official bio of course, like always, but could you just share a little bit of your background and how you got into this work and what makes you so passionate about helping people in the way that you do?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (00:30.23)
Well, it’s great to be back. Thank you. So my background is primarily in integrative medicine and kind of two main tracks for me, my private practice as a practitioner, but then in some ways really my more full-time job, which is building clinics. My biggest clinic was a large integrative medicine clinic with 30 providers kind of across the spectrum of care from allopathic MDs all the way to
energy work of various kinds and everything in between. And then my own private practice has been primarily kind of on the orthopedic side, pain, trauma, working on the body. But then over time, I got interested in bioelectric medicine. And then that led me down the path of bioelectric medicine. And then that led me to brains in particular. And now I spend most of my time working directly on the brain with neuroimaging.
neurofeedback, neurostimulation, neuromodulation. so, so now my private practice and my clinic life are much more similar as I’ve kind of dropped the big integrative clinic and moved to a more focused, you know, kind of brain centric bioelectric medicine specific approach for brain health.
Cheryl McColgan (01:49.168)
Yeah, love that. the fact that you’ve done so much work with these clinics and have that background, I think makes you really uniquely positioned to have a lot of knowledge across various subjects. And when we chatted before about what we wanted to talk about today, because you are such a wealth of knowledge, but I thought that the topic that you proposed was really good because it has to, almost everybody has a child in their life in some way, whether it’s a niece, a nephew, their own child.
something like that, somebody they know is probably in school in some capacity. And one of the programs that you’ve been working on has been with children specifically. And certainly since the pandemic, there has been a lot of changes in schools, a lot more stress in schools in a lot of ways. And the teachers are fighting a lot of this too. So I’d it if you could just share some of the things just more broadly now in the school system. What are their challenges?
what kinds of things are children experiencing, and then we’ll get into obviously kind of the ways that you deliver the brain health part, how you can actually help them with some of these methods that you have.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (02:57.304)
Yeah, it’s a favorite topic of mine and program that we’re developing at the clinic. So I’ll, you know, go back. I don’t know. You know, I have a mantra, don’t do the math, right? I’ll go back about 40 years. But when I was first in college, I went in for education and I got, I don’t know, about three years into the program. So far enough where I was doing internships, so was out in the schools.
And I learned very early on that I was not wired to be in the elementary school setting. Like, it was just clear, like, hey, nope, this isn’t gonna go for me, it’s not gonna go well for the children. So I moved on to then post-secondary or secondary and then had a similar realization there that, nope, still, this is not a good match. Eventually…
into adult education and then that’s where I was like, okay, this is my place. I can have a reasoned conversation with my students and that worked for me personally. So what that gives me is an immense respect for the people who can be in the classroom, know, K through 12 really, but we tend to focus a lot on K to eight.
Cheryl McColgan (03:56.614)
You
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (04:21.302)
And so I’ve always had that, right? The thing that I couldn’t do, immense respect for the people who do it. But now when I listen to my clients who are teachers and friends and neighbors, but mostly the detailed stories I hear from my clients and what an average teacher puts up with today is so far removed.
from my worst day in the classroom, which today any of the teachers would beg to have that be like their best day isn’t that good. And so again, hard for me to imagine that these folks get up and go back to work every day and do what they do with what they have to deal with in a classroom in terms of behavior and.
And not that any of it is considered acceptable. It’s just the ability to try and manage it. And what are the resources that a teacher can call on, whether that’s parental involvement, administrative involvement. The problem has outscaled the available resources. that’s what we hear over and over and over again from teachers is the overwhelm.
Cheryl McColgan (05:45.166)
And I mean, I’m sure people can imagine that there’s any number of things from behavior, but the reasons for behavior I think might be a little bit interesting to go into because one of the things that I’ve heard from previous guests and that I have seen data on it myself is that the incidence of ADHD is climbing as is people that are on the autism spectrum. And all of those things kind of come along with behavioral
challenges for sure and sometimes severe enough that it puts them in a Individualized education program kind of situation. So that’s a little different They might be in a classroom with other kids Are there other things outside of those two things that I just mentioned that teachers are experiencing? Is it? That the parents are involved in a different way or the kids are acting a different way or is they’re on their phones all the time What’s what’s the thing that you kind of hear the most that makes it more challenging for them?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (06:41.974)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it’s it’s so multifactorial with sometimes small but sometimes large shifts across many different points in the average child’s life and and so everything you just said But there’s so many variables within that, you know, so it’s I think it’s too easy
to simply shift towards the parents and just say, all of this lands at you. Or as maybe certainly teachers would say, or anybody in the school system would say, too often it’s the other way. It’s oriented towards the school and to the teacher and saying, this is all on you. And you’re the origin of the problem and you need to be the origin of the solution, figure it out.
And so we tend to have this kind of back and forth teachers pointing to the family and the families pointing to the teacher. And there’s truth in all of that. So, I mean, there’s just so much research we could go through around what seems to be the explanation for the changes we’re seeing. As you mentioned, the increase in kind of diagnoses of various conditions.
So on one hand, yes, I want to hold that as valid. But on the other hand, I think we have to look at this is too much of a common approach in our culture is to put a diagnostic code on something, make it a pathology, make it a condition, and then want to treat it. for the cases where that’s true,
Absolutely. But we need to, you know, really be able to pull apart the places where, you know, a child doesn’t need a diagnostic label. They need something else. But so some of the great the research, Jonathan Hayes research on the impact of the smartphone. So social media and that. mean, I think the the research there, the statistics.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (09:01.484)
I think it’s undeniable how big of an effect we could argue over that, but it’s a significant impact that it has had on Again on the in terms of the person it isn’t across one system We can’t just say it’s attentional like it. it’s just it’s what’s led to this ADHD epidemic No, because it is it’s about the person’s kind of self-esteem It’s about their reward system. Like we see this so much in the brain clinic
in when we’re looking at brain imaging and we’re seeing just this reoccurring pattern in mostly children. We see it in adults, but it is much higher prevalence in our younger clients. Is this dysregulation in…
What we could shorthand is say kind of the reward system or the self-regulation system. And it maps very well from what happens to us when we engage in kind of modern technology, screens, social media, but it isn’t only that. We could talk about the gaming and the gaming doesn’t have to be kind of the first person shooter.
type game that people get all excited about, it could be Wordle or, you know, anything where that device becomes your primary form of engagement and it’s driving the dopamine system. And people are disproportionately spending more time engaged with their device because of how it’s driving the dopamine system, the pleasure system, the reward system.
Then they’re not doing the other things they need to be doing right so if you know it’s parent It’s a parent on the device. It’s the parent not parenting if it’s the child on the device. It’s the child not childing and Right, so I mean this is this is It’s massive. I mean and I’ll just so my my family was just here
Cheryl McColgan (10:50.833)
You
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (10:59.864)
visiting, so my adult children and the grandchildren. And I would have these moments, I’d walk into the room and so the whole family sitting in the living room and everybody’s on a device. And I was like, wow, like in my own home. Right?
Cheryl McColgan (11:09.734)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (11:16.452)
Yeah, it’s unbelievable. It’s almost I have honestly almost given up at this point because it’s almost impossible to be in a group and to not have at least somebody in the group on their phone at some point, which is which is just a really sad state of affairs. But before we move on with that, I want to go back to something that you said about dopamine because it reminded me I heard an interview recently and they were talking about the dopamine system. I think it was an addiction conversation actually. And
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (11:22.36)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (11:44.036)
the person said, and it was something I had never really thought of it in this way before for some reason, but it’s something so simple. And it’s just that we have gotten with all these devices and online shopping and all these very addictive type behaviors that we, it’s all available with no work. Like before, at least to get a dopamine hit, you had to work for it a little bit. Like maybe you had to go for a long run or something to get your dopamine hit, but now you literally just click buttons or somebody likes.
you know, like something on your social media or whatever, and people are just getting these dopamine hits all the time with no work involved. And I think that that disconnect from the work and the reward is maybe at the crux of how we go after it. I don’t know. What do you think about that?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (12:29.272)
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think the no work thing and That this is a system like any other system in the body and it can fatigue it will adapt to its environment and so if if and it’s not if but You know when people engage in these activities that deliver them dopamine You know free right just
moment after moment after moment after moment, can scroll, scroll, scroll. if, if, you know, if Tik Tok runs out of dopamine for you, you can switch to the next platform and then to the next platform and, know, just keep, juicing the system. Well, the system starts to break down. Right. That, that we get, we get a dopamine fatigue. And so then the, you know, there’s a need for more and there’s the dysregulation, you know, downstream from when that core mechanism starts to go awry.
Cheryl McColgan (13:04.774)
Right.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (13:25.91)
So yeah, there’s so much right in this system right here. It could be enough to say, okay, if all we did was focus on fixing this, we would have a large demonstrable positive effect on culture, society, and then here, we’re talking about schools, on what’s happening in schools. If we just change this mechanism,
But of course, that’s not the only mechanism. There’s many at play. But it’s part of what makes this conversation, I mean, it’s an important conversation, a good one, a challenging one. And part of the challenge is there’s this tendency to kind of want to make everything down to a single variable. Like we have this idea culturally of a silver bullet. Like there’s one solution, right? And
So we have that mentality, like somehow we could solve the problem of education or the quality of life in our schools, outcomes for our children through some singular magic fix. no, that’s just no. Not true. Yeah, exactly. And we really need to have this. There’s all of these.
Cheryl McColgan (14:43.59)
I know, we wish it did. We wish he just had a magic wand to make it better.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (14:52.312)
issues going on. And then, you know, we come with a very, like, our clinic comes with a very specific place where we engage, and we help solve one of the thousand issues. It happens to be that ours is fairly far up in the stream, which is, you know, what we say in our clinic, our mantra is we regulate dysregulation. So we could
take a lot of the specifics we get into, say we’re talking about the dopamine network, but there’s also the self-esteem and there’s just so many different aspects of self. If we regulate the dysregulation in the brain, that’s very much a kind of a catch-all for all of those different subsystems that we could talk about that might be going on to the attention system, the reward system, the, again, self-efficacy.
just, you know, cognitive function, like just pure, intelligence and how well any one brain can navigate the landscape of school academically, but also socially. So when we regulate the brain, we actually get a lot of value out of that because it’s not a singular intervention at a behavior. Right. Right. Kind of out on the surface where.
regulating the mechanism that is the architect of all behavior. And so, and then also, it isn’t just for students. We encourage teachers to use these devices to help regulate their nervous systems. We encourage parents to use them. the goal is, again, we say, our ideal client is anybody with a brain. That’s a pretty
large population. So if we look at all of it is for everybody, it’s the toothbrush for the brain. But if we look at all of the people involved, if all of those people were more well regulated, that would have a dramatic positive impact.
Cheryl McColgan (16:52.198)
Sort of. Sometimes.
No, all kidding aside, it’s for everyone.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (17:18.858)
on the entire process. So even though we fully acknowledge we’re coming in with one solution to a multivariate problem, it is a solution that actually has a lot of downstream positive effects. And that’s part of why we’re passionate about it is this simple intervention can have a massive positive impact. And it’s been shown, I there’s decades of research
You know in general across healthcare for neuromodulation And I should just say just to take takes out of any sense of mystery here Primarily what I’m talking about is a device that does audiovisual entrainment so it’s a neuromodulation device that uses light and sound and a microcurrent to modulate the central and autonomic nervous system very very simple benign harmless
I tell my clients, you couldn’t hurt yourself with one of these unless you trip over it. it’s giving the body the inputs, the body is, been doing for as long as bodies have been bodies, right? It’s taking light, which we all use light to function. uses sound. We use sound to function. And then we are chemical electric beings. electricity is part of our makeup. So delivering a bio identical electrical current is
is all stuff that the body is 100 % uses all day, every day to function. So we’re not putting in some synthetic, exogenous force that might compromise the system, which is more like you could think like pharmaceutical. We’re going to put in a synthetic chemical that is going to impact
Part of the system positively and then part of the system not so positively, hence side effects. We’re all familiar with that model. What we’re talking about here is just using natural functions of the body to help regulate the system. So it’s a benign intervention. They’re low cost. They cost about $600. But that we’re regulating the brain, that’s
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (19:44.268)
That’s why it has high impact.
Cheryl McColgan (19:47.18)
Do you find that people are generally more accepting of this kind of program because it doesn’t really require them to sort of do anything really they just put on this device and I’m picturing I don’t know you’ll have to describe it to me because it’s so far in my head I’m picturing like some kind of you know helmet kind of situation that they put on their head but maybe you can describe the device a little bit and speak to you know the ease of use if that’s helping some of the results because there’s not a big barrier to getting people to say meditate every day for example.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (20:17.43)
Right. So a couple of things in there. I’ll quickly describe the device. So it’s set of glasses that have pulsing lights, headphones that have pulsing sound or binaural beats, and then ear clips that have a microcurrent. So that’s what we’re doing. So you put it on, like, yeah. Most people, kind of laugh. They’re like, I look ridiculous. It’s like, yeah.
But so, you know.
Cheryl McColgan (20:48.784)
Maybe you can get a photo that I can clip into the video at some point, just so people can see what it looks like. That would be awesome.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (20:52.428)
Definitely We’ll get you that but and also and Glad thank you for saying that is I will send you some of the the documentation that we give to clients around IEP programs for school funding and We’re we’re in Minnesota. So all of our stuff is geared around what’s available in Minnesota, but some of the programs are federal but even
What I would encourage, even if a person isn’t in the state of Minnesota, is your state likely has a program like this, even though the name might be different and some of the particulars might be different. But what we provide our families, teachers, school administrators with are kind of a…
template that allows them to access county, state, or federal funds to help either buy these devices for a school so that they’re in the school, students can access them there or staff, or some of the programs will pay for these devices for the family to have. So it’ll go home with the student.
So I’ll get you those as well. So you can put it in the show notes and people can download them there and take a look at this information. So we’ve had social workers who navigate these programs to help get their clients assistive technology. We use the same pathway that they might say get an iPad for a student to get this assistive technology. Same process.
So we’ll get that information. Yeah, so the device, it is kind of goofy, but once you have it on, you can’t see yourself. yeah, exactly. You don’t know how ridiculous you look. And then the other part of that, of course, is the effect. When people start to experience the effect, that goes a long way in counterbalancing.
Cheryl McColgan (22:44.006)
So you’re like, you may feel ridiculous, but you won’t have to look at yourself doing it.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (23:01.77)
the like, have to put this thing on and wear it for 30 minutes a day or, know, and the 30 minutes a day isn’t a, you know, an all encompassing, accurate treatment plan is highly variable depending on the person and what’s the nature of the dysregulation and, you know, but a common one for students. So let’s say the issue is focus and concentration for whatever reason, lots of things bring out, you know, focus and concentration. could be ADHD, could be anxiety, could be
post-concussive syndrome, you know, there’s any number of reasons why people have attention challenges. So you can, the device, you can get a set of see-through glasses. This is a very common thing we do with our students who have attentional issues, is we’ll have them wear the device when they’re doing their homework. And you see, like, within minutes, and this is the thing that…
It’s hard for people to believe until they see it. As you can take a child who’s got attention difficulties and have them read a paragraph and maybe they get three sentences and they’re already distracted. But you get them through the paragraph and say, what did you read? And they can’t really tell you. We put the glasses on and then they read three pages and they can tell you what they read.
And that that’s the difference. we, we know from neuroimaging that within three minutes, the device is changing brainwaves. Right. So we, we know that it works. People are, you know, find that difficult to believe that, you know, it’s like they’ve spent, you know, five years where school has been difficult and they can’t do it. And now all of a sudden I put on this device and.
I can read and comprehend what’s going on. And it’s really just a simple matter. Again, regulating dysregulation. We can get incredibly, you know, complicated in describing the nature of the dysregulation, where it is, what form is it, and, you know, a theta gamma, you know, phase amplitude coupling issue. Sure. mean, there’s all kinds of that exists and that’s the work we do in the clinic.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (25:16.748)
But the simple form is, if we regulate the dysregulation, we can improve function. That’s it. It’s that simple. And so this is one of the ways we use the device is simply that to help children be able to do their homework faster.
more accurately have better retention, less anxiety, a better outcome. And when you start to iterate that, if you can take away that anxiety of I have homework and I’m not going to understand it, it’s going to be frustrating, and I’m probably going to have a fight with my mom or my dad around it. But then that doesn’t happen. Or again, without.
being overly dramatic, let’s say there’s, in the beginning there’s less of a fight about it and the struggle is less of a struggle and the outcome is a little bit better. But when that iterates day after day after day, what we see in not that long, weeks, months, there isn’t the fight to do the homework. The homework gets done, it gets done well, there’s retention.
Anxiety goes down, self-esteem goes up, performance in school, it translates into school. In schools where they have students wear these devices, and we have schools, mostly special ed smaller classrooms, but it doesn’t have to be limited to that, where they’ll have the students wearing the device in the classroom when they’re doing certain projects together as a group.
And we see exactly the same thing happen there, where the challenges that the students had, the resistance, the acting out because of the anxiety about having to do the math or the reading or the, you name the activity for any given student, that’s anxiety producing. Regulate the nervous system. They go into the activity with less distress, less acting out. They do better at it.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (27:26.37)
There’s more learning that happens, which means just that in and of itself is going to mean they’re going to do better the next time, and they’re going to have less anxiety, more learning, better outcome. When you have that additive across all 10 students in the room,
what you get is a classroom that functions more like what we all would like to see an optimal classroom be, which is students are generally, you know, well regulated, they’re cooperative, they’re excited, they’re curious, they’re engaged in the activity, there’s more positive social interaction, that becomes reinforcing for the whole, you know, collective activity of school, and then that has an effect on the teacher.
When the teacher is is managing a classroom of more well regulated students that teachers stress level goes down They show up with you know more of the goods more resilience So now they have more to bring to the classroom and they have students more able to receive that
and the whole collective moves forward and more of what we want from the educational process happens.
Cheryl McColgan (28:44.762)
Yeah, that sounds like the ideal scenario. I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t want that. If you’re what you’re describing is like school Nirvana basically, right?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (28:54.983)
Absolutely. and, and but this is the thing, like, like, like you said, like, who wouldn’t want that? So I mentioned before we came on air about the this program that ran in Minnesota, about 20 years ago. And it was a, as often these projects in schools are, it was a passionate teacher who was aware of this technology.
advocated to bring it into the school, put together a group of people here locally, specialists. They implemented what was going to be a study, it turned out, I mean, the study was very positive. The program lasted a number of years. So what the program was doing is using audio visual entrainment in schools.
So they would use it in various ways, but much the way I described it, know, groups of students in a classroom doing audio visual entrainment in the class as a group. And when they measured the, you know, the various statistics, the outcomes, academic, social, you know, parental happiness, teacher happiness, measure all the statistics.
everything improved. This is great. There’s just no doubt there is a cross the board positive effect here. And not just on one test, they followed these students for the years of the program and they continued to excel through their academic career. So everything about it positive. When the teacher retired, the school ended the program.
And to this day, now we’re kind of picking up 20 years later where they left off. when we saw the statistics and saw what was happening in our own client population, we went to the people who did this work and said, what happened? How did this not just become, at least in this school, the…
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (30:58.048)
a norm that got iterated across all classrooms and all grades and has maintained. And it’s this strange phenomena that happens and we’re all familiar with it. Like we know, we’ve been told ever since I was old enough to realize I was being taught anything, I’ve been taught the value of exercising, eating well and exercising, right? Lifestyle medicine.
how many of us actually do it, right? As a population, we’re immersed in this information from birth on, we’re surrounded by it, but how many people actually exercise 30 minutes a day and eat zero processed food and minimize their carbs and maximize their protein? Like, like.
0.001 % of the population.
Cheryl McColgan (31:57.03)
It’s a very small number. I know that I heard a recent stat about how many people regularly exercise and it was astonishingly low to me. I want to say under 20 % of people that exercise on regular basis and I was just really blown away by that.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (32:14.314)
Right. So if these basic things that are self-evident, we don’t need randomized double-blinded placebo control studies to know that getting some exercise is better than not getting exercise. And again, I’m not talking about ultramarathon. The choice isn’t sit on the couch or do a triathlon. It’s sit on the couch or
You know, look, go walk a couple of blocks, right? Like that’s where we’re at, right? And we just cannot get that adopted at scale. Or again, a simple thing of highly processed food is not good for us. Self-evident. don’t, we have the studies.
But we don’t really need the studies to, and we can see that having the studies doesn’t change behavior. People always say, well, guy, what’s the evidence for this? Well, there’s 60 years of evidence, right? But the evidence doesn’t change behavior. So there’s just like a, you know, we have.
encultured a, I don’t even know what exactly to say, right? Just kind of a resistance to doing what’s good for us, no matter how it comes packaged. And that’s our biggest challenge. And that’s what we face with this program. And again, back to that example of here’s a school where they’re doing it and we’re seeing positives across the board, right?
No negative side effects. No adverse effects not a single one Positive change you would think this is a natural like this school will just continue this program. Nope Soon as the teacher was not there to advocate for it it ended and and we see the same thing today I mean we’re getting better uptake right that they were able to get it implemented in one school
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (34:11.448)
You know, we’re probably in five or six schools right now. And so that’s good in the sense of uptake is better. But it’s still the same thing. It’s because there’s somebody in that school that is passionate about this. And they are tearing down the barriers and implementing it through just sheer will.
And that’s great, but I have no doubt the moment that person stops being a passionate advocate, the momentum, right? really the inertia for status quo will, you know, these devices will be sitting in a shelf someplace and nobody will ever look at them again. And it won’t be because there isn’t science or because they don’t work. It’ll be because of an inertia that is just not about doing what’s good for us.
Cheryl McColgan (34:50.256)
Take care.
Cheryl McColgan (35:05.328)
which is a really sad statement. But I’m sure some people will be hearing, there’ll be probably two or three different kinds of people hearing this. There’s gonna be one that’s gonna be a teacher, hopefully, and hear this and be like, my gosh, I need to get this started in my school. So we’ll have that resource that you mentioned in the show notes where they can learn more about the program, get in touch with you if they need to, for example. And then I can see some other people that are gonna be like, okay, I don’t have time to try to.
implement this in my school, but I have kids and I think this would really help them. If they can’t go through one of these federal programs where it’s more related to a school for funding, is this something that they can buy at the Cerebral Fit website or if they reach out to you, can they learn more about how to get this device so that they can at least implement it in their own home?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (35:50.725)
Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So they can purchase them. They’re easily available online, whether it’s through the CerebroFit site or…
the Bakhti Brain Health Clinic. So that’s my kind of brick and mortar here in Minnesota where we’re doing these school programs through the Bakhti Brain Health Clinic. So available there. think the site is Tech4Brains with the number four in their Tech4Brains. So the devices are easily available. We sell them. So $600 for a basic one. you put…
some like add in the see-through glasses, add in a few other accessories that can be helpful in certain instances, you’re still all in at about $750. Not expensive at all considering the significance of what it can do in terms of changing a life course. And it isn’t really a single user device. So often there are multiple children in the home, there are adults, and everybody can use the device.
again, where we see the best outcomes is, again, regulate a whole household, not just one person, right? One more well-regulated person in the midst of an otherwise dysregulated environment, not as good as regulate the whole environment, and everybody moves forward more fully than if presumed that, you know…
You know, our one child is struggling in school. So they’re, you know, they’re the problem that we’re going to fix. Like that’s, that’s again, that kind of pathological approach where we really prefer more of a positivistic approach, which is just optimize the brain, no matter who you are. Right. You’ll do better with a brain that does better period. Right.
Cheryl McColgan (37:44.614)
Now, say you’re a fairly regulated person versus a fairly dysregulated person, just naturally or by the nature of your brain or by the nature of the other behaviors you do, maybe to exercise the meditation. You are one of those 1.001 % of people that are doing things. Say you bring that into your house. Theoretically, is the person that’s already more regulated, I mean, they’ll still benefit, but maybe they don’t need as much time on it, or is it kind of a time and dose?
response or is it more like if you’re severely dysregulated you might want to do it a few times a day kind of thing? Can you talk a little bit about how it works as far as the regulation?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (38:17.272)
Yeah.
Yeah, I’m to say one other thing about the acquisition. So we also have a rental program that is also a rent to own program. It’s kind of like a payment program. So people can rent a device for $75 a week. And that gives them a chance to try it. And the question there isn’t so much is it going to work, because a week is not a lot of time to know. The question is, am I going to do it? That’s first question a person needs to ask. They get this thing.
They take it out, they put it on, they go, this is ridiculous. I will never do this. Pack it up, send it back. Great. You just saved, yeah, you saved $525. That was brilliant. But if they’re like, yeah, OK, this isn’t so bad, right? I’ll do this. Then you run with it for a couple of weeks. And then you can start to ask the question of, does this seem to be helping? Yes, great. Then just make the payments, pay it off, and away you go. So we really try and take.
Cheryl McColgan (38:55.058)
That’s awesome.
Right.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (39:19.042)
you know, money as a barrier and minimize it as much as we can to make it so people can try the technology to see if it helps. whether you purchase it or do a rental, there are options. And then again, the kind of different financing through the school systems. And I’m sure there are others. People can use county like caddy waivers, disability waivers, so all kinds of options. Now back to your question. protocol. The device has 25 different protocols on it.
so there’s some, you know, kind of getting to sense of like which, which of the 25 is kind of right for me. some experimenting there, they vary in time from maybe the shortest at seven minutes to the longest at 80 minutes. So there’s a little bit there, in terms of a protocol and time. and then how often, you know, these are more challenging questions, right? Cause so much of this is going to be driven by personality more than rationality.
Right, like what I might articulate. And my big believer in the optimum treatment plan is the one the person will do, not the one I can think up. Right? And so if a person is willing to put in, let’s say, 30 minutes a day, then great. Like if that’s what they’re willing to do, there’s no sense in me saying I need you to do it 30 minutes twice a day because you’re not going to do it. Right? So.
Cheryl McColgan (40:43.558)
Right. And is this something that people could do? Like say I’m sitting here editing our video for the channel or I’m doing some other kind of work. Could I have it on then or could I be on the treadmill walking for a half an hour while I have this thing on? Talk to people about like how to have it stack it or how to integrate it into their day. Because I think no matter whether it’s a device or meditation or whatever it is, if you can kind of glom it onto something else and multitask as much as we hate to do that.
probably for our brains would be better if we just like chill out every once in a while. But realistically, if we want people to do this, they’ll probably feel like they need to be doing something else. So if you can just chat about that a little bit, is it as effective or are there certain activities that pair better than others kind of thing?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (41:15.298)
would be.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (41:26.402)
Yeah, yeah, great question. So this is very much the frame that I use when talking with clients is it needs to be integrated into a lifestyle. And if we do that, we can be successful. So yes, the see-through glasses, although they’re really made for task-based activity where you’re trying to increase performance in that activity, you can use them in other places. So again, you could be on the treadmill.
you could be on the computer. do it frequently. I will, my team, you know, has, has, they’re all like finished laughing at me for my different ridiculous things that I do. you know, I’ve got a nasal laser in my nose and you know, these goopy glasses on and maybe a, know, a red light mouth guard in and there’s like whatever guy, you know, sure. So if I’m in a, in a zoom meeting and it’s just
Cheryl McColgan (42:11.494)
You
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (42:23.446)
You know, one of those meetings where you have to be there, but it’s not all that exciting. I will put my glasses on and put it on kind of a brain brightener, you know, like a stimulating protocol to help me stay more engaged in the meeting. And it’s just that simple. so there’s any number of places that we can kind of weave it into our day. And I’ll give you great example. So for, I don’t know, a few years, my wife had a
Cheryl McColgan (42:36.198)
Mm-hmm.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (42:53.464)
audiovisual entrainment system sitting next to her on her nightstand and wouldn’t use it. And it was the, had the opaque glasses, the non see-through glasses and the chances of her taking 30 minutes out of her day and laying down and doing nothing and doing a treatment, clearly zero, like 0 % chance she was ever going to do that. She’s just not wired that way. I’m a meditator. So for me to
take 30 minutes and do a session, no problem, right? Like I’m wired to do that and it’s part of my day. For her, no. So then I got the see-through glasses for her. Well now, she’ll happily put it on in the morning when she’s having her coffee and tootling around the new sites and Facebooking with friends. So that was it. That was the solution, was find her a way that she could do it while she was doing something else.
Now doing a treatment every day isn’t a problem. So yeah, I’m very much a believer in if you figure out how you as an individual are going to integrate this and then that’s what you do. Yeah, turn it into a part of the routine, part of a ritual, part of a habit, and then it gets done. again, so I’m, although I can be prescriptive and say, well, given what you’re going on in the
the symptoms and all of these things. This is the protocol you should do and you should do it like this and great. But again, if the person isn’t gonna do that, then that whole activity was a waste of time. And so I really work more with people from what are they willing to do? What can we get? Because the nice thing about the device is, as I said, 25 protocols, there’s nine different benefits one gets.
from doing audiovisual entrainment, eight of the benefits are the same across all 25 protocols. So you get the bulk of the benefit regardless of the protocol you do. The ninth thing that is protocol specific is kind of the state. So it puts you into more of an energized state, more of an alert, aroused state, or more of a relaxed awareness state, or more of a meditative internal state.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (45:16.632)
And then we go down the scale like even more into kind of a drifty dreamy state and then sleep. So state is this other piece. And, that’s fairly simple. If a person is, is like, you know, I’m doing this before going to school as a way to optimize school. Does that person need, you know, more arousal? Does their system need to be, kind of boosted or are they the opposite? That what they need is actually to be calmed and settled.
to make their school day better. Then we just pick the protocol that has that state effect, but the other eight benefits you get no matter what protocol. So the way we can make the whole process simple, and I’ll say, you person doesn’t have to do the glasses, the headphones and the ear clips all the time. You can pick and choose. So if the glasses are, it’s not an appropriate place and it would be easy to have earbuds in and just do the binaural beats.
do that, that’s nice and easy. And then the other one is the transcranial stimulation, the ear clips. Again, super simple to just run that wire up your shirt, clip it on your ears, put the device in your pocket, and just go about your day doing whatever you’re doing. Again, you can have a student sitting in a classroom doing the transcranial stimulation with zero interference in what they’re doing in terms of classwork and what’s required of them physically.
Cheryl McColgan (46:46.49)
Yeah, amazing. This sounds so useful. So you already mentioned your various websites a couple of times, but to wrap it all up here at the end, again, we mentioned that all of this will be in the show notes, but you can use share with people where they can find you. You mentioned you’re in Minneapolis if they happen to be in that area, but where can they find you online? Are you active on any social channels and what’s the best way they can get in touch with you?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (47:07.64)
Sure. So the Bhakti Brain Health Clinic, so this is a mouthful. So bhaktibrainhealthclinic.com. What might be easier for folks is cerebralfit.com. So just cerebralfit.com. So either of those sites, you’ll find my direct number, direct email. So you can reach out that way.
We have a free consult that we do with folks. So you can book that right online on either one of those sites. And so if this holds interest for you, or if you’re a teacher or a school administrator or a parent who has a child in a school and you feel like this is something you might want to bring to the school, perfect. Like reach out, let’s schedule a consult. Let’s talk about what makes sense again, either for your
personal, you know, regulating the dysregulation, or maybe you think that you’re fine, but other people need it and you would like to help bring it to them. Great. Either way.
Cheryl McColgan (48:12.838)
Either way, you should still probably use it yourself too, right? Well, Guy, as always, it has been such a pleasure chatting with you and thank you so much for sharing about this technology and how it can help both students and teachers. I personally feel like this should just be a federal program. It should be in every school and maybe we’ll get there eventually, but thank you for doing the work that you do to kind of make those things happen.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (48:16.192)
Yeah, exactly.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (48:36.684)
Well, thank you, Cheryl. It was a delight chatting with you again. I look forward to more.
Cheryl McColgan (48:41.03)
Sounds good, thank you.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, I share my journey of returning to strength training after a long hiatus. The importance of strength training for longevity and health span, the benefits of starting at any age, and how to overcome common barriers to consistency are topics in this solo episode.
I provide practical tips for getting started, understanding progressive overload, and the significance of workout frequency in gaining muscle. I discuss the role of nutrition in supporting strength training goals and resources to find reliable resources for effective training.
Science Backed YouTube Channels: Renaissance Periodization with Dr. Mike Isratel, Dr. Menno Henselmans, Dr. Milo Wolfe and Jeff Nippard.
Newbie Gains: https://youtu.be/om7ow5PFhSE
How to Maximize Muscle Growth: https://youtu.be/55nfFfWXSTM
Hume Body Composition Scale, Big Black Friday Discount Plus Code HEALNOURISHGROW stacks on top!
Takeaways* Strength training is crucial for maintaining bone density as we age. * Starting strength training early in life can have long-term benefits. * Progressive overload is essential for muscle growth. * You can achieve significant results with just two workouts a week. * Body weight exercises are a great way to begin strength training at home. * Nutrition, including carb intake (GASP), supports muscle growth and recovery. * Finding reliable sources of information can enhance your training effectiveness. * Strength training is more effective for fat loss than cardio alone. * Tracking body composition can provide motivation and insight into progress.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.346)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I want to share with you some things I’ve learned when going back to gym over the last 16 months. I guess what I really wanted to share is that I know a lot of people are going to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions here soon and you know that I usually do some content towards the end of the year and the beginning of the new year around diet, around exercise, about…
tips and tricks and things that you can do to make these things easier if you are adding these into your life. And so this has been a lot on my mind lately because I just made a change at the gym and I’ll kind of go a little backwards and share with you just some of the things that I’ve been learning, what has helped me stay consistent and if you’re going to start doing this in the new year, some things that you can do to hopefully make it easier for yourself and not make some of the same mistakes that I did going back. So,
Just to give a little bit of background for those of you that may be new here, I’ve talked about this and shared this a bit in the past. I’ve been super active my whole life. I was a runner for 17 years, had to quit that because of my knees and I love hiking and anything outdoors. I am very excited to do and love doing. I walk almost every day outside. But what I haven’t done consistently over the years is lift weights. And there’s just been more and more
content and research coming out lately around the benefits of lifting and strength training as far as longevity and just better daily life and the ability to live a better life into your old age. And I know if you’re out there and you’re younger and you’re listening to this, you might not think that you need to start thinking about this now, but the sooner that you can implement this in your life and get it started, the better. There’s actually research showing that.
Children in particular and young adults like building as much muscle as you can when you’re younger can actually help you when you get older because if you even take time off from those things from strength training and stuff at some point in your life and you come back to it if you had built a lot of muscle at a much younger age, then it’s so much easier to get it back. So there’s that. So even if you’re younger and then also there’s just, you know, being the ability to
Cheryl McColgan (02:16.492)
be fit and do more things when you’re young before you have all these aches and pains and issues that you tend to have when you get older. So caring for your body when you’re young as much as possible is a really good practice to do no matter what your goals are. And then if you are already older though, it is never too late to make some changes to help your joints, to help you feel better, to help you feel stronger and ultimately help you have a better quality of life.
So the history with lifting is I actually first started lifting when I was playing basketball in the eighth grade. This is going way back here into the eighties and we had a weight bench in our garage. My dad had always lifted weights. So it wasn’t foreign to me, even though this was not a thing at a time. It wasn’t like the women’s sports teams were like they are now where I think just about every sports team, men or women in high school do some sort of strength training in the gym. And I think that is so amazing and something that I wish
had been more prevalent when I was younger. If I had my teammates to do it and stuff, maybe I would have stuck with it longer. But so I did that sporadically. And then as an adult, when I was married the first time around, we also had a weight bench in our basement. And I would go through phases where I would do that fairly consistently for a few weeks. Usually what would happen is I’d get injured because I probably wasn’t doing it right or I was doing it too much or I was running in addition to that at the time.
I’m playing a ton of golf. So I would quit for extended periods of time. So it’s not like I’m totally foreign to lifting, but I’ve never done it consistently through my whole life. And then over the last several years, as I’ve become more focused on Heal, Nourish, Grow, and producing this content all around health and wellness and writing articles and doing research and more and more research about how to live better, how to feel better, all those sorts of things, what has been coming more to the forefront and what is
particularly in the forefront in social media these days is strength training and particularly in women in perimenopause or menopausal age because they’re just finding that bone density in that age group is really poor. And the problem is once you get to be that age, it’s not impossible to reverse it, but we’d be so much better off if we were paying attention to this earlier in the process so that people never got osteopenia or osteoporosis.
Cheryl McColgan (04:40.344)
If you’ve never heard of, most people have heard of osteoporosis at this point, which is basically weak, brittle bones, but osteopenia is what happens as a precursor to that. So it’s like you’re on your way to osteoporosis and they’re just finding that this is super prevalent in the population. And one of the best ways to prevent it is actually strength training. I actually recently became aware of a study that they did over in Australia with people that were post-menopausal that had osteoporosis.
and they had them start strength training and they were able to get some of their bone mass back, which is something that they had never, nobody really thought that you can do that beyond taking some drugs that they have to prevent it from getting worse. But the idea that you can get more bone mass even in your older age just by strength training is pretty amazing. And then outside of that, it’s just about living better and longer, right? So even,
if you live a long life and you can’t get out of your chair when you get to that long life, then that’s not gonna feel very good in your body. You’re going to be dependent on other people. So the longer that you can maintain the ability to pick up and bring in your groceries, get yourself in and out of a chair easily, safely get yourself in and out of a tub. It just will make you more independent and have a better quality of life as you get older. So all that being said, I finally…
was able to flip the switch in my head that I really needed to start strength training. And when I first started thinking of this, I think I’ve talked about getting my DEXA scan in the past. And thankfully for me, a history of being active my whole life, I have really good bone density, like very high, like 75th percentile, maybe 90th percentile for somebody my age. So I don’t have to worry about those things, but it’s because I’ve been active so much up to this point. But really what I was struggling with is, you know, because of all the years of running, my knees are bone on bone osteoarthritis.
arthritis so I have some pain there and I have a tendency every once in while for my knees to just kind of give out. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this term or why and nobody really knows exactly why. Thankfully I don’t have any meniscus tears. Sometimes when this is cropped up I’ve had to get an MRI in the past and basically it just involves a period you know months and months and months of rehab before I can get better again. So when I originally had this idea to do this and I had planned on starting it well before my 50th birthday.
Cheryl McColgan (07:00.216)
got injured pretty bad with my knee and so I had to take some time to re-tap so I wasn’t lifting. But at this point, and this is, we are in November of 2024, so whenever you’re listening to this, you can do the math. But to this point, I’ve now lifted consistently for 16 months, which is by far the longest that I’ve ever done this for an extended period of time in my life. And so that being the case, I wanted to share with you
some of that background that I just described because really learning all about that and hearing it more and more and more over the years, that helped it solidify in my head that it’s something I need to do even though I really don’t enjoy it. Although I do have to say, just lately, I’m starting to finally enjoy it more. So there is this kind of idea of fake it until you make it or just do something because you know it’s good for you and you know you should. As much as I hate to say that, sometimes that is part of the thing. So it’s not about
know, willpower or passion to do it. It’s more just about the commitment to do it. And so that’s something that I’ve been about a lot of things in my life is just, you know, doing that process until it becomes a habit. And then it just becomes something that I do. And if that’s something that you’re interested in learning more about, if you go back in my channel, there’s a video on my YouTube, five things you need to create better habits. And that kind of walks through some of that stuff, my thought process and how to do that.
and then other content as well as I’ve had in the past just talking about maintaining habits. And I am certainly not the best or the most authority on the subject. There are plenty of books about it. The one super popular book about habits, the name’s escaping me at the moment. But anyway, if you just go to Amazon, type in habits, you’ll find James Cleary, I think is the author and I still am having the name escape me, but I’ll put the link in the show notes for you. So anyway, I thought I would share like what is the way
to get started again, especially if you have joint problems, if you are an older person, if you’re a woman that’s afraid of the gym. First of all, the thing to say is you don’t have to go to the gym. You can do so many things at home for such a long extended period of time without a lot of equipment and a lot of things with zero equipment at all. So the first thing is just body weight exercises. So things like squats, pushups, sit-ups, all those kinds of things you can do at home without any equipment whatsoever.
Cheryl McColgan (09:20.086)
And then if you have some light weights at home, that will get you pretty far for a while, especially if it’s been a long time since you worked out because you’ll be kind of not very strong. You’ll be a little weak. And so those smaller weights can work very well for a long time. And if you go on Facebook Marketplace, you don’t have to buy them new. There’s plenty of people just looking to get rid of dumbbells and stuff because they’ve been sitting in their basement for a long time and they haven’t been using them. And they’re finally ready to make peace with that and just get rid of them.
Their loss is your gain because you can pick these up for very cheap. Same with certain types of exercise equipment, whether it’s an old bike or a treadmill or things like that. And in fact, treadmills have gotten, and we’re talking mostly about strength training here today, but if you live in an area further north like I do and where there’s occasionally snow and weather in the winter, you might find it useful to have a walking pad or a treadmill in your house just to get your steps in. And those have become exceedingly inexpensive over the years. I think I picked one up, maybe it’s about about.
It was before the pandemic because I was using it when I was writing the book, I was doing a standing desk and walking on that little treadmill. And I think I picked it up on Black Friday, which is coming up here. If you’re listening to this in real time for, I don’t know, no more than $150 on Amazon. It might even been a hundred. And before I go on with this, I will mention one other thing. Since Black Friday is coming up every year, I put out a gift guide of like health and wellness products that I’ve been using over the last year and testing out. And I always
If I like something and use it, I go out of the way to get a discount code for you guys. And then I put all of those in a guide. So this year it’ll be heelnourishbro.com slash black Friday, 2024. That will be the URL and look for that coming up here soon. But if you go to the URL, it’ll have all the best health and wellness deals, things that I’ve been using, things that I love. And usually if you put in code heelnourishbro or H and G 10 or some variation of that. But the best thing is to just go to the website, click.
link and that will take you there and automatically apply discounts for the most part. So if you’re looking to get back into working out that might be a good resource for you coming up here with a lot of sales going into the holidays. And I’ll save one other thought on that for the end. But so starting with virtually no equipment you can get a lot accomplished and start to get stronger just doing body weight exercises. However at some point you might find that either
Cheryl McColgan (11:43.98)
going to the gym or having a gym membership might help you in your process of getting stronger. And it certainly makes it easier when you have access to a lot of equipment. Where I got started again, is I just signed up for Planet Fitness. had actually, speaking of the pandemic, I had been going to Planet Fitness during the pandemic. That was another one of my little stints where I started lifting and quit again. But, you know, that’s a good basic gym. They have everything you need. They really promote.
this idea of no judgment. And whenever I go into the Planet Fitness gyms, there’s people of all sizes there. Everybody is for the most part doing their own thing. Nobody’s really paying attention to anything anybody else is doing. And that’s one thing I can say is having been a yoga instructor for years and years and years and you know, people would be nervous when they would come to yoga class, that people were looking at them or judging them and those kinds of things. But quite honestly, when you’re working out,
whether it’s with weights or you’re in your yoga class or whatever, everybody is so wrapped up in what they’re doing and concentrating on what they’re doing that for the most part, they are not like concerned or looking at you in any kind of way. So as hard as that is, try not to let that be a barrier for you going back to the gym or to get a membership somewhere. And you know, there are good gyms everywhere. It doesn’t have to be Planet Fitness. just, that happens to be the one that was close to my house and it was easy and it’s inexpensive. So that’s what I did. And
My biggest first tip for going back, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve been lifting and like I was rehabbing a knee injury, so I really had to pay attention to this first principle very much. And I already have joint issues, so I need to be aware of that. So when I went back, I was very careful to start with light weights and just get my body used to doing the movements again and just staying in a rep range that is like in the eight to 12 range, which I will tell you some things I’ve learned scientifically about that.
since then. But just to get yourself used to it, that’s a good thing to have in your head. It’s a good amount of time. It’s not overly taxing if you’re not using a heavy amount of weight. And, you know, most machines are self-explanatory. Also at Planet Physicist, they have some barcodes on the machines where if you scan it, it’ll show you a video on how to use it. So it’s pretty simple. Also, you can ask any of the people there to help you use a particular machine. It usually has the body part on it. So whatever body part you’re wanting to work on first.
Cheryl McColgan (14:07.052)
that’s a good place to start, find that machine and then just try it out and do the things. Maybe only do one set, just when you’re getting used to it, do one set on one machine, go to another one. They also have a circuit area there at Planet Fitness that you can do, which is basically the purpose of that is a half an hour workout. So you just do each machine in order. And that’s a good way to get started again. But so what I learned about that is it just like, again, it got me used to moving my joints again.
And as time went on, what you really need to do to get stronger is this idea of progressive overload. So progressive overload is one of two things. Progressive overload means either more weight, more resistance. So you’re adding weight as you get stronger, or it can be more reps. So you’re using the same weight, but you’re doing more reps each time. Either one of those is progressive overload. And here’s where I go into the geeky thing, because I don’t know why it took me so long this time, because I think in my head, I just somehow didn’t believe I was
finally going to stick to it this time. so I waited until this point to start kind of digging deep into the research and into the science and like kind of how to get bigger and stronger and hypertrophy and you know, anabolism, catabolism, all these things in your body that these processes that bodybuilders go through to make themselves stronger.
And the one thing I learned about the progressive overload thing is there is a pretty wide range of reps that can actually grow your muscles. So if you’re looking to grow your muscles and get stronger, the rep range that can reduce that is anywhere between six and 30. So if you’re scared of lifting really heavy or you have bad joints, it might be a good idea to test out these two things because the one thing with higher reps, obviously you’re bending that joint more, which could be irritating.
But generally heavier weight on the joint is going to be more stressful. So if you want to do higher reps and then you use a lower weight, anything that’s up to 30 reps will get you stronger. Beyond that, you’re really not giving your muscle enough stimulus to make it grow. So stay somewhere between six reps and 30 reps. And it could just be, you know, a time constraint thing because part of the thing of doing that eight to 12
Cheryl McColgan (16:30.24)
Rep range is number one, it puts you on the machine for a reasonable amount of time. It makes the whole workout a reasonable amount of time. If you had to do every exercise for like 30 reps, you’d be on the machine for a long time, number one, which might annoy others there in the gym trying to use it. And number two, it would just take a lot longer. So something in the lower rep range might be good just for time constraints. But anything in that range will get you stronger.
The other thing that I learned about frequency is people always want to know how many times a week do I need to go to the gym to really see some gains. And when I started going back, I decided on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, give myself two days on the weekend off so could have some good recovery. And it was just an amount that I felt comfortable with and I could commit to. I think actually at the very beginning, I might have only gone twice a week when I was just getting used to it again. But in any case, what the science says about that is that
Even one time a week going to lift weights, you can get about 60 % of the muscle growth that you would get anyway, which is pretty amazing. So if you’re already having trouble convincing yourself to go to the gym, which was a struggle that I always had just once a week, I mean, that is not asking a lot of time to do that. And that could be a great way to start. You’re going to give yourself plenty of recovery time. So if you get a little sore, especially when you’re first going back, you’ll have six days in between before you have to go again.
But to really get that good balance between muscle growth and keeping the muscle stimulated, really two to three times a week is best. So at two times a week, you get something like 80 % of the muscle growth that you would get in an entire week. And then as you go up to three, you’re getting closer to that 100 % of muscle potential that you’re gaining by doing as many workouts. But so two times a week is a pretty amazing thing. Two times a week, you’re going to get 80 % of the muscle that you would grow anyway.
That’s pretty good. So if you can only convince yourself to go twice a week, that’s still going to give you benefits, still going to make you stronger, still going to make your muscles grow. So that extra, the third day or the fourth day in the week might just be because it’s in your routine. It could make the workout shorter amount of time if you go a few more times a week. And also the more times a week you go, the more you’re stimulating that muscle. So that’s where you get those little more incremental gains that you might get up to 100%. But I thought learning that science
Cheryl McColgan (18:50.872)
really just made me feel like it could be accessible to so many more people because you don’t need to be in the gym. And this is what has always kept me away from the, I don’t like being in the gym. I don’t want to be in the gym. I want to be outside. If I’m doing something, I want to just go for a walk or go for a bike ride or go for a hike. So being in the gym has just never been my thing. But had I known like years ago, really solidified it in my mind that if I went two days a week, that that was going to give me some great benefits. I think I might’ve gotten around to this a lot more quickly.
So that’s just what I wanted to share about getting you back in there to encourage you.
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.13)
I can’t believe I almost forgot this part. So I’m slicing this in. So if it’s a little disjointed, you’ll understand why. But maybe I was reflecting on this after recording the information earlier. And I, when I originally had the idea to record this and to give kind of my thoughts on it, there was one thing that I really meant to address that I completely forgot when I first recorded it.
And that is that there is such a thing in the first year as newbie gains. It’s a proven thing. And so while I’m saying to give yourself an adjustment phase where you get your joints used to lifting and all of that, there may be a reason to consider in the first year to eat in a slight surplus or if you’ve got a lot of body fat to lose, maybe just eat at maintenance and don’t cut back too much so that you can really take advantage.
of your body’s desire to put on muscle during that first year. And so if you’re not trying to lose weight, you’re just trying to get healthier and gain muscle, maybe eat at a slight surplus. And then also maybe consider just for that first year to go ahead and go to the gym three times, four times a week if you can tolerate it. Now, I think obviously kind of what I did, whatever I needed to do to get myself in there on a consistent basis. And that was to not load it up, because even if I really would have fully known
that newbie gains was a real thing and that it was my best way to maintain muscle. I don’t think if I would have started out saying, I’m going to go five days a week, given that, I just don’t believe that I would have stayed as consistent. So finding some kind of balance there between getting started again, getting consistent, but then maybe some time during that first year of lifting to actually ramp it up so that you can take advantage of that. I’ll see if can find the video again, but I thought, I think it was Minnow who
did a good explanation of that phenomena and how you can take advantage of it. Or it could have been Dr. Mike, I’m not sure. It’ll take me a while to dig back through that and find that video. But maybe consider taking advantage of that while you have a chance. And the same applies for people who maybe lifted in the past but have taken an extended period of time off. It seems that those people can also take advantage of a period where they have increased muscle growth when they first get started again.
Cheryl McColgan (02:22.474)
So anyway, now back onto the rest of it.
The other thing is when you’re first getting started again with any habit is people, especially with New Year’s resolutions, you tend to go overboard like, I’m going to eat so clean and I’m going to go to the gym every day and I’m going to walk every day. It’s too much. And if you go back to some of my other content that you’ll hear around this time of year, some are like look at episodes that came out between November and the end of January.
And some of them are even talking about like New Year’s resolutions or whatever. And the thing is, don’t take on too much at once. Make your goal reasonable and achievable. You’ll be so much more likely to stick with it and so much easier to make it a habit if you start slow and then build up. And so speaking of build up, this is where I’ve gotten to this point. So up to this point, I had chosen those three days a week. Do full body every time I’m at the gym. Takes a little longer, but then I only to go three times a week for the reasons I just described. I don’t like going to the gym that much.
But what I was finding as I started lifting heavier, as I started getting stronger, I became familiar with this term of systemic fatigue from Dr. Mike Isertel because I was adding more lifts, more sets, more weight. my body was just starting to, like I would still recover every time in time to go to the gym the next day, but I by far always felt best on Mondays after I’d had two full days to recover. I always felt like super fresh and I could just hit it so hard on Monday.
And then by the time I get to Wednesday, still had this like, even if my muscles weren’t sore anymore, I still just had this like a little bit of lingering fatigue, but I would do my Wednesday workout and I’d do my Friday workout and then I’d recover over the weekend and start over again. And so as I’ve been learning about this over time, as I’ve been looking at more and more YouTube videos with these scientists, I’m gonna list all of them below and I might as well just say them all right here right now in case you’re wondering who I’ve been listening to because this is the other thing. Don’t just go on YouTube and listening to…
Cheryl McColgan (21:11.768)
any random people about lifting, about working out. If you want to be serious about making the most of your time in the gym, and this is one thing I wish I would have done sooner now that I’ve been so consistent because I was probably, you know, working all this time to a point where it was not super effective because I was just kind of left my own devices and not paying attention to the science yet, which is very unusual for me. But again, this whole process in my brain, like I said, took a while because I was never a person who really enjoyed.
So to me, was like just a miracle that I was getting myself there every week and I was letting that be, you know, they say don’t, you know, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I really had that in head. like, hey, I’m going, I’m doing it. That’s going to be good enough for now. I’ll worry about the rest of later. I’ll figure it out. And now as time has gone on, I’ve gotten more interested in it and I’ve gotten, like I said, I’ve solidified it where I’ve convinced myself, you know, I’m solid in this, I’m going now. And I felt like I could dive in a little more and try to get more out of my workouts now that I’m more consistent.
So that’s why I started diving into the science and the people that I’ve been enjoying listening to the most Dr. Mike Isretel, he has tons of videos on YouTube. He really, he has two different kinds of videos for the most part. Ones where he works out with people in the gym and really pushes them to their point. And if you watch those, you might think, I have no interest in doing this at all, right? Those kind of videos, people are just in pain and they’re really, they’re, you know, they’re bodybuilders. They’re, they’re looking to get the most
growth out of every single session and they’re just really going after it hard. I’ve found those entertaining now. I think if I would have been watching those ones at the beginning, I might’ve been like discouraging myself a little bit quite honestly. But then the other videos that he does that are really amazing, he really goes into the science of what makes your muscles grow the most, what makes you the strongest, what’s the minimum stimulus, different body parts that he talks about. If you have a specific body part that you would like to grow more.
And then he just breaks it down and makes it very simple, even though it’s very science based. Particularly when he talks about fat loss, he does an amazing job of talking about fat loss and that process. And like I’ve said in the past, is I’ve been focused on health and wellness and a lot of people that come to a low carb space are very focused on weight loss. so I’ve over the years read tons of things about that. I’ve always said that I just think that whole foods are the way to go.
Cheryl McColgan (23:33.858)
Personally, I do low carbs, that works for me. I have been experimenting with adding some more carbs since I’ve been lifting consistently because there is some evidence that adding carbs around your workouts is anti-catabolic, which is what you wanna avoid. So catabolic is muscle breakdown. Anabolic stimulus is muscle growth. That’s mostly for the proteins job.
But that’s adding some carbs definitely helps with this process of not breaking down. So I thought that was pretty interesting and that’s made me start experimenting a little bit. I’m still like, you know, lower carb obviously than the standard American diet. But it’s just been something interesting to learn about. And I also think when you work out on regular basis, you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you’re metabolically healthy. There’s no reason that healthy carbs can’t be on the menu if they work for your body and it’s not causing you to, you know, blood sugar,
average just to skyrocket and cause you to go towards diabetes, then maybe your metabolism is not ready for that yet. But if you’re really, really healthy, carbs aren’t a problem for everybody. So it’s like, I feel like I’ve never demonized carbs in my content. But definitely, like for a lot of people, low carb can be very, very healing. It’s not necessarily something you have to do forever once your metabolism is healed. If you’re working out more, there’s so many factors, right? If you want to go back to a good episode where I think we talked about that a little bit more, Alan Aragon is also a great
person in the health and wellness space that’s very science based. I’ll put that link in the show notes. can’t remember the episode of that. But anyway, so Dr. Mike Isretel channel on YouTube, the link will be below. Dr. Minow Henselman’s, Dr. Milo Wolf. Those three have been the ones that I’ve primarily gotten onto lately. There’s this one other guy that I’m, his name is escaping me, also a doctor. But those, does that,
That information is just going to ensure that they know how to do things properly. They’re giving you science-based information. They’ll make your workouts more effective because like I just said about the knowing that two times a week can get you 80 % of the way to get you’re getting stronger and getting more jacked goal or whatever your goal is or losing some more fat. That’s all really important stuff, right? So listening to people that really know. I mean, there’s plenty of workout people on YouTube that are more for entertainment purchases.
Cheryl McColgan (25:56.344)
And I’ve been enjoying some of those channels too. One of them came across as Will Tennyson and the other one is… His name is escaping me at the moment too, but a guy that he’s actually played lacrosse, which is kind of funny to me since our kids both play lacrosse. in any case, those…
And they actually do a great job. And I think at this point, both of them have been lifting long enough and doing it long enough that they are reliable sources of information as well. And there plenty of people that are reliable. But I’m just saying, for my brain and the way I like to approach things and the effectiveness that I want to get out of my workout now, that’s why I really rely on the science-based people to a certain degree. So all that being said, here’s the other part of this. You might be thinking, well, I don’t really want to get jacked.
I just, you know, I could stand to lose 10 pounds or 20 pounds and you know, yeah, getting stronger. That’d be great. So I should probably just use my exercise time doing cardio, right? No, that’s not right. That’s unfortunately what we’ve all thought for way too long for so many years. You do absolutely still need to move your body, do cardio for heart health, for mental health, all of those things. I’ve talked about that in the past, but really for fat loss for is strength training is going to be one of your most effective tools.
It won’t make you as hungry when you’re working out as much and won’t increase the appetite as much. So that’s a good thing if you’re really, you know, focused on fat loss and it’ll actually make you look better once you do start losing fat. You’ll be able to see the muscle underneath. And they’ve just shown time and time again with controlled groups, people doing cardio only versus lifting only that resistance training beats it for fat loss. So that is no longer.
I think it’s still in the general population, the idea that you need to be running or doing a bunch of cardio or these kinds of things to lose weight. Definitely still true in the general population. But in these science based communities and people that have done the research, it is just really unbeatable as far as something to add to your fat loss program is getting stronger. yeah, so that’s kind of what that has been all about. Then I have another I’ll have another video coming out. I think I’m going to go ahead and
Cheryl McColgan (28:13.272)
it out on the podcast is kind of like a special episode. But I’ve been testing a new product, which is the Hume Health Scale. It’s a body fat scale. And I’ve used a bioelectrical impedance home scale for probably over 10 years now. And I’ve talked about them in the past. They’re fine. They’re a good tool. They can show trends, but they’re not really all that accurate for body fat levels. However, this one that I started testing back in October
September actually, so it’s going to be coming up on three or four months that I’ve been using it now. it is, well, to go back to, this is what I was going to come back to with the Black Friday thing. They’ve got a huge Black Friday sale and my code stacks on top. So you get an extra 15 % off of the big Black Friday sale. And that link is heelnourishgrow.com slash Hume, H-U-M-E. So if you go to that and you use my code, check out, it should auto apply, but…
put in Heal Nurse Row and it gives you the discount on top of the Black Friday deal. So that’s pretty cool. But the full review is coming up. But the short version is, I think it is very, very good. It’s the best one I’ve ever used. It’s so good that they say it correlates 98 % with Dexa, which talked about Dexa in the past here. It’s pretty much the gold standard for body fat at this point, even though it’s not perfect. is one that people use the most when they’re doing studies and that sort of thing. But
I had gotten a DEXA right when I got the body fat scale just to see did they match up? Was it close? Within a percent of body fat, it was the same. And I’m going to go over all this more in the review. And then as I’ve used it over these last several months, what I’ve noticed is the trend over time is exactly matches my training and what I’ve been doing with my diet that I’ve lost about an additional two pounds of fat and gained some more muscle, which I will be testing that again in December when I go back for DEXA.
to give really this full three month of testing the scale versus the DEXA and see what those are and see how accurate it is. But I’ve been really pleased with it. Like I said, by far the best I’ve ever used. It seems to be tracking really well with, like I said, the first number when I first did it was absolutely spot on. And where it is now, based on what I’ve been doing with my training and my body fat, I think that it’s very accurate.
Cheryl McColgan (30:36.824)
And they have like a 60-day money-back guarantee. So if that’s something you ever thought about using, especially if you’re going to start, if you’re thinking about going on this strength training trip, it’s really nice because the number on the scale for me, since I started this process, has actually gone up because I’ve put on like at this point, I’m probably up to like maybe nine pounds of muscle that I put on over this last 16 months of this process. And so my number on the scale is actually higher, but my body fat is lower. I have much more muscle.
So I look smaller, but that number on the scale is bigger and that freaks people out. It freaks me out. It freaks me out. Like the last three months, I’m like, my gosh, I’ve been working so hard, training hard, you know, doing really well with my diet, just a slight deficit. And the number is staying the same. But if I didn’t have that body fat component and the muscle component that I have on the scale, it’s showing me that I am making progress. You know, it’s easy to throw in the towel. So
Anyway, if you’ve been thinking about looking for a tool like that, I think this is super useful and it’s a great time to get it. So I did just want to mention that even though, like I said, it’ll be on the Black Friday list of tools that I love and make great gifts for health and wellness people in your life. So I think that kind of covered everything that I wanted to share with you today and talk about. I hope that if you are not strength training now that you’ll consider.
doing that going forward, knowing how good it is for you and convincing yourself like, hey, Cheryl said, I only have to do it twice a week or even once a week. And that is a great place to start. Like just once a week. If you’re not doing it now, like I said, start out light, start out easy, start out with body weight stuff at home, do it once a week, get used to that, add on another day. And if you get to a point like me now, where I was getting that systemic fatigue, I think I forgot to finish that.
thought earlier about where I was going with the systemic fatigue. So I was doing my three day week program. I just this week decided, okay, I’m going to go to the gym four days a week. Like I said, I’m not happy about that. It’s not a place that I like to be. But I am starting to like it more. And more like having these goals in mind, having these strength goals, having also in my head some other goals that I’m not going to share. I don’t know if I’ll actually do it, but something I’ve been toying with the idea of doing in relation.
Cheryl McColgan (32:56.098)
to strength training just to give me a goal, but you know, like something out in the future to work towards. But so the four days a week now, so now I will not be doing full body every time I go to the gym, I’m doing upper lower. So I started out on Monday with a hard lower body day today, I went and I did upper body only. And I think I’m gonna really like it, even though it requires another day in the gym, just the mental break of not having to do.
everything while I’m there every time. Like I went in, I did legs and I was like, I really hard on legs. And then I, and I like felt like it was really weird. I left and I was like, God, I felt like I didn’t do much, you know, cause I’ve been used to doing full body. And then same thing when I did the upper body, like my lower body was really sore, but upper body, hadn’t touched it. So I did all the upper body things. And now tomorrow I get a full day off and then I do that again, Thursday and Friday, and then two days off again. So,
Seem to see how over time, you know, it’s all a progression. It’s all in good fun. It’s all meant to, you know, challenge you, get you healthier, help you reach your goals. The other reason I’m doing it is because, and here’s where you do need to be careful, is I’ve gotten some pretty flared up elbow tendonitis happening on my right arm. And so I also thought that switching to that split would give my upper body an extra day off during the week so that hopefully this can calm down a little bit because it’s been going on.
for months and I just haven’t wanted to stop training. And it’s not bad enough that it made me stop or anything like that. But I’ve been using my, you know, the other tool that I love to use so much. using my Kenyon red light on it every single night. And they also have great Black Friday deals. So definitely check that out. heelnurshershow.com slash Kenyon. I made all the links like that now. So this would be super easy, you know, whenever you’re looking for those. also,
just any time of the year. Go to my shop page. I put all of those on my shop page. It has a little blurb that talks about like why I like it and has a discount code. So you can always find that stuff there or you can always email me and ask me. But yeah, so that’s the other reason I did it I need to give my upper body a break so can hopefully heal that a little bit more. And I’m also looking to push through the next
Cheryl McColgan (35:15.608)
I think it’s an eight or 12 week cycle because number one that’s really a good way to do your training just to go in cycles where you kind of have these certain exercises you’re working on. Keep building your strength over time over those 12 weeks and then maybe take a little what they call a deload week or a break. And what my goal is is to make it to mid January when I will be going snowboarding and you know getting really strong for snowboarding season which I’m super excited about. This would be by far the strongest my legs have
ever been on the mountain. So I’m really excited to like test that out and see how it affects my snowboarding. So to push through to then, and then we’re actually going on a trip. And so what I will do then, since I haven’t really done this at this point, is one of Dr. Mike’s tips was to take like a week or two off on vacation. Don’t train, just let your body like heal, relax, recover.
doing that every once in while is actually really good for your body, probably mentally too, just a good break from it. And I did a little break from that when we went on the trip in September. I only trained one day that we were there because I was also sick the entire trip. So I really, really couldn’t do too much outside of just dealing with being away on vacation and getting around and having the energy to do that. So I’ve really only taken one break like that during…
the time that I’ve been training so far, but I also had not been training probably as hard as I am now. And so I think that my body is going to need that more going forward. So in any case, hopefully that was helpful in some way. Now I really will wrap it up now that I’ve explained all the things how I got to this point. So I didn’t start out with going four days a week, obviously, like I said, I started out slow, lighter weights, build myself up, got used to it, tried not to hurt my joints, still did it. So you just got to be careful, especially the older you are.
And this is one final, okay, then I’ll say one final thing and then I really will wrap this up. The one thing I would recommend doing sooner in the process than I did is the reason I started, so I just started going to a new gym as well that has different equipment, but it’s because that I found a trainer that I’m going to go to once a week for a few weeks so that I can learn some more things, learn some better techniques, learn some workarounds for this elbow. And just, you know,
Cheryl McColgan (37:31.896)
progress. Once you get to a certain point on your own, feel like I’ve kind of learned the things I can learn on my own. And now that I’m diving into these videos, I’m certainly learning much more that it’s going to propel me after I have these few more sessions with the trainer. But it’s also just good to learn new technique, be pushed a little bit more in a different way. And had I done this sooner, maybe I would have mentioned.
to whoever I was working with. whenever I do this exercise, I’m getting this pain and it kind of just came on really slowly. So I’m usually pretty good about at this point, paying attention to my body backing off because several points throughout this, I’ve had like a little things with my knee kick up and I’ve kind of had to back off lower body a little bit or change the exercises that I’m doing to better accommodate how my knee was feeling. So I’m overall pretty good at that after all these years of having those issues. But for some reason, this one just got me.
And I feel like if I would have maybe started working with someone sooner or talked to somebody about it, somebody who trains regularly and that knows what they’re doing, that I might have been able to avoid making this as bad as it is now. So obviously that does cost money. It’s not cheap, but I actually found something that’s very reasonable. And I think it’s worth it for investment because once I learn how to do this properly and learn more things that I can do as workarounds and different ways of doing things,
then I can carry that with me into the future and hopefully avoid having this problem ever again. Probably not because I always seem to have some kind of joint issue, but I’ll do my best. So anyway, if you have any questions, definitely get in touch. If you happen to be in Cincinnati, the gym I’m going to, really like the trainer Steve Ross. He’s close to my age, which I like because he’s been training for a really long time. He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to work with older people with achy joints because he’s done it all himself too.
But it’s finished strong if you happen to be in Cincinnati. And yeah, so that is it for this week and look for the Black Friday deals update. Like I said, it’ll be at the link heelnurserygrow.com slash Black Friday 2024. And yeah, if you have any other questions, let me know, get in touch. The other thing I will, I don’t know if I’ll have it in time for the Black Friday thing, but
Cheryl McColgan (39:48.631)
I also cleaned out the basement because I’m looking into getting a home gym after, like I said, being committed to this for so long, I finally feel like, okay, I can get a home gym and that’ll actually use it. And so I’m in the process of researching those now and looking into, you know, ones that have affiliate programs so that whichever one I choose based on like doing all this research that hopefully that you’ll have a way that you could, if you’re interested, get the same thing, get a little discount, that sort of thing. So anyway, I haven’t.
picked it yet, still working on that research. You know how I love to do a deep dive on these sorts of things, so it’s taken me a little bit. Anyway, I hope you’re having a great rest of your week wherever you are. As always, get in touch if you have questions or need help with anything, and I will talk to you again probably next week.
Cheryl McColgan (40:44.696)
So hope you’re having a great week wherever you are and I will obviously be putting, you know, it’s supposed to be weekly. I’ve missed one here and there occasionally, but I have no plans on stopping. So just bear with me when I might miss a week. But hopefully I’ve had a couple of interviews lately. I have those in the queue to edit and get them up for you. And we’re coming up on almost a hundred episodes, which I can’t believe. So crazy. I was trying to think if I should do some kind of.
event or giveaway or I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I’ll definitely if I do something like that, you’ll be the first to know. So anyway, I will talk to you again soon.
In this conversation, Dr. Victoria Williamson discusses the profound impact of music on the brain, exploring its role in memory, emotional connection, and cognitive enhancement. She highlights the significance of music from infancy through adulthood and introduces the concept of binaural beats as a tool for sound therapy.
The discussion also covers her company, Audicin, which aims to provide sound solutions for wellbeing and productivity, backed by scientific research.
Stay in touch with Dr. Victoria and get a free trial of Audicin at this link.
Takeaways
- Music has been a part of human life for millennia.
- Newborns can remember melodies they heard in utero.
- Music is deeply tied to our emotional experiences.
- The brain processes music in a unique way that enhances memory.
- Binaural beats can help synchronize brain waves for various states of mind.
- Music can be used as a mnemonic device for better memory retention.
- The right kind of background music can enhance focus and productivity.
- Nature sounds in music can significantly reduce stress levels.
- Research is ongoing to explore the benefits of music therapy for various conditions.
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.868)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal and Rosh Ro podcast. I am so excited. I I think I say this when I’m talking to every guest, but that’s because I only choose people that I really want to talk to for the most part. So today I have with me Dr. Victoria Williamson, and she is basically her life’s work is all about music in the brain. And this is a topic that really gets me excited because I was a musician most of my time throughout school. I played saxophone for many years, also sang.
and then my interest in psychology and the brain. And at the time, even way back when, when I was in school at this point, there was a lot of research on the really positive effects in a child’s developing brain with using music. So I know that that research is out here, but what I’m really excited to talk to Dr. Williamson about is how they’re finding that music also works wonders on the adult brain. So very long introduction there, Dr. Victoria, but I kind of wanted to let you know where I’m coming from as well.
So welcome and could you just give people some background on how you got into this work? What sparked your interest in music?
Dr Victoria Williamson (01:04.371)
Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It’s my absolute pleasure to be with you today. We share a lot in our background, you and me. So I paid for school teaching music. I’m a guitarist, classical guitarist, but I love all instruments. I love all forms of music, impossible to name a favorite. But I studied psychology. That’s what I was drawn towards was understanding human behavior and
I was going to school in the sort of late 90s, early 2000s, where neuroscience was blowing up. And we were getting all these cool studies where you could see actual pictures of the brain working. And that was just magnetic to me. when I found out I could combine my two loves, I could combine psychology and music. That was it. That was my pathway right there. And it mattered not that I had to study for so many years and have this kind of uncertain academic life.
Cheryl McColgan (01:57.112)
haha
Dr Victoria Williamson (02:01.587)
because you follow your passion, right? And that’s what you’re all about. So we absolutely share that as well. So my pathway through research always clung to this idea that music is transformative in human life. And we’ve been making music as a species for as long as records exist. The oldest musical instruments we’ve ever found on planet Earth are 40 ,000 years old.
And these are very intricate bone flutes. They’re carved from the bone of a vulture wing, and they use the same musical scale that we use in modern folk music.
Cheryl McColgan (02:42.082)
That’s absolutely amazing. I never heard that before and I’m totally going to go look this up after we finish chatting.
Dr Victoria Williamson (02:47.887)
You will find it. It’s a National Geographic and all kinds of things that were discovered in caves in the south of Germany. And it’s absolutely transformative in our understanding of the importance of music in human life, because not only have we been making music for millennia, we’ve been making the same kind of music. So humans have intuitively developed with music, but music has been an agent of massive change in the human brain and body.
And there’s a professor called Annie Patel. He’s at Tufts in Boston. And he’s talked about the impact of music on the human brain, mind, and body as being akin to that of the invention of fire. And what that allowed us to do was to cook our food. And once you’re able to cook food, you change completely the aspects of nutrition you’re getting, the job of consuming the food, the jaw changes, because we don’t have to chew so much.
The gut microbiome changes because of the different kind of food compounds and structures that we’re getting. And the invention of music and the use of music in human culture, there has never been a human society on earth found that hasn’t used music of some kind. So it’s universal. So the impact on the human brain and body has been this transformative. There isn’t a special musical box in the brain anymore that there’s a special area for cooked food. The evolution.
of our brain and body is one which takes best advantage of what we have. So what you find with music is something that stimulates multiple areas of our brain, all at the same time, visual area, auditory area, memory, pleasure centers, the thinking frontal planning areas of our brain are all studying music. So it’s the perfect medium for our brain to engage. The brain loves music. And so there’s so much power in there to do good.
And my whole career has been about firstly trying to understand that and then thinking about what’s the little way that I can make a message of transformation through music because people do it in all kinds of wonderful ways. Music therapists, music healers, doctors using medicine and intensive care and stroke recovery, neonatal units. I see myself as part of a massive community and I’m here with my message, getting really excited about one kind of music, one aspect of music.
Dr Victoria Williamson (05:12.147)
that can make a difference in the world we live in today.
Cheryl McColgan (05:15.404)
Yeah, and I really am excited to get into that towards the end because I went to your website and listened to a couple of the clips of the music before we got on the interview. And it’s really, really different, but I kind of want to save that for a little bit later when we get to that. In the meantime, though, you mentioned a couple of things there as far as the music’s effects on the brain. And one of the two things come to mind when you were saying those things, the first was
Dr Victoria Williamson (05:30.898)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (05:43.832)
I think one thing that people focus on and as we get older becomes more of an issue is memory. And I think in your work, reading your bio that that’s something. I think that would be really interesting to chat about because maybe there’s some actionable things that people can find their ways to use music to improve their memory. And then the second thing that you mentioned, you said there’s a lot of power of music to do good. And I think like 99 .99 % of the time music just…
makes me feel good in so many ways. But in your bio, it mentioned something about earworms, which I think is such an interesting phenomena. So I don’t know which one of those you want to take on first, but music and memory would be an awesome thing with some actionable tips. And then I really need to know about this earworm thing because that happens to me sometimes and it drives me crazy.
Dr Victoria Williamson (06:16.615)
Right.
Dr Victoria Williamson (06:32.221)
you’re not the only one. And actually they’re beautifully linked because ear webs are a music memory phenomenon. So they’re kind of part of what comes with the gift of how beneficial music can be for the memory is that means music is powerful in memory. And if it’s powerful in memory, it’s going to go awry occasionally. And that’s the kind of earworm side of things when it gets stuck on repeat. But let’s go to the general.
Cheryl McColgan (06:33.652)
I… Good.
Cheryl McColgan (06:54.306)
You
Dr Victoria Williamson (07:01.139)
memory area first. So we know that music marks human life. So I wrote a book about 10 years ago called You Are the Music. And the way I set up the narrative of that book was to look at human life from cradle to grave, and how important music is throughout each of our journeys, how it’s woven into the life course, the human life course, even if you tried and avoided music, I don’t think you could manage it.
especially these days. But right from when we are born, there’s crazy evidence. Did you know that newborns are already remembering music?
Cheryl McColgan (07:42.06)
Wow, that’s great. I didn’t know that.
Dr Victoria Williamson (07:45.085)
So there have been studies done where they played in utero babies, very simple melodies. And then when they’re born, they’ve played them those same melodies compared to other similar melodies that the child has not heard before. And they get a significant relaxation effect to the familiar melody.
Cheryl McColgan (08:05.676)
Very cool.
Dr Victoria Williamson (08:06.003)
So already in utero, that memory is starting to cook. It’s starting to take in sound messages, because we can hear long before we can see anything notable. So your brain is starting to learn about patterns, predictions, and memory from sound principally.
And the Cradle to Grace thing plays out there because there’s a lot of evidence that one of the last senses that we’re blessed with on our journey is sound. But right from the start, we have this powerful memory for sound. it’s starting to tell us all the important things we need to know about our environment. Newborns also react to the sound of their caregivers’ voices far more strongly than anybody else. And that’s based on the Neutro Exposure Party as well. They become familiar with the sounds.
particularly as the mother. Everything from her heartbeat to the way her joints sound to the rhythm of her walk. This is all musical signals that the child has picked up on and is starting to build. So before our children can speak, which is an enormous cognitive effort in a typically developing child, we signal to our infants with music. We talk to them like this. Right?
Cheryl McColgan (09:25.592)
Yes!
Dr Victoria Williamson (09:26.279)
We use infant directed speech, which is essentially musically loaded. We’re using musical structures to emphasize the shape of the language, the pauses of the language, what the vowel sounds are, which is the first thing a child will start to repeat. So that’s our form of communication. It’s our form of connection with our young, but it’s our first form of communication as well. And if you have a neurodivergent child like I do, my son is nonverbal, non -speaking.
And so music is a large part of our ongoing communication. And the memory system is what supports that. And the memory system of the human brain, there isn’t a special memory for Musicbox, rather it’s hyper -connected, as I was talking about before, to all kinds of powerful systems, particularly the emotion system in the brain. So right in the core of your brain,
you’ve got a system called the limbic system, which is attached to your brainstem. Imagine this is your spine coming up. It goes into the brainstem first and the hindbrain, the mammalian hindbrain. And on top is that wiggly brain structure, the cortex that we’re all familiar with when see a picture of the brain. But right in the middle are the ancient senses. And in there is emotion and memory. And they’re tied up together with superlane highways, which is why, as our emotional development begins, as a teenager,
And we have first love, have emancipation, we have financial freedom, we have heartbreak, we have all of these first really emotional experiences. The music that is tied to those transformative times in our lives becomes our soundtrack. That’s the music we forever remember. That’s the music we can recognize at half a second exposure. I know what that is. I know all the lyrics. Wash.
Cheryl McColgan (11:18.636)
And not only, yeah, and not only that, it makes you feel a certain way, right? Like when you hear a song that you first heard in high school or something that you loved, it’s a flood of memory that comes back with that and feelings too. I can see now how you’re saying it’s all tied up in that kind of ancient brain area because the amount of things that come up for me when I think of that stuff and certain songs come on or whatever, it’s…
It’s really amazing. Like I can get sad instantly or get really happy instantly depending on what song comes into my memory from that time period. And I think it’s especially tied to, as you’re saying, that period of time where we’re really still developing and having all these major life changes like in late or early, late teens, early adulthood kind of timeframe.
Dr Victoria Williamson (12:11.357)
You’re so right, you’re so right. And that sort of minimally conscious experience is similar to smell. You had that experience as well when you smell a perfume you haven’t smelled for years. Right, I was doing my daughter’s hair for dance class the other day. It’s first time I’ve sprayed hairspray for a while and I went, the 80s.
Cheryl McColgan (12:20.056)
Yes, hairspray for my skull.
Cheryl McColgan (12:30.324)
Yeah, right, exactly.
Dr Victoria Williamson (12:35.187)
I was right back there. But that is the same kind of brain connection. It doesn’t have to go through the conscious processing, those big evolved human cortex centers right sitting on the top doesn’t need to pass through those. So it’s fast. It’s quick. And these are memories are like the pathways we would make through long grass.
So if you imagine you find a pathway to a beautiful beach for the first time, it’s all long grass and you walk through it. And the first time you walk through it, you’re going to make a little indentation. The more you go down and visit that beach, the more you’re going to tread that path, the easier it’s going to be and the quicker it’s going to be for you to get there. Well, that’s what happens with memory. When people ask me, why can I remember the song that was playing in my high school dance, but I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.
Cheryl McColgan (13:28.119)
Right.
Dr Victoria Williamson (13:29.383)
It’s like, how many times have you thought about that dance versus how many opportunities you’ve had to think about breakfast yesterday? It’s the way that we process our life experiences that says a lot about our memory experiences and because music weaves its way into so many of our significant life moments. And this is to say nothing of our favorite films, our favorite concerts that we go to.
The connections we make with people, the songs we associate with people. First dance at a wedding, all this kind of stuff. Music is part of human ceremony, it’s part of human celebration, it’s part of human commiseration worldwide. And because of that intimate relationship, there’s an intimate relationship with our brain too.
Cheryl McColgan (14:19.19)
And now that you’ve kind of explained how this is in the, you know, a deep part of our brain, but it can also, I think, affect, you said that the centers that are more cortex and memory related, any tips or tricks for, you know, those of us who are getting older and finding themselves forgetting things a little more often, you know, there’s, there’s a bigger catalog up there now is what I like to think of it as it takes me a little longer to go through the memories, you know, but
Dr Victoria Williamson (14:45.543)
Right. Hugely valuable.
Cheryl McColgan (14:47.96)
How can we use or is there a way to use music, say as an adult you’re trying to learn something newer or trying to remember something well, is there a way that you can use music to make that memory stick a little easier or have it stick around longer?
Dr Victoria Williamson (15:06.707)
Okay, that’s a good question. let’s deal with the sort of two parts of that, which is music for learning, essentially. So creating new memories that you want to hold on to, maybe music for studying. And then there’s this idea that music can help keep your memory healthier for longer, which is 100 % true. And the neuroscientists are starting to now reveal why. So in terms of the learning, I’ve often spoken about the power of music as a mnemonic.
And mnemonics are what world memory champions use to recall 40 ,000 cards shuffled at random. Just so it’s a fancy word for memory tricks. And mnemonics rely on allowing us to encode large amounts of information with little effort. So they put 40 ,000 cards to remember. How do you get that into just a few bits of information? And the trick to it is to link different things together.
It’s how musicians go on stage and play an hour of music from memory. It’s because when they practice, they’ve linked sections together. They’ve played always this section this much and then the next section this much and then they join them together and they’ve become a bigger section and so on and so forth. When you remember a dance routine, when you remember a workout routine, it’s the same. You remember in sections and then it starts to stitch together and it gets to be a bigger thing. All of a sudden you can do an hour without thinking about it. Well, music can be a connector.
Putting music to memories can give you triggers as to what piece of information should come next. You can do this small scale. So if you’re trying to remember a pin number, try putting it to a little four -tone melody. Try singing your pin number to a musical note. You’ll remember it better than if you’re just trying to remember the numbers themselves, because the music has a more natural fluid link from the memory.
It’ll help you link those things together. If you’re studying, I always used to use exactly the same playlist in the same order.
Dr Victoria Williamson (17:15.655)
when going through my study notes. And my study notes would start to take on the form exactly how a musician would study a large piece of music in order to perform it from memory. Things like studying, taking exams, they are a performance from memory. Same thing preparing a large presentation or a talk from memory. Having music as your cue, as your background, will help you encode larger bits of information better, quicker.
Cheryl McColgan (17:42.11)
that’s brilliant and something that I never seemed to be and I you know everybody learns a little bit differently or their brain works a little bit differently and I would think I would think having a background in music that that would have worked well for me but I often find if I play music in the background if I’m trying to write in particular I just find it’s very distracting but I could see like maybe if I were studying and just had it quietly in the background maybe it’s sort of
Dr Victoria Williamson (17:52.033)
sure.
Cheryl McColgan (18:11.296)
subconsciously links or is there a particular kind of music like you said when you studied you had this was there a particular type of music that facilitates that better because I don’t know in some ways my brain friends that distracting with certain tasks but I can see the utility of it it seems like something that would work for me if I could figure out how to do it properly.
Dr Victoria Williamson (18:24.721)
Right.
Dr Victoria Williamson (18:31.231)
Right. the key to making effective background music is something science has been interested in for a couple of decades now, because you’re absolutely right. It is not just you. Music is very distracting for a lot of people. And that’s because there’s a lot of overlap in the brain between the parts that are interested in language and the parts that are interested in music. They’re both sounds, they’re both sequences. It’s not surprising the brain is kind of seeing them at some level as the same thing.
So how do you create music that goes effectively into the background? So part of the work I do at Audison at my company is to use all of this science to create effective background music. But to give a couple of simple tips, avoid any music with lyrics in it. Even if they’re foreign lyrics, there’s a cool study that showed that people were trying to study and they tested them with German opera in the background. It’s as distracting as any type of the brain does not care.
Cheryl McColgan (19:15.861)
Yeah
Dr Victoria Williamson (19:29.821)
that it’s not your language, it’s a verbal signal. So it thinks, I should pay attention to that. It might be important. So anything with lyrics, nah, that’s going to hamper your chances. So pure instrumental music is going to be a lot better. You also want to choose instruments that have things, musically we call them lower attacks, softer decays. So they’re basically instruments that are less bright.
So think a trumpet is bright, cymbal is bright, something that has a sudden onset, it has lots of high frequencies. That’s more alerting to your brain. That’s pure evolution. If something is making a very high shrieking sound, it might be an emergency. It might be another human screaming, it might be an animal about to attack you. So avoiding those kind of frequencies and sticking to lower frequencies, so lower piano, softer flutes.
kalimbas, soft drums, the sort of meditation instruments. The shamans of the past knew what they were doing when they were choosing the instrumentation that formed part of chants and formed part of meditations, ancient Asian meditations, for example, ancient Indian meditations. They knew what they were doing. All we’re doing with science is looking at the brain and saying, okay, that makes sense because of aviancy what’s going on. But all the human
instincts are right in terms of what music is best for us when we’re trying to focus our mind.
Cheryl McColgan (21:04.482)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think now you mentioned that science has been working on this. One of the things that I’ve seen come up lot more commonly lately, and I don’t know that I’ve ever actually looked into what the definition of this is or what it means. And I would love to hear your perspective on this, but binaural beats. And I think it’s used quite often to help people sleep. But I could also imagine maybe it’s this kind of repetitive thing that could be a nice background. Can you speak to maybe how that binaural beats, what effect that has on the brain?
and what they actually are. Because I don’t, like I said, I don’t think I’ve actually looked up what that definition is.
Dr Victoria Williamson (21:35.035)
Absolutely.
Dr Victoria Williamson (21:39.793)
Yeah, sounds cool, listening to binaural beats, but what are they? Absolutely. So I got into binaural beats about three years ago when I co -founded this company, Audison, which is audio medicine. So we were trying to create audio treatments to improve wellbeing and productivity. And from what I knew coming from my academic background, so I was in a university studying away, trying to make my career. And I decided to break away, partly for personal family reasons.
and also to try and chase my dream of making the world a better place with music. And with Audison came the opportunity to dive into binaural beats, because this was a new technology at the time, but it had a lot of promise. So I got to asking in the labs around the world that were using this, because the science that you see published is about two to three years least behind what’s actually going on in labs.
So the stuff that’s going on in labs right now, for the most part, apart from bulletins, you’ll see in major, you know, public conversation in two to three years time. So I was asking around and they were saying, yeah, this is promising. You need to look into this. This, this, this can have a transformative effect. Okay. What is it? Right. So a binaural beat is an auditory illusion. Makes it sound like magic. What it is, is you, when you’re wearing headphones like me,
You send a signal of a certain frequency into one end and a slightly different frequency into the other end. It can be slightly higher or slightly lower, doesn’t matter. The brain is really interested in the fact that these don’t meet up. It’s interested in it, but it doesn’t like it. The brain likes consistency. It likes to understand its environment. So what it does is it actually generates its own frequency that represents the difference.
So let’s say I sent 150 hertz into here and 155 into here. The brain says, OK, I’ll create a 5 hertz frequency to match them up.
Dr Victoria Williamson (23:43.665)
And that is the binaural beat. So it’s binaural because it’s come from a signal from two ears, b, two, aural ears. And then the beat is the frequency beating between those two bands. So it’s actually coming from your own brain, is the binaural beat, as a result of the sound that you’re exposed to. And if you hear it, it sounds like a soft beat or hum in the background. Now, I listened to pure binaural beat tracks when I was first, I thought,
people can’t listen to this. It’s like, I’m not working to that. Dude, that’s impossible. Like three minutes and I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, my brain’s going to explode. You can’t do that. And then I got talking to our amazing engineer, Marie Souza Aghiya, and she has studied human sound perception and performance. And she knew about how to best embed binaural beats in real music.
So it’s like, if you had a supplement that tasted foul, but was brilliant for your health, what do you have to do? You have to hide it. You have to mix it with something else to get it in. Can you think of something like that? I’m struggling. Creatine doesn’t taste bad. It doesn’t taste of anything.
Cheryl McColgan (24:59.928)
I’m a weirdo because, no, I’m weird though because if I know it’s good for me, I’ll just do it anyway. But it’s like, you know, the old adage that they’d say a teaspoon of sugar helps the medicine go down. Like you just make it taste better or sweeter or different somehow, right?
Dr Victoria Williamson (25:06.215)
You’ll just do it anyway.
Dr Victoria Williamson (25:13.819)
Right.
Dr Victoria Williamson (25:18.821)
You absolutely got it. So she convinced me that if you engineered binaural beats properly, it’s like putting the medicine of binaural beats into sugar. So what you need to do to make binaural beats effective is have them properly engineered, because the pure form is just a bit tasteless and difficult to swallow. And we’re only human. If something sounds horrible, we’re not going to listen to it. And if we don’t listen to it, it can’t do us any good.
So what does it actually do? What does medicine actually do? So when the brain generates this frequency, what the other brain waves start to do around it is to synchronize to it. The brain’s generating this signal. It must be important. So the other brain waves start to synchronize, and they start to entrain. So we entrain to a beat when we dance to music. It means to move along with. So your brain waves start to centralize and to synchronize to this signal.
Good is that. Well, the speed at which the brain is synchronizing will help you get into different states. If your brain is synchronizing at a very low, slow way, you’ll get sleepy. If your brain is synchronizing to a reasonably high medium wave, around 10 hertz, you’ll feel relaxed but awake. And the higher you go, to about 30 hertz, you’ll start to get into flow, focus, and then up to creativity.
So you’re basically helping the brain slowly and gently move into states that you need it to be in for whatever the task is or the time of day is that you need it to be in.
Cheryl McColgan (27:00.672)
Okay, I’m so excited to do this trial of autism now because this could be life changing. What was going through my mind when you were saying that is, is that, is binaural beats the only way that you can cause these effects in the brain? Or are you working with other sound patterns or sound technologies that do something similar depending on what you’re trying to achieve? is that really the best way that you found?
Dr Victoria Williamson (27:27.539)
It’s the best way I’ve found to do brain entrainment in a way that is palatable. It’s like you can listen to a pure binaural beat track. You can put yourself through that and it may have a similar effect, but there’s actually scientific studies out there that pure binaural neural beat tracks can impair productivity. And in certain frequencies as well, when they’re not well engineered, especially in the theta band, so that’s relatively low, not quite sleep, but not quite awake and focused.
It can induce nausea and headaches. The problem is if it’s not engineered well, your brain is very good at spotting something that isn’t quite right. And the brain’s response to something that isn’t quite right is universal. It thinks it’s a poison. It’s exactly why people get car sick. It’s because the brain is getting signals that aren’t quite right. You’re still but your eyeballs are moving. This doesn’t make sense to the brain. So its reaction is
I must have been poisoned. Therefore, I must purge it to make my system healthy. That’s why we feel can feel nauseous when we travel. And the same can be true of something like binaural beats. If it’s not engineered well to be palatable to the brain, then it can damage productivity and it can even make you feel unwell. So I’ve always prided ourselves at autism that we test absolutely everything on ourselves and we make sure that it is safe before it goes out to anybody.
Because music is power. It has the power to do good. It can have the power to do harm if you’re not putting all the testing in there. And that’s what we do. So.
Cheryl McColgan (29:05.912)
Yeah, I think that’s a great point that you brought up because my first experience with this when I first learned about it and kind of wanted to see, of course, you know, I went on YouTube as one does. And, you know, I think you’re right because I think some of them that were designed for sleep and I would try that and I would be laying there listening to it and I would be thinking, well, you know, I don’t know if this is as relaxing as I, I don’t know if it was having the intended effect. So my guess is.
Dr Victoria Williamson (29:15.944)
Bye.
Dr Victoria Williamson (29:31.483)
Hmm
Cheryl McColgan (29:32.234)
any random thing that you find on YouTube, much like anything, it may or may not be accurate, factual, all, you know, everything. So it’s nice to, you know, if you’re going to use this for purpose, for memory, for doing better work, for focus, that it makes total sense to, you know, use a product where you know that there is some science behind it and that somebody’s actually
Dr Victoria Williamson (29:41.309)
Right.
Cheryl McColgan (29:53.398)
looking out for your best interests because again, like I said, I had varying experiences with what I found there and not all of them were great. I didn’t get nauseous or anything like that, but I just felt like they just didn’t really do anything. And that’s why I wanted to ask you about it. Because so many of these kinds of things come up and you wonder, is it just like the next fleeting thing that people think is gonna work, but it doesn’t actually. But it sounds like now that there is some good research to back it up too.
Dr Victoria Williamson (30:02.661)
Me too.
Dr Victoria Williamson (30:17.863)
Mm.
Dr Victoria Williamson (30:22.705)
Yeah, so the thing about binaural beats is in the pure form, in the basic form, they’re not hard to make. You can make them in any audio synthesizer, which is why you can find loads of free ones on YouTube. would most of us order our medicines off the internet without knowing what kind of lab they came from and ingest them and hope for the best? No. And some of these binaural beat tracks are designed for
elderly design for children. And I’m thinking, as a scientist, I’m thinking, my hackles are up because I’m like, this isn’t fair that this is out there, but it is. But we’re really hoping that we can, we can bring some trust, we can bring safety, we have a lab, we’ve done all the scientific studies, because the beauty of binaural beats is it’s come from science. Right back in 1852, this was discovered by physicists called William Henry Job. And since then,
It’s science that has been studying this phenomenon. So how to apply it into something we can use in our everyday life is something that’s come from evidence. And the way we do it in autism, everything comes from the evidence. So what we want to do is drive forward a responsible and ethical product that people can trust and that I would be happy if it was in my grandmother’s care home or if it was in my child’s therapy center, you know?
That matters to me.
Cheryl McColgan (31:50.52)
And I’m sure, and you mentioned your son before, and I’m guessing that at least in part, some of this work is finding new ways to communicate with him or new ways to help him just have a better experience in his world. And you mentioned your company, Audison, so think now’s a great time that we just move into that. it’s basically, I went to the website earlier today, and like I said, I experienced some of the music. And so now I’ll just describe that from a lay person who had no idea what to expect.
And so if you go to the website, which by the way, Dr. Williamson is generously giving listeners a 30 day free trial. So you’ll go to healnurishgrow .com slash audison. And that’ll take you to the website. You can get this 30 days for free so you can experience it too. But also on the website, before you even sign up, there are like three little play buttons that you can click. And my experience of it was there was definitely something like
underlying that I couldn’t put my finger on. But then there were some sounds that I recognized. There were some nature sounds, some water sounds, and it kind of reminded me like, I don’t want to say this because it’s not exactly like this at all, but it definitely reminded me of massage studio type of music in the way that it was like the cadence and it was relaxing. But it was just a different in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on. So.
Dr Victoria Williamson (32:55.707)
Mmm.
Dr Victoria Williamson (33:05.245)
Mm -hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (33:14.784)
Anyway, I’d love to have you expound on that. That’s the experience from a lay person. I didn’t get to listen to it for an extended period of time, so I can’t say any effect as far as focus or any of that. But it was just, I didn’t dislike it and it was different. And that was my initial impression. So I’d love to hear more about that.
Dr Victoria Williamson (33:32.925)
Well, thank you for listening. That’s very kind. Yeah, so the three samples are there to sort of give an idea of some of the different kinds of music that Audison makes. So part of what we do is we pioneer the background music, because that’s what people need. You we don’t need another thing taking up time. Audison is about providing nervous system regulation on the go. You don’t need to do
anything. This is about getting you the benefits of mindfulness, meditation, yoga on the go. And it takes as little as 10 minutes a day listening to autism to get the benefits of your nervous system. So that includes building up your HRV resilience, improving your late levels of relaxation, improving sleep, reducing irritability.
And then once you’re in a nicely regulated state, you can boost productivity, creativity. We even have Finnish, our company is from Finland originally, beautiful Finnish forest that you mentioned there, you’ve heard a little bit in the sound. It’s even being used by Finnish Olympic athletes as part of their training because nervous system regulation benefits everybody. We are all in a world where our nervous systems are being pushed to beyond anything they were ever designed to cope with.
Cheryl McColgan (34:34.647)
Yes.
Dr Victoria Williamson (34:54.141)
So having the audits and sound there is a period of time where you can be doing something else. You can be training, you can be doing housework, you can be running around after the kids. As long as you can wear your headphones, which I run with my kids on the headphones sometimes. As long as you can wear your headphones safely, you can have this sound on and your nervous system is being regulated. What that means is it’s triggering the parasympathetic nervous system, getting you out of fight and flight.
and into rest and digest. Whether it’s nervous system is relaxing, respiration is regulating, heart rate is regulating, blood pressure is lowering, and the body is centralizing and it is becoming present. This is what the binaural beat achieves because it synchronizes and entrains and calms the brain. So the way I use it going about my day,
As you mentioned, I have a son who is severely disabled with autistic traits. So he’s nonverbal. He has a lot of meltdowns. He has very strong difficulties regulating in a world that wasn’t made for him.
My day, when it isn’t about audison, is about helping my son to regulate in our world. And that’s about at the moment, a lot of external things that people on the spectrum find to be helpful for regulating the nervous system. He does his stimming, does his trampoline, he does lots of, I do massages, lots of movements. This is like the internal sound version of that. It’s regulating the nervous system for you from within.
And the scientific studies that we’ve done, we’ve studied people for weeks, months, our longer studies are over years. And the month long study is my favorite because if you listen to Audison, you get a significant relaxation effect within 10 minutes. We’ve done a scientific study showing that. But the month long study is where you start to see the cumulative benefits of using Audison. That’s where you start to see really cool things in heart rate, heart rate variability.
Dr Victoria Williamson (37:09.351)
which is the hot bio measure that everybody’s talking about right now, which is a measure of how healthy your nervous system is. Measure it with the aura ring, measure it with your Apple watch. I’m all into this kind of bio measuring. There you go. Totally right. We’ve got the original aura team, a lot of them who created the aura ring is now on the audison team, making audison alongside us because they’ve seen the effect. The original CEO, Petri Latunen.
Cheryl McColgan (37:20.002)
Totally gonna do it.
Cheryl McColgan (37:30.84)
Sound very cool.
Dr Victoria Williamson (37:38.596)
is on record saying that Audison has impacted his HRV more than any other form of external method he’s found, as measured on his own device.
Cheryl McColgan (37:47.768)
That’s amazing.
Cheryl McColgan (37:51.564)
Wow, that’s really amazing. Okay, everybody, she’s giving you a free trial. I better hear from everybody that they’re doing this. And I wanna track this, because I do track my heart rate variability. So think that’s very, if nothing else changed in your health world other than that, that would be a huge worthwhile benefit of your service. But it’s not just that. As you mentioned, it’s this overall nervous system regulation, which I think, I don’t know.
Dr Victoria Williamson (37:54.227)
It’s super cool.
Cheryl McColgan (38:18.744)
again, 99 .999 % of people really need in this world that we’re living in. Any other? So you mentioned the way that you use it. mean, we’re primarily trying to get that rest and digest. you doing anything? You mentioned the Olympic athletes. I’m wondering if, okay, so that’s more for recovery. I’m wondering if you’re doing anything with like, you know, helping like physical performance kind of things, or is there any way to tap into that for, like you mentioned, training or going to the gym, that kind of thing?
Dr Victoria Williamson (38:24.723)
Totally.
Dr Victoria Williamson (38:35.399)
Bye.
Dr Victoria Williamson (38:48.433)
Yeah. So when we first heard from the Olympic athletes who were interested in audison, we were a bit abused because we thought from everything I knew about music and training, audison didn’t seem to fit. You know, there’s a there’s a large body of wonderful research on music and exercise led by people like Professor Costas Cariagoris in the UK that details the kind of music that is good for training.
And it’s a lot about the beats per minute and this sort of thing that’s good for training. And I thought, that’s not autism. We don’t make that kind of music. But it’s the people themselves. It’s these wonderful athletes who said, you’ve got the wrong idea, actually, because what you really need for a good training session is flow. You need to be in the zone. I want to tune out all the signals that are telling me.
tired, don’t want to do this, whatever, I’m not enjoying this. Those need to be quiet. And I need to be focused and present. And when that was explained to me, it clicked. Okay, I get it. Like, this isn’t if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t need to really motivate you, and you might be and if you are cool, fantastic, there’s music for you. Absolutely. But there are athletes out there who’s really are seeking flow.
And that’s what certain app tracks within Autism will do. If you open the app, you can select what you want to achieve from the app. Just select Focus.
any of those tracks are a binaural beat frequency level that will induce this experience of flow, getting you in the zone. Now we originally can see that as being for work.
Dr Victoria Williamson (40:35.613)
But out there in the field, being used for two, three years now, we’ve learned that people training feel the same benefits. That actually being in the zone is such a precious thing. And the great thing about Audison is like all music, there’s variety there. So if you like darker music, we’ve got beautiful composers who grew up in the sort of Finnish, you know, dark, inspirational, atmospheric. There’s tracks like Lava that are there too.
capture that. And then there’s beautiful light stuff, know, like Lakeview, I saw you light and shadow. These wonderful tracks are much, much lighter. They will feature a lot of nature sounds. You’re absolutely right. Of the kind I saw you working in your yard, in your new yard, a few months ago that you have looks beautiful. And the benefits of being out in nature, of hearing those sounds and being out there. Now we’re not always in a world where we can capture that. I don’t have a garden.
Cheryl McColgan (41:22.486)
Yes. Thank you.
Mm.
Dr Victoria Williamson (41:34.077)
Certainly nothing as beautiful as yours. So it’s very nice that you let me in to see it. But having those nature sounds, we know significantly reduces cortisol, significantly increases HRV, significantly lowers heart rate. There’s loads of research out there that nature sounds versus urban sounds has this beneficial effect. So that’s partly why it’s in order to see this well. We’re putting all that science into the sound.
Cheryl McColgan (41:38.21)
You
Dr Victoria Williamson (42:01.127)
But ultimately it is music and people come to music with their own preferences. So there’s a variety of tracks in there. So whatever works for you of the kind that you need, it’ll be there.
Cheryl McColgan (42:12.386)
Yeah, and I would imagine, mean, this seems like such a fun project. I mean, obviously it’s doing a lot of good with just whatever library you have now, but I can imagine that over time, like you’ll get more and more people interested in maybe musicians that want to work with you and do this kind of, you know, interesting new kind of thing. So I don’t know, I think it’s really exciting and I can’t wait to implement this into my personal health and wellness routine because I can totally, what I was thinking of when you were talking about flow, how certain sports,
are much more amenable to that. So can see how you’re saying like some sports that might have to be the more like pump you up kind of, you know, fast beat hardcore music. then on the other hand, like I was, I played golf in college and, you know, golf is very much a flow state sport. And I can totally see how if I would have been walking down the fairway, you know, listening to one of these tracks and coming up to my next shot, I just
I think there’s something there too, if you haven’t worked with any Finnish golfers yet, I would definitely have them check it out. Well, anyway, Dr. Williamson, this has just been amazing. Before we go here, I do want to share with my audience, you have a really amazingly cool study coming up. Anybody that’s interested in anything that we talked about here today, or if you’re just a biohacker and you’re interested in optimizing your experience, which I know is a lot of you out there listening,
Dr Victoria Williamson (43:12.541)
noted. Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (43:34.968)
Dr. Williamson has a very cool study coming up. So can you share a little bit about that and how people can get in touch if they’re interested in participating?
Dr Victoria Williamson (43:43.571)
Thank you so much. we are just in this coming to the US in very soon. We are launching a study which has been funded by public funding in Finland. We are looking for people from particular groups to try our orders in and let us know how it impacts their daily lives. So this would be paid research. We are more than happy to recompense people for their time and effort. But we are science driven but with people.
We want always to write something that works for people, that fits into their lives. And the only way we can do that is by asking them. So the study is interested in three main target groups within the US, and that is nurses, people with diagnosis of ADHD, and biohackers. So these are three target groups that have very potentially different requirements from autism.
but that come down to three groups of people that would benefit from nervous system regulation to meet their goals or to help meet the demands that they’re facing. So if anybody sees themselves in one of those groups or knows anybody who is, where the Audison website is going to have a sign up link on it. But if you would like to know more, my door is open. I’m victoria at audison .com. You’re more than welcome to get in touch with me.
If you’ve tried it and you want to give me some feedback as well, that’s always more than welcome. If you want to know more about the study before clicking on anything, just let me know and I’ll be more than happy to talk to you about it.
Cheryl McColgan (45:17.688)
Dr. Williamson, has just made my heart so happy today to have this conversation because I love it when people are doing the work that is so meaningful to them and that brings them joy and brings joy to the world and helps people feel better. So thank you for taking the time today and thank you for making this amazing product and your life’s work, like all this years of music that you did coming into this thing. So amazing. It is.
Dr Victoria Williamson (45:34.707)
Thank you.
Dr Victoria Williamson (45:43.737)
It’s exciting. It’s so exciting. It’s just wanted to make a difference with music is what they’re to ride on wherever I lay. And if they can say tick, I’ll be lying happy.
Cheryl McColgan (45:56.044)
love it. Thank you again so much.
Dr Victoria Williamson (45:58.767)
And you. And you. Thank you.
In this episode, Dr. Malaika Woods discusses her journey from traditional obstetrics to functional medicine. She is now focused on the importance of understanding hormones for optimal health. She shares insights on personal weight loss journey, the mental aspects of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and the common hormonal issues women face, particularly during menopause.
Dr. Woods also explains the significance of hormone replacement therapy, different methods of administration, and the importance of testosterone for both women and men.
You can find Dr. Woods at her website, https://drwoodswellness.com/
Takeaways
- Weight loss is easier than maintenance; mental aspects are crucial.
- Nutrition, stress management, and inflammation are key pillars of health.
- Women often experience hormonal changes in their 40s and 50s.
- Hormone replacement therapy can reduce risks of various diseases.
- Bioidentical hormones are preferred for their safety and efficacy.
- Testosterone is vital for women’s health and often overlooked.
- Men also experience low testosterone, impacting their health significantly
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.111)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I have Dr. Malekah Woods and she is a specialist in women’s health. She talks a lot about hormones and she also sees men patients. So if you’re a man, don’t click away. Plus you need to know this stuff about women’s health as well. So all that being said.
Dr. Malaika Woods (00:17.592)
Bye.
Cheryl McColgan (00:19.428)
Welcome Dr. Woods. I would love if you could share with people a little bit about your background. How did you come to this line of work and any personal health and wellness thing that speaks to why you’re so passionate about this now.
Dr. Malaika Woods (00:32.175)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Cheryl. So just to give you kind of a brief synopsis of my background, I actually wanted to deliver babies back in eighth grade. So that’s how it all started. ended up being fast forward to 2011. I was a full -time OB -GYN and a very busy practice. I was a year out from having my second kid and seeing 30, 40 people a day. It was supposed to be the ideal job, but I was stressed out. I was a mother with, you know, a five -year -old and a one -year -old.
And I was overweight. I was about 240 pounds and I knew I needed to do something different with my own health. And so that was my first step into looking at something other than traditional obstetrics and gynecology, which is what I’m board certified in. So my first journey was weight loss and I actually got board certified in obesity medicine. And over the course of 2011 to 2013, I lost 60 pounds. I tried a lot of different things and we may get into some of that down the road.
And then I learned about bioidentical hormones. And I thought, wow, I’m an OB -GYN, but I don’t really know anything about bioidentical hormones. And so I got certified in BHRT, bioidentical hormones for short. And then I learned about functional medicine. And all of this happened in a short span of time, probably around 2011 to 2014. And when I learned that functional medicine was about root cause approaches and natural solutions, I was like, okay, wow, this is what I’ve been missing all along.
And so functional medicine is now what I do. It is the umbrella under which I offer those other services, whether it’s hormone optimization, weight loss, thyroid support, a lot of different things, but that’s kind of what brought me to where I am today.
Cheryl McColgan (02:11.612)
my gosh, I get so excited when I talk to health professionals like yourself that are really going away from sort of the traditional paradigm of just, you know, fix it with a pill or something and where it’s really like a whole systems approach and, you know, getting to the root cause with functional medicine. Do you think that, you know, you mentioned that you had a weight loss journey, which I think is a really amazing background for you to have as an obesity medicine specialist now.
Can you maybe share a little bit with people, you know, what were your frustrations with that process? What did you learn along the way? Just speaking from not as a doctor, but just as a person who had success losing a great amount of weight. I’m sure everybody would love to hear how you did that. What were your struggles? What were your triumphs and you know, any tips and tricks you may have.
Dr. Malaika Woods (03:00.463)
Yeah, absolutely. I would say one thing for sure that everyone really needs to tap into is the mental aspect of weight loss. And so one of the things that I say to people all the time, and I found it to be true with myself, in a lot of cases is easy to lose weight, but it’s harder to keep it off. So it’s kind of that idea that you can jump on a bandwagon for a short period of time, but it’s hard to sustain something. And something that was a game changer for me, and I actually have, think the workbook behind me, kind of that pink book.
It’s called, train your brain to think like a thin person. And it’s actually using the concepts of cognitive behavioral therapy to help you with weight loss. And it is written by Dr. Beck, who is the daughter of the original Dr. Beck who came up with CBT to begin with. But I found that what I was doing as a heavy person is that I was looking for excuses, honestly. And I was thinking like,
life is unfair, like it’s unfair that this other person is so thin. I’ll take, for example, I had a medical assistant in my office who was very fit. And when I really analyze it, it’s not like, it’s not fair that she’s so thin. She brought her workout clothes to work every day. And she went to work out after work. And when the drug reps, before I went all functional medicine, when they would bring us lunch, she would have a salad and I would have a sandwich and a cookie. So you start to really say, hmm, what am I doing?
Cheryl McColgan (04:25.049)
You
Dr. Malaika Woods (04:28.612)
So one of the things that I learned is that I have to take responsibility. The other thing I learned is that, you know, it’s important to have a community and to have support. So one of my phases of weight loss is that I got into P90X back when that was popular and I did it with my husband and he was a great support. And we did all those, you know, crazy videos together. I’ll say crazy because, you know, there were stories that people were hurting themselves and kind of doing a little too much.
Cheryl McColgan (04:43.642)
Yes.
Dr. Malaika Woods (04:54.95)
but we did that together. And so I think the community and having support is important too. And I think what I’ve realized working with patients is that the traditional advice of eat less and exercise more is not enough for most people. That is a first step, but you have to take into account how are the hormones affecting your ability to lose weight? How’s your metabolism and all the things that impact your metabolism, how is that affecting your ability to lose weight?
So you really wanna take a more comprehensive approach. So those are some of the things that I learned along.
Cheryl McColgan (05:28.654)
Yeah, and those are awesome, really good, just succinct, take away things that people can look at, taking personal responsibility, having a, I always call them accountability buddies, which the first time I heard that phrase was, it’s from South Park. I don’t know if it was somewhere else before that, but that’s actually where I first heard it. But anyway, so I think those are awesome tips. And I love that you mentioned P90X also, because that was such a thing in that timeframe that was very, yes, in fact, my husband just.
Dr. Malaika Woods (05:39.792)
Love that.
Dr. Malaika Woods (05:44.26)
Okay
Dr. Malaika Woods (05:53.083)
It was a big deal back then.
Cheryl McColgan (05:56.592)
brought it up the other day, we were talking about something and he said, yeah, I used to do the P90X yoga. anyway, all that being said, so you mentioned hormones and thyroid and a few things. if people are say, you know, whether they’re just not feeling optimized, or they do have some extra weight that they’re carrying around that they’d like to lose, what are the sorts of things that patients come in and say to you like how they’re feeling and things? And then how do you move forward with identifying
Dr. Malaika Woods (06:01.681)
Mm -hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (06:25.882)
what their hormones might be doing or how you might be able to shift that to help them feel better basically.
Dr. Malaika Woods (06:32.051)
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of times when I see women, usually they’re in their mid 40s, early 50s. That’s probably the most common age group that I see. And they’re coming in and they’re telling me, and I see virtual. So when I say coming in, I’m using that figuratively speaking, coming into the video room, if you will. And what they’re telling me is they’re like, doc, I’m having hot flashes, nice sweats. Even on video, they stand up and grab around the middle and say, I don’t know where this belly fat came from. It wasn’t here 18 months ago. haven’t.
Cheryl McColgan (06:47.398)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (06:58.671)
You
Dr. Malaika Woods (07:00.872)
change what I’m eating, I’m still exercising the same as I was before, and the libido is completely gone. Those are some very common things, and fatigue. So those are the things that are the common concerns of the people that I see. And so the first step that I do, first of all, I just like to get a very detailed history. And because I have a non -traditional practice, I really have the opportunity to sit down with my initial patience
like 90 minutes, we like go in depth. And even our paperwork is more involved than patients have ever done before. We wanna get the entire backstory. I also start with a comprehensive lab panel, which I think is very important, where we’re looking at hormones and thyroid and inflammation markers, and a lot of other things to really get a good idea of what’s going on from the patient’s perspective. And then also what is the body telling us about what.
about what’s going on and we put those two things together to develop a plan of action.
Cheryl McColgan (08:04.198)
And you said that typically people are coming in between maybe age 45 to 50. I would love for you to maybe talk a little bit to those people that aren’t in that age group yet. They know it’s coming. Before we move on to talking about how we deal with that, like once we’re there. But when you know it’s coming, do you feel like there are things that women can do to better prepare to go into that stage of life? Things that they can kind of do to either
Dr. Malaika Woods (08:17.511)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (08:32.28)
mitigate some of the symptoms or to just have more knowledge going into it so they’re not shocked when these things come up because I think, know, once you’re there, you’re of like, yeah, now I know all about that with the heat and all the things you mentioned. But they, they’ve at this point, hopefully they’ve just heard about it and they’re like, I wonder if there’s anything I can do to like to my health now to maybe counterbalance some of that, I guess going.
Dr. Malaika Woods (08:43.614)
Mm -hmm. All right.
Dr. Malaika Woods (08:54.441)
Yes, absolutely. so, and functional medicine is for everyone. Hormones, you know, not everyone needs that. But the functional medicine approach really encompasses a few pillars that we like to work on. So one of those pillars is nutrition. So really, you know, cleaning up your nutrition. And even for the younger women who may be in their early 40s, now some of them are truly experiencing what we call perimenopause.
So you’re around the menopause, but you’re not at the exact menopause. And just for definition sake, menopause is a whole year without a period for women who are still having periods. The average age of menopause is at 51. But a lot of women can start having symptoms prior to that. So again, in those early forties, what can you do? One of those pillars is nutrition. And I tell women to be wary of what I call the menopause pretenders. So you may be young and you’re having hot flashes and night sweats and you’re like,
39, 40, am I going through menopause? Likely not, but you may be dealing with a menopause pretender. And two of the biggest ones that kind of go hand in hand, one is alcohol. So, know, a lot of times women are thinking, let me get a glass of wine so I can relax at night, but the swing in the blood sugar overnight can actually precipitate and bring on hot flashes. So that is a menopause pretender to be aware of. And then also sugar coming from other sources, know, cookies, candies, et cetera, especially if you’re eating that at night.
So nutrition is a pillar. Another pillar is dealing with stress. And this is one that we just don’t do a good job of because stress is so hard to kind of define. But stress has a real role that it plays in your body. It can wreak havoc on your sleep, on your ability to burn fat and so many other areas. So stress is an important pillar. Thinking about dealing with inflammation and where it may be hitting you, moving your body.
is important. So those are some of those basic pillars that you can start to work on. And I kind of think of it this way, like, if your body is in a hammock, and that hammock is being held up by four or five of these pillars, if you can really raise those pillars, you’re really off the ground. And so when you get a hit like menopause, you’re not smacking down to the ground if you’re already kind of upheld, if that analogy makes sense, by some of those good, you know, basics to be working on.
Cheryl McColgan (11:15.386)
Yeah, love that analogy. it’s also, I mean, everything that you spoke to is really some just speaks to just the greater health that you have overall going into this, the more resilience your body has to deal with these extra things down the road. Excellent points. So okay, so we were talking about have have as good a health as you can going into menopause. But the truth is, once you get to be into your 40s and early 50s,
Dr. Malaika Woods (11:27.663)
Absolutely. Yes, yes.
Cheryl McColgan (11:41.67)
There are hormonal shifts that naturally happen that do cause these symptoms that you talked about. Is there, and I guess we should go to, think, I feel like everybody knows this at this point, but they probably don’t. A lot of women know about the Women’s Health Initiative study, which, you know, there was this big headline 25, 30 years ago that, you know, these hormone replacements cause cancer, which actually is not the case at all.
So that’s like the really simplistic explanation, but I’d love if you could share a little bit about why that is not the case and how, you know, what kinds of things this hormone replacement help if you decide to, you know, go down that road.
Dr. Malaika Woods (12:21.879)
Absolutely. So yeah, I was a resident, was an OB -GYN resident when the Women’s Health Initiative was published in 2002. So I remember it very clearly. And you’re right about that headline. What we understand now about that study and the OB -GYNs, we were understanding it in real time and we were the only ones still prescribing hormones.
I kind of imagine all the other doctors just ripping up prescriptions, know, like no more hormones for any of you. And unfortunately, an entire generation or two, you know, 20 years of women have suffered from minimal access to hormone replacement therapy. So some of the big errors in that study, first of all, they were giving women hormones for the first time at the average age of about 62 or 63.
Cheryl McColgan (12:47.304)
Right?
Dr. Malaika Woods (13:09.836)
That is not the real world. I just mentioned women in their mid 40s and 50s, that is when we usually start hormones. And the thing with estrogen, it is time dependent as far as how it works with your cardiovascular system. So if you give estrogen in a younger woman who does not have any plaque development in their vessels, estrogen can be protective. And there’s lots of studies, longitudinal studies like the Nurses Health Initiative.
that shows a 30 to 50 % reduction in cardiovascular disease in women who take estrogen, who take hormones. And I’m gonna particularly, and they don’t even make the distinction all the time between estradiol, which is bioidentical versus ethanol estradiol or what you get from your primarin, your pregnant, major and the synthetic. So sometimes even if you’re on synthetic or bioidentical, you see that benefit. If you give estrogen in a woman in her 60s,
when she is likely already to have some plaque development in their vessels, that is a potential disruptors what that thought was. One of the biggest things that came from the Women’s Health Initiative and my assessment and with my colleagues is that it was the synthetic progestin, madroxyprogesterone acetate that was really the culprit as far as the increased risk of breast cancer, heart attack and stroke. It wasn’t even really the synthetic estrogen.
And so if we think about what does estrogen do for you outside of even just helping you with hot flashes and night sweats, and the Women’s Health Initiative taught us this, you see about a 30 % reduction in colon cancer, you see a 30 % reduction in osteoporosis, and those are major issues for women as they age.
Cheryl McColgan (14:53.274)
Yeah, I’m so glad that you gave a much better explanation of that because I’ve heard this story multiple times, but not being a practitioner, I don’t have to explain it to people very often. And I just tell my friends, I’m like, that’s been debunked. then, you know, it takes a little research on your own to really get to that place. So where I’d like to go now, after learning all of that over these many years and knowing risk factors that I have in my family for various health things,
Dr. Malaika Woods (15:06.892)
You’re right.
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (15:22.392)
including that my sister that’s a year younger than me does have breast cancer. She’s an ED right now. So that’s one thing that people, and they recommended for her to not do hormone replacement, for example, different situation. But knowing the other factors, I did decide to go down that road. And I guess my question is there’s a lot of, so you mentioned bioidentical, there’s a lot of different routes of administration that you can take these different hormones. There’s creams, there’s
pellet that you get in your subcutaneous fat, there’s pills that you might take, and obviously you’re not giving medical advice here, but with not going there, can you maybe describe each one of those methods of administration and why some may be better than others?
Dr. Malaika Woods (16:08.6)
Absolutely, and I’ll give you kind of my opinion as far as, you know, least effective to most effective or, you know, least popular, most popular in my office and amongst my patients. And so I will start with a cream. A cream is something that you apply daily. You can combine hormones in the cream like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, those are kind of the main ones. I had one of my patients say she’s on the strony soup talking about, you know, her different hormones.
Cheryl McColgan (16:34.47)
I like that.
Dr. Malaika Woods (16:37.56)
But the issue with the cream is that people absorb it differently. Sometimes people don’t like it because it’s messy. With the testosterone in the cream, you do have to be careful not to transfer that to like other people, pets, children, things like that. And with progesterone in particular, this one is very important, Cheryl. You cannot get a good blood level of progesterone. It’s very hard with the cream. And so, and let me say why that’s important with progesterone. Progesterone, I call it my secret weapon hormone.
because it has two really great benefits. It has a natural sedative effect, so it can help you sleep at night. And a lot of women are dealing with trouble sleeping insomnia when they hit this age range as well. And secondly, progesterone has a calming effect. It helps the mood. It really works on these GABA receptors, which are calming. Now I veered off, so there’s cream. Next, we have a troche.
Cheryl McColgan (17:29.186)
you
Dr. Malaika Woods (17:32.404)
A trochee is like a throat lozenge. It’s usually a square wax -based preparation. You hold it in your inner cheek and it’s not considered an oral administration. It’s a submucosal. in most cases, you wanna bypass the stomach in particular. You wanna try to get right into the bloodstream with all of these hormones. They work better that way and less risk to your liver. With capsule, can do progesterone as a capsule. You can do…
estrogen as a tablet oral. Then you also have an injection. And this is something that is actually very popular in my office. With injections, it’s a little bit more potent administration, particularly for the testosterone. You can dial in the dose very specific to the individual. And so that’s why we like that. It’s every two weeks for women. And then you mentioned the pellet. I really liked the pellet, Cheryl, but it is not something that I start with. And so…
When you talk to traditional OB -GYNs, they kind of lose their minds about pellets and they hate it. And the reason why they do is because I feel like there’s people out there giving pellets not in the best way. And then the woman ends up with all this irregular bleeding and they go to their traditional OB -GYN to fix them. So that’s why they hate the pellet. Now, I love the pellet because it gives you a steady administration of the hormone for about three months.
And so you only have to do it maybe four times a year. So that’s wonderful, but you shouldn’t start, I don’t think you should start a person on a pellet because once the pellet is in, and let me say it is a little compressed powder of hormone, like the size of a Tic -Tac or smaller. It’s a little procedure that happens in the office. So we make a little tiny incision kind of nail to nail, if you’re kind of doing a little pinch. And we slip that pellet into the fatty tissue and it’s absorbed in the body.
over the course of again about three to four months. So wonderful for a steady state of hormone. But if you have an unwanted side effect, we have to then wait it out for three or four months because you cannot go and take that pellet out. That’s why I don’t start there. I start with something that’s easily reversible. And once we get a sense of how a woman is gonna do on her hormones, then we will consider a pellet.
Cheryl McColgan (19:45.466)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. just if anybody’s listening to this thinking, gosh, that’s horrible. I would never like want to have this. It’s really easy. This is actually what I get. It is. And it’s interesting because, you know, it just feels like a little pinch. They have me ice it. There’s lidocaine in the shot. They give you, it feels like a little bit of pressure. But for me, I think what you said, the convenience of it is just amazing.
Dr. Malaika Woods (19:55.542)
super. Yeah, it’s super convenient, isn’t it?
Dr. Malaika Woods (20:06.98)
Mm -hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (20:13.328)
The one thing I had heard recently though that was interesting and I pride myself on, I’m one of those crazy people that like I researched the heck out of things before I do it. And of course I was on PubMed doing all this research before I decided to do that. But then just lately I saw a couple people, know, menopause is suddenly much more popular on Instagram and other places where people are talking about it, which I think is amazing. But with that comes the same thing as fitness, nutrition, everybody’s got an opinion.
You never know exactly where they’re coming from or if they’re right. one of the doctors commented on somebody else’s post and he was saying, never appellate for women. And I just said, I said, that’s interesting. Why do you say that? And he said something about big overdose. He didn’t like explain it very well. But I guess the thought was that maybe it doesn’t try trade evenly throughout the three or four months. So I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that or have any thoughts on that, but I’m just curious.
Dr. Malaika Woods (20:59.43)
Mm -hmm.
Dr. Malaika Woods (21:10.62)
Yeah, my understanding of how the pellet works, and this is partly subjective in some of the research that I’ve done as well. It takes about two weeks for the hormone levels to peak, and then they’re pretty steady again for about three months, and then they’ll start to decline. And for women who have done pellets, you know this because as soon as you say, hmm, I think my pellet is wearing off, like I’m starting to get hot flashes again, probably by 10 days later, it’s like taint. Like, you know, it’s kind of out of your system. So, but I think…
symptom -wise, a woman can also attest that she gets a nice steady state. As far as overdose, again, I think it’s the way that you’re giving it. Each practitioner and the way that they administer the pellet, particularly the dose that they use, is probably unique. And so are there some people out there maybe getting overdose perhaps? But again, I think that the experience that I have with my patients, they do very well and we track their hormone levels.
If we’re talking about testosterone and Cheryl, you’re probably familiar with this since you do some hormone yourself. With women, our goal is actually to super optimize their testosterone level. That’s kind of how I explain it. And that also is sort of, you know, people kind of lose their minds on that concept as well for people who don’t get it. But I would direct them to, I believe it’s Dr. Glaser. You’re probably familiar with her. She’s done a lot of research on testosterone in women. She’s based out of Ohio. Rebecca’s her first name.
Cheryl McColgan (22:25.37)
right?
Dr. Malaika Woods (22:38.334)
and she published a paper of 10 ,000 of her women patients and the average testosterone level was 299. And so, yeah, and so when a woman gets their testosterone level checked, the range only goes to like 30 to 50, 48 maybe. And so she super optimizes on purpose. And this is the same doctor who has looked at testosterone experimentally as a treatment for breast cancer. So.
And this is the other thing, let’s say for you example with a family history of breast cancer, a woman like you, you may have some legitimate concerns about hormones. And even though you and I kind of understand they don’t cause cancer, but that mindset is hard to unwind. And let me also say caveat, if you get a breast cancer that is estrogen receptor positive or progesterone receptor positive, then no, you should not.
beyond those hormones. It doesn’t mean that those hormones cause the cancer though. Again, it’s complex. It’s a lot to unravel. However, a lot of times if a woman has a concern about breast cancer, we start with testosterone. There’s absolutely no concern about cancer there. There’s really no controversy about breast cancer as far as testosterone is concerned and it actually might be beneficial. Again, I’m just telling you based on some of the studies I’ve seen.
Cheryl McColgan (23:53.478)
And would you say when people come in and so you said you’re testing the hormones and they’re telling you how they feel and things, when you test, actually when I first had my testosterone tested, this is, I guess it was about four years ago, so I’d been 47. And my doctor came in, she said, well, congratulations, you have the testosterone of an 85 year old. And I was like, okay, that can’t be optimal or good in any way, I’m only 47. So.
Dr. Malaika Woods (24:17.576)
Right, absolutely not.
Cheryl McColgan (24:21.306)
Would you say that when you test people that are coming, now you’re seeing people that are having some issues already, right? That’s why they’re coming to you. So it might be higher, but what percentage of women would you say come in and have low testosterone, for example?
Dr. Malaika Woods (24:34.267)
I’d probably say 80 % easily. And let me also say this too, for your younger women who suspect that they’re having issues, we do see low testosterone in younger women too in their 30s as well. And I think, and this is with men too, let me say that, like there’s a lot of the technical term for guys is called hypogonadism. There’s a lot of men also who are coming in in their 30s with low T, you heard that word, low testosterone.
And I think it’s environmental and just things that we’re exposed to and just how our diets are different. There’s a lot of factors, but I don’t want a younger person to discount their symptoms and not get things checked out if they’re worried about their hormone levels. And understand too, that your traditional doctor is likely not going to check your hormone levels. They don’t believe in checking hormone levels. They believe in treating symptoms more so. And again, it’s just their style, not throwing any shade. I grew up in the traditional world.
But now that I do hormone replacement therapy, we take a different approach. We want to look at labs and yes, we understand that the hormone levels fluctuate, but we also can look at relative changes and relative differences, you know, prior to hormones, after hormone administration. I think that’s important. And the thing that I tell, you know, the folks that I talk to all the time, Cheryl, is that the lab tells part of the story and you tell part of the story. And I think it’s important to find a physician or a practitioner who is going to consider both of those things.
Cheryl McColgan (26:01.42)
so many pieces of excellent advice there that you just hit on and the one that I think I would say to people if they happen to be listening to this in their 20s, whether they’re male or female, there’s plenty of online services now where you can pay out of pocket to get tested. I would get your hormone levels tested as early as you can, early 20s, mid 20s so you have a baseline so you know as you age how much you’ve lost or if you’ve lost any.
Dr. Malaika Woods (26:15.081)
Mm
Dr. Malaika Woods (26:19.979)
Mm -hmm. yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (26:25.426)
and it might give you a better idea of how to optimize it in the future. That’s not to say you probably can’t get there eventually without knowing what you were originally, but I always thought that would have been like, that’s a basic biomarker. I’m not really sure why doctors don’t test for that.
Dr. Malaika Woods (26:36.49)
Yeah. And to your point, when you come in, let me switch gears and talk about thyroid, because that’s another huge travesty, tragedy, all of that tragic that so many people are walking around with poorly optimized thyroid. And so again, you might come in and have all the symptoms. I’m tired, I’m constipated, my eyebrows are thinning, my hair is falling out.
I’m cold all the time. And you get that one number, they check the thyroid stimulating hormone and it’s quote unquote normal, okay? What they don’t know, and again, if you’re 35, we don’t know what it was when you were 25. Maybe there has been a significant shift and not just in the TSH, but in your actual thyroid numbers, but you don’t have a comparison. So I think that’s a great point that you mentioned there to know your baseline.
Cheryl McColgan (27:28.112)
Yeah, if we could only get people to have it as standard practice or standard of care, think that would be amazing.
Dr. Malaika Woods (27:34.783)
Right. I think unfortunately the traditional world is so occupied with just sick people. And that’s just sort of where we are. And so those of us who are the true health seekers, like people listening to your podcast, people who come to see me, they are the ones who are looking for optimization. And you’re not going to really find that done well in the traditional world. It’s okay. We need the traditional world. You know, when we break a bone, surgery, cancer, et cetera.
But when it comes to optimization, when it comes to prevention, not so much, and that’s okay.
Cheryl McColgan (28:09.754)
Yeah, but to your point, mean, there are more people like you and others that I’ve interviewed that are really into this functional health paradigm now, and they do no insurance care, concierge care. mean, it’s a shame because maybe the average person can’t as easily afford it since it’s not covered by insurance. But by the same token, at least we’re moving in a direction where that kind of doctor is available and that there are people that can help you do that if that’s your goal rather than just sick care.
Dr. Malaika Woods (28:26.817)
Mm -hmm.
Dr. Malaika Woods (28:37.575)
Absolutely,
Cheryl McColgan (28:38.566)
It just takes time, right? We’ll get there hopefully. So you mentioned that you also see men as well in your practice. And I think you mentioned low T men in their 20s, 30s. I think I read a study recently that the average testosterone in men is significantly down from where it was even just 20 years ago. Can you maybe speak to a little bit on the men’s side?
Dr. Malaika Woods (28:58.836)
Mm
Mm -hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (29:04.816)
tend to see in your practice and what kind of things do men struggle with when they’re having low T.
Dr. Malaika Woods (29:09.779)
Absolutely. So jokingly, I’m going to tell the ladies and the men to watch out for what we call the grumpy old man syndrome. So if they’re, you know, they’re irritable, you know, they’re lacking motivation, they’re getting belly fat around the middle, they’re losing muscle mass, certainly their libido and, you know, erections and things like that can be impacted. So those are some of the signs when you know that the testosterone is low.
And you may not have all of them. It may just be fatigue and lack of motivation. And it actually can manifest as something that looks like depression in men also. Speaking to the testosterone levels in men, the standard lab test says that 250 or something and above is okay, but optimal is really 800 to 1 ,000. And to take it back to connecting it with health outcomes,
There’s a study of veterans where they divided them by testosterone level. The male veterans who had a testosterone level under 500 had a higher rate of diabetes, high blood pressure, risk of death, any comorbidity problem that you could think of. In men with the testosterone below 500, it was higher compared to above 500. So I would say at least based on studies like that, we should be shooting for at least above 500, not.
So again, there’s a little bit of disagreement in the hormone replacement world about where these numbers need to sit. And another thing that I learned from my mentor is that normal is not optimal, but optimal is best. You don’t want to be normal and feeling terrible, right? You don’t want a normal lab, but you feel horrible. And that’s why I say the lab tells part of it, you tell part of it. So we have to put those two things together because
Cheryl McColgan (30:51.514)
The right.
Dr. Malaika Woods (31:00.771)
Again, men are walking around suffering as well. you’re just, it’s sort of like, unfortunately in the traditional world, like you come in and your testosterone’s 500, you feel horrible, talk about a guy. Then next year, you know, maybe it’s 420. And then, so they’re just waiting and waiting and waiting. And for years you’re suffering without, you know, taking action. And I can give that same analogy with so many other instances for men and women.
Cheryl McColgan (31:25.734)
Yeah, and that’s such a great point too, because I think that people forget in the general public that laboratory norms are based on the whole population of people getting labs, which are generally, they’re already sick, right? And they’re going to get all these labs.
Dr. Malaika Woods (31:36.092)
my gosh.
Thank you. I say that to everybody. I’ve said the standard lab is based on all the sick people coming in and out of the lab. You don’t want to base your normal off of their normal. That’s exactly right. Preach into the choir.
Cheryl McColgan (31:49.528)
Right. Yeah. So I’m with you there. know, it’s amazing when you when you think you learn to think about these things in a critical way and you know how to read studies and stuff. It’s like people just see these headlines and they don’t kind of think more critically about what does that mean. Well just because you’re in the normal range you’re comparing yourself to all these people that aren’t very well. So so Dr. Woods you’ve mentioned that you see people online. Can you
Dr. Malaika Woods (32:04.709)
Mm -hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (32:18.998)
share a little bit about your practice, where you’re licensed to do that, how you like to work with people, your website, all that good stuff.
Dr. Malaika Woods (32:26.136)
Yeah, absolutely. So I am a hybrid practice. So I’m mostly virtual. And then the people who come into the physical space, which is in Missouri, it’s a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri called Lee’s Summit. Those are the people who are doing injections or doing pellets. Otherwise I see people virtually, which is great. It’s convenient for them. They can be on their lunch break and all of that. I see people who live in Kansas, Missouri, and California. So anybody living in those states, I can actually be your provider.
And so ways to reach out to me, my website is drwoodswellness .com. That’s just drwoodswellness .com. I do have a private Facebook group called the Natural Hormone Fix. And so those are for the ladies who want to come in and learn about hormones and the functional medicine approach to that. I would say those are the two places to check me out.
Cheryl McColgan (33:19.174)
Okay, awesome. And one final question, just because you mentioned that people from other states, for example, say I lived in California and I would like, I would love for you to be my provider. I don’t live in California, unfortunately, but I live in Ohio. But how would that work if they reach out to you and start to work with you if they need to do something like have, get medications or get a pellet or something like that? How does that part of it work since they’re not physically there with you?
Dr. Malaika Woods (33:29.835)
Mm -hmm. Okay.
Dr. Malaika Woods (33:44.389)
Yeah, so pellet would be hard to do unless they’re coming here to Kansas City. But otherwise we can prescribe the other modalities. Our compounding pharmacies can send medications to all 50 states. I just happen to be licensed in those three. And so actually it works great to do this remotely. And think about it, you’ve got those examples of all these online big companies that do this as well. The difference is you know the doctor that you’re working with.
we get to develop rapport and have an ongoing working relationship together.
Cheryl McColgan (34:16.558)
Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge and some amazing tips and nuggets in here that I hope people take to heart and use to better their health. So again, Dr. Woods, thank you so much for joining us and hopefully I’ll see you again in the future.
Dr. Malaika Woods (34:31.769)
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Sharp discusses various aspects of health and wellness. She emphasizes the importance of diet, lifestyle and stress management. She shares about her journey into functional medicine, which led her to the the significance of gut health and hormonal balance.
Dr. Sharp also highlights practical strategies for stress management, the impact of food sensitivities, and the role of habit stacking in creating sustainable health routines.
You can find Dr. Sharp at Health Meets Wellness.
Takeaways* Diet and lifestyle are crucial for overall health. * Daily movement, like walking, is essential for stress management. * Mindful eating can improve digestion and reduce stress. * Food sensitivities can significantly impact gut health. * Gut health is interconnected with hormonal balance. * Chronic stress can lead to various health issues. * Habit stacking simplifies health routines and reduces decision fatigue. * Maintaining muscle mass is important during weight loss.
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.908)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Elizabeth Sharp and we are going to talk about all different kinds of aspects of health, but a couple of things I think you guys will really appreciate, especially since we’re coming in to this busy time of year with the holidays and stuff coming up, a lot of stress, so we’re going to talk about that. But before we get into all that, Dr. Sharp, I’d just love if you would share with people, kind of a little bit about your personal…
background because you have lot of interesting things that you’ve done. You’ve done some amazing hiking. You’re also a yoga instructor. So you’re obviously really passionate as am I about health and wellness. I’d love to just hear some of that background so that people can get to know you a little bit and understand why you’ve become so passionate about helping people on their personal health journey.
Elizabeth (00:44.559)
Yeah, so I would say I’ve always been interested in primary care and that’s why I did the internal medicine training that I did and I knew that I wanted to go into primary care in residency. But as I started to practice, really started to appreciate the importance of diet and lifestyle and also the impact overall and kind of wellness and a general feeling of well -being in terms of the mind -body connection. And I think also that ties in with the gut -brain axis.
And so I try to tie in all of those things with my practice because I’ve noticed the difference in my own personal health. When I’m active, when I’m eating a healthy diet, it makes a big difference. Right. And so that’s kind of part of what got me into functional medicine is GI related conditions. Generally, I had a lot of patients coming to me with some kind of symptoms that were all very similar. So, you know, gas and bloating, abdominal discomfort that were really explained by the traditional medical work.
And so I just thought, you there has to be more that I can do for these patients, more that I can offer. And so once I opened up that door, I really started to explore a bit more in terms of lifestyle medicine, a little bit more with expanded testing and understanding how you can incorporate general internal medicine with, you know, botanicals, nutraceuticals, supplements, that kind of thing. And ultimately how you can create a healthy lifestyle.
which is really what sustains people for the rest of their lives with their health as opposed to just treating symptoms.
Cheryl McColgan (02:21.56)
Yeah, love that. And it’s definitely a paradigm that this audience is used to hearing about kind of this functional health approach where it’s not just, okay, take this pill is more like, hey, you’re gonna probably have to do a little more work than that to move on and really have an optimally healthy life. So before we get into that, because you said you were noticing that your patients had a lot of similar things going on. I definitely want to chat about that. But did you, I’m just kind of curious, did you find yoga?
during medical school, before medical school, or is this something that you kind of took on after as you realized that this overall wellness thing was really something that was gonna help your overall practice?
Elizabeth (03:01.415)
Yeah, so I actually I’ve had a yoga practice for a long time, like through college and before med school. And then I would say it was something that I was really doing, you know, I would say more and more consistently as I got older. But I noticed that it helped in all aspects of my health. So it made me a better runner and I like to run. It helped keep me grounded. It really helped with mobility and flexibility. And I liked the meditative component of it. And so I actually didn’t become a certified yoga instructor until COVID.
had some time to do it. And, and then I really wanted to incorporate it into my practice. Even when I was in residency, I had initially had this dream of like having a medical practice attached to a yoga studio. But you know, I would say ultimately, I think now being able to incorporate exercise into your daily life in a way that’s sustainable and easy is really the best way for most people and myself included. I used to go to classes all the time. And now I, I practice mainly on my own or with a yoga instructor.
And so I just kind of do it like when I can fit it into my schedule. And so I really wanted to be able to bring that to my patients. And that’s part of the reason I wanted to get certified so I could design classes for them that they could use as a way to not only treat symptoms, but also invite daily movement into their life.
Cheryl McColgan (04:19.638)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s what I’ve always loved about it too, is that you can do it anywhere. And I also found it during college, which was a really important time because we’re talking about stress going to the and stuff. mean, students are a ton of stress, medical school is a ton of stress, grad school is a ton of stress. It’s like, you’ve got to find some outlet for that. And I’m so glad that you kind of found, because over the years, I’ve just thought that that’s one of the easiest things to go back to. You can do it anywhere and it’s just so accessible really for everyone.
Elizabeth (04:29.825)
Yeah.
Elizabeth (04:47.03)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (04:48.536)
All that being said, I’m sure other than yoga and meditation, that you probably have some other practices and ideas around stress. And since we kind of just led into that with the yoga discussion, maybe let’s focus on that first. So I would love it you’d share with people what you’ve been imparting to your patients as far as daily lifestyle practices that they can do to kind of mitigate some of the stress. And I’m assuming that that helps them relieve some of these hormonal symptoms that you mentioned and also the gut symptoms that you mentioned.
That’s a big questionnaire.
Elizabeth (05:18.231)
it.
Yeah, yeah, I would say, know, generally daily movement is one of the easiest and simplest things that people can start to incorporate for stress management. I always say walking is the most underrated form of exercise and just, you know, even getting 10 or 15 minutes of walking in every day will add up to a lot over the course of the week. And then that really moves the needle over the course of the month and then the year. So I kind of start there. And then I would say yoga is another thing that I typically do like to recommend if people are open to it because it has that meditative component so it can really help
with stress and help with people feeling grounded. And then also taking some time where they’re not on their phones and they can kind of just really focus on themselves. So time for self care is another thing that I really try to focus on. And then in addition, would say having wellness routines. So in the morning or at night, you know, it may be getting up, taking a minute just to kind of get centered, then have your coffee, you know, kind of habit stacking is one of the things I recommend. But I also think that having a routine helps you
people stay grounded when they get stressed. Because oftentimes what happens is people get stressed and then things start to fall off because you’re focused so much on all the other stuff that you have to get done during the day. So carving out a little bit of time for yourself and to keep that consistency and routine, I think helps a lot in terms of reducing cortisol levels, helping people feel more in control because stress can, you know, and anxiety can make people feel a little bit out of control and then help to prioritize things for the day. those are just a few
kind of like lifestyle things that I typically do like to recommend and then as much exercise as possible in terms of getting at least that 150 to 300 minutes that a week that the American Heart Association recommends really actually helps with reducing cortisol levels, reducing stress levels, and helping with cardiovascular health and hormone balance. So I would say those are the biggest things that I would start to recommend. And then one last thing I would say is just with eating. So a lot of
Elizabeth (07:19.151)
times eating is impacted by stress, right? So people are eating at their desks, they’re eating really quickly, they’re eating on the go. So I do try to recommend as much as possible having at least some time where when you’re eating, you are focused on what you’re eating. You’re sitting down, you’re relaxed, so rest and digest, because that really actually does impact then your gut, your digestion, and how you feel.
Cheryl McColgan (07:44.022)
I’m so glad you brought that one up because I think it’s such a easy habit to fall into like my husband and I both work from home. And so quite often he’ll come down to have his first meal of the day, which is usually brunch -ish time. We tend to eat twice a day usually. But anyway, all that’s to say that he’ll come down and he’ll still have his phone and he’s reading work articles and stuff while he’s eating.
And I always have to remind him, I’m like, honey, just take a break from it for like 10 minutes while you’re eating, like let that go and be mindful. Actually, there’s also an article on my website at HealNourishGrow called Mindful Eatings. I’m a big proponent of that. think there’s so many reasons why that helps your digestion, but also just gives you a little break, I think, related to stress in the middle of your day. Like you don’t wanna keep working while you’re trying to eat.
Elizabeth (08:13.461)
Yeah, exactly.
Elizabeth (08:34.503)
Exactly, exactly. But it’s tempting because you feel like, I want to just get everything done. But yeah, then you don’t enjoy the food.
Cheryl McColgan (08:37.077)
It is.
Cheryl McColgan (08:42.265)
Yeah, so speaking of food, you mentioned that a lot of your patients were coming to you with gut problems. So maybe this is a good time to talk about that. you share maybe what you were observing in people and then some of the methods that you were able to use to help them get in a better place with their gut health?
Elizabeth (09:01.043)
Yeah, sure. So when I first got into functional medicine, I had a lot of patients that ended up being diagnosed with IBS. And so, you know, they had a lot of gas and bloating, alternating, or maybe sometimes one or the other in terms of constipation and diarrhea and some food sensitivities. And so what I did with a lot of those patients is identified some food sensitivities. And there’s a couple of different ways that I would do that. One would be an elimination diet or modified elimination diet if patients were open to doing
that, it requires some commitment. And, and, and, or I would also do some food sensitivity testing. And that would kind of depend on, you know, the patient’s appetite for wanting that data, wanting to do the testing and or being able to do the elimination diet. Because the eliminate, I would say the elimination diet can be very diagnostic. It’s a really great way to identify food sensitivities. But again, it requires a lot of dedication from the patient. So it’s not easy to necessarily do.
So, and then the other thing is I started to explore microbiome testing. And as I was finishing my functional medicine training, I also had a lot more tools to be able to understand how to treat dysbiosis, how to diagnose SIBO and gut dysbiosis and how to treat them. So I worked on that as well with patients and then also did a lot of nutritional counseling and worked a lot on diet, sometimes using probiotics, sometimes using other supplements like ginger for digestion.
peppermint oil, things like that, entericotid. So, know, different things of that nature, I would say, were really helpful in terms of helping to control symptoms. And then one of the big things I really like to do is empower people with their health, right? So just even understanding that, you know, maybe someone has a sensitivity to broccoli and they might want to go out and eat broccoli, but then they can, you know, take something beforehand so they feel better after, or at least they know what’s going on. So when they get those symptoms of bloating a little up down
Elizabeth (11:01.715)
discomfort, they’ve been intentional with their food choices. So I think that was really helpful. And also just feeling like there were tools to give patients or things to do in terms of their symptoms, as opposed to just sort of saying, well, the workup was negative, so everything must be fine. And so I think that was a big turning point for me in my medical practice. And I definitely still like to practice guideline -based care in terms of using antibiotics when appropriate, cancer screening, all that stuff. But at the same time, I think there’s
much more we can do as I was just kind of explaining in certain situations. I would say also with hormone health as well.
Cheryl McColgan (11:39.82)
Yeah, and the food thing’s interesting because I think you mentioned food sensitivity testing and things and every individual has different things that they may be sensitive to, but I’m just kind of curious if there are any foods or categories of foods or types of foods that you have noticed that across the board tend to give people symptoms or is it just kind of everywhere based on the individual?
Elizabeth (12:02.685)
Yeah, so you know, it’s interesting. would say I’ve noticed, especially with IBS, you know, there’s the acronym FODMAPS for those specific types of foods or saccharides in particular that tend to be more irritating for patients. I definitely have noticed cruciferous vegetables while they have a lot of health benefits can be gas inducing. So, you know, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, that kind of thing. I’ve noticed also sometimes onions and garlic.
garlic can be irritating for some patients. And oftentimes it can be like a dose dependent response, depending on how much is added into the food. And then the other thing I would say that I try to talk about a lot is just a lot of food additives, right? So as much as you can, eating a whole food based diet and cooking so you know what’s going into your food helps to identify food triggers a lot easier and then understand what might be impacting different feelings in your gut, whether it’s, you know, it’s slowing digestion.
or feeling bloated or you know, also just generally feeling fatigued or having a lack of energy. I would say, know, generally those things, so artificial sweeteners are a big thing that I try to, you know, talk about. And then one other thing I would say I always ask about is caffeine because caffeine can really impact digestion and you know, a lot of people will slowly, slowly, slowly start drinking more and more coffee.
or a strong copy. So that’s something I like to talk about as well.
Cheryl McColgan (13:37.432)
Yeah, and then wonder why they’re running to the bathroom after they’ve had five cups of coffee. I think that’s definitely not good for people with IBS in particular. Yeah, and one thing I like that you mentioned, because I think it, first of all, it’s kind of interesting to sometimes tie your symptoms to what you ate that day or keeping a food diary so that you can really go back and notice like, well, every time I eat this specific thing, this.
Elizabeth (13:44.772)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Cheryl McColgan (14:04.44)
happens, whether it’s an IBS thing or bad sleep or whatever it is, because sometimes, you know, for even people that are really aware of that stuff and very focused on it, like I find them like if I would have just if I would keep a food diary, I could maybe tie this together a little better.
Elizabeth (14:17.257)
and then you know. Right, but you know the tricky thing is when people go out to eat, then you don’t actually know everything that’s in the meal. So let’s say you order like chicken with sweet potatoes and rice, like who knows if they put butter or olive oil or you know what I mean? So it’s hard to know. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (14:33.08)
Yeah, most likely canola oil though, or something like that if you’re eating out. So probably the seed oils, which I have been able to, know, some people, know that’s a whole kind of controversial topic in the health and wellness space, but I have definitely been able to tie not good symptoms in my body because I never use those things when I’m in control of the food and we don’t eat out that often. And so I’ll notice if I’ll go somewhere that, you know, that most of them, 90 % of the restaurants are using that type of thing.
that definitely doesn’t make me feel good. Like sometimes it’s really like a negative effect like on my gut and just not like feeling right kind of headachy and stuff. So I think there’s definitely a little something to that for some people, but it’s just, again, being aware enough to kind of realize, what would that extra thing that we’re not seeing, what could that have been?
Elizabeth (15:04.641)
Thank you.
Elizabeth (15:21.109)
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I notice a big difference also. I know it’s hard to identify, but once you do, it’s very empowering. So you’re like, OK, I know what’s going on.
Cheryl McColgan (15:28.406)
Yeah. Yeah, except the problem is if you go out to eat, cannot avoid that. You just have to know that you might not feel so good, which is unfortunate, but.
Elizabeth (15:34.059)
Yep. Yes. I agree.
Cheryl McColgan (15:39.938)
So talking about gut health, mean, one of the things that you mentioned is once people kind of, know, an IBS is I think somewhat more common today, but how that ties into hormones, because I know one of the things that I was noticing like on your content when you’re, I think it was an Instagram video, it was basically like kind of like debunking TikTok myths and talking about hormone health. So maybe if we could chat a little bit about that and how improving your gut may also help some of these hormonal issues.
Elizabeth (16:09.981)
Yeah. So I would say, terms of gut overall and gut health, there’s a lot that I think we’re still exploring and discovering, but I think it’s definitely more widely recognized now that the gut brain access. so your gut talks to your brain. I would say even if you look at the class of GLP -1 medications, for example, we can see how increments, which are hormones that are released in your gut in response to food, actually impact the pleasure and reward center of your brain.
impact feelings of satiety and feelings of hunger, right? And so that’s just like a simple example of how hormones are really interacting in our gut, just even in response to food. But beyond that, when you have leaky gut or you have inflammation in the gut, let’s say from a bacterial overgrowth, it also then changes hormone balance and changes the way that your gut is interacting with really the rest of your body. And I think that it’s important to recognize that there’s such a complex interplay
between all of the hormones in the body that nothing’s acting in isolation. So that can start to impact thyroid health and can impact hormones for your menstrual cycle, for example, or things like that. Or for example, could be that PCOS as a diagnosis that is impacting your gut health. It’s hard to sometimes say it’s not a bi -directional relationship with all of these hormones, especially if, I’ll just take another example, but let’s say you have dysbiosis and leaky gut
then it’s impacting your GLP -1 levels, and then it’s changing your hunger and satiety cues, and then it leads to weight gain, and then that changes other hormones in your body. You it’s just very easy to see how everything can all be mixed together. And that’s why I really think that focusing on diet and exercise actually has such a big impact on all areas of your health, but mental and physical health.
Cheryl McColgan (18:03.981)
Yeah, and that, you know, when you were saying that and describing it, was thinking how, you know, for those of us who are kind of in this space, you get used to thinking about that. And it doesn’t seem as overwhelming just because I think we’re used to it. But somebody on the outside hearing all that, like, I have this and I have that and it’s all tied together. And like, what am going to do? You know, it sounds overwhelming. then, but then you just summed it up right there at the end, which is this like, focus on your diet, cleaning that up and exercise. Would you say that that’s really one of the best places to start if you are experiencing these kinds of things?
Elizabeth (18:20.478)
Yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth (18:32.979)
Yeah, of course. And obviously I don’t want to oversell it in the sense that it’s not like a cure -all for everything, but it definitely, I would say, moves the needle in the right direction and it helps to establish those diet and lifestyle, I would say, behaviors that can really sustain your health. So it’s really important to do that kind of in combination with treating other things that you may need to treat so that once your body is back in balance, you can maintain that.
Cheryl McColgan (19:01.75)
Yeah, and I was thinking, you know, going back to the stress component and the connection with gut health, it’s all connected as you described. But I think for a time you said that you were working at Google, which I would imagine that there are plenty of stressed out people there that you were working with. I was just wondering if you could share any stories or revelations that you had in working with people that are in a particularly high stress environment. And if you found like, was there anything extra?
that they needed to do to move the needle when it came to their health.
Elizabeth (19:34.895)
Yeah, so that was an interesting position that I had. I worked actually for one medical and then I worked in their corporate partnership office with Google. And so it was really interesting for me to be able to see how they set that office up because it was very different from other one medical offices. One thing in particular that I thought was great is that they had mental health and they had physical therapists in the office, which is an unusual thing than other one medical offices. They don’t didn’t have that, but that was particular to that corporate partnership. And I think that really speaks to how
Cheryl McColgan (19:38.018)
I’m sure.
Elizabeth (20:04.849)
can impact the body and also how having a job that requires you to be seated most of the day really impacts the body as well. There’s a lot of back pain of course with anyone who has a more sedentary job that’s one of the first things or one of the you know it’s one of the most common complaints in primary care generally but it’s definitely something that I think is increased with with jobs that require extended periods of sitting or working at a computer.
And I think an additional thing to just consider with anyone who’s under a lot of stress is, know, counseling is really helpful in terms of helping with stress management. So that’s why in my practice now, I do really focus on health coaching. That’s not the same as a therapist, of course, and it’s not the same as a psychiatrist, of course, but it helps a lot with behavior patterns and routines that can help with stress management and help mitigate stress before it gets to that point where it is negatively impacted.
impacting your health. And so that’s why I do really focus on a lot of, I would say habits and behavior patterns that can help in terms of taking stress down to a lower baseline level so that even if it does increase, you’re not reaching that critical mass amount of stress where it starts to really trickle down and impact everything else. Because as we know, know, chronic stress is a killer.
chronic stress really will start to impact everything in terms of, you know, cardiovascular health, cholesterol, blood sugar, weight, and then it’s just a cascade effect, right? And so really being able to intervene in the preventative stage or in the more acute stress phase is really important for impacting people’s health and being able to, as I was saying, just sort of like prevent some long -term impacts of chronic stress where then you’re dealing with a whole host of other things that have happened as a result of
chronic stress.
Cheryl McColgan (21:53.26)
Right, I think one of the, and I’d love for you expand on this a little bit, because you mentioned one of my favorite things, think, people don’t think of it as a stress management tool, but I do because you mentioned habit stacking. And again, for me, it does two things. It takes away decision fatigue, which to me adds stress, like if you’re already in a stressful life and then you just have to make all these micro decisions all day long, like what am I eating, what do I do, this and this, to me it takes some of that away.
Elizabeth (22:06.036)
Mm -hmm.
Elizabeth (22:18.014)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (22:22.284)
And then the habit stacking too, just becomes this, I feel like kind of like the habits become like a little security blanket. Like they’re just things that you do that you don’t even have to think about them. That’s just who you are now. Like the exercise, like just like brushing your teeth, it becomes the same thing. So I’d love it you could talk about how you see habit stacking and how you’ve seen that impact people in their health.
Elizabeth (22:30.618)
and then.
Elizabeth (22:45.437)
Yeah, yeah. So I think you, you touched on something that I love to kind of highlight, which is that it becomes part of you, right? So when you start to habit stack and then have a wellness routine, which is what that turns into, then it just starts to become part of who you are and what you do every day. And I always talk about how those little things that you do every day actually are what move the needle with your overall health. For example, those are typically the things that tend to lead to weight regain where it’s like small changes that happen over time and then you fall off of your
exercise routine and your eating patterns and then you gain a small amount of weight over the course of the year and all of sudden in the year you gain five pounds and then you know in five years you know it adds up obviously right and that’s how it kind of happens right and so in terms of maintaining your health it’s really the things that you do I would even say 80 percent of the time that really move the needle so I focus on that a lot in terms of moderation because the reality is like you want to recommend a healthy diet to someone they’re still going to go out to you with their friends
they’re going to want to out to restaurants. We talked about that. You’re still going to go out to eat even if canola oil bothers your stomach, right? It’s happening. setting patients up for success is one of the things that I really try to focus on because if you make a plan that is not achievable, it’s not going to feel good for anyone, right? And so being able to have a sustainable plan is the key to long -term success. And that’s why I do like habit -stacking because generally you’re focusing on things you’re already doing. So you can easily kind of incorporate that into your team, you know, doing something after you have coffee in the morning or
Cheryl McColgan (23:50.018)
Right?
Elizabeth (24:15.191)
that you already like and enjoy doing so you have that positive reward from. And then when you add some of those other things, just, I would say, compounds that positive feedback.
Cheryl McColgan (24:25.718)
Yeah, totally agree. one of the, I’ll just give, this is like a silly example, but it’s one that I’ve done, started in the last probably four months. And it just made it so easy because it’s stacked with my coffee. Like that’s one of my things that I do every day. I have a whole ritual about it. I do a pour over and then I put this lovely keto cream in that I love. It makes it taste so good. It’s like a whole like routine, right? So then when I wanted to start taking taurine and creatine,
Elizabeth (24:34.166)
Hmm?
Elizabeth (24:48.321)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (24:54.252)
I was like, okay, I can do it later in the day, like mix it in water or whatever, take it with my vitamins. But to me, I knew I’m like, if I really wanna do this consistently, I’m gonna do it with my coffee. Because I know that I’ll do that every day, that thing about taking the vitamins later in the day and stuff sometimes. I mean, that’s mostly ingrained now too. But it’s just like, I knew that that one would stick. And so it really has made it super easy to just, you know, add those ingredients to the coffee, have them at that moment. And so there’s other things that you could add.
Elizabeth (25:00.694)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (25:24.568)
So that say it’s, you you need extra protein in your life. So maybe in the morning when you’re doing your coffee, you do a protein coffee or something like that. You know, it’s like just those little things that really does help it stick. So I’m glad that you’re a fan of that as well.
Elizabeth (25:38.199)
Yeah, definitely. No, I feel like it really does move the needle. And then you start to feel good because you’re like, okay, I’m taking the supplements that I wanted to take and…
Cheryl McColgan (25:47.552)
Exactly. Yeah, it all all feeds on each other and it’s definitely helped with my muscle mass stuff. So that’s that’s pretty amazing. I love that. Yes, big win. So big win all the way around. So you mentioned so you have now a practice and I know that you see patients in your office, but you also see them virtually. And I think what I was reading is that you have kind of a three prong approach. So we’ve talked about two of them strongly already, the nutrition component, the
Elizabeth (25:55.347)
Yeah, that’s a big win.
Elizabeth (26:07.382)
and
Cheryl McColgan (26:15.968)
Lifestyle, can you kind of describe that system a little bit to people and how you like to work with your patients?
Elizabeth (26:21.743)
Yeah, sure. So I developed the health meets wellness method, which is basically combining medicine, exercise and nutrition for all of my patients. So everyone that comes into the practice gets a medical program or plan. They get an exercise plan and they get a nutrition plan. I have dietitians in the practice. so since I’m a membership model based practice, I wanted to make it inclusive so that everyone wants to do everything in the in the membership and in the program. I found that sometimes when things are a la carte, it’s sort of like,
Do I really need to pay for that or do it? And so just want to make it easy because I feel like if people really do benefit from talking about their nutrition and then as we were talking about before sometimes it’s easy to just have the decisions taken out the decision -making like need taken out a little bit to remove the friction and essentially just to make it easy and so we do meal planning and it’s not mandatory obviously, but if people want it then what happens is we can plan your meals for the week around
your preferences and your health and wellness goals, body composition optimization, know, other symptoms, gut health, et cetera, and then tie that in with the medical plan with medication supplements and things like that I might recommend, and then with an exercise plan. And I believe that that’s what really sets my patients up, not only for success in the short term, but in the long term with their health and overall wellness.
Cheryl McColgan (27:45.122)
Yeah, that’s amazing. mean, we could have a whole other podcast for hours about all the issues with our healthcare system. But I really believe if the system in the whole in the US could move towards that model where it’s a more preventative and holistic way of approaching it, I think we’d have far, far better health outcomes, spend way less money, and everybody would just be much better off. But I don’t know if you can convince whoever the next president is to do that.
Elizabeth (28:14.902)
I know, no I
agree. think this is the way medicine should be practiced. And one of the things, so I do general primary care, taking a more integrative approach, of course, and then also weight management because medicine, exercise, and nutrition really lends itself to that. And so it’s been fun to really work with patients in that capacity because when people feel empowered with their health, when they feel like they’re getting the results that they want, it can be really life -changing. And so that’s been an exciting area to be working in as well.
Cheryl McColgan (28:46.028)
Yeah, especially now with the new tools. I think I’ll just ask this one final question just out of curiosity, since you mentioned it before you mentioned the GLP ones, which for people that haven’t tied those together yet, GLP ones are things like Wigovia, Ozempic, new drugs that are, you know, helping people lose weight. Do I guess two questions, do you use those in your practice? And if so, how do you have people implement them to have the best outcomes from those and avoid any of the unwanted side effects, I guess?
Elizabeth (29:05.313)
Mm
Elizabeth (29:15.285)
Yeah, sure. So I do prescribe them in my practice and I would say I prescribe them for the medically appropriate patients. And I always do, I would say I always make sure that everyone has a medicine, exercise and nutrition plan. And what I like about the medications is that with diet and exercise, especially with weight loss in particular, it can take a long time to see the results. When you introduce the medication, it can actually help in terms of shifting some hormone imbalances and helping to promote weight loss quicker.
So it’s a positive feedback loop with those other behavior changes that you’re making at the same time. So as you start to see the results that you want, it makes you want to continue doing the exercise and nutrition program. And then the goal is to be able to have the medica – not need the medication or take the medication away and then still sustain that weight loss with the exercise and nutrition program. So that’s my approach and I’ve had really good success. And the biggest thing too that I really do like to focus on is not even just the weight, but we do body composition analysis.
and strength assessments in the office. And so we focus on maintaining that muscle mass, which is, I think, really one of the biggest game changers in the way that I practice because it helps people.
actually be set up for success. Because as we know, if you lose weight and you lose muscle mass and end up with a higher body fat percentage, you need to actually consume less calories to maintain that lower weight. And that can be really challenging if you’re in more of like a weight loss phase, maybe you’re eating a little bit less than you normally would. When you stop that intervention, you may eat a little bit more, right? And so that’s kind of a natural shift that happens. If you need to continue maintaining eating a significant amount less than you were eating before,
the propensity to regain the weight or yo -yo dial is there. And what happens is you end up in a worse place than you were initially in terms of your body composition, because you have weight regain and you have higher body composition to start with. So it’s this kind of negative feedback loop where you regain the weight, then you want to lose it again. And so in my practice, we really protect against that by maintaining muscle mass and helping to maintain a higher basal metabolic rate as you lose weight, allowing for maintenance
Elizabeth (31:25.993)
with that current nutrition plan that you have while you’re working together with me and with our nutritionist in the weight loss phase. So when we take the medication away, essentially if you maintain exactly what you’re doing, you’ll maintain your weight.
Cheryl McColgan (31:41.624)
That’s amazing and I love that you approach, think that’s the way anybody that’s on that drug should be strength training. I mean, I just have heard so many people, so many experts talk about this and I’m sure you’ve seen that study that showed it was one of the initial trials I think with those drugs that people, you know, they lost a lot of weight but something like up to 40 % of that was muscle mass that they were losing as they were doing this because they weren’t strength training, they’re eating so much less, they’re probably not eating the right amount of protein as they’re losing weight.
So I wish that every doctor would approach it that way, just so that people get this wonderful benefit from the help of the drug, but don’t lose their valuable muscle mass on the way, which like you said, will help them maintain that weight loss after they’re finished with that initial loss phase. So that’s amazing. Well, all that being said, you have all these wonderful paradigms that I think people that are out there, especially in this space and that are kind of more forward thinking are looking for. So can you share how people…
Elizabeth (32:23.264)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (32:38.189)
Like, you taking on new patients? How can they work with you? Where are you located? The virtual stuff, all the good things.
Elizabeth (32:44.215)
Yeah, so my practice in New York City is on 60th Street between Park and Lex. So you can find the practice there. You can go to our website, healthmeetswellness .com, and you can see all the information about the primary care memberships and the, or membership, sorry, and the weight loss membership or weight management membership. And then you can find us on Instagram at healthmeetswellness. That’s the handle. You can find me on Instagram at Dr. Elizabeth Sharp. And then you could call our office. The odd number is 917 -888
Or you can email us at info at healthmeetswellness .com. And I’m licensed in New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Florida, many, many states. So doing telehealth in a lot of other states, but seeing patients in person in New York. So come check the practice out.
Cheryl McColgan (33:35.076)
Love it. And just because I’m in Ohio, are you licensed in Ohio yet? I know I some listeners here, so we’ll just have to wait until you get licensed in Ohio. But I’m sure if they call or go to your website, they’ll know if you can work with them virtually or not. But anyway, Dr. Sharp, I appreciate you so much coming on today. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and I love the type of work that you’re doing and I just really appreciate it. So thank you.
Elizabeth (33:38.143)
I’m not, unfortunately.
Elizabeth (33:59.908)
likewise. Thanks so much for having me on. This has been really fun and I love chatting and doing this. So hopefully we’ll get to do it again soon sometime.
Cheryl McColgan (34:08.056)
Awesome, thank you.
In this episode, Cheryl interviews Michael Byrne, CEO of BIA Neuroscience about their new biofeedback sleep mask. Michael shares his background in psychology and how he got interested in sleep. He explains the connection between stress and sleep issues and the importance of accurate data collection for neurofeedback.
The sleep mask uses conduction drivers to provide audio stimulation to encourage the brain to enter desired sleep stages. The mask also mimics sunlight to wake users up gently and offers features like meditation and affirmations. The wake up experience Michael describes is amazing and we’re looking forward to sharing more about it when it finally arrives!
Order now at an insanely discounted price with a lifetime subscription to the software.
This article is a great resource for more better sleep tips and strategies.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Takeaways:
- Stress is a major factor impacting sleep, and accurate data collection is crucial for effective neurofeedback.
- The sleep mask uses conduction drivers to provide audio stimulation and encourage the brain to enter desired sleep stages.
- The mask mimics sunlight to wake users up gently and offers features like meditation and affirmations.
Watch on YouTube:
Episode Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.068)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Michael Byrne and he is with BIA Neuroscience. And just me saying the word neuroscience, know that that’s one of my things just to remind you about my previous content. I have a background in psychology and actually went to graduate school for a bit for clinical neuropsychology. So the brain is definitely something I’m always interested in. So I’m excited for you to share more about your company today. Michael, welcome. before we…
get into all that and how this is going to help people with sleep, which is another one of my favorite topics. I’d love for you to just share how is it you got interested in this kind of work and kind of what inspired you to, you know, make a sleep product? Were you having personal trouble with sleep? Like what’s the scoop?
Michael (00:44.354)
I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I’ll give a long -winded story and edit it as you feel. I went into biopsychology myself. I was very interested in the why behind people’s behavior. Why do we do anything? And originally that led me to psychology. And then more I studied it, more I realized the brain was behind it. So I went towards biopsychology. And I ended up doing an internship with a group in paranoid schizophrenia.
Cheryl McColgan (00:51.84)
you
Michael (01:14.38)
Very quickly learned studying and working are two vastly different things in the field of psychology. So, you know, I was expecting something like a little bit more exciting and fast pace. And instead it’s really quite upsetting and requires a significant amount of empathy and, you know, emotional backing behind it that can be quite draining. So I decided to just get into the working world and see what I liked. So I ended up getting a position at a neurofeedback clinic.
I became a certified neurofeedback technician and just saw everything under the sun. And one of the things I noticed and one of the things that we emphasize every single time was when someone came in for a session, we asked them, how was your sleep? And big reason why we did that is it’s a more objective way to get an understanding of someone’s current cognitive state, so to speak. When you ask someone who’s, for example, going through depression and you ask them, how are you doing today?
it’s one a negative trigger and two you might not get as direct of a response in terms of their current state of mind then if you ask something along the lines of how was your sleep? How was your energy? How are you feeling? It gets you a bit more of a rounded understanding and we asked that no matter the reason someone came in to the neurofeedback clinic so that was kind of my first touch point on the sleep side.
ended up moving on to a sleep supplement company. So that’s where I met my co -founder. My co -founder was the very first hire there. I was the second hire. He was handling everything front end of the business. I was handling everything back end of the business. So we kind of got to grow that together. And we were selling a natural sleep aid, just a health supplement, little bit melatonin, lemon balm, chamomile, so on and so forth. That we did quite well. We were selling over 500 bottles a day, you know, over a million customer who serves and
We got to see a ton of feedback and understand the issues around sleep in a much more holistic manner. We both ended up moving on, wanted to keep working together. I wanted to get back into neurotech. His background is actually IBM software. So he was looking to get back into that side. So we started researching the neurotech space in general and surveyed thousands of people, went through hundreds of companies and analysis and ended up actually right back at.
Michael (03:35.36)
sleep as the most opportune area for us to build and work towards and sleep and neurofeedback actually. it’s kind of a came full circle for us there.
Cheryl McColgan (03:49.492)
Yeah, that’s a great backstory because I find that there’s so many, generally, I feel like people making products of this type that are in, a lot of them that are in the health and wellness space, they like genuinely see an issue or a problem that’s not being addressed and they wanna help people. And so I always think it’s great to have that background because it’s like a lot of companies are a lot of these kinds of things that really help people. It’s not something that might make them a million dollars. Like for example, this is what I bought from one of my,
previous guest, it’s like a, I’m not going to say it right, but it’s a neuro stimulation kind of thing that you work with with your feet that helps you with your balance and proprioception and stuff like that. I mean, this little ball is probably not going to make her million dollars, but it’s serving an amazing purpose. And I think that this sleep mask that you guys have created is going to do the same thing. And, you know, I think first to say people also know how focused I am on sleep. think it’s one of the most
underappreciated aspects of your health. So when you were working in these clinics and hearing about people’s problems with sleep, what was it that you were hearing that made you realize, okay, I think there’s a way to connect this to neurofeedback. And then also, was there like a common theme, like people just weren’t getting enough sleep, enough restorative sleep, like just maybe talk a little bit about what you were seeing that led you to this product.
Michael (05:06.38)
Yeah, so I’ll kind of separate the two in terms of like the consistency of issues and then how neurofeedback connects to that. So on the sleep side, what I saw a lot of was generally speaking, the impact of stress. That was like by far the number one impact on sleep, where even it was falling asleep, waking up frequently, not getting enough of that deep restorative sleep.
that seemed to be like the number one connection was how stressed people were. There was everything under the sun. It does generally impact women more. The more you dig into it, the more you see that things are in many cases getting worse. So for one amazing finding was the number of people that are sleep deprived, getting six hours or less of sleep is four times, I believe it’s four times as high as it was
in the middle of World War II. So the problem has gotten worse. It’s a lot of over -stimulation. Our brains are just firing a mile a minute and being able to shut it off is very important. So that kind of brings me to the neurofeedback piece. So essentially what you’re doing with neurofeedback is you look at where the brain currently is, you look at where it wants to go, and then you provide some sort of simulation, audio, light, haptic, it all varies. We focus
mainly on audio, to guide you towards that desired state. It’s a lot more complicated when you’re looking at something like, let’s say, a concussion. One, it has a wider range of how that looks when it’s in its current state, and two, what that desired state is a lot more personalized. A big reason why we looked at neurofeedback for sleep is that sleep is, generally speaking, standard across, like in terms of what the brain looks like, like sleep stage one for me and sleep stage one for you.
are quite similar. determining what that desired state actually looks like and getting to it is quite similar person to person. How long you need to spend in that stage and how many cycles would have you, that is also incredibly personalized and unique to each individual. But in terms of the brain patterns of stage one, stage two, the four different stages, depending on three, depending on who you ask that you cycle through are generally speaking the same person to person.
Michael (07:31.65)
So that makes the neurofeedback guidance a lot simpler because it’s generally speaking guiding towards the same goal.
Cheryl McColgan (07:40.052)
Yeah, that makes sense. so then the tech of it, you’re saying that there definitely sleep is very individualized in some ways, but there are these stages that are consistent from person to person. Is that consistency in the stages enough to have this mirror feedback work on the person or is it a type of product where it might learn more about your personal needs as it goes on?
Michael (08:02.59)
Perfect. That’s exactly one of the things that I’m extremely happy with this product. another issue when we saw selling the sleep supplements is that it would work great for a few months and then it fade. Typically it was like six to seven weeks where we’d start to see a fade off for people. And we saw that when we started researching other sleep products as well. And generally speaking, you need a product that learns, individualizes, and grows with you. So our product personalizes to your needs. look at the general
processes that we work with you to set your sleep goals. So if you wake up 10 times a night, okay, by the end of the month, let’s get you to waking up eight times a night, just something progress forward, but we’re going to continue to work with you month over month and individualize and get better. So based on that, we look at data that you collect. We, make it, we have a super easy journaling process. We can see what’s impacting your sleep. And then we also can see how you’re responding to the neurofeedback and we adapt both of those things. So we provide insights on how to improve your.
day -to -day activities and your actions that impact your sleep, as well as we personalize and individualize your neurofeedback algorithm to your unique needs. And then work with you to improve those goals. personalization is definitely, in my eyes, absolutely vital to a sustained sleep improvement product.
Cheryl McColgan (09:20.48)
And so that’s the app -based part of it. So I’m assuming over time that adapts and talk about AI and stuff these days, run some kind of algorithm that figures these things out to adjust it properly for you. So there’s not a whole lot that people have to do with that side of it other than wear this mask at night and then you said there’s some simple journaling that you have to do. Can you maybe describe that part of it a little bit more? What kind of data are you collecting?
Michael (09:29.314)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (09:49.394)
as far as what people have to log.
Michael (09:49.645)
Yeah.
Yeah, so goals we do, generally speaking, we keep things as optional as possible. It’s better. The more info we have, the more we can personalize and improve. The objective would be to have a before and after scientifically validated psychometric to see, you improving outside of the data we collect? Outside of, did your heart rate variability improve? What were the psychometrics? What are the things that matter to you?
falling asleep faster, there’s scientifically validated studies we can use, surveys that we can use to do a before and after and see if you improved and what matters most to you. So there’s that aspect. And then there’s like super simple tagging, know, caffeine, it’s kind of like a one to five scale. It’s not like how many coffees and when did you like, it’s just slide the scale, how much caffeine did you have compared to normal? When did you exercise and how vigorous it was? We want to make it super simple. You can use like previously Sage one, so it’s
one click to fill in five, six responses. We want to keep it as simple as possible for filling that out. And then the other piece there is what are we measuring? What does that data look like? So we have four different sensors in there, well, technically five. Our key sensor is called FNIRS. So what it’s doing is measuring brain activity. So we measure where it matters, sleep happens in the brain.
That’s where we want to measure. So what it’s looking at is the amount of oxygen your blood is carrying to your brain. And it’s more, it’s more akin to like fMRI where it’s looking at blood flow and activity within the brain. we’re looking at blood flow to your brain and that is correlated to sleep stages. So based on how much oxygenation and what that pattern is like, we can get a determination of sleep stage. With that, we also get breathing rate, heart rate variability, heart rate, a handful of other metrics. But that’s our kind of key.
Michael (11:48.648)
sensor that we have in the product. Then we have other ones that you see in standard wearables. like IMU, so like movement and head positioning, we’re able to capture that activity. We have a temperature sensor. we’re working hard on this one. Definitely follow us along if you’re looking for a wearable that can measure temperature to two decimal places, cause most can’t do that right now. And it’s definitely incredibly important for, for women’s health. We’re working on that as well as getting it to two decimal places.
And then we have our fourth sensor is a binary microphone. Collecting eight hours of actual audio is just way too much data to store. And we operate Bluetooth free as well. You can enable it if you want, but we are completely Bluetooth and signal free. All the data is stored on device. So it just measures more or less decibel levels. And that can tell us if there’s patterns with it, we can detect something like snoring. If there was like a loud jump in it, we can be like, okay, whatever.
Cheryl McColgan (12:26.743)
I guess.
Michael (12:46.862)
your neighbor slam the door or card, card honk, whatever it is. So we can start to connect those two disturbances in your sleep and we can make that connection and overlap. The fifth sensor is just a light sensor in the mask. So we know if you’re wearing it properly and if it’s getting 100 % blackout. So we combine all that data to get sleep staging as well.
Cheryl McColgan (13:08.702)
Yeah, and because you brought up other wearables, so I have my wearable, everybody has all their wearables now, right? Would you say that the proximity to the brain in your head during sleep has any other either benefits or challenges versus something you’re wearing on your wrist or your finger or anything like that? I’m curious about that kind of part. Does it make it more accurate in some way or is it more challenging for the tech?
Michael (13:36.206)
Challenges, 100%, going through this, making a product around the head. There’s a lot more safety regulations, just generally speaking, for you to work with, even if you’re just a general wellness product. What qualifies for safety is much, higher. The other side is most people don’t wear things on their head. are, you know, wrist watches are very common. It’s very comfortable, so wear rings.
Most people don’t wear things on their head. It’s why we’re doing a sleep mask It’s something people are already familiar with the other benefit with that is that actually blocks out light which also helps you sleep But yeah, so just the form factor itself is more difficult the benefit is definitely like if you look at any studies on the accuracy of a Wrist wearable or a ring based one. It’s almost always compared to a headset for the brain
like some sort of neural headset. That’s how they determine the accuracy is how does it compare to measuring things from the brain. So it’s by far the standard to follow. So you get way more accurate data and sorry to ramble, just neurofeedback, the basis of good neurofeedback is good data collection. Cause if we’re not understanding where your sleep stage currently is and where you currently are, the feedback we provide to get you to that desired state is not going to be accurate. So accurate data means accurate feedback.
Inaccurate data means inaccurate feedback and ineffective product. So it’s really important to get that high quality data and the high quality input from the beginning.
Cheryl McColgan (15:12.116)
Yeah, and this might be slightly in the weeds, but I think it’s a little, I think it is kind of important because one thing I’ve observed with different wearables, even my, also have a sleep number bed, which is a bed that has like an air mattress and even it has something that detects, you know, how long you’re in bed or how long are you in your sleep stages and this sort of thing. So from what I’ve read in the past about these is that things like HRV or whatever it is, there’s a lot of different ways to choose what algorithms you’re using or how it’s going to actually calculate.
those numbers. So a lot of them, what you get on your ring or your watch or your bed or whatever it is, won’t be the same. And so guess my question to you as a person who’s developing the technology is what factors did you use to kind of decide what how you were going to calculate this data and how that’s like matching up with maybe studies that you’ve read about it and that sort of thing.
Michael (16:05.4)
Yeah, a lot of it does come down to the method of collection. With us, an important factor is because our tech is all completely contactless. All you feel is the soft inner textile and foam. Everything is either infrared light or it doesn’t require immediate skin contact. We had to factor in the distance between where the sensor is and where it’s collecting the data from. And we’ve had to engineer around that quite a bit. It’s been a pretty significant challenge.
to go completely contactless. With something like a wrist wearable, it has that direct skin contact. So temperature sensors, for example, much easier for them to be able to collect that much more affordable component as well, because they have that direct contact. It’s substantially easier. But generally speaking, you kind of have to look at what the studies are out there currently. What have they found in terms of what is accurate and what isn’t?
algorithms and processes, a lot of this stuff is actually open source. A scientific community is generally speaking supportive and trying to help each other out. So you can find quite a bit of data out there. And then of course, we’ve got a couple partnerships coming up with universities to conduct studies and further validate as well as further improve because as you’re saying, it’s algorithmic based. So the benefit is even if if you’ve got the hardware down pat, the current
Sleep staging could be a little bit inaccurate. And the more you study and research it, the more data you collect, the better that can get.
Cheryl McColgan (17:34.836)
Yeah, very cool. I think it’s interesting too that it seems that you, I mean, you definitely have everything to a certain level right now. But one thing that’s interesting is that you’re still in pretty early stages because these units are not shipping yet. And so what has that process been like? it, you know, did you run into some things along the way that like, well, this is taking a little longer than we thought, or it’s taking shorter than we thought. I mean, I’m sure it’s really interesting developing a product from the ground up, and especially one
that has these technical challenges that you’ve decided, but I think that you described, but I think it’s really neat because, you obviously, like you said, you have it in the proximity of the place where it’s gonna be more accurate in that way, but then you have this challenge of not putting sensors on people, which I think is really interesting. So anyway, all that is to say, I appreciate the tech behind it, which is really cool. What’s been like the biggest thing is what you mentioned with…
the lack of sensors being in contact with the skin, one of the major ones, or were there other things that came up too?
Michael (18:35.404)
So there’s that aspect of it. And then generally speaking, the form factor, building a mask, there’s so much variability in head shapes and sizes. And because of that, you need variation in softness. tech inside a sleep mask does also make it far more complicated because we need to get precision to a millimeter accuracy in manufacturing. And we’re doing that with foam and textile.
Textiles are a little bit easier, but we’re now going to stitch and cut tiny little holes. But getting the foam to expand into that exact shape is incredibly difficult. It’s not just as easy as just cutting a hole out. That has been incredibly difficult, getting that level of precision to a millimeter, while also working with something like foam, where they pre -print this in sheets of length of a football field. And we’re getting this much that in terms of manufacturers and businesses,
We are not a $10 product, so we’re not selling this in massive volumes in terms of the foam. To justify the business with them is also a difficult process. To find manufacturers willing to work with smaller quantity on the foam side has been a challenge, with that being absolutely vital to getting that blackout experience, to getting the contactless. FNIRs, you don’t want any external light interference, so it’s to our benefit to make sure the mask is 100 % blackout because it improves our sensor accuracy.
With that being said, need to, again, know, neurofeedback the quality of data coming in is the quality of output going out. So we need to make sure we had that a hundred percent blackout, no matter the head shape. And that just took a ton of R &D, ton of research, ton of iterations. And we thought we had it nailed and it didn’t work out. We thought it had nailed again, didn’t work out. So we’re finally at that stage where that part seems to be resolved. It’s now actually being able to scale this and build it for mass manufacturing to meeting the quality standards we have.
very tasteful standards.
Cheryl McColgan (20:34.944)
Yeah, and that’s what I love that you guys are so committed to getting this just right and to making sure that you’re going to market with a product that works amazing, the tech is there. That’s why I kind of want to go into that a little bit, just because that’s not something I think people think of very often. But what you’re trying to achieve with this, I think will be really special and really valuable to people. So to go back just to the tech a little bit, you said you do it primarily with audio.
So can you describe the experience people get when they put on the mask and it’s well fitting and it’s got the nice foam and there’s no sensors on there or anything like that. So they put on this mask. And by the way, I’ve used a sleep mask for a long time. really is the whole full blackout is really important to sleep. So I think that on top of what you’re doing with the neurofeedback is also amazing. But I would love to hear more just about the experience of put on the mask, what are the sounds, what are the things. One thing I also wanted to clarify for people
you mentioned the Bluetooth. So that’s related to EMF, which EMF is something that you don’t want to be, you want it as much out of your life as possible, right? And so when you especially when you have things right on your head. So I think that’s really important. And I just wanted to kind of call that out again. But so anyway, back to the experience of the mask and the sound.
Michael (21:49.114)
Yes, and let me know if I’m going off track here at all. So one of the things that we discovered accidentally was the sound quality and the experience. We didn’t want any hard parts over the ears. We’ve tried a handful of sleep masks and the speakers over the ears, just killed the cartilage in my ears. My ears would wake up, they’d be super sore. There’s one, you know, I tried like a cheaper one, it was sore for like five days afterwards. It’s a terrible experience. So we use something called conduction driver.
So conduction drivers work through contact. So we skip the ear canal and it vibrates through the bones and straight to the inner ear to create the music experience and what you hear. The benefit to that is there’s no hard parts over your ears. All of our electronics sit around your eyes. And the unexpected benefit is that it was just incredibly soothing. You put on the mask.
the audio starts and you just fall into your chair. It’s incredibly relaxing. And we found out afterwards, they use it with, you know, veterans with PTSD, like conduction drivers or, children with autism to help stimulate the vagus nerve, help them calm down and relax. So that was an unintended benefit of avoiding tech over the years. the audio itself, we’re going to have a handful of different tracks. We’ll have things like
Ocean waves crashing, we’ll have things like white noise, we’ll have things like, my personal favorite is the piano. And then behind it all, there’s kind of like an ambient music that was designed by neuroscientists that mimics these stages. So there’s…
Cheryl McColgan (23:28.192)
Is that like a binaural beats sort of idea or is it something different?
Michael (23:31.822)
It’s similar. So, binaural beats tends to emulate a specific Hertz in your brain. The music we use emulates the entire sleep stage. know, if binaural beats is targeting 10 Hertz, stage two sleep, just for argument’s sake, is going to be predominantly 10 Hertz range, but it’s also going to have some other aspects to it and other Hertz ranges. Our music hits that entire spectrum of that sound scale. So, it’s mimicking it. It’s like…
seeing the full sunset instead of just seeing a hint of yellow. You get to see all the colors. We’re doing the same thing with our music. So that’s a neuromusic portion. And then there’s a neurofeedback portion. So you put on the mask, the music starts, and then there’s kind of an encouragement and discouragement track. So those are there to teach your brain when it’s starting to go towards a more relaxed state, go towards that sleep stage, or when it’s moving away from it. And this is all passive. It doesn’t require active engagement.
your brain will just start to make these associations across time. So that once it starts to hear that encouragement, it’s going to fall asleep faster, it’s going to stay asleep. And when it hears the discouragement, it also knows, okay, I’m going in the wrong direction and get it to switch gears.
Cheryl McColgan (24:44.992)
And this is, so since this is neurofeedback, it’s kind of encouraging your brain to do these specific stages. So let’s say you’re a person right now that is getting 30 minutes of deep sleep at night, which is, would be very poor and not good for your health. And they’re relating this to so many things now, Alzheimer’s, your brain, the glymphatic system at night cleans your brain of these plaques and tangles that they think are related to dementia. So there’s, there’s a lot going on when you sleep that’s really healthy if you’re getting to those stages.
So guess my question is if say you’re a person that’s say right now getting 30 minutes of deep, like how does that work? Is the sound programmed to get sort of an optimal amount, two hours of deep sleep, or does it again just learn based on where you’re starting now and it starts to increase you, something like that.
Michael (25:29.43)
Yeah, generally speaking, we’ll work towards the generic eight hour window to start just to be safe, but it’s going to learn and adapt to your needs. So in the morning when you wake up, there is two pieces. There’s a video game we’ve made with a game designer that objectively tells us how alert you actually are. So we don’t necessarily focus on the number of minutes of deep sleep or minutes of RAM or how many wakeups that you have. How alert are you in the morning to be able to function?
throughout the day. Like that’s our number one objective, get you to be at your very best. And then there’s a second piece of just one to 10, how much energy do you feel? And that helps train the algorithm of what is a good night’s sleep for you versus a bad night’s sleep. And again, same thing, the more you do it, the more you use it, the better it’s going to learn and better it’s going to be able to adapt. And I’ll start to be able to correlate that info to exercising in the afternoon versus evening, for example, and it’s going to start to make those connections to what is best for you as an individual.
but it’s gonna start with a more generic window as to, know, example, I might need two and a half hours of deep sleep after a day of exercise compared to someone who might need only an hour. It’s gonna vary individually. So it learns and adapts to that. And then throughout the night, that neural music, the neurofeedback will continue to work. So when you get towards that deep sleep, and I know in this instance, it’s two and a half hours and I slept amazing, it was…
fully recovered the next day, it’s gonna encourage me to stay into that deep sleep for longer so I can get towards that two and a half hour time frame.
Cheryl McColgan (27:03.198)
Awesome, I love that it individualizes like that and that it somehow is able to improve that over time or change that or if it gets you to an optimal level, then it may just stay at that same thing. It’s not gonna push you to like you’re getting eight hours of sleep, because that’s just not possible or that wouldn’t be healthy either. So one of the stats and I think I just wanted to call this out because one of the stats I read on your website was something to the effect that you could get up to
Michael (27:18.03)
Yeah, exactly.
Cheryl McColgan (27:30.836)
double the amount of deep sleep? I remembering that correctly? Any other, as you’ve been testing this and learning more about it, and I’m assuming you’re probably using this every night yourself, are there any things that you’re noticing personally or that you’ve seen validated throughout your testing that are some improvements besides the deep sleep that people might be interested in?
Michael (27:34.413)
Yeah.
Michael (27:52.494)
The main thing is going to be the boost in energy. The wake up experience, I think on its own is going to be incredibly valuable and we can talk about that in a bit, waking up and feeling actually ready to take on your day compared to waking up and contemplating, should I hit snooze? Should I not? I know it’s not healthy, but I’m going to hit snooze. Then you wake up again 10 minutes later and then you go and get your coffee. You kind of drag yourself out of bed and it takes you a couple hours to get going.
It’s a vastly different experience to your day to wake up and feel good and ready to move. It sets your mood for the rest of your day. And I think that would be, to me, the bigger thing. We talk about deep sleep simply because it’s something people can understand and they know it’s important and almost everyone’s lacking in deep sleep. So it’s an easy way to describe that, but the energy experience is by far gonna be the best benefit.
Cheryl McColgan (28:49.15)
And then what about things like sleep duration or REM sleep or things that people, think, you you’re saying, of course, that wake up experience, that would be amazing to wake up like that every day, first of all, because I don’t, I definitely don’t have that myself. But those other aspects of health and that people are hearing about duration or what improvements or what changes have you seen in those areas?
Michael (29:12.998)
That we see as very subjective person to person So I wouldn’t necessarily both specific stats of whatever adding an extra hour of sleep or anything I wouldn’t necessarily focus on any of that. I would be much more heavily focused on Did you get the right amount of sleep for you?
Cheryl McColgan (29:32.414)
Yes. then do you also, and this is just, so maybe you wake up feeling pretty ready to take on the day and like you slept pretty well, but then maybe you have afternoon fatigue or you have, you’re just like really tired and it’s hard for you to make it until the end of your day. Are those some things that are being factored in as well where you can say, yeah, I woke up amazing, but then I don’t know if something still happened where I don’t feel like I’m optimized.
Michael (29:57.23)
Yeah, 100%. There’s a aspect of it where we look at your chronotype and we look at your behaviors matching to your chronotype. So are you acting in a way that matches your energy schedule? And then if it’s something, you do shift work, not really your choice, we’ll work with you around that. And we’ll also provide advice on that. But we’re going to work with you to deal with whatever your circumstances. With that, we have an energy forecast. So we look at
where you are now and we kind of forecast where your energy peak is going to be during the day when it might come slow. And of course we have a nap mode with it as well to give you kind of that optimal 20, 30 minute nap to get you back onto your feet.
Cheryl McColgan (30:40.672)
Okay, that is very cool because here’s my challenges. First of all, I did have a bad bout with insomnia years ago. And so as a result of that, now I don’t care how tired I am, I will not nap because I just have this fear ingrained of taking a nap and then I don’t sleep well that night and then it becomes this horrible cycle. But I do think there are times where naps are very valuable. There’s a lot of research on that. But there’s this optimal nap time that they say is, I believe it’s 20 to 30 minutes.
But my challenge with that has always been, okay, I lay down, it takes me a while to settle. I’m like exhausted, but it takes me a while to settle down. And then I finally fall asleep. But if I set an alarm, how long do I set it for? It’s just this whole thing. I would really, what I’m imagining happens, you put on the mask and then it kind of, you know, gently wakes you up at the appropriate time. Or can you describe that experience?
Michael (31:21.28)
Yes.
Michael (31:31.018)
Yeah, so I’ll talk about the nap and I’ll talk about the wake up experience because I love the wake up experience. So on the nap side, the objective there is to make sure you don’t get into that deep sleep. And then when you get in that deep sleep during a nap and you wake up, you wake up groggy, you kind of throw your system into a loop. We try to actually encourage, you know, not going past stage one or stage two, get you to relax as fast as possible, get you relaxed, get you calm, and then keep you at that stage one, stage two sleep, sleep component for the nap.
The wake -up experience we have a handful of different things. So there’s a smart alarm So outside the nap it’s easier to talk about this in terms of a full night’s sleep, but there’s a smart alarm so if you set it for Whatever 7 a Just for argument’s sake around 630 will have the tiniest cue of light for your brain to start to wake up nothing like it’s almost Wouldn’t register consciously
and it slowly increases in brightness, the music changes to go towards a wake up state. So instead of encouraging you to sleep at that point, the music’s actually gonna change and it’s gonna encourage you to wake up. So you kind of wake up in that optimal state. And then as you approach that 7 a timeframe, make sure you don’t sleep past that, the lights will come on and it actually mimics sunlight. it’s tons of people talk about the importance of getting sunlight first thing in the morning. It’s very well researched.
we’re able to mimic that directly in the sleep mask. So we worked with several optical engineers to mimic that sunrise experience directly inside the mask. With that as well, we’re working on a like auto meditate from there. So without moving the muscle, you can start to meditate first thing in the morning. You get that 10 minutes of sunlight, you get some meditation. You can have affirmations going. that same thing, the first thing you hear in the morning is so important.
And instead of seeing an email from your boss telling you how you’re late on a project, you hear some positive news, you hear some affirmations to start your day. It’s a way better way to wake up and set the mood.
Cheryl McColgan (33:37.054)
I can see why you’re super excited about that because that is quite often what I do is like once I’m actually fully awake is I take a couple more minutes right then to meditate, which is it’s so interesting because I was a yoga teacher. I don’t teach publicly anymore, but for many years in a practice for many years and so meditation, of course, the big part of that and what I find is, you know, people have this block against so I have to sit this certain way. I to sit on floor cross later, whatever. I’m like, no, you can like literally lay down and meditate and I think it takes a lot of the
Michael (34:02.701)
in the
Cheryl McColgan (34:06.73)
you know, the barriers to meditation away. So even better is if you’ve woken up nicely, you’re actually refreshed in your body and you can take those few minutes to settle into a meditation before you get, and I mean, this, might be my favorite part of this product. didn’t even read about this yet. So I love it. It’s amazing. well, everybody can see like, I’m super excited about it. I can’t wait to get it. And that’s why I reached it out to you and was like, my God, this is so cool.
Michael (34:20.63)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (34:33.29)
But Michael, we have a little bit of a wait. This is gonna come out and it’s gonna come out though at kind of the perfect time. If you know somebody in your life that doesn’t sleep well or I mean, who couldn’t use this product really? So it is orderable right now and it is an orderable at an amazing discount. And I’ll let you kind of describe that includes a lifetime subscription to the software, all this kind of stuff. But it actually won’t ship until sometime next year. So maybe you can talk about that a little bit now.
Michael (34:36.035)
Yes.
Michael (35:00.876)
Yeah, so I’ll get the bad part out of the way. It’s shipping mid next year. The current price is quite a bit lower than we anticipate when we get to launch. You’re looking at a hundred bucks cheaper if you were to order now. And to me, the big thing is a lifetime subscription. There are a handful of other wearables there where you pay a monthly subscription for access to your data. The way we focus on the subscription is providing continuous value to you. And for us, that’s improving the personalization AI.
that’s improving the insights aspect, but it’s also new feature releases. So, you know, there’s gonna be new meditation tracks, new audio tracks, but there’s also gonna be things like snoring interruption. One thing I’m really excited about that we’re working towards, it’s gonna take some time, won’t come out at launch, it’ll take a little bit, but nightmare interruption and being able to detect that interrupted. So there’ll be a handful of features constantly released every year. And that’s where that subscription would come in. If you pre -order now, you get that
subscription for free for life. It’s not for the product if the product dies You need to start paying the subscription. It’s going to follow your account everywhere you go So for the rest of your life you get that lifetime subscription
Cheryl McColgan (36:12.724)
Yeah, and that’s one of the major reasons I wanted to lock it in. So mine’s already ordered and I can’t wait. And so if you’re hearing this and you’re like me and you think this amazing or you want to get it for somebody Christmas, go to heelnourishgrow .com slash BIA, B -I -A. And that will take you there. You can read all about the tech we’ve discussed. You can read more, but I don’t know what else there is say about it. mean, after hearing, if I heard this, I would be like, what? I gotta get this. So Michael, any…
final thoughts you’d like to leave people with before we move on with our days here, anything that we didn’t cover or just any final words.
Michael (36:47.618)
I guess the main thing is I handle, yeah, the product’s amazing. I absolutely cannot wait to get this out in everyone’s hands. We know it’s a bit of a wait, but it is gonna be worth the wait. The one other thing is I handle all the customer service directly. So if you have any questions, email, I’ll be the one to respond. It’s not gonna be someone who doesn’t know anything about it. It’s me personally that will handle that email or handle that message on Instagram or Facebook. So happy to…
clear any further questions, reach out. We know it’s a complicated product. We know there’s questions and we don’t want you placing the pre -order without feeling 100 % excited about getting it mid next year.
Cheryl McColgan (37:29.898)
Yeah, and so which one of those ways is the most effective to reach out to you? Would you recommend that they go to the website or to reach out to you? You mentioned Instagram, like what’s the best or will any of those work?
Michael (37:39.886)
Any of them will work. It doesn’t matter. I handle them all.
Cheryl McColgan (37:43.784)
Okay, awesome. Well, Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to do this today. And like I said, I’m super excited about it. And I hope when people hear this that they will get excited about too and get better sleep. So thanks again for joining us.
Michael (37:55.65)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Dr. Emily Spichal, a functional podiatrist and human movement specialist, discusses the importance of foot health and the role of functional medicine and movement in podiatry. She shares her journey into this field and the development of her sensory-based product line, Naboso.
Dr. Emily emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to foot health and the impact of footwear on foot function. She also explores the connection between foot posture, movement patterns, and overall body alignment, as well as the importance of foot health and its impact on overall posture and movement.
She explains the benefits of using toe spacers to reset the feet and improve conditions such as bunions, hammer toes, and plantar fasciitis. Dr. Emily also emphasizes the role of sensory perception in foot movement and the importance of reconnecting with the sensory side of ourselves.
Her new book is called Sensory Sapiens, which explores how modern movement is aging us and the need to prioritize movement longevity. She advises releasing the feet daily to reduce foot stress and pain.
Connect with Dr. Splichal at her website and if you check out Naboso products here, use code HEALNOURISHGROW for 10 percent off. Kineon red light therapy for body pain was the other tool mentioned in this episode.
After chatting with Dr. Emily, I bought the toe spacers as well as the sensory ball, I’m obsessed!
Takeaways
- Foot health is an important aspect of overall well-being, and a holistic approach that considers factors like movement, stress, sleep, and diet is crucial.
- Functional podiatry focuses on treating feet in an integrated way, considering complex human movement and the sensory side of the foot.
- Footwear trends, such as the current maximalist shoe trend, can impact foot function and movement accuracy.
- Understanding foot posture and its effect on body alignment is essential for addressing movement patterns and preventing injuries.
- Setting a stable base by activating the foot tripod, externally rotating the hips, and connecting with the toes can improve foot function and overall body alignment.
- Toe spacers are an effective tool for resetting the feet and improving conditions such as bunions, hammer toes, and plantar fasciitis.
- Sensory perception plays a crucial role in foot movement and overall posture.
- Reconnecting with the sensory side of ourselves can unlock proper movement and support longevity.
- Dr. Emily’s upcoming book, ‘Sensory Sapiens,’ explores how modern movement is aging us and the importance of prioritizing movement longevity.
- Releasing the feet daily can reduce foot stress and pain.
Watch on YouTube:
Show Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.026)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Here and Learn, Grow podcast. Today, I’m already tongue twisting myself, because I’m already thinking about Dr. Emily’s name, it’s Dr. Emily Slickle. And we were just chatting before the podcast, I was hoping not to butcher that, but I think I got it right. So Dr. Emily, welcome. I am so excited to chat with you today about all things foot, because we have not had that subject on the podcast yet. And I think…
what you’re doing with the way that you treat people virtually and the products that you have brought to market to really help people with their foot health is pretty incredible. So all that being said, I would love for you to just kind of introduce yourself and tell us how you got into this line of work.
Dr Emily (00:39.508)
Of course, well, thank you for having me on Dr. Emily. I am a functional podiatrist. that’s, to me, that’s very important to have that distinction. So that means that I treat feet, but I treat feet in a very integrated way. think very much about complex human movement, but also stress, sleep, inflammation, diets, how do people breathe? So a lot of stuff that I bring into it, almost like functional medicine, functional movement into my podiatry.
Cheryl McColgan (00:43.031)
Hey.
Dr Emily (01:08.576)
And then I’m also a human movement specialist where I focus primarily out of my practice on chronic patients. Maybe it’s chronic pain, chronic movement disorders, chronic movement dysfunction. And I’m trying to look at them from an outside of the box perspective. I teach people how to empower themselves by understanding their body and how they move and their feet. And then finally, in addition to that, I’m the founder of Noboso, which is a sensory based product line.
I’m very much into the sensory side of the foot versus thinking of it very biomechanical. I’m fascinated on how our feet are the gateway into our brain and that’s how we control our movements. And then my final passion is movement longevity.
Cheryl McColgan (01:51.564)
I love that you just covered all of that because everybody that hears that is gonna know exactly why I wanted to have you on, because I love having people on that really take a whole body perspective and a functional perspective, because I think so much of medicine, as you well know these days, is putting a bandaid on something without getting to the root cause. And I think it’s really amazing what you’ve done to try to promote this idea of a very holistic.
thing with your feet because there’s something that are so important to us and you usually don’t think about them too much and still you have a problem with them, right? So you mentioned your functional products. I’m guessing that this became kind of a thing because you kept seeing people and were maybe seeing some consistent issues that you were thinking, how can I better help these people? And maybe it’s like a little tool or something to help get their foot stronger or
Dr Emily (02:23.19)
Not like yes.
Cheryl McColgan (02:44.406)
you know, all those sorts of things. I’m guessing you were just seeing a lack in the market. So I’d love if you could just talk about what you were seeing in your practice that then led you to produce these certain tools and products that you have now.
Dr Emily (02:57.588)
Absolutely. So I will share first, let me find what I can show you. So this is an example of the texture. So all of the products at Noboso, which is my products company, features this texture to stimulate the nerves in the bottom of the feet. And we have a patent around the texture. Now, what I was
Starting to see a really avoid in the market. This was back in 2008, nine, 10. If you remember the barefoot running boom and the five finger shoes and that whole time is that it was bringing an awareness to the feet, to foot health, to movement and how the shoes that we wear might actually be doing more harm than good. That there’s a lot of cushion, lot of structure that just naturally our feet probably don’t need. So people were moving more minimal.
Cheryl McColgan (03:26.808)
Yes.
Dr Emily (03:49.442)
which is great. Similar around that whole thing is that people then started also saying like, what if I take my shoes off entirely and I work out barefoot, I run barefoot, I go around my house and there’s just this attention around the bare foot. One thing I didn’t mention in the beginning is that I’ve been in the fitness industry for over 23 years. So being intertwined in…
coaching and athletic training and strength and conditioning. That’s another big part of what I was doing. So I would speak and educate about the feet, minimal shoes, getting out of your shoes. And then I started to realize, well, that’s not the end of the story. It’s not just if we take off our shoes, therefore we are optimizing the sensory side of the human foot. There’s more because there’s special nerves in the bottom of the feet.
that are sensitive to very specific stimuli and texture. This is actually two point discrimination. Texture is like a consumer word, but it’s two point discrimination like braille. There’s a very specific nerve in the bottom of their feet that reads two point discrimination. So I started to get into research of that. One of the other nerves in the bottom of the feet is sensitive to vibration. So I started to get into vibration and really understanding how do we target these nerves
to get a little bit more out of our foot function besides just take off your shoes and that’s all you need to do. And now you’re optimizing your foot activation, awareness, strength, circulation. How do we get even further into that? And that’s really what led to Noboso and then just my specialty in the neurosensory side of the foot.
Cheryl McColgan (05:29.816)
That’s so interesting. So I’ve never heard about those specific receptors in the bottom of the foot that you described. So that’s really cool. And for those of you that were listening and not watching on video, she was holding up a yellow cylinder that you could basically like put under your foot to kind of, I’m guessing, like roll back and forth on it. But before we move on with the technology, because I know you have some other things and I want to get into that part where you talked about the vibration, but you mentioned shoes and I have to go there because I was a runner for 17 years and the shoes kept getting more and more.
And this is what we thought before I read, you you mentioned the book, The Barefoot Running, that was such a great book. I’ll put a link for that in the show notes, because I think even if you don’t run, it’s a really just a good, great read. But for years, and I have like really bad knee problems and stuff now, and I really think it was a factor of I kept wearing more and more padded and padded shoes. And now I see this trend right now. Have you seen the Hoka’s shoes? like, they look like three inch heels on tennis shoes, running shoes. I would love to hear your perspective.
Dr Emily (06:24.898)
very much.
Cheryl McColgan (06:29.497)
I’m guessing there’s a balance because then I think running barefoot or running in very minimalist shoes kind of creates its own problems, especially when our bodies have been used to a certain other way for 50 years. So could you just talk about that a little bit and what you recommend for people as far as footwear, particularly if you’re doing something like a lot of running in your life.
Dr Emily (06:49.25)
Yeah, one thing that I would say at the start of any footwear conversation is that we have to remember that footwear is still part of fashion. And that’s really important that fashion, all aspects of fashion have trends. And that includes the footwear industry is that there are trends that you will see in the footwear industry, some athletic, some not. But for the listeners, I’m sure that they remember, remember Shape Up.
So the rocker shoes, that was the trend. So there was this trend within the footwear market that had to do with like shoes that get you in shape, let’s say like the gym and the shoe. Then there was Clops, there was Uggs, there was Doc Martens, remember Toms. So there’s all these footwear trends. And then that’s important because right now we are in a super shoe maximal
Cheryl McColgan (07:19.518)
yes.
Cheryl McColgan (07:30.892)
The Fit Flap. Yes.
Dr Emily (07:48.086)
Hoka -esque trend within the footwear industry. And a lot of people thought that the minimal shoe during the barefoot running boom was a trend and then they would completely go away. However, that’s not the case because there is a need and a justification and there’s science and evidence behind minimal based shoes. Obviously it’s still trendy. So now Hoka is totally trending in these super shoes. But
When we think of them as a hocus -pocus with a lot of stack or cushion is essentially taking away the important sensory stimulation that we need when we move, whether it’s walking, running, jumping, et cetera. We need that information to create accurate movements. And if you don’t have the information, your movement accuracy, your movement efficiency, just the preciseness and the…
quality of how you move will just not be as high because of less information coming in. Now, can you still move? Absolutely. You’re just disconnected. Now, the one thing that I do like about Hoka, which is just a little disclaimer on the side because sometimes I do recommend it to my patients, is that they actually have a rocker in them. And there’s a time and place for a rocker, a four -foot rocker in the front of the shoe that is based off of this carbon fiber interlay that’s in the shoe.
And if you have severe bunions, maybe you have arthritis in your big toe, you have a neuroma, you have a plantar plate tear or something going on with the second joint, something going on with the forefoot, it’s actually a really good benefit to get into a forefoot rocker such as a Hoka so that you can still get an optimal step length and you can still walk as close to the right way as possible.
Because there’s a lot of compensations that happen when we can’t move through our big toe and our forefoot the right way. So it’s always a balance. So I love the footwear conversation. I do try to look at it very objectively and not say that everyone should be minimal or no one should ever wear Hoka, but let’s just be educated on the appropriateness of all the different shoes.
Cheryl McColgan (10:01.848)
Yeah, and I think that’s a great point because since I’ve recently started having these couple of foot issues and I guess this is the time to chat about that. Cause I think it’s really in relation to what you just said about the functionality of footwear. So I had two things happen kind of close succession. And one was I started having this pain. I Google diagnosed it. I have not been to the doctor, but I Google diagnosed it as a Morton’s neuroma, which you just mentioned the neuroma and why you might want that rocker.
Dr Emily (10:21.196)
Okay.
Cheryl McColgan (10:27.692)
And the second thing was I was dancing in some silly little kitten heels at a wedding for way too long, like for hours. And I think the pounding of my heel kicked up some plantar fasciitis. And that has been ongoing. And so all this is to say that normally I am a big proponent of, you know, former yoga instructor. I walk around barefoot all the time in my house. If I can not be wearing shoes, I’m happy. But right now, since I’ve had these two little issues kick up, I’ve not been able to do that. I’ve had to wear shoes in the house and…
have gotten a couple of tools that you just mentioned there, like the little padding under the forefoot because of the way I’m hitting. And then also like slightly more cushion under the heel because of the plantar thing. I think it is, you know, realize there’s a time and a place for everything. Right now I’m kind of wearing, I’m considering it in my head like rehab shoes basically until that my feet are healthy again. So I don’t think there was a question wrapped in that, but just to kind of put a fine point on your, on your
what you just said about, you know, footwear that’s appropriate for what you’re doing and what your foot is currently, I guess, feeling in the moment or in the season.
Dr Emily (11:33.344)
Yeah. If I could actually add on that though, because I do see a lot of the patients that I see come to me because they know I’m a functional podiatrist. I work with a lot of the minimal shoe companies. I advocate barefoot training that, that one, I’m going to recommend to every single one of my patients that they should be in a minimal shoe or two that that is like the Mecca that they should be achieving towards. Right. And then if they happen to have
foot pain or whatever it is that if they go into something supportive, quote unquote supportive for a period of time, just like you said, your rehab shoes, that they’ve somehow failed their body of its natural function. which sounds crazy, but people get really into this natural foot function thing. And I always will share with them that this is temporary.
It’s transient. We’re trying to get control of the situation. So in the case of plantar fasciitis, when someone is having this on and off or just persistently for six months, nine months, a year, sometimes several years, then I say, okay, we need to get control of the situation. I need to get control of the situation because I need to help you to understand tissue stress and the tissue remodeling process.
Cheryl McColgan (12:48.105)
You
Dr Emily (12:56.876)
so that we can get you in a situation that this is behind you. And that’s very hard for patients and consumers and everyone to understand, because they’re just not doing that dance every day like I am with patients. So there is this important period of time where we are in quote unquote rehab shoes so that we can get control of the situation, right? And then you can go back to strengthening the foot and all your natural and your barefoot.
Just that aspect is, find important for people to understand and say, it’s temporary. It’s not like I failed my foot or my body, just like with everything, right? And it’s the, that’s the psychology of I think healing and chronic conditions is, it’s just maybe how you frame it in your mind of the relationship to that moment.
Cheryl McColgan (13:36.485)
Right.
Cheryl McColgan (13:51.158)
Yeah, no, excellent point. I’m hoping, and I am not opposed to, I said I hadn’t been to the doctor, but you know, lot of things it’s kind of just a wait or see pattern or just let your body do its normal healing process. I’ve been doing the red light therapy on my kidney on every night on my foot and along with my knee and my other body parts that have pain. But one of the things that you said that I’d like to revisit, because we just talked about that, I’m guessing that one of the issues with my foot, like I recently,
Dr Emily (14:05.559)
to be in.
Cheryl McColgan (14:17.411)
Well, now it’s been over a year, so not as recently, but I started weight training on a consistent basis again. And I’m also noticing like in my knee pain, for example, I was doing some research on the movement pattern in a squat and why that tends to kick up some stuff with the IT band. But I also think, you know, it goes all the way down to your foot. So I would love if you could, you mentioned like functional movement patterns before. When people have these kinds of things pop up, I think it’s probably some poor movement.
patterns throughout my whole body that are obviously anchored at your feet. I don’t know, can you just like maybe go a little bit more into that and how you work with people to correct movement patterns? Because I really think that that’s how you end up getting these little injuries is you’re just doing something not quite right when you’re doing a new pattern that you’re not used to, you especially when you’re doing a new pattern. Not to say that you can’t do it in things that you’ve done for years, like your golf swing or your whatever.
But think particularly when you take up something new, that’s maybe you’re more likely to get injured or have some kind of problems crop up.
Dr Emily (15:18.602)
Absolutely. So I always start, let’s say a new movement assessment or injury risk screen, let’s say by having people understand their foot posture and the foot posture, which would be also known as your foot type, right? So let’s just understand our foundation because your foundation, which is your feet is ultimately going to affect your knees, hips, pelvis, T -spine, shoulders, cervical spine, like
everything the entire way up. Oftentimes I will demonstrate this by having people feel how their feet move. So if the listeners want to kind of go through this, I will tell them how they could do it is that if we stand up and we put our feet shoulder width apart and you’re just starting standing nice and relaxed, doesn’t matter how you’re standing. And then we roll to the inside of our foot and we exaggerate making a flat foot, let’s say.
and then we roll all the way to the outside of our foot and we exaggerate that movement. And then essentially go back and forth is that I want people as they move their foot to look, see, feel that every time they move their foot, the knee is rotating in, rotating out. The knee rolls in, the knee rolls out, right? You can put your hands on your hips and say, okay, this rotation every time my foot moves is going all the way into my hip. my goodness.
put your hands on your pelvis. my pelvis goes forward and back every time that I move my foot. So why that’s important is, okay, one, have to appreciate the interconnection of the feet with the rest of the body because certain positions of the body, leg, knee affect the way that the muscles contract. So let’s say in a squat, as an example, if your foot posture is more collapsed,
flat foot, but it’s collapsed, we just went through the movement that that makes your knees roll in or kind of knock inward, which also makes your pelvis roll forward. Now, both of those, actually all three of those positions, a rolled in foot with a kind of knocked in knee and an anterior pelvis makes it very difficult for your glutes to contract. It makes it very difficult for your deep ab muscles to contract, makes it
Dr Emily (17:41.504)
difficult for your foot stabilizers to contract, puts a lot of strain on your IT band. So now this is where you could say, okay, I understand, however, my foundation isn’t stable in the case of a squat. And now I’m going to put weight on my shoulders. Okay, now I’m actually stressing the system more. So that little part of understanding our foundation, what is our foot posture?
What is the effect of the foot posture on our body alignment? And then how does our body alignment affect the way that our muscles stabilize and that the way that our muscles generate strength? That’s really what you’re asking, right? And that’s an important thing for people to understand. I have lots of resources out there on that. It’s very hard to kind of obviously do that in just the podcast version, but I have lots of videos actually teaching people how to determine their foot.
If the listeners go to Barefootstrong .com, there’s actually a foot type quiz on there and they can start to understand do I have high arches, flat feet, neutral foot, et cetera.
Cheryl McColgan (18:49.728)
Nice. And yeah, I’m definitely going to go take that quiz after after we talk. But is there is there like an overarching principle for whether it’s what you know, Matt, no matter what exercise you’re doing, or what athletic posture, whether it’s your golf posture, or just standing in your kitchen? Are you? mean, if you are having issues, is there something like press into like in yoga will cue a lot like press into the big toe side and the baby toe side equally or
Dr Emily (18:53.256)
you.
Cheryl McColgan (19:19.382)
Is there some kind of overarching thing that you can recommend for just daily life, basically?
Dr Emily (19:24.884)
Absolutely, absolutely. So I consider this setting your base. So when we set our base, and again, if the listeners want to do this, as I’m kind of talking about it, that you would stand up, or shoulder width apart, and your foot base or a stable base is set around your foot tripod. So you would lift your toes. And as you lift your toes, feel the pressure under your first met head, fifth met head heel. That’s the tripod. Keep the toes lifted, spread them out nice and wide, and then place them back down on the floor.
even just doing those two things, huge improvement in your foot posture and your foot base. However, we can continue and do just two more things, which is remember the rotation that we did collapse in collapse out when you externally rotate your hips. So that’s kind of like when you squeeze your butt or your glutes, it makes your hips externally rotate. So can the listeners slightly externally rotate their hip or imagine
screwing the heel into the ground, which will slightly lift the arch. Okay, so you’re on your tripod, toes are long, straight and flat. You do a little external rotation to essentially center the arch. And then the last thing is that you wanna connect into your toes. So a good bass has connection into the digits and it’s literally like 5%. You’re saying hello to your toes, right? So you just kind of…
touching the tips of the toes into the ground. The way that I get people to connect to how your toes contract or anchor into the ground is through an exercise called a forward lean. So if the listeners stay exactly as they are, arms are by your side, you’re standing nice and tall, imagine that you’re stiff as a board, stay nice, tall, stiff as a board, and then you’re going to slightly lean your body forward. Think like a ski jumper or Michael Jackson or something, you’re leaning forward, and then come back into a vertical position.
slightly lean forward, and then go back vertical. Every time you lean your body forward, staying stiff as a board, your toes are going to contract into the ground. The tips of the toes are. This is activating a postural reflex because your body does not wanna fall in its face, so your digits, which is part of this long fascia line, essentially prevents you from falling by contracting everything on the backside of your body. So.
Cheryl McColgan (21:39.714)
Yeah.
Dr Emily (21:50.048)
this postural reflex, I want people to feel what happened in their toes. Okay, I feel it. Yes, I felt my toes pushed down. Okay, can you do that same contraction without leaning your body forward? Can you just stand there nice and tall and relax and boop, push the tips of your toes down into the ground? That connection on your tripod with your toes long, straight and flat, and just a little lift of that arch, that’s going to lock in your base.
Cheryl McColgan (22:04.332)
Mm.
Dr Emily (22:19.424)
And that’s what I have people do if they stand on their feet all day, if they have foot pain, when they’re doing exercises, it’s a great way to do the dishes and brush your teeth and all those different things. It’s really you setting your foundation and getting it part of really the gravity party. Because our feet are really important to how we resist gravity. And the last thing that I’ll say is that people who have diffuse foot fatigue,
Cheryl McColgan (22:39.756)
Yeah.
Dr Emily (22:49.61)
or diffuse foot pain and they’re just like the whole foot, the whole bottom of the foot, not one point, it’s just boom, the whole thing. To me, that’s telling them that they are passive in gravity. They’re just, they’re sitting in their skeleton. They’re not lifted in their fascial system and they’re really becoming subjected to gravity, which is this downward pressure. So.
Cheryl McColgan (23:04.194)
Mm.
Dr Emily (23:14.806)
For those, I say you gotta set your base, get a little tone in there. It’s almost like lifting your pelvic floor, boom. And that’s a really great practice to start.
Cheryl McColgan (23:26.158)
my gosh, such actionable tips there. I love it. And I love how you walk to people through that and definitely go to the website and look at the videos as well. One of the things that you mentioned in there, we always said this in yoga, you know, try to get people to spread their toes. It’s amazing how many people cannot spread their toes. And so I was really excited when I went over to your website, one of the things on the Boso is kind of a toe spreader. Can you talk kind of about why you design that and what the importance is to your foot health or your whole postural?
chain that you described with that little device.
Dr Emily (23:58.464)
Absolutely. So for those on the video, I have a toast spreader here, toast spreader. This is the Neboso version. This is called Splay. And toast spacers are one of the best ways, easiest ways to reset your feet. Now they’re great for bunions, hammer toes, ball of foot pain, which is just called metatarsal jut, neuromas, obviously second digit things.
Cheryl McColgan (24:02.123)
nice.
Dr Emily (24:25.58)
plantar fasciitis they’re great for. So this would be really great for you. So they are very easy way to incorporate recovery for certain conditions. But think about a lot of modern footwear that puts your foot in a restricted position. So now we’re essentially doing the opposite and we’re opening up all of the small tissue, the ligaments, the little itty bitty blood vessels.
Cheryl McColgan (24:29.37)
yeah, I’m already on the website ordering as soon as we’re off here, no doubt about it.
Dr Emily (24:54.562)
so that your foot can reset itself. The toe spacers in general are becoming one of the fastest growing foot recovery tools, like trends on the market. Back in March it was, I believe, that the Wall Street Journal did a report on the economics of toe spacers and they’re like, this is a crazy foot recovery trend. Like, what is this thing? And then they’re like, ooh.
There’s a lot of money behind this thing of how many people are buying, et cetera. So it’s just a really, really interesting. I’ve been recommending them to my patients for years. And then we started selling them at Naboso a couple of years ago. And the ones that Naboso are designed a little bit different, just so they’re more comfortable. You can wear them in shoes. Some of them that people will see on the market are really big and bulky and you have to just sit on a chair and wear them. You can’t walk around.
So depends on the style of what you get, but some, such as the Noboso Splay, you can wear in your shoes when working out, when walking around all day, every day, or it could just be at the end of the day.
Cheryl McColgan (26:03.864)
or when you’re sleeping even like I’ve been wearing the plantar fasciitis boot at night when I’m sleeping. So let’s see, we mentioned the toe splay, we mentioned, we just revisit a little bit the tool that you showed at the beginning that has the patents on the sensory part of the foot? Because I think you touched on that briefly, but what is the importance of that in your daily movement? Does that train your foot to better sense the vibrations and the other two step thing you mentioned?
Dr Emily (26:05.314)
or when you see it.
There you go.
Dr Emily (26:33.834)
Yes, absolutely. this is now I have a different shape. Now it’s round, not cylinder, but all of them have this texture. So I just want you to see that again, that texture, the texture is waking up and stimulating the nerves. There’s thousands of nerves in the bottom of the feet. Same thing with the palm of the hand and the fingertips. There’s many, many nerves and these touch nerves are actually called mechanoceptors, but they’re touch nerves.
Cheryl McColgan (26:37.31)
This just is a ball.
Dr Emily (27:02.166)
And it’s how we feel the ground when we stand. It’s how we feel the ground when we walk. And I mean, just think about that, that as you’re walking and you’re navigating different terrains and different surfaces, right? There’s different, maybe there’s irregularities, there’s different impact forces that are coming in. We need that information. We have to feel that information. We have to feel every step so we can create a
a proper balance or a response to that movement. So foot awareness or the perception of your feet and the ground is really, really important. It is very much not appreciated unless you are a dancer, a gymnast, because they’re barefoot, they’re barefoot sports, right? Martial arts, Tai Chi, they obviously really appreciate it.
kind of in the general population way is we don’t appreciate this until we have neuropathy. And then we start to say, whoa, whoa, I can’t feel my feet. I can’t feel the ground. So our awareness of our feet in the ground is very much in the background. I’m trying through all these different products and everything I advocate to bring it to the forefront, to bring it to the consciousness of like, yes, I feel my feet. How am I standing? Am I?
passive in my feet because I’m thinking about something else, right? Like how do we stay in tune with our feet, our foot movements, our posture, et cetera? So just because I mentioned neuropathy, our products work really, really well with neuropathy, post -stroke, Parkinson’s, MS, spinal cord injury, the whole neuro rehab side. Our products work amazing because we’re targeting a very specific nerve.
And these people know that if they bring in a very specific stimuli, this happens to be two point discrimination, then it’ll actually wake up the nerves and people say, I haven’t felt my feet in 10 years and I can feel my feet again, which that’s huge. That reconnects and empowers someone to movement. And I don’t want people to underappreciate movement because
Dr Emily (29:22.624)
Even just every night I walk my dog. Like if I couldn’t do that, like that’s something small, but it’s a huge part of quality of life, right? Almost every pastime that we enjoy involves some degree of movement and the ability to feel our body or our feet.
Cheryl McColgan (29:40.97)
No, and you’re right. It’s so underappreciated for quality of life. mean, it’s until like, like I was saying with this injury that I’ve had, I usually go for a walk every day and I’ve not been doing that because I’m trying to let this heal. And it’s just amazing how you just don’t, I mean, I don’t know, I guess you appreciate it, but you just don’t realize how important it is to your quality of life until you can’t do it anymore. and one group that you did mention in there, which a lot of people come to this podcast for either, you know, they’re interested in keto or weight loss. So a lot of them are
prediabetic or diabetic and unfortunately that is one of the really bad things that can happen down the road if you allow blood sugar to be uncontrolled. So I’d imagine that for those people as well using that tool could help them possibly regain some function and then also obviously controlling blood sugar so it doesn’t get any worse.
Dr Emily (30:28.322)
Yeah, absolutely. When people think about, I’m very much into longevity, decisions we make now affect how we will be in our 60s, 70s, 80s, et cetera. So just having that forefront. A lot of people from the neurological side focus on cognitive. Like I don’t want dementia. I don’t want Alzheimer’s. I want to keep very sharp. So I’m like with it when I’m 80, right? People think that.
What I want people to also think about is their peripheral nervous system. So your brain is your central nervous system. You have to think about your peripheral nervous system as well. And that’s your, really your hands and your feet and what’s controlling the movement. So we need to get out of our shoes. We need to get on the earth and ground and do earth thing to connect to that aspect as well. should be doing these things very easily throughout our day. They don’t take a lot of time. It’s, you know, if you’re
Going outside anyway, then could we just kind of kick our shoes off for a moment and get a little bit of that connection. I’m into integrating small little habits that we can easily do every single day that accumulatively have this big effect.
Cheryl McColgan (31:40.534)
Yes, my gosh, amazing. So you already have so many resources. Your Instagram is amazing. I became aware of you through another podcaster, but you actually have another resource coming out soon. And I’m excited to hear that you have a book coming and I would love to hear more about what made you decide to write it, what’s it gonna be about, who’s this book for, when’s it available, all those kind of things.
Dr Emily (32:04.61)
Absolutely. So my first book, just so I had mentioned the URL, but my first book is called Barefoot Strong and it is Unlocking the Secrets to Movement Longevity. It’s a small little read that is essentially a cliff note of everything to get you started, to appreciate your feet, to prioritize your feet, to understand your foot type, things like that. It’s available on Amazon. I think it’s $15. That was my first book and I published that almost like…
10 years ago, I believe. So, whoo, long overdue for another book. So, my next book, which is called Sensory Sapiens, is looking at how modern movement is actually aging us. And it’s not saying the lack of movement is aging us. Like we are a sedentary society now. Yes, we know that. I don’t need to make that argument, but it’s much more
Cheryl McColgan (32:37.592)
Goes fast, doesn’t it?
Dr Emily (33:04.322)
Part of how we evolved to move goes back to sensory. That’s why it’s the sensory sapiens. We are sensory beings. And I feel like a lot of modernization, cushion and shoes, technology, surfaces, concrete cars, all of that stuff really disconnects us from our external sensory experience with the world around us. And then also our internal sensory experience. And by reconnecting to the sensory side of ourselves,
we can then essentially unleash or unlock the proper way to move to support longevity. So it’s still on the basis of movement longevity because that’s really my belief. The longevity conversation and the number of books that are in the longevity space right now is very high. It’s a hot topic, right? People know that they, that’s why there’s biohacking, podcasts and things like that. People just want to be healthy and they want to take ownership of their health.
The one piece of that story is specifically how to move. Like the quality and the specificity of the movement, that unlocks longevity. So we know it’s walking. Walking is great, right? That’s the most foundational functional movement that we do every day is walking. And that’s most people’s first line of increasing movement in their day is how many steps, right? Let me just increase my steps. Let me walk more.
So it’s great. But when we think about walking, to reap the benefits of walking for health and longevity, you have to be able to walk at a certain pace. We have to walk fast enough. When you start to walk fast enough to actually activate this entire circulatory pump within your body and within your fascial system that drives blood to the brain, which stimulates brain derived neuro growth factor, which is
cognitive protective, prevents dementia, Alzheimer’s, et cetera. It’s part of how you recover the system. It’s how you support the fascial system, et cetera. Now, in order to walk fast enough, you have to have sufficient mobility. Your fascial system has to be like a rubber band. You have to be able to balance on one leg. So it’s essentially saying, we know we need to walk. We have to walk fast enough.
Dr Emily (35:27.956)
What are the things that are required to walk this way so I can get the benefit of walking that way? That’s like a little teaser of what that is.
Cheryl McColgan (35:37.49)
And so without giving too much away, is there, I mean, is that whatever that speed is that’s quote unquote enough? Is that the same for everyone or does it vary from person to person?
Dr Emily (35:48.716)
Yep. So various person to person has to do with obviously height, mobility, all the individualized health and mobility strength factors that are involved in there. But the way that you know that you’re walking fast enough is that you achieve this momentous state. And that’s really what you’re trying to achieve. So optimal walking, you fall into this fascial momentous
fall, essentially. so I oftentimes, my explain this, I’ll say that I lived in New York City for 20 years. And in New York, which is a walking city for anyone who’s been there, if they live there, you literally walk everywhere, even if you’re taking the subway, you walk everywhere. So when I live there, I would I would feel the most connected to my body and I walk fast. I’m five to but I walk fast. And
Part of what I would feel is by walking fast to whatever my destination was, I would suddenly fall and walk and then feel that I’m no longer utilizing muscle energy here. It was literally like I’m kind of, know, compounding the energy with every step that I take, which means that I’ve switched into this momentum. And…
When you achieve that, you will feel it because it’s at the point that you are walking and you’re like, if someone cuts in front of me, I cannot slow down fast enough that I’m just going to run right into them. And that state is really what we want to achieve. Now for people, depending on now I live in Arizona, it’s like 110 degrees. Totally different here is this is where I love mall walking is go to a mall because you got your air conditioning.
Cheryl McColgan (37:32.168)
Yeah.
Dr Emily (37:40.278)
You got the concrete, which I’m not a fan of, but at least you have this space and the availability to get into that momentous state. Or do you have maybe like a rec center that has an indoor track and you could walk on the track, but you want to pick up the pace fast enough that you feel like you are now no longer muscularly moving and.
I’m gonna just kind of leave it at that for the listeners to kind of like explore and play. It’s not to the level of can you still walk and talk? Like sure that’s an indicator that you’re out of breath, but it’s different. It’s a little bit more rhythmic. And when I teach people about gait and proper gait is I very much emphasize that walking is…
Cheryl McColgan (38:07.649)
Okay.
Dr Emily (38:33.066)
rhythmic. We have rockers in our foot and you can think of it almost like a rocking chair and you feel that rocker effect with every step that you take. Walking should be light, effortless, rhythmic, graceful, like you’re falling, it’s fascial. That’s what walking is designed to be. It’s not muscular. We are actually not designed to burn a lot of calories when we walk, which is just like for people who walk,
Cheryl McColgan (38:53.526)
Such a great description.
Dr Emily (39:02.06)
to start to lose weight is a little like, wait, what, what? But really, we are not designed to burn a lot of calories when we walk. Doesn’t mean that increasing your steps is not a way to start increasing caloric burnage and starting weight loss, but it could just be like, let me play with it a little bit more. Let me wear a rucksack, right? Let me walk up a hill. Let me walk upstairs. So you can obviously play with the…
the experience of the walk to burn more calories, but kind of by general recommendation is walking does not burn a lot of calories.
Cheryl McColgan (39:42.498)
So I think what you’re speaking to there is just the kind of efficiency of the movement if done properly that you’ve had this momentum so you’re not expending extra energy if you’re doing it properly.
Dr Emily (39:52.832)
which you want to do. because now.
Cheryl McColgan (39:55.104)
Yes, I know you want to do that because you want to stay healthy in your body, but not burn calories.
Dr Emily (39:58.708)
I’m going to walk inefficiently. No, no, no. That’s not what I’m saying.
Cheryl McColgan (40:04.714)
No, we don’t want people to get hurt.
Dr Emily (40:07.286)
The benefit of walking efficiently and in this momentous state of what I’m saying is that’s what hydrates your fascia system and your joints. And that’s what drives the circulatory pump to just feed your brain with lots of oxygen and circulation. So that’s where I want people to like understand that there’s this difference.
Cheryl McColgan (40:28.002)
Totally, and besides they should be lifting weights if they wanna lose weight and become more metabolically balanced. So just one final question on that before we go away from the momentum. You mentioned walking on the track or walking outside primarily, but if someone were struggling to kind of find this momentous way of walking, would getting on a treadmill and kind of pushing the speed be a way that they could maybe more easily feel that if they have trouble speeding up while they’re outside?
Dr Emily (40:32.064)
That’s just yes.
Dr Emily (40:57.378)
100%. 100%. Absolutely.
Cheryl McColgan (40:58.934)
Okay, great. just want I just didn’t know if there was some reason that maybe you liked. mean, obviously being outdoors is always better just to be in nature. But I think sometimes for certain training things, the treadmill can be a great tool if you’re working on speed or trying to push yourself a little bit.
Dr Emily (41:11.958)
Yep, you absolutely can do that. I love woodways. So you are actually moving the belt of it. That’s a really good way. Those are the curved ones that don’t have a motor. Those are really good to do it. I would recommend not holding on ever when you walk on a treadmill, even if you’re at an incline. Sadly, you’ll see a lot of people walk on an incline and then they’re holding on and then they angle their body. They’re essentially literally just flat. So
Cheryl McColgan (41:18.13)
Mm. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (41:35.861)
Right.
Dr Emily (41:40.652)
That’s it, is that we just want to be very mindful of, we want to be really carrying our own body weight without holding onto anything. Obviously, if it’s a balance issue and you don’t want to fall or trip, I get it. But for the most part, if we cannot hold onto the treadmill or the step mill or whatnot, poof, it’s harder, but you know, that’s what we want to try to achieve.
Cheryl McColgan (42:03.416)
Yeah, 100%. So let’s see, we hit on, think, most of the things we chatted about. Love that you have the new book coming out. Do you have a new URL for that yet? Or can they just go to the website, your normal website, and it’ll be linked there eventually.
Dr Emily (42:16.0)
Yes, so it’ll be linked on sensory sapiens .com and then it’ll be on Amazon.
Cheryl McColgan (42:21.366)
Okay, fantastic. Well, Dr. Emily, any final words you want to leave people with before we move on with our days? And love to hear any final thoughts.
Dr Emily (42:30.63)
Yeah, so my one tip that I give to everyone and this is kind of like the apple a day keeps the doctor away here is my one tip that I give to people as a functional podiatrist is release your feet every day. Whether it’s rolling on a golf ball, a cross ball, I used to stand on just the handle of like a little five pound dumbbell and release your feet. If you want to excuse me use any of the Noboso products and our Neural Ball and things like that to release your feet. But if you do that,
Cheryl McColgan (42:36.929)
Yeah.
Dr Emily (43:00.386)
at least once a day, every day, that will really start to build this appreciation of your feet, the role that they have in your posture and your movement, and then it will offset a lot of unnecessary foot stress and foot pain.
Cheryl McColgan (43:15.978)
Okay, amazing. I’m adding this in my repertoire too. This was basically like my own personal little consultation today, but I so much appreciate you taking the time to do this today. I think that people are going to take away so many actionable things that will really help not only their foot, but as we learned today, it’s this whole chain that affects your knees, your hips. So wherever you’ve got pain in your body, I would definitely recommend checking out your feet first. And I think as well with Dr. Emily. So again, thank you for being on and have a good rest of your day.
Dr Emily (43:21.506)
I’m not sure you can do that.
Dr Emily (43:46.188)
Thank you so much.
In this episode, Cheryl McColgan shares her journey of strength training and body composition changes over the course of a year. She emphasizes the importance of tracking body composition, not just scale weight, and highlights the benefits of consistent strength training. She discusses her approach to strength training, including progressive overload and full-body workouts.
She also mentions the use of supplements like creatine and the importance of proper nutrition. Throughout the year, Cheryl gained 6.5 pounds of lean mass and lost 2 pounds of fat, demonstrating the effectiveness of her approach.
Takeaways:
- Consistency is key in strength training and body composition changes.
- Tracking body composition, not just scale weight, is important to understand progress.
- Progressive overload and full-body workouts can be effective in building muscle and losing fat.
- Proper nutrition, including adequate protein intake, is crucial for muscle growth.
- Supplements like creatine can support muscle growth.
- Gains in lean mass and fat loss can occur simultaneously with the right approach.
- Addressing foot health can improve overall strength training performance and reduce pain.
Creatine and aminos I use
Foot health tools from Dr. Emily
New Sleep Technology Bia
Body Pod at home body composition, 98% Correlated to DEXA
Study on full body workout vs split training for fat loss
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Show Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.748)
Well, hello friends, welcome back. It has been a little bit, but I am excited to be back on the mic and have several interviews scheduled coming up over the next.
few weeks, so it should be back to a more regular schedule going here into fall. I promise if I’m ever going to peace out for an extended amount of time again, I will definitely let you know. So don’t worry if occasionally there’s a week skipped or something like that. I used to put this out religiously every single week on Wednesday and it was a lot easier when I had some interns helping me produce the podcast. But now it’s just little me again, all by myself.
So and a few things have been going on in not only my life, but in the business. And so that has made things not as regular. But anyway, I have no intention of going away at least not right now. So I will let you know if that ever happens. But anyway, for today’s solo episode, I have something to update you on that I’ve wanting to share for a while. And I’ve mentioned this before in the past. And that is my Dexa body scan.
that I was keeping track of since I started lifting again. And so I’ve talked about this a little bit in the past, but I might as well share the history again with you before I get into what I’ve been doing over the last year to increase my strength.
and how that’s been going and what I’ve been doing and some lessons that you may want to take away from that process. But anyway, how it all started is that I’ve been active pretty much my whole life, was a runner for 17 years, played sports in both high school and college. so my first experience with weightlifting was way back in the eighth grade basketball, which at my age is kind of shocking that it
Cheryl McColgan (01:58.306)
even in my mind to lift some weights to have better sports performance because it definitely, especially in high schools then, you maybe the boys were in the weight room, but it was definitely not a thing for the girls teams. And I think the only reason that I had it in my head was just because I’ve always had such this personal interest in health and wellness and because I had watched my dad my whole life. He was a runner and he had always lifted weights. He’s basically like Jack LaLanne. If you don’t know that name at the younger people listening here, go Google Jack LaLanne, but he’s very
inspirational, was very ahead of his time in terms of being into health and wellness and lifting weights and being very fit. So anyway, I think it was basically just my exposure to all that and my own personal interest that made it so that even at that young of an age and a time where it was definitely not as known as it is today, think girls teams in high school today do get in the weight room and I think it is, you know, all over social media and more normal for women to be lifting. But anyway, way back in the eighth grade, that was my first thing.
pretty consistent there for a while while I was playing.
And somehow got off of that. And then when I had my first big girl job in downtown Cincinnati, I belonged to Gold’s Gym and I would lift weights there. I was mostly cardio because I was a runner then and that is what at the time I believed was the very best thing to do for fitness and for health. And so it was primarily cardio, but I did do some lifting. And then all over the many years since then, I have been involved or joined a gym.
I was a yoga instructor for a very long time, have been practicing yoga for, my God, embarrassing to say, but like 30 years now. On and off with the asana, it’s always like part of my paradigm to follow kind of the yoga principles of living. But the asana part, which is the poses that that kind of has come and gone over the years, but I definitely always have stints with it where I’m super consistent and then go away. So that was a very power based yoga. So I did get a lot of body weight exercise.
Cheryl McColgan (04:01.204)
in through that. So strength training, like I said, basically on and off my whole life. And what has generally happened in the past is that whenever I get injured, I just quit going to the gym for that amount of time, quit lifting weights, I’ll still always do my walks and my hikes to the extent I’m able depending on what the injury is. But something would happen, and I would just quit because I ended up having in the past, I’ve had surgery on each one of my shoulders.
Long story, I a genetic anomaly with the shape of my bone and because I did a lot of repetitive motion with golf over the years and also the times I probably lifted weights repetitively that that hurt my rotator cuff, so I had a lot of pain. So I had a surgery on each one of the shoulders. And so obviously I did my rehab at the time, which involved…
certain types of movements and some weights. So that was also mixed in there. So I’ve certainly had plenty of experience doing it. I’ve just never been long -term consistent. And so now as I turned 50 in 2023, it’s definitely been in my mind. And it’s also something that’s talked a lot about on social media nowadays is just the importance of muscle as we get older. It is really highly related to strong functioning in older age.
quality of life and the ability to live independently and to you know do simple things like lift your grandkids or go to the grocery store or and be able to hang bring in groceries and go upstairs. So it’s a lot of things like I think younger people don’t always think of it they just think they’re always going to be young and healthy and not have to worry too much about that stuff but the more muscle that you can build early on in life the better and this is something that I wish I had taken more to heart way back then in eighth grade and if I just
only been consistent with it this whole time because now they’re discovering that muscle is actually an endocrine system. It is an organ of longevity. There’s so many people out there that really push this idea forward and have made it much more popular. It’s Dr. Peter Atiyah and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, her book, Forever Strong. I’ve mentioned that in a previous podcast, but just really the importance of having muscle and especially as a woman. But basically,
Cheryl McColgan (06:17.75)
you just continue to lose muscle over your life. And what was really interesting that I heard Peter Atiyah talk about one time was that it’s not, doesn’t, muscle loss as you age is not inevitable if you keep it up, but it mostly happens in these chunks, which can be really devastating to your health. So for example, if you go through a period of time where you’re very sick and bedridden, that is a time where people lose a lot of muscle mass. And I certainly saw this when my dad was battling cancer, even though
between every treatment and whenever he was, you know, healthy in between the treatments, he would go back to weightlifting immediately and really try to maintain that muscle mass. And honestly, I think that is a huge part of the reason that he did well for so long and was able to keep, you know, doing these treatments and doing these things was because outside of that, he kept building himself back up. And so these times that he would go into the hospital and lose a little muscle mass because he was bedridden for an amount of time, it didn’t affect him long term.
because he still had that reserve of muscle if that makes sense and then he would build it back up and then he’d be able to you know do another treatment down the road. So that’s that’s not anything that’s necessarily fact it’s just my opinion of probably why he continued to do so well with so many treatments over the years. So you want to have that muscle and reserve in the case that
you know, you ever have a major surgery or an issue where you’re bedridden or you’re just really sick for a couple weeks, you have the ability to bounce back from that. Also, there is this kind of idea of muscle memory so that if and you’ll notice it like in football players and people that were young that did a lot of strength training, even if they take an extended amount of time off or they get a little fluffy for a while, if they go back to training, they can build their muscle back a lot more quickly. So these are all reasons to get started sooner than later. And it doesn’t matter. It’s never too late.
There’s actually some really amazing studies where they there’s this one that had women who had never strength train that were in their 60s or 70s start strength training and in like 12 weeks they built muscle and got stronger and So it’s never too late is the message there and I am going to do my best this time To have this stick and so far now it has stuck since I started in June of 2023 so it’s been over a year now and I’m
Cheryl McColgan (08:38.032)
super excited about that and I just want to share like some of my tips around that and consistency and what I’ve actually been doing and then what my results have been. So I had the foresight, I was lucky because I was in Utah during this time when I started this and I’ve always been aware of the DEXA scan. So I’ve talked to you guys about this before. DEXA is about the best that we have.
Right now, as far in terms of a body composition measure, you know, there’s a lot of other tools out there like the Bod Pod, the InBodyScan, but Dexa at this point is kind of the gold standard. There’s also hydrostatic weighing, but you don’t really see that used very often. And that’s another thing that Dr. Lyon talks about. It’s really sad that we don’t have a really great way to easily measure body fat and lean mass in people. That’s something that hopefully will get better at in the future. But for now, these are the tools that we have.
And, you know, there’s definitely I’ve talked before in the past, the with things scale that I have does do body composition to some extent, but it’s not nearly as accurate and it’s really only good for trends. What I’m hoping is I just became aware of a new tool and I’m really excited to try it out and let you know what how it compares and what I find with it. I haven’t gotten it yet. It’s on the way. But since we’re since I just mentioned it, I’ll go ahead and tell you about it. It’s basically it’s called the body pod, which is separate from the bod pod, which is the other thing.
But it’s an at -home scale that basically replaces the in -body scan. And it’s supposed to correlate 98 % with the DEXA. So very accurate, something that you can use in your home every single day so that when you’re working on losing fat or building muscle or both, you can actually track that at home and have the ability to see those changes over time, which is really useful. And I’ll explain why when I share with you my results and what would have probably been going on in my head if I hadn’t had these DEXA scans. But anyway, that is by Hume Health.
So and I got you a discount 15 % off. it’s heelnourishgrow .com slash Hume, H -U -E health. And you go to that link and then when you get there, put the, put it in your cart, put in code heelnourishgrow. That will get you an additional.
Cheryl McColgan (10:44.91)
15 % off and right now it is already on sale. So that’s pretty cool. You get the 15 % on top of that. And like I said, I have not tried it yet. So I’m excited about it. I can’t speak to how accurate or effective or useful it is on a day -to -day basis yet, but once I get it, I’ll be using it every single day and I’ll be sure to share an update.
about that with you in the future. you know, I’m always an early adopter of these kinds of things because I think it’s part of my job, right? So it’s one of my things that I do to be able to share with you guys like, does this work? Does this not work? What I feel are useful tools? What are some things that aren’t that useful? I have another one actually that I’m really excited that I’m testing out as well that hasn’t even shipped yet because it’s a brand new technology. But that code and right now you can get this. It’s amazing.
pre -sale deal, it’s like hundreds of dollars off and you get, think, maybe a little additional. But if you want to read about that, it’s all for sleep. And you know how excited I get about sleep and improving sleep and how important sleep is to your health overall, but also for fat loss. And so that one is Heal Nourish Growth slash BIA, B -I -A. So you can go check that out, read about the technology. I’m actually interviewing someone from their company here soon to talk about that technology. So that’ll be one of the upcoming interviews that I mentioned.
And again, I’m really excited to test that out for like 30 days in a row and then I’ll give you based on my aura ring, I can see like, did I get more deep sleep? Did I get more REM sleep? Kind of how things are progressing as I use that tool. So anyway, but all that’s to say, I love gadgets. I always try to get ahold of them early so that I can test them out for you guys and give you a report. So that’s what’s coming. Okay, now that I shared all about how my history with
bodybuilding and or bodybuilding with weightlifting, strength training, whatever you want to call it. Now I want to go into what I’ve been doing for the last just over a year and how it has changed my body composition. So for this period of time, let’s just go back into another little history lesson right now, shall we? So back in January of 2023, I got a DEXA body scan because it was my intention at that time to start
Cheryl McColgan (12:58.99)
strength training then. And what happened was I was snowboarding and in first time in my 10 years of snowboarding, I got injured. Somebody ran into me and I sprained my knee pretty badly. It blew up huge. was a mess. And so for months, it was a miracle. I did get to snowboard a couple of more times after that. It would be like enough that I could
do that and then have to rehab it for a few days, ice it and stuff. whenever I was trying to hike or anything like that, my knee kept giving out all the time. And so I had to take a few months off and really let that heal. So I was just glad that I could still finish out the snowboard season, do it without too much pain. I only went out when there was powder. didn’t go out every day or anything. So it was just several more days in that season. So that was January of 2023. So I got that DEXA scan. Obviously, that’s not going to be relevant to this because I did not start.
strength training then until about six months later. But what is relevant to that conversation is from January to June, having to take that time off from really any kind of significant activity. I think I finally started hiking again about March, April, but didn’t, you know, couldn’t do anything as much as I was doing before I was getting started again very slowly.
between the time I had that DEXA scan in June of 2023, which is kind of where we’re gonna start this journey when I started lifting, is that I had lost two pounds of lean mass and gained, let’s see, I wrote this all out so I would have it right here. I had lost two pounds of lean mass and put on five pounds of fat in that six months where I was not able to be active. So this just goes to show you how quickly…
Things can go awry if you get injured or if you have to be restricted for a while. And looking back on that, what I should have been doing, and which is what has happened since, and I’ll go into that a little bit too, but usually when you’re injured, you can still find something to do. So I should have been biking, or I should have been trying to do something that worked for my knee during that time, and it doesn’t have to be hiking or anything strenuous, but just doing something. Maybe it could have been rowing, would be a great cardio.
Cheryl McColgan (15:13.514)
activity that’s still a lot of knee bending so that may or may not have worked but I could have still been doing upper body strength training and back strength training and working on pull -ups there are a number of things that I could have been doing during that six months but I hadn’t made the jump to that mindset yet because I think as I mentioned before that’s what would always happen to me in the past I’d be going to the gym for a while I’d get injured and then I just quit going altogether well the truth is you still can always do something and during that time
you can be doing exercises to rehab your knees. So like I could have been doing side laying hip strengthening exercises. There’s any number of things that I could have done, but I didn’t. And hopefully you can learn from my mistakes or laziness or whatever we’re wanting to call it. But so then in June, 2023, I got that Dexa again so that I would have a base. And what’s interesting about that is the weight I started in January, that first Dexa scan to
the one that I had in June, I only gained on the scale two and a half pounds. But as I told you, I lost two pounds of critical lean mass and gained four pounds of fat mass in that time. So this is where really having some kind of tool that can show you your body composition, not just scale weight is so, so important. That’s why I’m really excited about the Hume Health product. So again, that’s heelnourishgrow .com slash Hume Health. You can go read about it.
And like I said, there is like a sale and an extra discount on top of it right now. But again, it has been, it remains to be seen how effective it is. And I’m excited to try that because my body scale that I’ve had for years, my withings, like I said, it doesn’t like day to day what it says on lean mass or fat loss or fat gain or whatever it is on a day to day basis is not that accurate when I’ve compared it to Dux and this stuff in the past. But what it is good at showing is trends. So over time,
and we’re talking years now, it’s better on a big macro scale, not on a, even a month to month is very iffy with that one. But I do like it, so that, I have a link for that too with things. But anyway, over time it has shown my lean mass has gone up over the last four years since I started working on prioritizing protein, and particularly since I’ve started strength training.
Cheryl McColgan (17:32.962)
So it’s good for trends, but I haven’t found an at -home tool up to this point that is very effective for true body composition assessment. So that’s what I’m hoping that the body pod is going forward. But that just shows you that that amount on the scale is not always meaningful. So even if you’re staying the same weight over time, but you’re not strength training,
you might be losing muscle and gaining fat over time. So you might start out you’re 30 years old, you weigh 150 pounds, and maybe at that time you’re 25 % body fat, let’s say. Well, by the time 10 years later, when you haven’t been strength training or doing these things to work on your body composition, you might see that same number on the scale 150, but you might have gained 5 % fat over the time. And that is typically what they’ve shown happens is that you just lose lean mass as you
get older so that’s not unusual for that to happen. So that’s why having something even if it’s a very even if it’s a tool like the withings that is not perfect but at least it shows you some trends over the years I think that is very helpful and it does have a couple of other good features it it measures your pulse
Rate Velocity, I believe is what it’s called, which has something to do with your heart health. So it can show you trends there too, like are your vessels staying flexible and getting good blood flow. So again, it’s a good tool. It’s just, I’m hoping that this new one is going to be so much better. And like I said, it’s supposed to be 98 % correlated with DEXA. So that’s pretty amazing if that turns out to be the case. So anyway, go to June. What am I gonna do at the gym? Okay, so my history in it, like I said, I’ve been in the gym before.
I’ve never been a serious weightlifter. I just was going to Planet Fitness, which is nationwide and it’s nice for when I was going back and forth between Cincinnati and Utah, I would always have a place that I could easily work out. So that is one consideration if you travel a lot and you’re thinking about joining a gym, maybe get on something that has a national presence just so that you can always easily have somewhere to work out because even though I did work out in plenty of hotel gyms during this time,
Cheryl McColgan (19:47.352)
They’re generally not nearly as well equipped, but you can still always get in a good workout. So that’s just something to take into consideration if you start to go down this road. And of course, working out at home is amazing. You can do that anywhere. You can use resistance bands. There’s lots of things that you can do without a gym membership. can do body weight. So don’t feel like if you can’t afford a gym or don’t like going to the gym that you can’t work out because you absolutely can. There’s just no excuse really for not doing something.
And that’s just the way to start. This is just do something. And so that’s how I approached it with going to the gym. Like I said, I was already used to being active every single day, always hike, walk, pretty much every single day. So my thought with the gym is, okay, my body is old and has a lot of aches and pains. And so I didn’t want to go too overboard. So I decided on a three day a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday kind of schedule. And just for me, I figured every time I go,
these whole split things about do the back and then do the legs and do, I’m like, no, I’m only gonna go three days. I’m just gonna do full body every time, keep it simple. And then I primarily just use the machines. I mean, they’re pretty, and if you do go to gym, first of all, they’ll show you how to use every machine, but they’re pretty self -explanatory. Like you just get on the machine, you do the movement and that’s it. And the idea is to, you you wanna lift an amount of weight where you can lift it eight to 12 times.
and that’s a set. So if you’re brand new, I mean, don’t, you know, I know there’s got to be some people have never done this out here that are listening. So this is going to be very basic. But you also want this idea of progressive overload. So you can’t just go to the gym and lift 10 pounds, say you’re doing bicep curls, lift 10 pounds, 10 reps, and just keep doing that. You have to consistently add more weight to stimulate your muscle to grow more muscle. So that’s called progressive overload. So you always want to be aiming
for that rep somewhere in the six, eight, 10, 12 reps when you do it, that amount of weight that you can lift in that last rep that you’re doing should either be to failure. That’s one way to approach it. If you have, you know, joints that are, get unhappy really easy, you might just want to go till you feel like you have two to three reps in reserve. So this is like, I don’t want to go into too much detail about that because there’s all these different theories and paradigms in weight training.
Cheryl McColgan (22:11.566)
But basically if you’re in that range of, you know, eight to 12 reps, three sets, I had to look this up because this part was new to me. If you’re looking to build muscle, how many reps per week do you want to do on each body part for building? It’s like somewhere around 20. So that three days a week schedule, you can totally easily get that into build muscle over time. And there’s actually a brand new study out. I’ll link it in the show notes.
about what’s more effective. They did, I believe, 12 weeks and they had people do these either split exercises that I described. So like one day you do back, one day you do legs, one day you do this and that, or full body. And they actually found that for the purposes of fat loss, that the group that did full body lost more fat. So I’m like, I accidentally happened into that category and that the strength gains were…
very, very similar. So if you’re pressed for time, the full body workout is a great way to go. Bodybuilders have a very different goal when they’re doing their like, they’re trying to, you know, sometimes get specific body parts to look a certain way in proportion to others. And so they might do a back day or arm day or whatever it is, they’re doing something much more specific, but just for overall strength training, fat loss, whatever, full body workout is totally fine. And again, I’ll link that.
in the show notes. So this is how it went for me for there. So I had the starting one in June and then I said that I had already lost muscle and put on fat during the time that I was injured. And then, so we go to November. So that’s about five months later. After five months of going to the gym three days a week, and I’m telling you guys, I wasn’t doing anything crazy. I was always, you know, challenging my muscles and stuff and starting out.
it’s more your joints that will be the issue. And because I already have osteoarthritis pretty bad in both my knees and, you know, have a tendency, I think, for my joints to be achy, I did less weight than maybe my muscles could take at the time and just like slowly built up. But by the end of that five months, my, you know, my body’s like, okay, we’re doing this. I’m more used to it now. And so I was, you know, kept doing the progressive overload that I described.
Cheryl McColgan (24:27.47)
And so in that five months, I went back for another Dexa in November of 2023. And at that point, I was up three and a half pounds of lean mass and down four pounds of fat, which is, I think pretty dang amazing in five months. And here’s another point to that. If you just had a scale, you would have weighed the same weight. So literally when I went for the Dexa in June and I went for the Dexa in November, my weight,
was the same scale weight. Yet, my body composition during that time had vastly shifted. And if I wouldn’t have done the DEXA, I might have just been looking at the scale and been thinking, now I know it’s getting stronger. So I knew that I was getting stronger and lifting more weights, all of that. But I would have looked at the scale and I might have been depressed because I would have just seen the same weight and thought, God, I’m doing all this stuff for five months and nothing’s happening. So that’s one reason.
to try to find a dexa if you can or a bod pod or try this new scale that I was mentioning so that you have some idea that even if the weight on the scale isn’t moving that the composition is changing photos are another great free way to do this. Just take photos of yourself and you can see that your body looks different or looks less fat even though the weight is the same. Also taking measurements with an old school tape measure that’s another great and free way to track some of this stuff. So
This is important for me to mention at this point too. So at that point when I got the scan in November, I had re -injured myself pretty badly in October. We had gone to the U2 concert at the Sphere, which was really, really cool, but we had floor tickets and so we walked to brunch that day. And if you’ve ever been to Vegas, it’s just like so many steps in a day just because of the every, even just in your hotel, it’s so huge to get around this kind of steps.
But we walked to and from brunch, which was about five miles around tripped, walked all around town, walked through their casinos, walked to the concert, and then we were standing on a concrete floor for the three hour concert or whatever it was. By the end of the night, I mean, my knee was just so swollen. And then the next morning I could hardly move. It was really difficult to accomplish walking to breakfast that next morning. And I can’t remember, I think I didn’t have my knee brace with me. If I had had it with me, I would have worn it, but re -injured myself again.
Cheryl McColgan (26:50.126)
pretty bad in October. so I made most of those gains probably in that Dexa during the time that I was not injured. But here is where we did something different. When I say we, I mean me. I did something different from what I’d done before. I still kept going to the gym three days a week during this time. And I was doing what my knee would allow me to do. So I wasn’t doing as many squats and those kind of things. I lessened the weight up a whole bunch.
I still did upper body. I did whatever my lower body would allow me to do, but I kept going. And so here we are again. This was November when I did the scan had gotten injured in October and I was moving into snowboard season again. So all I was trying to do is like keep healthy and get myself, get my knee not irritated so that I could snowboard. That was the most important thing, but did keep going to the gym. So kept doing upper body. So here we make it to March. So during snowboard season,
while I was still in Utah and still going to the gym, what I would typically do is if I had been on the mountain for the day snowboarding, again, we only went if there’s powder, we’re such snobs living there because we could be. So we didn’t take a day off work or take the morning off work, we’d usually just get up, we went to the place where the lifts opened at eight o ‘clock, go hard in the powder, which is really super tiring for a couple hours and then.
get home and back to work. In those days that I did that, if it was a gym day, I’d still go. I would typically do less on the lower body after I’d snowboarded that day. And then there were some weeks where if there’s a lot of snow and we were like riding a lot, maybe I only went to the gym two days that week, but I kept going, kept it consistent. If you take nothing else away from this conversation, it’s you’ve got to be consistent and you’ve just convinced yourself to go even on the days that you don’t want to.
Do something, even if it’s less, even if your body’s tired, just still go, don’t do as much, but keep up that habit and over time, it’s going to reward you. So again, by March, 2024, during that whole time since November, I only gained one pound of lean mass and I was up one pound of fat. So I was fine with that. I basically stayed consistent through the snowboarding season, didn’t make any huge gains, but I did still get lean mass. I got a little fat on there. Who knows what that was from.
Cheryl McColgan (29:12.258)
Probably too much good eating in the Alps when I was eating some cheese fondue or something like that, but it’s all good. So then May, which was only about two and a half months later, these last ones are compressed because we’re in the process of moving back. So we had actually bought a house in Cincinnati in December. So during this whole time, that was a lot of stress also going on.
moving back in December, moving all of our stuff to Cincinnati. So there’s a lot going on. So staying consistent during that time was a pretty big win. And like I said, still gaining a pound of lean mass, that’s amazing. The fact that I gained a pound of fat, let’s like chalk it up holidays, moving, tons of stress, all these things going on, that’s totally fine. So then we’re back to do some things with the house in May.
And I wanted to keep going back. I don’t have easy access to a DEXA scan in Cincinnati, unfortunately. There is one kind of up by Dayton, which I might go do that. And maybe just do it twice a year, and especially because I’d like to have something to compare to the body pod when I get it. It’s just a little bit more.
like a little bit more, an hour drive, which is not great. But for whatever reason in this area, we just don’t have access to that easily, which is kind of annoying because we have plenty of scan centers, but I don’t think any of do body composition. This one was just so easy in Utah. So I was back in May to Utah. So I did another scan. And not surprisingly, that was only like two months later. I was up like a quarter pound of lean mass, but I was down a pound of fat.
So that also just goes to show you that all these numbers that I’m sharing with you at times, especially the one where I went from June to November when I first started, I mean a huge amount of lean mass gained, three and a half pounds and down four pounds of fat at the same time. So you can do them both at the same time. And I should address my diet during this period, right? I haven’t talked about like, am I dieting? Am I doing anything different?
Cheryl McColgan (31:20.974)
During this whole period of time, starting weight training and being injured, my primary goal was to fuel myself well, eat healthy. I did not restrict. I was obviously eating somewhat at maintenance level, maybe even a slight surplus because of what I was able to do with my body composition, but I was not restricting calories in any way. Trying to get my level of protein every day. I shoot for between 120 to 150 grams of protein a day.
That’s about one, you know, you’re trying to get, now that I actually know my lean mass, so, Bidexa, my lean tissue, as of the last one, is about 109 pounds. So that would be a way that you could go a gram per pound of lean body mass is one of the things, but if you don’t know your lean body mass, you’re going for like a gram per pound of ideal weight, and eating more protein is not going to hurt anything. There’s, you know, up to 2 .2 for a lot of,
people that are doing a lot of resistance training is still totally fine. But your basic thing that you want to shoot for is a gram per pound of ideal body weight. So for me, in my head, I’m always shooting for between 120 and 150 grams of protein every day. I tried to do that during the whole period. I’m not always perfect. When I’m tracking, I do much better. I’m actually tracking right now. So if you don’t know, if you think you are, you’re probably not getting enough. Because when I don’t track and I really look back at my day and I think, I didn’t quite
I didn’t quite get there. I’m generally always over 100, but to get to that 120 to 150 is a lot more challenging, especially when I mostly only eat twice a day. So I’ve had to add in a little bit of either a snack or trying to eat more like, at least some kind of like more traditional breakfast where I’m getting more like three meals a day some days. But generally it’s two meals a day and then maybe a protein shake if I realize that I’m not gonna make it. So that’s kind of what I was doing with my food, but I wasn’t.
restricting calories at all. I know I was definitely in a surplus at times, which is probably how I gained some of fat. But again, my goal was to heal these injuries really well and to build muscle. And so to build muscle, you need to eat properly and not be restricting yourself. Now, you can still definitely maintain your muscle mass and lose fat if you start going into a calorie deficit, but you
Cheryl McColgan (33:43.138)
There’s a reason. Bodybuilders haven’t figured out, They have been doing this stuff for years on how to most effectively build muscle and then lose fat for competitions. And it’s easiest when you’re trying to build muscle to eat in a surplus. That means gaining a little fat. That’s why they typically look larger while they’re in a building phase. And then when it’s time to go into a show or to cut back down to show your muscles,
then you focus on fat loss. So it’s a lot easier if you’re focusing on either building muscle or fat loss separately. That’s the most effective and the way that you can do it the quickest and the easiest, but you can do it at the same time. It’s just not going to be as big a gains, for example, if you’re restricting calories while you’re trying to build muscle. So they do know what they’re doing and you can learn a lot of lessons from now. I’m not gonna say everything they do is great, obviously.
But there’s definitely some lessons to be learned there. Okay, so now we’re finally, we went back to close on the house and I was there to finish things up. So that was in July of 2024. So again, even though it was only two months later, I still had this.
you know, it was my last chance basically to get a dexa there before I left. So even though it was two months later, I’m like, I’ll just get one again so I can like wrap this thing up. It’s about a year later after I started lifting. So then I’ll have what my whole result was over the year, which is another lesson to learn from this because if you look at each one of these individual things, you’ll see that there was two times where I got measured where I barely gained any lean mass yet over the whole year, what I’m about to tell you. So this final one from May to July,
I gained a pound and a half of lean mass. That’s pretty amazing. The only thing that I changed in this last few months is that I added creatine, which, you know, again, with the bodybuilders, they’ve known this. It is the most studied supplement. It is very, very safe. There’s actually data out now that is amazing for cognition as well, but it’s like one of the most studied supplements. It’s cheap. It’s effective.
Cheryl McColgan (35:57.51)
And here we go, like that’s three quarters of a pound of lean mass per month. I mean, I’m feeling like pretty good about that, especially because there’s this thing newbie gains. It’s like, basically you’re going to max out the quickest gains of muscle in the first year. I don’t know that applies, like if you’re kind of training, you know, not as hard like I’ve been doing. But basically to wrap it all up in a year of strength training consistently, only three to
two to three days a week with injuries. So backing off when I needed to, taking care of my body, all that kind of stuff. And like I did progressive overload. I did to failure. I did principles. Like I’m doing enough when I’m at the gym to, to build muscle, but I’m not, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything crazy. I’m not, you know, like the doing one rep lift maximum reps or anything like that. I’m not doing anything crazy. I’m just doing basically the bare minimum in my mind. I mean, maybe a little more.
bare minimum, but not much. It’s like not too crazy. So during a year, I gained six and a half pounds of lean mass and down two pounds of fat. So again, if you look at that, there’s periods of times, there might’ve been times where you got depressed, there might’ve been times where you thought you should have gained more or lost more, but on the whole, I would say as a 51 year old woman who is
basically new to strength training. Let’s be real, like I’ve never been this consistent. I’ve never done it for this long before, even though I’ve had little bouts with strength training in the past. I’m going to call that a huge win. Here’s the other thing to remember about this. So what that means with that gain and loss of fat, gain of lean mass and loss of fat on the scale, since I started this, I am up four and a half pounds. Again, had I not done the DEX’s, had I not whatever, I just think I’m gaining weight.
when in reality I’m gaining really valuable lean mass and I lost fat at the same time. So all this is to say, this is the reason why you want to have some kind of way of tracking your body composition, not just the scale weight. So yeah, I’m really hoping that this new tool is going to be useful. I’ll give you a full report on that later after I get it and I start using it, but…
Cheryl McColgan (38:18.092)
If you want to be an early adopter like me, like I said, now’s a great time because it is on sale and you can get an additional discount using Heal Nourish Grow. But yeah, so that is how the last year has been going. I’ve actually been struggling with another little injury, well, a few things in the last three months. But again, I’ve still been going. I’ve just been modifying some things. What I’m…
really missing right now is my daily walk because one of my problems is my foot and when you listen to the next podcast that comes out I have this amazing foot doctor that came on and she talks about how to improve your foot health, how it’s connected, all these other things like probably this IT band pain that I’ve been having on the outside of my knee when I’m doing squats is probably related to how my feet are working and stuff so that’s something that I personally am going to be working on for the next
Forever basically, she basically said her top tip is to release your feet every day. So whether it’s using like a golf ball or a tennis ball or something like that, but like working the bottom of your feet every day. said that that’s the kind of tip that’s like basically an apple a day keeps the doctor away from a foot doc. That’s like the major thing you should be doing. And what I’m personally gonna be working on is improving my base when I’m lifting, especially when I’m doing heavy lifting, like on the squats and the deadlifts, really focusing on setting my foundation on my feet.
activating my arch, doing the things that she described in the interview. So I’m really excited to share that with you up next. And I think if you’ve been having ongoing like little knee or hip pain or anything like that, think addressing this stuff with your feet can be a huge help. And it’s something that, like I said, something I’m going to be working on over the next several months. So anyway, I hope that was very long winded like usual when I tell my own little stories, but I really wanted to give you the sense of
You can’t look at things month to month like change is a little slower than we’d like it to be. But again, I think the number one thing to take away from this is to just be consistent and also find a way to track what you’re doing that shows you the true result, not just what’s happening on your scale, because as you know, that is not the full story. So until next time, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. If you’re watching this on YouTube,
Cheryl McColgan (40:40.622)
Please let me know in the comments below what you’re working on right now, what your experiences with weight training. I’d love to hear any tips or tricks that you have to share with me as a somewhat newer person to this. I will share with you the link of that study, because I think that’s super interesting about doing the full body workout. If you are listening to this on your favorite podcast player, please pop over and leave a five star review. If you love the show, share it with a friend. That’s the best way people can find us. The podcast world.
is exploding, which is amazing and I love, especially because I probably shared this before, but I had a podcast with my old business, like way back in 2005, which is absolutely crazy to me. But nowadays there’s just so, so, so many podcasts in the world that it is very difficult for people to find what they’re looking for. So if the content here resonates with you and you know somebody in your life that you think could benefit from this information.
please just share it with them because that’s one of the best ways for people to learn about the Heal Nourish Grow podcast and the second best way is to leave a review, tell us your true thoughts, your feelings, what you’d like to hear about in the future. yeah, appreciate that little thumbs up or likes or wherever you’re listening to this. Every little bit of help that we can get is very much appreciated. So have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you again soon.
Dr. Joy Kong shares her background and journey into stem cell therapy. She explains that stem cells can be used to treat a wide range of conditions, including autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, organ damage, and even sports injuries.
Finding a properly trained doctor who uses native stem cells rather than expanded cells is very important and we discuss the best ways to find a qualified provider. Dr. Kong also discusses the challenges and resistance faced by stem cell therapy due to the current healthcare system and the influence of pharmaceutical companies. She encourages patients to be cautious when seeking treatment overseas and highlights the advancements and potential of stem cell therapy in the United States.
Find Dr. Kong on her website and podcast. Her training for physicians is AAICT.org and you can buy her book here. Stem cell skincare, save 10 percent with code HealNourishGrow.
Takeaways:
- Stem cell therapy can be used to treat a wide range of conditions, including autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, organ damage, and sports injuries.
- It is important to find a properly trained doctor who uses native stem cells rather than expanded cells.
- Stem cell therapy faces challenges and resistance due to the current healthcare system and the influence of pharmaceutical companies.
- Patients should be cautious when seeking treatment overseas and consider the advancements and potential of stem cell therapy in the United States.
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.023)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Joy Kong and she has a really interesting background, kind of this escape from China kind of story. And then now she’s doing all this amazing work in stem cells. And I’ve just got so many questions about all that, but Dr. Kong, I would love it if you could share a little bit of your background first, because I think that that will…
enable people to kind of understand where you’re coming from and to get to know like why you’re so passionate about your work now, what you had to do to get here.
Joy Kong, MD (00:34.158)
Right. Yeah. So I definitely have an interesting story. You know, up to age 20, I am one of the I don’t know, half a billion Chinese women. I was just a Chinese girl with no money, no connections, not like my family had, you know, any high officials or any money. But I had a dream I wanted to come to this country because there’s something that’s really exciting and inspiring about the kind of freedom, the kind of accomplishment that you know, you can pursue.
I don’t know, it just sounds so exciting. So I decided no matter what, I’m gonna be there, I need to be there. So I was studying architecture and I decided to come to this country. I switched to biology because that’s the only field that you could get a scholarship in, but I have diverse interests. So a lot of things interest me, which is probably why when I ended up finally going to medical school at UCLA, I specialized in psychiatry because the brain is so interesting, right?
when you go into medicine is not a typical specialty that you think about psychiatry. We’re kind of the, a bit of a in the medical community. We are all just a little weird, a little strange, a little something different. So, but my interest in medicine in the whole human body is still the same. I’m a passionate about human health, but the brain is fascinating. But if you just keep pounding on the brain looking
at all the receptors and neurotransmitters and thinking that everything is related to brain structure, then you’re missing the boat because you’re not looking at your whole body. So when I was doing psychiatry while prescribing all these medications and doing some psychotherapy, I was trying to also improve my own health. I appreciate the body I was given and I want to do justice and want to do everything I can to nourish the body.
and medical school gave me no tools, really very little tools because what medicine, the traditional medical education, what it does is to teach you what to do when a person is sick. It doesn’t do much except for, yeah, exercise, eat healthy and sleep a little bit more. I mean, it’s like a mantra, right? Every doctor just say those three things and then you’re covered. We have no detailed knowledge of exactly how to enhance health. We just know.
Joy Kong, MD (02:58.304)
exercise, eat right and sleep better. And yeah, then that’s my counsel. That’s my medical advice in that regard. But everything else will be related to when you get sick. If you get sick, now I feel useful. Now I know what diagnostic tools to run. know what kind of symptoms to look for. can put you in a category. So we’re like catarizers. We’re looking at symptoms.
and test results and we put people in a category and we throw drugs. So category, the whole purpose of categories is so that we can match a drug to it. So in my pursuit of looking for enhancement of my own health, that model certainly doesn’t work. So I had to go outside. Outside means looking at what’s called integrated medicine or functional medicine. I I’ve never even heard of the word functional medicine.
up to 10 years ago. So I finished medical school in 2004. So that’s, that’s 20 years ago, but for 10 years of being in practice and I’d never heard of functional medicine. didn’t know existed. So that’s how we were all like, you know, in our bubble, but functional medicine is looking at how can we enhance the functions of the body, not just, you know, wait until you’re sick, but looking at all these details of how different systems can affect each other. So that’s when I got excited about
this holistic way of looking at medicine. And that quickly led me to stem cells, because that’s, those are the kind of doctors that are actually starting to do stem cells, because stem cells are not FDA approved yet. And only the pioneering, more open minded, more adventurous doctors are willing to do it because most doctors, want to stay exactly what FDA says, because it’s safe, right? I can give you the most terrible drugs,
because I’ve told you all the potential side effects, including death, right? So if something terrible happened to you, I’m completely protected. Nothing will happen to me because here I give you the consent and these are the list of side effects. Everybody’s safe. there’s no, unless you’re flagrant medical mistake, right? You’re safe. So that’s the whole difference. But it takes a doctor who is brave, who believes in what may be the best for patients to take
Joy Kong, MD (05:24.352)
a therapy that’s not FDA approved. So I’m just that kind of doctor. I wanna do what I think is right. I’m willing to take risks. Actually, a lot of us are taking our risks and some actually have lost our lives. I’ve heard plenty of doctors who had mysterious deaths. It’s unfortunate, it’s scary, but it is not…
you know, out of the realm of possibility that, you know, there are forces really against doctors who are trying to do this. So that’s a long way of telling you about my story, which is that it takes courage to get out of China because it was not easy. So I wrote a memoir, Tiger of Beijing. People can find it on Amazon. It’s about how I got out. So that part was not easy. So that’s battle one. Battle two is to, you know, really become a doctor.
and educate yourself. And the battle three is actually going into a regenerative medicine and a whole new specialty that doesn’t have the FDA approval yet. And the entire establishment doesn’t quite know how to regulate the industry. So there’s a lot of confusion. There are a lot of myths in the field. The public’s confused and it’s controversial. So that’s what I’m in. That’s what I got myself into.
What drives me is my patients, is what I’ve seen as far as the transformation for their lives. As far as people who had previously no hope, and all of a sudden they have hope, then they start to see improvements. So that, and they come to me, right? If I don’t do this, then where do they go? So I have to do this. So that’s kind of the story about how I got to where I
Cheryl McColgan (07:18.291)
Yeah, that’s amazing. And your passion is obviously very clear. It comes right through, I think, whether people are watching this on YouTube or listening it, that they can hear the passion in your voice. fighting the American health care, really the American health sick system, is not an easy task. So I think it’s really wonderful that there are doctors like you out there that are willing to challenge the status quo and kind of bring these new ideas about
know, keeping people healthy or, you know, using things that aren’t just drugs to make us feel better. So you mentioned your patients and I think probably a good place to start. Some people have probably heard of stem cells. I remember even way back it used to be a controversy because they used to only be able to get them, I believe, from umbilical cords or something. This is before they learned that adult stem cells could still kind of be used in certain scenarios.
But maybe you could just tell us a little bit of the history of that kind of where stem cells are coming from now and then how you’re starting to use them to help your patients.
Joy Kong, MD (08:26.412)
Yeah, I think the sequence is a little bit in reverse. It’s actually, we started to, we first found out that when we transplant bone marrow, we were actually transplanting stem cells. So they realized that there are certain cells in the body that can replicate a cell, a renew a cell, and then can differentiate to become new tissue, more functional, more specific type of cells.
And then they thought the only stem cells in the body were in the bone marrow. that’s, they were, you know, kind of backward in, in, know, they didn’t just didn’t know. They didn’t know that actually stem cells are all over the body. Am I frozen? No. No, I’m good.
Cheryl McColgan (09:11.529)
Now I think, and I’ll mark this so I can cut a little clip out. I was seeing your video being pixelated, but part of this riverside thing is that it records both sides natively. So if there’s any internet trouble in the end, parses it together and makes it look perfect again, basically.
Joy Kong, MD (09:30.838)
Okay, so let me rewind, let me go back. So when they first discovered stem cells, they found stem cells in the bone marrow. And that was the place that they thought that was the only place stem cells were. And then they found out stem cells were all over the human body. Anywhere you have any vasculature, you will have these cells called mesenchymal stem cells. There are all kinds of other stem cells too. But so they started doing bone marrow transplantations. And later on, they found out that fat
you can get stem cells out of that. It’s not from the fat itself. It’s from the blood vessels that are supplying the fat tissue. And then they found, there are a lot of stem cells in the umbilical cord. So that’s when they started utilizing the umbilical cord. So that was, I think it’s back in 88, that’s when they first actually got cells from that umbilical cord. So it, but the bone marrow transplant was, you know, that was started in the sixties. So, yeah.
And there are a lot of different types, right? We don’t do embryonic stem cells in this country. That’s not legal unless you’re doing it under a clinical study. You can’t do any fetal stem cells because, you know, in this country, you know, we’re not going to destroy any fetuses. But in some other countries like Ukraine, you know, that has been, you know, a popular form of therapy. So, so anyhow, but in the U .S., the main forms are bone marrow derived, fat derived.
or umbilical cord derives themselves.
Cheryl McColgan (11:00.873)
And what, when people, I imagine it’s things that people have a long chronic history with, or maybe an acute injury that is not amenable to surgery, or there’s some reason why they might seek out an alternative type of therapy like this. What are the types of things that people come to you for when they’re looking for stem cell therapy?
Joy Kong, MD (11:24.364)
Yeah, it really is wide ranging. It pretty much covers, you know, all the chronic conditions or acute injuries. But, you know, I always want to go start from research, how much evidence there is as far as research studies. But just remember, when the disease is a little bit more obscure, so not as many people suffer from it, then there’s going to be less research about it. So but what we know in general, one of the
The most perfect type of conditions for stem cells is autoimmune conditions because they are a dysregulation of the immune system with over activation of the inflammation, you know, kind of a type of reaction from the immune system. you, the stem cells we’re using these days, the one that’s the most utilized is called mesenchymal stem cells, MSCs.
and those are powerfully anti -inflammatory. And they’re also very balancing for the immune system. They can help you shift your immune, you know, the whole angle of your immune system. So, you know, autoimmune diseases are 122 known different kinds. And of course we all know, you know, about rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, there’s psoriasis, there’s, you know, gut diseases like Crohn’s or osteoarthritis, and
scleroderma, there’s even multiple sclerosis for the brain. So there’s wide range of conditions, thyroid, thyroiditis. So yeah, wide ranging conditions that medicine really doesn’t have a whole lot of solution for except for prednisone, except for steroids, which have significant drawbacks, a lot of side effects, including bone necrosis, really causing death of the bone.
plenty of other issues. So other conditions that have been studied are things of cardiovascular nature, like atherosclerosis. Research has shown that stem cells can help arteries to literally clean up, to become healthier with less plaques, less aggregation of those inflammatory cells, with heart diseases, heart repair, kidney function improvements.
Joy Kong, MD (13:49.998)
liver cirrhosis and liver problems, lung diseases, including lung fibrosis, which is one of the hardest things. So COPD really our medicine doesn’t have a whole lot to offer stem cells. It’s I’ve seen incredible things and it just it’s so fun to treat people, you know, like that because they you can see drastic changes and they but you know, they’re dragging oxygen tanks around and on all these medications. And for me to do
some simple treatment that they can ditch oxygen and ditch almost all medications. mean, that those are kind of the things I’ve seen, which is really, really, you know, exciting for a doctor and, and brain conditions. So, you know, the brain is not easy. You know, I don’t want people to, think that, yeah, we’ve got a cure for all brain conditions. I that’ll be nice, but no, we’re not there, but we can offer more hope than anything out
I love the brain, but there’s a reason I did not become a neurologist, even though I had wanted to become a neurologist. But there’s not much option for therapy when you diagnose somebody with traumatic brain injury, with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, ALS, there’s just not much therapy that are helpful.
But stem cells has been shown to potentially be beneficial in all these conditions. And I’ve seen improvement in my patients, or post stroke victims. then, so really all these internal organs, so many of them can receive benefits, especially if it’s chronic and there’s an inflammation as a driving force and immune dysregulation.
or tissue damage. If the tissue is damaged, the cells have the capability of sending signals to trigger this repair mechanism. So I would say to people, yeah, if you have inflammation, you have immune dysregulation, if you had tissue damage, then stem cells can be a powerful way of helping you. And of course, these MSEs are anti -fibrotic. So if you have scar tissue, it can help you break it down. And then it can also help you fight
Joy Kong, MD (16:08.638)
infections. So these stem cells have direct anti microbial properties. So they can actually see create anti microbial peptides, not to mention it’s going to help you enhance your immune function. So it will help you fight these infections better. And it has direct anti cancer properties. So it has been used for cancer treatments. It can help protect tissue and accelerate healing. One thing I’ve done quite a bit
to use it for pre or post operations, pre and post -op, to help people become way faster. What I’ve seen is twice, three times as fast as far as recovery, drastic, shocking the surgeons, because they haven’t seen people recovering that fast. So it’s really exciting. So sports injuries, that’s the most common. That’s like the bread and butter of stem cell therapy, any joint damage, tendons, soft tissue.
And then it can be used for rejuvenation, right? Facial rejuvenation, hair restoration, really beautiful benefits, or sexual organ. So all these are very accessible, right? You can inject into the penis, the vagina, these are easy to access. But when it comes to internal organs, it can be helpful, but it may be a little more difficult to access, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t access it
tapping into the ability of the cells to get into a particular region because they’re attracted to areas of injury and inflammation. So let’s say we do an IV infusion for a patient and the cells will be attracted to wherever tissue, know, wherever the, the scream is the loudest. So, and they tend to go there and start fixing that problem.
in that region. know, one example is my first stem cell patient who had, who was 69 years old and was told that he absolutely needed bilateral knee replacement because he would just, know, osteoarthritis degenerative and he definitely needed knee replacement. Yeah. Two orthopedic surgeons said for, you know, in no uncertain terms and he’s extremely active, you know, go to all these trade shows all the time, like every month. And so
Cheryl McColgan (18:14.925)
Okay.
Joy Kong, MD (18:27.214)
he wanted to avoid surgery. So what I did was that I gave him knee injections, know, directly into knee joint, but also an IV infusion because the outer one third of the cartilage in the knee is nourished by the blood supply. The inner two thirds is nourished by the synovial fluid. So the exchange between the blood and the synovial fluid in the joint is very slow. So if you attack from both angles, then you can actually send signals
the cartilage on both sides. So that’s why I gave him an IV infusion. And then what’s interesting was the next day, he told me, he said, you know, I slept through the night. I haven’t slept through the night for decades because when my car rolled over when I was a teenager, I damaged my shoulder. So my rotator cuff injury never fully healed. Every time he would shift in the bed, he would wake himself up. But guess what? He was not woken up that night.
And he still is fine. His shoulder is fine. It’s fixed. Now is eight years later, right? This is beautiful. I didn’t know about his shoulder issues. I never touched the shoulder. So that just goes to show that the cells have intelligence. They can find places where they’re needed. So, yeah, so which means that we can utilize that kind of capability to target even deeper tissues. So in our clinic, we actually use
laser light. We use light to help attract more cells in a particular organ because research have shown that light can activate mobility of cells and can help the cells adhere to certain tissues. So that’s fascinating, right? All of a sudden we can help direct the cells. yeah, this is kind of a, you know, like a broad range. autism is one of the things that has been shown to be beneficial.
and yeah, reproductive, even for, you know, there’s some good research, well, animal studies showing that stem cell infusion of younger cells, when you are giving it to aging rats, paramedic, posal rats actually increase the number of follicles in ovaries, the size of the ovaries, and you know, that improve their hormone levels, you know, closer to the younger state, and then they have more pregnancies.
Joy Kong, MD (20:53.146)
And then clinically in my clinic, I did see people becoming pregnant more easily. So there’s just a wide range of possibilities.
Cheryl McColgan (21:02.293)
Well, I’m sure people are hearing this and thinking, my God, this sounds amazing. You just inject me with something. It goes where to the place that needs to be fixed and fixes it. And I don’t have to take drugs and I don’t to do anything. So the big question, I know. So the big question I think in people’s minds are why isn’t this being more widely used? And second, and I think I have
Joy Kong, MD (21:13.058)
Why do you think I’m so excited about stem cells? Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (21:26.505)
you know, we talked about the sick care system. This would put a lot of surgeons out of business if we use this and it would get rid of a lot of drugs that people are taking. there’s, you know, follow the money, I think is one of the big answers. But I guess the second question is, you know, people would also wonder what sounds too good to be true. There must be some risk here. Is there a risk that the stem cells will migrate somewhere in the body and have a negative effect? Like people kind of, I think picture.
cells proliferating like they do in cancer or something like that, for example. And they made me wondering, like, is there a kind of thing like that that can happen with this? So I would love to hear your thoughts around all of
Joy Kong, MD (22:03.936)
Okay, let’s let’s address your second question first. Yeah. So when you look at side effects, you have to look at what kind of tissue is used. So cells from an adult person versus cells from a book or court have drastically different properties. So let’s say you use cells from your own body, your stem cell is the age of you. So your stem cells, even though is in somewhat quiescent state, right, it’s kind of hibernating a little bit, but still they accumulate genetic changes.
just like you do. And they also decrease, they decrease in number as time goes on, because even the environment of where the cells are, are less conducive to their health. So they start to degenerate. So if you get those cells out, not only don’t have a whole lot, but they also have lost the potency and also they can have changes as far as neoplastic changes, right? Cancerous possibilities. And they also have lost certain intelligence.
when they should detect cancer and kill cancer, now they forgot that they need to tell cancer cells to die, because there’s so much of what they do is to tell everything to grow, then they start to secrete all these growth factors telling everything to grow. And that’s why there has been a report of cancer promoting properties from stem cells is overwhelmingly from these adult stem cells who have lost certain capabilities. But when you use younger sources,
they retain that intelligence. So they tell the cancer cells to die. If you look around, look at research, you know, statistics of safety, I mean, the safety has been extraordinary. There’s so few potential issues. Of course, if you use embryonic stem cells or induce pluripotent stem cells, like I said, we’re not using that in this country, you have a potential of causing teratoma.
So that’s uncontrolled growth of all kinds of tissue into like one lump. You know, this is a tumor. So there has been reports in certain countries when they inject stem cells, embryonic stem cells, that’s from early embryo. When they destroy an embryo and then get some cells from the inner, you know, inner ball of the embryo, they could cause this uncontrolled growth, but that potential is not there anymore.
Joy Kong, MD (24:26.242)
when it comes to unblockable quartz stem cells, because these are much further down the road as far as development of the cells go. So they lost that wild potential. But what they can do is that they can tell all cells to grow. So theoretically, there’s a possibility that they can tell cancer cells to grow as well. However, if the cells maintain a lot of his intelligence, then it should be able to tell cancer cells to die. How do they know? I don’t know.
You know, that’s, that’s a whole other discussion. It probably involves metaphysics. So I don’t know how the cells know, but they know some cells don’t belong just like certain things, you know, can kill off bad bacteria, but preserve the probe probiotics. You know, it’s interesting. How do they know? I don’t know. So, but the cells have the intelligence to tell that, certain cancer cells don’t belong.
So as far as side effects, I think any medical procedure there can be problems, right? If the doctor doesn’t know what he’s doing, then you can cause potential problems. For example, this clinic that got shut down in Miami, they were injecting stem cells into people’s eyeballs and they ended up blinding three people. So they were shut down. So how you’re providing the therapy, how safe the route is make a big difference.
If you inject stem cells IV and you don’t use proper filter, the cells have a tendency to aggregate. So I would say maybe 95 % of doctors who are using stem cells, who are doing stem cells IV are not using proper filters. I mean, that’s unfortunate. That’s why I found it in the Academy. I’m trying to educate doctors. If you’re going to do that, then you need to do it safely. You need proper IV filters to break up cell aggregates. So if
don’t do that, there is a chance, it’s a small chance, but still that’s a chance that I’m not willing to take for my patients, right? It can cause embolism for your lungs and for other tissues. And then if you inject cells in particular area, you can always cause swelling and pain and a lot of times temporary inflammation, but that usually correlates, lot of times, let’s say in a joint, you inject into a joint and the patient is like, my God, my knee is stiff, I can’t move and it hurts.
Joy Kong, MD (26:44.18)
Usually within a few days that will get better and they actually have pretty good results because your immune system just got mobilized and they all these cells came. So the knee joint is like, my God, what are all these? You know, it’s just, it’s a lot of cells, a lot of volume of fluid. So those are very common problems, but I think unsafe administration from the doctors is the majority of the problems like anything, right? Like any surgery, you go into surgery.
Are you saying it’s surgery safe or not? It depends on the surgeon, right? So you can’t say, some surgery went bad. So we’re going to ban the surgery from now on, you know, no one is going to do the surgery anymore, just because some doctor didn’t do it right. So, you know, okay, you know, let’s look at logically. So that’s kind of where things
Cheryl McColgan (27:20.896)
right.
Cheryl McColgan (27:38.699)
And so, I mean, hearing that, I’m sure people think, okay, like you said, that there’s like such an amazing technology and amazing therapy for people that may not be able to get relief any other way. And in the same token, it’s still kind of a little bit in the wild west. It’s not regulated. There are people that are doing it maybe improperly or just doing it for profit and don’t have their patient’s best interest in mind. So if somebody wanted to seek this out,
Is there any way that you can recommend that they, you know, how they can best find a doctor that does know what they’re doing, that puts these filters in place that you mentioned that has, you know, more experience? How would people go about, you know, getting somebody with the right credentials?
Joy Kong, MD (28:22.07)
Yeah, that’s one thing I’m trying to do. So I founded American Academy of Integrative Cell Therapy. Actually, just last weekend, we did our certification training. So it’s a two day course, you know, with lots of information and hands on, you know, kind of instructions, just on how to do this well and do it safely. So that’s one.
One way is to see if the doctor actually received proper training. So if anyone is interested, they can go on the Academy website is aact .org. So that’s American Academy of Integrated Cell Therapy. There are some research articles. There’s actually some case studies. A lot of them actually are cases, are patients I’ve treated, but it’s, you know, of diverse disease conditions. I think people will find that very interesting. But yeah, for a doctor to be properly trained, unfortunately,
you know, doctors are kind of humans just like anybody else in any other business. They do tend to want to help. That’s why they went into medicine, but some went into medicine to make money. I, you know, make no mistake of that. You know, some people just want to make a living. So there are different kinds of doctors, you know, I, the doctor who actually come to our training are the ones who actually are willing to invest in their skills and in their competence so they can do the best thing for their patients. So that’s a different.
kind of crop of doctors who really are doing everything they can. So I would encourage people to make sure that these doctors have actually sought out training and not just receiving instructions from reps. I’ve seen so many doctors who are purchasing stem cell products from a company that produce these products and they just get instructions from the rep. I mean, that’s no way to practice medicine. You don’t get instructions from somebody that has no medical training.
that just telling you, do this, do that, and then you’ll be fine. yeah, check out what kind of training doctors
Cheryl McColgan (30:21.215)
Yeah, and I think that’s a good caution because I think people also have this, you know, authority figure thing where they probably feel nervous to question their, like they see that’s up on their website or wherever that says, I’m a stem cell specialist. And they think, I found one. This is great. I can go do this. But unless they, you know, ask a lot of questions or check with your organization to see if they’ve had some of this additional training. I mean, I think that is one.
beauty of the traditional medical system is you do have your board certification process that kind of shows that you’ve gone through a specific training and you can prove it. have sort of the training, the background, the certificate to say it all went together, but it sounds like in stem cells that that is not really there yet, but something that you’re working towards with your organization and your training so that someday people will be able to see like, okay, this doctor is certified in stem cell therapy or something like that. Yeah.
Joy Kong, MD (31:13.676)
Mm hmm. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, there’s just not much out there. I mean, I had to train myself. There was no textbook, there’s nothing. So I just accumulated articles. I mean, that’s that’s the way you educate yourself is by reading articles, because the articles, the studies, they will give you the background and the science. So then really, that that becomes the beginning of a textbook textbook. So that’s what I put together in the course material to, you know, just
Cheryl McColgan (31:17.599)
Yeah, that’s really cool that you’re doing that.
Joy Kong, MD (31:43.096)
kind of coalescing all this information into a format where doctors can have this linear thought of what this is and how the cells work and why you have to do things certain
Cheryl McColgan (31:56.777)
Yeah, that’s really cool. So finally, to kind of and I want to be respectful of your time. But is there anything that we haven’t touched on yet that you’d like to share with people will have your organization in the show notes. So definitely, if you’re thinking about doing this, either go see Dr. Kong or look into the doctor. Don’t be afraid of the white coat. Ask questions, find out about their training and their their knowledge in this area before you go down this road. But is there anything we haven’t touched on yet or
Joy Kong, MD (32:17.678)
was more than
Joy Kong, MD (32:23.34)
Yeah, I think, know, to, you know, I, yeah, I didn’t even answer your other question about why it’s not widely spread, you know, why it’s not, or fully accepted. I mean, we are interrupting the entire cashflow of the current medical model, right? We are not. I don’t think we’re really welcome at this point, you know, unless we are part of the, the, the, the, mechanism of generating huge amount of money for the establishment. So because we’re interrupting
Cheryl McColgan (32:26.901)
Sorry.
Cheryl McColgan (32:37.609)
Bye.
Joy Kong, MD (32:52.526)
you know, it was a great model for the drug companies. was perfect, right? Insurance, the drug companies, everything’s working well together. You’re making lots of money and people are sick. They’re staying sick and they keep taking drugs. They have to take drugs for life and the drugs will create side effects and take another drug. So I worked at the VA, you know, all the veterans have 10, 20, even 30 drugs every time they come in to see a doctor. It’s great. It works great. So, but we’re interrupting all of
I want my patients off medications if possible. And a lot of times I’m able to accomplish that because you don’t, know, the biological system, you know, you don’t have, just like they said, you don’t have a Prozac deficiency, right? You don’t, you know, for your depression, it’s not because you have a deficiency of these drugs, it’s because they’re underlying, you know, mechanisms to trigger your disease. So you need to address all those. So we’re being able to address that. And I can’t think of anything more holistic than stem cells.
which is the source of life, which gives you all these signals from all these different angles, trigger and repair of all these different organ systems. So your entire body is gonna help you repair. So it’s very holistic because it’s an interrupting, because it’s new, because the government agency doesn’t know how to regulate it. And of course we all know how the FDA is funded.
you know, huge percentage of their budget comes from funding from big pharma. I mean, that’s the truth. You know, there’s a saying, this is not just for the, you know, the regulation of this area, the EPA, you know, a lot of government agencies are like that. And they call them captured agencies. The agencies are captured by industry they’re supposed to regulate. So it’s just the way it has evolved. So that’s probably one reason why things have not been easy. So it’s new, also doctors,
are very conservative, a group by nature. They are very skeptical. So when there’s new science coming in, a lot of them are very slow to adapt. They want to stick to what they know. So all these play into a role. And actually stem cell therapy is a patient -driven therapy. I call it a grassroots movement because patients are the ones that are going to the doctors.
Joy Kong, MD (35:15.304)
asking for stem cells, hey, do you do stem cells? And that’s how I got a lot of doctors coming to me saying, Can you teach me how to do it? I’ve got a few people asking me for it. I feel like I need to know how to do it. So so that’s that. Yeah, that aspect. But as far as what I want people to know that I haven’t discussed, I think one of the big glaring question is where do you get a stem cell treatments, because a lot of people are going overseas and they think going overseas are better. Of course, you’ve got big names in the health
area, know, health longevity arena, know, Joe Rogan, Tony Robbins, and Brian Johnson, everybody is going overseas, right? It could be Panama, the Bahamas, Colombia, Mexico. So the issue with going overseas is that you are going to be getting expanded stem cells. So there’s no way around it. If they tell you I’m going to give you 100 million cells, 200, 300 million cells, they’re expanded because it’s going to be way more expensive.
They’re going to charge. Yeah, it’s just, it’s going to be too much if they give you native cells that have not been expanded. The problem with expanding the cells is even though the number sounds good and it goes along with the kind of research, research usually say 1 million per kilo of body weight. So they are going along with the bigger numbers thinking that’s the way that you have to, you know, bring about change. But the research also is based on expanded cells.
The problem with expanded cells is that when you start expanding them, they can start to produce inflammatory molecules and those can cause a reaction. And also they start to differentiate to manifest the proteins that’s consistent with the donor, which can cause rejection in the recipient. So this is why Tony Robbins, he doesn’t know this is why, but he said, you’re going to get cytokine response in this cytokine storm.
that that’s, you know, it’s okay. It’s part of the normal. No, it’s not part of the normal because I have never seen cytokine response in my clinic using the native stem cells that I’m using. I’m producing at least just as good of a results, if not better than what’s going on overseas. So I want people to understand that you don’t have to fly overseas and getting cells from, you know, a of times these countries that their prenatal care is not
Joy Kong, MD (37:38.242)
rigorous as in this country, the screening is not as good. you know, so that’s a risk on its own. And then you start to expand the cells, and you’re causing these inflammatory components to manifest and also causing potential rejection. That’s why I’ve seen people who are getting significant side effects. I’m not saying that there are no people that are getting great benefits, there are people who are getting great benefits, but there’s much higher chance of problems.
And I, for me as a doctor, I just don’t see I need to risk people in that way. If I can give them products that are safer and are possibly even more effective, then that’s what I’m going to give people. So that’s kind of, you know, you know, the, the, the glaring question that I think people have, because so many want to go overseas because that’s what they heard from all these big names. That’s what they’re doing. But
you know, people don’t know that, America is still the number one country when it comes to stem cell therapy. So you can go overseas, you want it, but we are the most active research and, and it’s actually just, it’s growing like wildfire. Yeah. So, but since we’re not allowed to advertise for stem cell treatments, because some people are still some, some certain private companies still are believing that stem cells
in the same category as miracle cures. I mean, just so silly. Have you looked at research? Have you seen the science behind all this? It’s not miracle cures or it’s science. So, but it’s just funny, you know, this big private companies, corporations have way too much say on everything, including what can, you know, can be regarded as safe and effective therapy and should be allowed. So they will not allow advertising.
of clinics, they won’t even run the ads. So let’s see a doctor are doing the stem cell treatment, but they just can’t shout to the world that they’re doing that. But that did not stop the growth of the stem cell clinics. So that just goes to show is the power of the healing potential that’s generating results. And that’s what’s driving people to seek it. So
Cheryl McColgan (40:02.101)
Yeah, well, I’m glad you brought that up because that has kind of been a little bit in the, and I can’t remember when Rogan did that, but I do remember vaguely hearing about that at some point. you know, whenever he brings something to the forefront, it does definitely make people have more of an interest and more, you know, more questions about it. So I’m glad that you’re out there sharing the real scoop and,
Joy Kong, MD (40:23.18)
Wow.
Cheryl McColgan (40:26.837)
the US, there’s still no better place to be if you do have a serious condition. let’s, mean, I think there’s a lot of issues with our healthcare system, but there’s also a lot of good things about it. And there’s a lot of good people involved with it, such as yourself. So I think it’s always important to take that all into consideration before you just run off to Mexico to get some treatment that you think you can get cheaper or whatever.
Joy Kong, MD (40:46.67)
Yeah, I actually did a podcast with a 911 responder about the subject and he lists he heard Joe Rogan’s podcast and thought you can’t go wrong, right? Joe Rogan is supporting it. So he went over there. So if people want to just look up on YouTube, just put in 911 Joy Kong, you know, they will find the podcast. So I interviewed this, you know, this veteran 911 responder, know, amazing, amazing human who
went to Mexico and received the treatment, did benefit, but he didn’t see benefit until two and a half months after the treatment. But for two months, he experienced extreme fatigue, not only him, because he kept in touch with 20 people that were all at the clinic at the same time and they all exchanged contact. So everybody experienced those side effects. And then he experienced benefits about two and a half months after the treatment. But when he came to our clinic for treatment,
He experienced absolutely no fatigue. He experienced increased energy. And then within three days, he started noticing benefits in his breathing and just in his lung symptoms. So yeah, there can be drastic difference when you don’t elicit that kind of inflammatory response. You can have much better results.
Cheryl McColgan (42:07.684)
Well, Dr. Kong, can you share with everyone this again, this will be in the show notes, but one last time you have a podcast, I don’t know if you’re active on social media, you have your organization website, can you just share kind of all of the places that people can learn more about you and your work?
Joy Kong, MD (42:22.732)
Yeah, people are interested in finding out more about what I do. So drjoycon .com that probably, you know, has everything, you know, I developed a stem cell skin cream and, you know, with Academy, my clinic in Los Angeles, and also my memoir and, the stem cell company I started and then Academy. So everything is on there. They can follow me on Instagram, which is dr underscore joy underscore con and,
They can also follow my podcast, just the Dr. Joy Kong podcast. So all these are great places and I always respond to people’s questions on YouTube, on Instagram. I’m very engaged with people who want to know more. Yeah, so I look forward to chatting with more people.
Cheryl McColgan (43:15.125)
Yeah, awesome. Thank you again for taking the time to join us today. And I really appreciate the information you’ve shared today and all the wonderful work that you’re doing.
Joy Kong, MD (43:23.234)
Thank you, Cheryl. Yeah, it’s been fun.
Cheryl McColgan (43:25.823)
you
In this episode, we talk all about the challenges of weight loss and aging as well as strategies to cope. Recent research points to consistent movement, optimal protein intake and resistance training as key strategies for weight loss, especially as we age.
Cheryl shares her personal experiences and provides recommendations based on what she’s learned over the last several years. In this conversation, Cheryl shares various strategies for overcoming weight loss resistance. She emphasizes the importance of prioritizing protein intake, tracking food and exercise, getting quality sleep, managing stress, incorporating movement throughout the day, and engaging in resistance training. She also discusses the role of nutrition in weight loss and the importance of finding a sustainable eating plan that aligns with individual goals.
Additionally, Cheryl touches on the significance of body composition measurements, the potential benefits of fasting, and the importance of seeking medical advice and testing if weight loss resistance persists.
Creatine+Taurine (HNG10 at checkout to save) for Muscle and Brain Health
High Protein Diet For Fat Loss Research Paper
High Protein Diet For Appetite Regulation and Body Composition
Forever Strong, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
People I’m following for weight loss/aging/menopause information: Dr. Mary Claire, Wise and Well, Dr. Jamie Seeman and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
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Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Takeaways
- Protein intake is crucial for weight loss, with recommended amounts ranging from 0.8-1.2 grams per pound of body weight.
- If your current weight loss strategies aren’t working, consider making changes to your diet and exercise routine.
- Managing stress and improving sleep are important factors for successful weight loss.
- Supplements such as aminos and creatine can support muscle growth and cognition.
- Make small changes over time and track your progress to achieve long-term success.
- Prioritize protein intake to support weight loss and muscle growth.
- Track food and exercise to stay accountable and make informed choices.
- Get quality sleep and manage stress to support weight loss efforts.
- Incorporate movement throughout the day to increase activity levels.
- Engage in resistance training to build muscle and boost metabolism.
- Find a sustainable eating plan that aligns with individual goals.
- Consider body composition measurements to track progress.
- Explore the potential benefits of fasting, but prioritize protein and resistance training.
- Seek medical advice and testing if weight loss resistance persists.
Transcript:
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.122)
Well, hello friends. Welcome back to the Heal Nurse Show podcast. Been on a bit of a break and before we get into the topic today, I just wanted to share with you that it has been a very busy summer and I can’t believe that we are so far into it. mean, Labor Day is just about four weeks away at this point. I mean, this has just flown by. Lots of events we had to attend to, sold a house, so just a lot going on, which is why I had
little bit of an unintentional break, but it is good to be back on the mic. And what actually prompted me to take on this subject today is I had a conversation with a good friend of mine yesterday, kind of all around this topic around aging and weight gain and just not feeling good, that sort of thing. And then I had somebody else reach out to me again today.
And these two people are very different ages, but I think that the things that I’m going to talk about and share with you today, number one can be really applied to weight loss at any age, but number two are particularly even more important as you do get older. And I’ll go into some of the reasons why. So it’s interesting because the reason that people tend to reach out to me with this sort of thing is they know that I keep up on all the research and I’m constantly listening to
new interviews and podcasts. in fact, that’s really what I do every week when I’m at the gym or I’m in the car going to the gym or on a walk or all those things. I’m almost always listening to an interview with a industry expert, people that review different studies that come out and just people who really have their finger on the pulse
the latest innovations and the latest thought leadership in the health and wellness space. And of course, a lot of that is around weight loss because it is a topic that is so challenging for so many people. And it’s also become even, you know, for a while there, we weren’t even allowed to talk about weight loss, it seemed like. And now that the GLP -1 drugs have come out, Wigovie, semaglutide, all of those things.
Cheryl McColgan (02:16.352)
it has become a topic that is very popular and very controversial in a lot of ways for like who should be using it. Is it good for you? Is it going to cause long -term side effects, that sort of thing. So all of a sudden weight loss has really been thrust into the spotlight yet again and everybody’s talking about it. So now it’s not taboo as much anymore to talk about these things. But anyway.
So after talking to these two friends of mine, it became apparent to me that so many people are just really frustrated with this subject. They’re not sure what they should be doing to feel better, to lose weight, to just feel better in their bodies and feel better in their lives. And so I just wanted to share the things that I have personally been doing over the last several years and things that I have heard.
more and more about as people are interviewed and thought leaders in this space, talking about these different things that I’m about to go through here. And I’m going to have some links for you in the show notes. went through and tried to find at least some study, man, when you do, I don’t know. So I went to grad school and I remember doing a research review and it’s like when you have to actually go through all the literature and find the relevant studies, there’s
so, so much, right? But it’s, if you go to PubMed and you just search for weight loss or weight loss in women, any of those kinds of things, postmenopause, perimenopausal, I mean, you’ll find a lot of things. Unfortunately, though, there isn’t as much research done on just women. So a lot of these things, ways to lose weight and things that you do to lose weight have been studied primarily on men or studied in people that
a lot younger because they typically recruit college students to do a lot of these kind of studies. So you might find that what applies to those ages and sexes may not apply to you. I think the certainly the basic biologic processes are the same through both genders and through older and younger, but there are definitely some things that change.
Cheryl McColgan (04:31.05)
There are definitely life priorities. There are definitely environmental factors. There are hormones. There are so many things to take into account as we age that it really frustrates me that there are still people out there who really just say calories in calories out and that’s it because to me that’s very short -sighted. It’s just one part of the story. The truth is probably somewhere in between. It’s not all hormonal and insulin based and that whole theory of weight loss.
the truth is probably somewhere in between and the truth is in your lifestyle, the things that you’re dealing with, everybody’s going to be a little bit different. And so experimenting on yourself and studying things in relation to what fits you. So if you’re woman looking for different research studies on women or people’s experience that are women, or if you’re a man, you know, an older man looking for those kind of studies, not looking for things that are done on college students.
So there’s really just so many factors to take into account. it’s like weight loss is complex. It’s if it was so easy, everybody would do it, right? We wouldn’t need these weight loss drugs that are out there. But I will share with you again, sort of some things that have worked for me, things I’ve been experimenting with and doing over the last several years. And so the very first thing is something that has come up a lot in my content before. And this is something that I’ve probably been working on myself for about the last
five years, I think I’m going to say it’s been a while because people in the space that are in the know and thought leaders have been talking about this for a long time. It’s just that people, it takes people a long time to change paradigms or for people to hear something new and actually believe that it could work or that it is a thing. So I think in previous episodes, I’ve mentioned this hypothesis before.
by Robin Heimer and Simpson. Basically, these researchers did some studies that started on locusts. And the idea is that you will keep seeking protein until your body needs for protein are met. And so what happens is if you’re, say, in the United States where this diet that we have full of processed food and packaged foods and all that sort of stuff that are not very nutrient dense, all of the any nutrients that were there have been
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through our soils. mean, again, there’s so many factors. But basically that you will just keep eating until your body gets that amount of protein. So if you’re eating a lot of packaged foods or you’re primarily plant -based and you’re not very focused on making sure you get the proper amount of protein, your body is likely to make you overeat. And so again, that theory get started in Locust. They tried it on several different things. They’ve done some studies about it in humans now, and they do seem to find
you have this innate protein sensing ability in your body. So it will make you just keep eating until you get the right amount. So all that being said, just about the number one thing I can say, especially for anyone over the age of 40. And I actually have an old YouTube video that I made several years ago. Somebody asking me the same question, struggling with weight loss over 40. So you might want to go check out that video as well, just to see what I had to say then. And of course, you
If you study a lot and new research comes out, I think one of the best things that you can do is be open minded. Getting stuck on one paradigm or another or one way to do things is just not a good sign of an intelligent, reasonable person. If you’re confronted with new evidence or new research about a particular way that something works or that another idea that maybe you hadn’t thought of before or that you hadn’t.
put any credence in before, but more and more evidence keeps coming up, it would be ridiculous to be stuck on an old paradigm. And I think it’s great to be in a place where I’m not a doctor, I’m not somebody who has based my life’s work on some kind of paradigm that I have to stick to for pride, basically, I’m willing to change my opinions and my thoughts based on the latest research and new things that I learned.
And I think that that is a good thing. don’t think it’s a, you know, I’ve come to think of that a little differently over the years, even in when I, it’s not quite the same as politics, but you can think of it a little bit in that way. Cause often people will complain that a certain political candidate just like changes his view or a change his position.
Cheryl McColgan (09:07.82)
And I think a lot of that is they are pandering, right? They go back and forth and maybe that’s most of it, but like consider for a moment too, like maybe they learn more, maybe as they get more educated and they hear more people’s opinions and hear more research on a particular topic, like let’s say about climate change, for example, or economics, a different way of thinking of a particular economic paradigm or a climate paradigm.
and they get more research and they get more evidence presented to them. Well, maybe they change their view based on all that. And I don’t think that’s always a negative. anyway, that was a bit of a tangent there, but I think you get my point of that. So let’s still stay focused on protein for a moment. So again, going back to some of my previous content, if you have listened to me for a while, you’ve likely heard me say this before, but the thing that I have been working on over the last five years or so is to get an optimal protein intake.
where the experts are landing on that nowadays is somewhere between 0 .8 and 1 .2 grams of protein per pound of body weight. That’s the simplest formula. If you happen to know your lean mass, and we’ll get into that later on in this discussion, if you happen to know your lean mass number, then you can just do one pound or one gram of protein per pound of lean mass
If you are listening to this from the UK or Australia or anywhere else in the world, but it’s not on our silly number system, that’ll be in kilograms. And so you can just convert from there to get the proper number. But about one gram per pound is the simplest formula. Now, if you are not super active, then you can probably go on the much lower end of that. You want to go maybe more towards the 0 .8 number for that protein number.
And if you resistance train or you’re very, very active, you’d want to go on the top end of that number, like more towards the 1 .2 per pound. And by the way, there have been very several studies that show even higher protein intake than that. It does not have any negative effects. It doesn’t harm your kidneys. There’s a lot of myths and rumors and things about too much protein in the past that have kind of been debunked at this point.
Cheryl McColgan (11:20.806)
So it would be almost impossible for you to eat too much protein But however eating too little protein does have a number of negative effects on your body on your muscle mass on the things that you want to have not only for optimal body composition, but just for health and life the Stronger you are the less likely or to have falls or breaks or fractures those kind of things as you get older
Any kind of things like that that happen as you get older, whether it’s osteopenia, your bones get weak, osteoporosis, that can all be prevented and mitigated by optimal protein intake. if you have a fall at some point in your older age, that is a very poor indicator of your future health there going forward. So you definitely want to avoid those things as much as possible. And one of the good ways to do that is to stay strong and to eat the optimal amount of protein.
So in addition to eating the optimal amount of protein per day. And so I’ll just share with you, I’m 5 ‘7″, I have BMI and body weight that’s within the normal range and I am generally on a day -to -day basis shooting for anywhere between 120 to 160 grams of protein. And if you’re not used to eating that much protein, it can be really challenging. But each meal,
of the day is also another opportunity. So you could sit down, and this would be very difficult, but you could sit down and theoretically in one meal at the end of the day, eat 120 grams of protein. I don’t think I could personally do it, but I know a lot of people that do a one meal a day seem to somehow still be able to get in their protein by doing that, but that is not really the optimal way to do it because each and every time you eat is an opportunity to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And so based on the work of Don Layman,
You basically need somewhere around two to three grams of leucine per meal to stimulate that process optimally. And the way to get two to three grams of leucine is just to make sure that you get somewhere between 30 and 40 grams of protein each and every meal. Whatever that protein happens to be, the chances of you getting the leucine in it if you hit that number is pretty high. So you don’t need to go to each and every meat and see.
Cheryl McColgan (13:41.038)
How much leucine is in this and figure that all out. Basically just shoot to 30 to 40 grams of protein in each and every meal and that’s an opportunity to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. Excuse me. So if you’re a little bit older, so say for example over 40 or over 50 like myself, I really try to get more to that 35 to 40 grams of protein in every single time I eat just so that I…
make sure that I hit that threshold because as we age your body also becomes less sensitive to protein sensing and to using that protein. So you really want to make sure just to since you have to get to like for even for a smaller size woman getting to 120 grams of protein per day that be 40 grams at each of three meals and that’s a good way to split it up and then you’d be insured of hitting that number you’d be insured of hitting your daily
goal by doing that. And I’ve heard varying opinions on this. If you go back to my interview with Alan Aragon, which was like so many good things in that interview, I think I remember asking him that question if he thought that that your protein ability is sent your body’s ability to sense protein gets weaker as you age. He didn’t seem to think so. He does a lot of research reviews, but then I’ve heard other experts talk about it since then.
and maybe some possibly new emerging research, especially in this area of muscle growth and protein synthesis. And I’ve heard definitely more than one person say that, yes, that is a thing that as you get older, your body is just not sensing protein as well. So in any case, I think it’s just better to err on the safe side and get a little more protein with each meal to really stimulate that protein synthesis. So what that might look like on any given day, I’ve heard
told you the split. Sometimes if I’m having something for a meal and you know one of the best ways to do this is to simply track. I know people don’t like to track but until you get to know how much protein is in a specific thing what you need to have in a meal to hit those numbers it is very helpful to track. Maybe you don’t track everything in your meal but maybe you weigh your protein. So for example if you put the amount of protein you’re used to putting on a plate
Cheryl McColgan (16:00.75)
you might find, it’s only three ounces of chicken breast, maybe that’s only 25 grams of protein. And one negative thing is if you eat out a lot or if you buy things in a package, you will notice that even the amount that it’s saying, even with protein shakes, it’s generally like 20 grams per serving. It’s not getting you to that number. So you just need to be really aware of tracking and putting those numbers in for a little while until you know what it is that you’re trying to get.
So some of my tricks around that, I use egg whites quite a bit. and because if I find if I have to try to eat like five or six whole eggs, that is just too rich for me, it’s too much, I can’t do it. So what I’ll typically start my day with is two eggs, some egg whites thrown in there, quite a significant amount to get me up to that number and maybe some cottage cheese. That’ll get me to like 35, 40 grams of protein, not too many calories. If you’re, you know, looking at that and trying to lose fat or…
you know, keep yourself at a deficit. That’s a really handy meal. I also will sometimes use protein powder. And the one that I’ve been loving lately and use the most is by Equip. It is super clean. It’s made out of 100 % grass -fed beef. Their amino acid, it’s a full amino acid profile. That’s the other thing you need to be looking for. For example, if you take collagen as a supplement, which I recommend that you do, but in it’s technically protein, but it is not a complete protein amino acid.
So that really doesn’t count towards your numbers, unfortunately. So Equip protein, 100 % grass -fed beef, really super, super clean, good testing. You can get a discount with it if you like. With my code, it’s heelnourishgrow .com slash equip foods. And they have all kinds of deals going all the time. But if you use my link, you’ll always get a discount. And then also just
protein the center of whatever the meal is. So of course, steaks are great or chicken breast or something that’s a large piece of meat is easier to track and it’s easier to make sure that you know you are getting what you intended. And at the very worst case scenario, like I was about to say with the protein powder, if I feel like I didn’t get quite enough in a meal, I’ll just do a little top off with that. Maybe 10 grams to 15 grams of protein powder. My favorite way to do it is like a little dessert and some Greek yogurt.
Cheryl McColgan (18:21.878)
stirred up, which Greek yogurt also has an amazing amount of protein. And so it’s almost like a little chocolate protein pudding. So there’s just some of my tips on how to get more protein. And now that was, that was quite a long explanation into this whole protein thing. So let me go into some of the other things that you may want to try if you’re, you know, getting older, you’re frustrated. You know, the challenging part of this though, is like my, the one friend I know her a little bit better, know her habits a little bit better.
And just, you know, the amount of things she’s telling me, she eats really clean, she cooks all the time, she walks every day, she’s been strength training. It’s just that there’s so many things that she’s doing right and really well, and yet she’s unable to lose this weight that she’s put on in the last couple of years. She’s approaching 50. I think her hormones are probably out of whack. I know she doesn’t sleep well all the time. She has a very stressful life.
And so this is a very unpopular opinion folks, but if your stress and your sleep are not in order, you are going to have a very difficult time losing weight. So if this is your struggle, if you find yourself creeping up, you’re gaining or you’re really trying to lose weight and you can’t, you’ve got to look at those things. You’ve got to look at your sleep. You got to get that in order and you’ve got to look at your stress level, get that in order. So my two favorite things.
to recommend to help with that is number one, meditation and yoga. That is always amazing for stress relief and for learning to breathe properly and for giving yourself an outlet to kind of get out of your head and escape some of the stress. So that’s that part. And then for sleep, my gosh, you know, I’ve talked about sleep in the past and I have so many things that I use for that. So if you’re hormonal and you’re a hot sleeper, I highly recommend the Ullr, believe it’s heelnursery .com slash
I have to look that one up. Anyway, if you go to my shop page, you’ll always find all my codes and it’s all stuff that I have gotten discounts on because I use it and I love it. So that Oolr is actually out of stock now. I think that’s called the Chili Sleep. So it might be slash Chili Sleep. But anyway, it’s on the website and just a pad that cools down your bed so that you can actually not sweat and not be woken up every 10 minutes in a puddle so that you can get some sleep. So that’s a big one, especially if you’re in that hormonal phase.
Cheryl McColgan (20:42.822)
The second one is magnesium. People are so depleted in magnesium because it’s all out of our soil. And so if you’re eating particularly a whole foods diet, you’re not eating a lot of foods that are fortified, right? With like it’s not done have on the box that it’s got this vitamin, this vitamin, this vitamin. They’re adding because the soil is so poor and because they’ve also taken this thing that you can’t really call food and tried to make it into food. So they’re trying to add some things in there.
So just about everybody is depleted in magnesium and magnesium is really huge in sleep and it’s involved in something like, my gosh, I’ve heard people say like over 300 bodily processes. It’s like a huge substrate kind of thing. You need your body to be able to do all these other things. So supplementing with magnesium is really easy. There’s, I believe, seven or eight different kinds. The one that I use is by bioptimizers. So it’s heelnourishgrow .com slash bioptimizers.
It’s got all of the magnesiums in it. And it is, it’s a great page that they actually have too, that just tells you all about the things that magnesium is involved in and why you might want it, but it’s huge in sleep. And then there’s this other one, I believe it’s magnesium 3 and 8 that I’ve been hearing more people talk about lately. And that one is really involved in cognition and memory. So you can’t go wrong with magnesium. It’s a supplement.
as long as you get it from a clean brand. here’s my thing about supplements. So if it’s on my web page and I use it, you know that I’ve gone through this whole process. I always look to make sure that it’s made in a GMP facility, which means it’s at least somewhat. What do you want to call it? Not regulated and monitored, maybe not as much as we’d like to be, but it’s at least somewhat monitored some of the time. And it’s a clean facility that has been vetted and all that sort of thing.
And then I also look for supplement makers that do third party testing on their products. So at the very least, they want to be testing it when they’re finished with it, but it’s better if it’s a third party, obviously, because it doesn’t have that appearance of, you know, that they could fool with the numbers or anything like that. So if they have third party testing, that is really amazing. And you just want to make sure it’s clean of all these things. I’ve heard these horror stories. In fact, I knew a friend, one of my old yoga
Cheryl McColgan (23:02.912)
Students ended up having arsenic poisoning from she’s taken all these supplements and she wasn’t really checking on those things and obviously who she bought was buying them from we’re not checking those things and the supplements were contaminated with arsenic. I’ve heard heavy metal stories about the contamination stuff. So don’t just go to Amazon and pick the cheapest supplement especially not Amazon because there’s so many fakes and counterfeits on there. You want to go
to a website, if you want a couple good brands off the top of my head that have these that are really well known and that have all the things that I just talked about. Thorn is one of the very best. I tried to apply to be an affiliate with them years ago, but somehow that never went through, which is unfortunate because I do really love them and use them. Maybe I’ll just send them a little clip of this and see if they’ll reconsider that. But anyway, so that’s a great brand. Now Foods, I really like a lot.
that when you can get on Amazon and they have their own store on Amazon. So if you go to like find now foods on there and look for seller now foods, theoretically that means that it has come exactly from now foods, but still somehow in my mind, I still prefer if I can to order directly from the manufacturer just because I think that that is a little safer. The whole Amazon thing, it’s like, I know people use it for distribution in some ways and also for exposure.
But it’s nice. And then also a lot of my discount codes and things like that you get when you do the website. And I find that most of them match Amazon in speed and in giving good shipping prices and things like that. So you shouldn’t be spending more getting it from the direct and you can be ensured that it’s also very clean. So that is my thoughts on supplements. So
The other one that I have been taking recently and I have a future episode coming where I’m going to talk about, I got some DEXA scans, I’ve been tracking my body composition and I don’t want to go too much into detail on here because I’m going to do a whole episode but basically I’ve been gaining muscle which is amazing and I’m going to tell you how I’ve been doing it. One of the things though, so I had a DEXA about two months ago and then I just had one when I was in Utah just recently.
Cheryl McColgan (25:25.678)
What I found was that in the last two months that I put on two more pounds of lean mass, which is kind of crazy because now I’m a year into lifting and you know, something like a pound a month is not very typical the longer you’ve been lifting and it’s also like difficult for women and it’s also especially difficult for women over 50. So I was really shocked to see that number. But the only thing I’ve done different, I haven’t been training differently. I haven’t been training more.
really done anything different except two things. And they’re both supplements. And I will share in the show notes, but the one is aminos. And so it’s components of protein. So even though I eat a high protein diet, I’ve been using these aminos. I try to, I take them every day, but if I’m lifting that day, I try to take them right before I go lift. And that’s by a brand called Kion, K -I -O -N. So that’s heel nourish growth slash Kion. You’ll get some discounts. You can see the aminos.
I would actually love to have him on. I’ve heard him in other interviews and it’s just super interesting. He knows the research really well and just adding aminos even without exercise theoretically, it’s supposed to be able to really help you maintain the muscle you haven’t possibly gained a little bit of lean mass. In fact, he had a story of somebody in his office who had a shoulder injury.
And so he wasn’t able to work out really nearly as much, but during his recovery, he started taking a whole bunch more aminos to help with recovery, to help just repair in the body, but also in the effort to kind of maintain his muscle while he wasn’t able to work out in the same way. And this guy apparently like had just amazing results. So that’s definitely a thing. And then the creatine that I’ve been taking, which creatine is one of the most studied supplements on the planet.
you can get it in so many, so many supplement places will have it just pure creatine monohydrate. It is just a powder. It’s super cheap. It is one of the most researched supplements as long as you got it from a place that had me all met all those things that I described and you just add every day five grams, put it in your coffee. It’s tasteless. And yeah, it helps you build muscle is the main thing. Bodybuilders use a lot more of it than that. It can give
Cheryl McColgan (27:44.536)
Let me just warn you, some GI distress. So you might want to just start out with half that amount in your coffee and build up. But I’ve been doing five grams a day. And then what is even more exciting? And I haven’t gotten to that point yet, because I am one that has a little bit of GI distress with it. So I’m just going to sit with this level for a while and see how I do. maybe I’ll try to add more at some point. Because I think also if you spread it out throughout the day, that would probably be better. But I know myself, and I know just getting it in that once a day is pretty, you
That’s enough of a challenge to make sure I get all my stuff in once a day. Adding twice might be too challenging. But anyway, all that to say, the research that they have done on creatine and cognition, brain health, is also very strong and very interesting. But to get the cognitive benefits from creatine, you need to have more, I think it was like 10 to 15 grams a day. So of course you’re getting, especially when you’re eating a high protein diet, you’re getting some creatine in meat itself, probably about two grams a day.
And then, but to get to those levels where you’re building muscle and improving cognition, those are been at higher amounts. That’s going to require some supplementation.
So yeah, I think that is all I have to say about supplements for the moment. I will talk a lot more about that on the future episode when I tell you about my little journey into this whole bodybuilding thing. I’ll put my little baby bicep here, it’s not his baby anymore. But yeah, it’s just spoiler alert a little bit. It’s like what I’ve been doing is not super crazy or super hard and I’ve definitely seen benefits. Not as much as if I was super crazy or doing it super hard, I’d probably be further along, but you know.
You gotta just fit it in how you know it can work for you and doing something is better than nothing. So don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. One of my favorite thoughts lately, just like getting on here today. I couldn’t find my light because I’ve been out of town. look, you know, whatever. And I’m like, no, I need to just get on and record. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be. So here I am. And just let that be your little mantra. Don’t
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perfect be the enemy of good. We all just need to try to do a little better every day and if it’s not perfect, that is fine. So let me go, I actually made a whole little, this is very unusual for me for an episode, but I made a list here so that I could make sure that I kind of talked about all these different things I’ve been learning that I’ve been trying. So another one is to change what you’re doing. So there’s this old saying about how
the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting things to change. If whatever you’ve been doing to lose weight or to feel better or whatever has not been working for you and you’ve given it a serious good try. So I’m not saying like, I went to the gym yesterday and I’m sore and I’m not doing that again. Not like that. If you’ve done something consistently and done it well and given it a good fair shot and it’s not working for you. like really tracking calories. I will say here’s where I land.
on the part with the calories in calories out thing. Within your system, have homeostasis, right? You have a thing where you can balance where you’re, if you’re maintaining your weight, then you’re obviously eating the perfect amount to maintain your weight. And so if you want to lose fat, you’re going to have to eat less than that. So that might require some tracking, but it also requires you actually knowing what you’re eating. So if you’ve never been a person that tracks, you might not even realize the amount
intake that you’re actually having. So when I actually track everything that I’m eating a day when I’m just in maintenance days or what I’ve been doing for the last year and a half, which has basically been a bit of building and healing my body for some things, not restricting calories. mean, if I really track it, I’m eating something like 2500 to 3000 calories a day, which is a pretty significant amount of calories. And
I’ve not been maintaining my exact scale weight. I’ve actually been gaining weight, but most of that’s muscle. Again, spoiler alert, we’ll go to that when I do that full episode. But you know, knowing some of those things are important when you’re working on this, because if you’re not doing a lot of resistance training or doing any focus on really building muscle and you’re trying to lose fat, then yes, you are probably looking for that scale number to go down over time.
Cheryl McColgan (32:10.106)
But this is where the important stuff I really do believe if you can get a good gauge on your body composition that will do you so much more good than just the scale alone because just the scale alone there’s so much fluctuation as you know especially women in particular retaining water losing water you know I promise you when you went out and ate Mexican last night you did
quote unquote, gain three pounds overnight. You are retaining water, that’s it. And the way that people talk about weight and weight loss and weight gain is kind of like that sometimes. And that can be really frustrating. So what you’re looking for is trends over time. Also, you need to change things up. So what if you’re working is not working for you, you need to change things. So here’s where things come in. If you’re using a flexible diet or just kind of, you know, eating whatever you want, not caring about the quality of the food, whatever, and that’s not working for you.
You need to change. This is why some people do a trial of strict keto or of a carnivore diet or a vegetarian or whatever it is, just making sometimes this 180 degree shift from what you’re doing. That can be enough to shake things up. Or if you’re not a tracker, maybe you track for a while or change what you’re doing. If you’re not exercising, try exercising. If you are not eating enough protein, eat more protein.
I can almost guarantee you if you are listening to this right now, you’re not eating enough protein. can almost like I would say 99 .9 % of you not eating enough protein. So if you just change that, maybe that would be enough to shake things up. But if whatever you’re doing is not working, you’ve got to make some changes. And that can be very challenging and can be very frustrating in that you might not know what you need to change. But the idea is just change something, ideally not too many things at once. So you can tell us something’s working.
cause I know there’s also this temptation to just want to like, you’re like, okay, I’m finally going to do this. I’m going to change all the things I’m going to, I’m going to work out every day and I’m going to eat like this. And I’m to do that. That is just too much. Again, a theme of my content. If you go back over time and hear the thing, that is one thing I’ve always consistently said, small changes over time, make things habits. You’re not looking to just like do something for a few days and then you give it up and it doesn’t stick. You’ve, you’ve got to just,
Cheryl McColgan (34:27.658)
over time make these small changes that become a habit and that’s it. And oftentimes it’s like if you have it stack, you’ve heard me talk about that before, something like brushing your teeth every day. there was a pill, if I wanted to take more creatine, for example, what I’d probably need to do is put it by my toothbrush in my bedroom at night so that it would remind me the last thing I do of the day is okay, I brush my teeth.
And then I would take the extra creatine. So there are ways to accomplish these things if it’s something you’re serious about, you know, making that change. so, like I said, for my example with the creatine, I just haven’t made that mental shift yet that I’m going to add some. So when I do that, I will do something like that. I will figure out a way to stick it to something else that I do every single day without fail so that I know that I will actually add that in and then it’ll become part of the habit, part of the routine.
Another thing if you haven’t tried, know tracking steps has become very popular last several years and so if you don’t wear a fit, I actually have two. I have the aura ring which is more about sleep and recovery and then I have just an old Fitbit which is more about movement and activity. And a lot of these things, I do want to go to say a lot of these things I’m mentioning are talking about like tools or things that cost money. But there are so many things you can do for free.
as well. so like, for example, the tracking your food, I use a, an app called chronometer. I do get a discount on that as well, but I use the free version. I always have, you don’t really need to pay for it. But if you go to heal nurse grow .com slash chronometer, C R O N O E T E R, it’ll take you, you’ll get to sign up. I think you get a free trial of the pro, but you really don’t need the pro. You can stay with the free version and you can just track your things for there. The same thing with tracking steps. You don’t need a fancy, there are so many cheap things on Amazon you get now,
If you want truly free, all you need to do is track time. So of course you’re trying to move more throughout the day. And that’s really what these help you with is reminding you to move every hour. They’re good. It’s also tracking like incidental steps, like you just moving around the house, doing housework. But if you want to be totally free, just start tracking time. Go for a walk for 10 minutes after every meal. That all adds up. And at the end of the day, you know, eventually over time, after a month, after two months, you’re just trying to build
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each day a little more time that you’re moving. So that’s that easy. And then the tracking steps, it’s more about, it’s a lot of things. So walking after you eat, for example, you can really get a lot of blood sugar regulation by doing that. And blood sugar regulation helps you be satiated and have less hungry, like hangar mood swings up and down. The more even your blood sugar is, just the more
likely you are to be satiated and not overeat. The other thing I just heard about this study recently too that instead of walking after meals that you did 10 body weight squats after every meal and the 10 body weight squats were as effective as like walking after every meal for blood sugar regulation which I just thought was fascinating. So that’s also another easy
that can just start to incorporate more movement into your day. So after every meal, maybe you do 10 body weight squats. Try that for a while. So it doesn’t even have to be going outside and walk. You can do body weight exercises in your house, pushups, sit ups, squats, lunges, all kinds of things that you can do for a hundred percent free with body weight that don’t require any special tools, but just tracking steps. Overall, you’re just trying to get more active each and every day.
even if it’s not like a set workout thing, like going for a walk or going outside, it’s just more movement in general. The more that you move, the higher your metabolism is gonna be and the less likely you are to just kind of sit in front of the TV and mindlessly eat or snack or those kinds of things. If that’s you, just getting this extra little movement in, being more active during the day will help with your hunger levels and it will help with burns and extra calories as well. Let’s see.
So always keeping that in mind, even though we’re going for more activity, most of your weight loss is going to come from actually what you’re putting into your body. So nutrition part is very important. And you may have heard this saying before, like abs are 80 % made in the kitchen. It’s not how many sit -ups or push -ups you’re doing or how much exercise you’re doing. It’s all about what you’re actually eating and putting in your mouth. So moving
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higher quality food, moving towards less processed food, moving towards less sugar, more, you I’ve never said, you know that I do keto low carb, but I’ve never said that that’s the only way I was vegetarian for years. I, you know, back in the nineties did the zone diet. I did the super low fat. I’ve basically tried it all. And I also don’t want to say though that you should, this saying that everybody has is like the diet that works for you is the one that you can stick to.
I don’t know. I just I don’t know how to think about that because yes, I do think you need to find some way to eat that serves you and that you’re able to adhere to but by the same token, I kind of don’t buy this whole, you know, everything in moderation thing now not to say I never eat any treats because I do but you know, do you have a cookie every single day or to have a I don’t I don’t even know how to describe this but basically
I guess maybe break it down day by day is that each and every day, 90 % of the time trying to eat things that are healthy for you and good for you and serving your goals and maybe 10 % of the time eating things that are less aligned with that goal, something like that. I mean, maybe in that way, finding a way that works for you that you can sustain. But this idea of, you know, the eating cupcakes and sugar and cake and candy and all of that stuff is actually, you know, good for you or in some way.
Like, do you know what I’m trying to say? It gives me this dissonance in my head. Like, we all know that it’s not good for us. Like, if you talk to anybody, nobody’s gonna say that eating cookies and cake and candy every day is good for you. Now, because we’ve all grown up with it though, our palates crave that, love that, it. It’s associated with parties growing up. It’s associated with fun childhood things. So that again, it’s so complex, right? There’s so much.
There’s so many things that are rolled up into food and just being social and everything. So you can’t say that you’re never going to have those things again. But then you’ve got to find some way to balance that. Like you can’t move for most people, or at least I should say, I cannot, if I have treats every single day, I’m not going to be able to maintain my weight. I’m not going to feel good. I’m not going to, you know, have it be aligned with my goals. So some restriction or some
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thing that you can put on yourself that’s like, okay, I can’t have that every day or I shouldn’t have this kind of thing. I don’t know if those things are necessarily bad, even though a lot of people in the space talk about those things as being bad or you get too orthorexic, like you’re afraid to eat anything or afraid of food. I don’t think it has to be like that, but I definitely think like realize the things that are fueling your body and that are actually good for you and mostly eat that. And then those other things, they are a treat. They’re not something to have like every single day like bread.
Bread for me is a treat. When I choose to eat bread, I don’t seem to be too affected by gluten, so I can still have that on occasion. Will I get kicked out of ketosis? Yes, I will. But I also try to eat, like I’ll make my own bread, I’ll make organic sourdough, or recently I have a French heritage, so I started making croissants on occasion, because my sisters were coming to town, I thought that’d be a good treat. But that’s what it was, it’s a treat. It’s not something I’m gonna eat every day or even every single week.
just because it’s not really in line with my goals. I don’t think that, you know, when you eat bread, it’s like, it’s hard enough for me to eat the amount of protein I need to get to be healthy. I start throwing in some bread and there are other things like that. I just don’t have the room to eat the protein then. So it’s very difficult. So you’ve got to prioritize these things. And again, make it in line with your own personal goals. If it’s more your goal to just, I don’t know, say your goal is to just enjoy food and have a good time in your life
you know, not have restrictions at all, then I can’t guarantee that that is going to be in alignment with having the body composition that you want or having the other kind of goals you want. So it’s all just prioritizing these things. And I’m not saying any of them are bad or wrong. It’s just like actually putting some thought into that, I think will help you make those choices. And that’s the way to look at it. It’s a choice. It’s not something you have to do. It’s something you want to do because you know, it makes you healthier because it’s going
allow you to have more time to, you know, healthy time to spend with your grandchildren in the future or to do good work in the world because you’re healthy. You know, if you’re not healthy, it’s going to be more difficult to accomplish the things you want to accomplish. So I think that’s also putting it in this mental perspective in a way that will help you, you know, just get your goals in alignment with what you truly want out of your life and your health.
Cheryl McColgan (43:54.486)
Okay, another bit of a tangent there, but sometimes it’s hard to like get across the years and years of thoughts or of how you’ve come to think about things in this format. Like I usually, I do better when I write, obviously, if you’re reading my things, because you have time to like map it out a little bit more and make your case, make your argument and get your thoughts together. So sometimes I find when I just talk about it, it’s kind of hard for me to get out in a short amount of talking basically.
So the next point I had on here is resistance training. If you’re not resistance training, if your goal is to lose fat, then I suggest you get on it. And I say that kind of tongue in cheek, but yet I’ve known this. This is not a new thing about resistance training. It’s always been known that resistance training builds muscle, helps you lose fat. I think just maybe in more recent years, it’s become more of a thing where people are realizing that is, that cardio is not the end all be all.
like cardio is not the way to lose weight. know, resistance training is definitely much more powerful for that. And it’s also much more powerful for your long -term health. So if you haven’t read it yet, there is a book by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. I’m trying to think anyway, she talks about muscle is that muscle is organ of longevity. And she gives all of her case for why this is she’s a big researcher, doctor, she
basically lays it all out and it’s escaping me, I’ll put it in the show notes, but like strong something, but Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. And so basically it’s like resistance training. And like I said, I’ve known this for years. And if I really look back at my history with resistance training, I first started weight training when I was on the basketball team in eighth grade. I remember being in my garage, we had one of those weight tower things and I was pretty consistent with that for a while.
And then I became a runner and I was a runner for like 17 years, which is why my body and my knees are a mess. If I had to do it all over again, I would never, never be a distance runner. would just have lifted weights my whole life. But here’s the problem. I don’t hate it. I don’t like lifting weights. And so I was always able to convince myself because I was always running. And then after that, was power yoga and walking and because I was always super active, hiking.
Cheryl McColgan (46:20.01)
So I was always active, but I never really was consistent with lifting weights. And I’d start at various points over the years. And what would usually happen is I would do it for a while and then I’d get a little injury or something. And the little injury was enough to put me off of it completely. Then I would just stop for a while until I healed and then I would never go back to it. And so just about a year and a half ago, after delving into this stuff more and more, after people like Dr. Lyon coming out with her book and
You know, also listening to Dr. Fit and Fabulous on Instagram, Jamie Seaman, and just a lot of these, particularly women in this space and talking about hormones and how much resistance training is really related to metabolic health. And that is what I’m very interested in. And so I finally somehow in my head made the mental shift to do it, even though I didn’t like it, because there’s plenty of upsides. I say that to our boys sometimes like,
I don’t like it either. But guess what? When you’re an adult, that’s what you have to do. And that shouldn’t be a good enough reason. But hey, and whatever gets you there, right? So the resistance training thing, I just decided that I was going to do it. And that was that. And am I super confident in the gym? No, I use machines a lot because they’re just kind of easy. They don’t make you feel like an idiot because there’s not a lot of am I doing it right or not, you put your hands or your feet or whatever body part on the machine and you do the thing.
and you kind of trust that that’s worth working. I do use some free weights as well. And actually, this is really funny. After being back to the gym for just over a year now consistently three days a week, I don’t know why I find it so intimidating as a woman, but I do because I always just feel like I look like an idiot and I don’t know what I’m doing. But you know, so that I get that that is a big part of that keeps people out of the gym.
So for a long time, that’s also why I did things at home like yoga and videos and weight resistance bands and all that’s amazing, body weight exercises. But it just kept me out of the gym for a long time because I just never felt confident. But anyway, just this yesterday when I worked out on Monday at the gym, it was like, somehow I got to the part in the day where it wasn’t as busy as usual.
Cheryl McColgan (48:34.87)
And there was a bunch of the Smith’s machine. if you, that’s like a squat rack. So if you know what it looks like, it’s like the bar on this big thing and it’s usually on like little platforms or something. But people usually use them, they’ll use them a lot for squats. They use them for bench press because you don’t have to have a spotter. That thing kind of spots you because you can just rack it at each little level. I hope I’m describing this well. I think most of you know what I’m talking about. But for whatever reason, like I always just look at those and I just think that’s not for me. Just like how I never go.
in the free weight section where all the men are for the most part, there’s this like giant rack of all the dumbbells they have the barbells too and tons of benches. There’s probably like 20 at my gym and there’s always like a bunch of guys. There’s women too, but not that much. And so whenever I need the free weight stuff, there’s like this little upstairs section that’s more like the TRX section and they also have a little rack of free weights up there. And so like when I do my split squats, I would go up there and do them. I mean, just this crazy stuff. So even somebody who has been
I’ve been into fitness my whole entire life, but like I said, never been into the gym or consistently weight lifting and it just, it’s that intimidating. So believe me, I understand your pain when it comes to going to the gym. So, I don’t know, it’s just finding a way around that finding a way to still go. And, so anyway, there’s so back to this and the machine I finally decided I’m like, okay, there’s plenty of them open. I don’t feel like I’m like wasting, you know, taking up the space or whatever, that somebody else could be using that actually knows what they’re doing.
So I just went over there and I did it. And I was so proud of myself. So I did squats and I did hip thrust, which if you’re an Instagram person is like, that is what all the girls that are trying to get a booty basically do all the time. And it is a super effective exercise, but it is challenging to do. You can do it on just a bench with a free weight, like put the free weight on your hips, but it is definitely so much easier to do it with that machine.
So yeah, so I finally did it and I was super proud of myself for that and I still felt like really awkward and like I didn’t belong there, but I did it anyway. So I don’t know, I share all that with you just to say that, you know, even people, and I imagine that other people in the gym probably feel the same as I do, but they’re like, I’m just trying to get healthier and I’m just here doing my thing. And honestly, it’s the same thing with yoga class. Like I never looked or when I was teaching yoga for years,
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you know, students will always be worried, well, I look so awkward. Is everybody watching you? No, everybody’s up in their own head. Like when I was just doing that thing on the rack, like I wasn’t paying attention to anybody else in the gym. And when I go, I’m never really paying attention to anybody else about what they’re doing or do I think they’re doing it right or do they look goofy or whatever it is? I’m never thinking that. So anyway, I just try to remind myself of that. That probably everybody there feels a little bit awkward and like they don’t know what they’re doing and everybody’s just trying to get healthier.
And if we all just respect that, then it’s all good. so yeah, so that’s my spiel on resistance training. If you’re not doing it, do it. as I get more resources on that, cause I’m actually thinking about what I’m actually thinking about now is, okay, I’ve done this randomly. I’ve proven myself that I’ll go and I probably wasted my first year of newbie gains or whatever, but I did get some gains. but now I want to focus more on like, what can I do to be more effective in the gym? So yes, I’m going every time now.
while I’m there, what should I be doing? What order should I be doing it to really get the maximum benefit out of what I’m doing? Because I can see, you know, what I’ve been doing. I’ve had some success. I’ve definitely had growth of lean mass. I’m definitely way stronger. But I know that I’m probably not doing
the right amount of sets or on each body. I know I’m missing body parts that I’m not hitting as much. So I’d like to get that more balanced out and maybe get a program or something. And so as I look into that more and find one online or find something to help with that, I’ll share that with you guys later too. Then if you haven’t tested for anything. So probably should have said this in beginning. If you’re truly weight loss resistant or having trouble
There are definitely a lot of online things now that are helpful that focus on weight loss, but even just going to your doctor and getting kind of the basics, getting your thyroid tested, making sure there’s no issue there. If you’re a woman of a certain age, are you perimenopausal? Are you postmenopausal? There used to be this thought that once you were over 50 or once you were already into menopause that you couldn’t consider bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, but
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they are saying now that that is not the case. And basically the idea that hormone therapy is related or increases the risk of breast cancer that’s been debunked over and over at this point. And I do wanna link some resources down in the show notes for you about people that I’ve recently been following on this topic. A lot of people who really have the latest data in mind, have the latest studies in mind.
that aren’t just repeating that old dogma that they learned in medical school 25 years ago that they thought that estrogen causes cancer, breast cancer in women, it’s just not there. And so a lot of these symptoms can be mitigated. Also, if you don’t know this, so what happens, do know how women’s chance for heart disease becomes equal to men after menopause? That’s because estrogen goes away. So once we lose our estrogen,
Our risk factors for so many other things like heart disease and everything else goes up in heart disease is still the number one killer, I believe, over breast cancer. So you kind of got to balance out those things that we’re trying to fight, right? Do you want to feel better and have a better cardiovascular health or do you want to suffer and have this old antiquated idea that you might be at high risk for breast cancer, which probably isn’t even true based on the data?
So I would just like dig into that a little bit more for yourself and like use some of these resources that I list, read about it, see what you think. So whether you’re paraminopausal, menopausal, post -menopausal, those are all still phases in a woman’s life where you could possibly use hormone therapy support and it could help you with weight loss. So that’s definitely something to check out. I’d also recommend that you test
blood sugar. Most doctors test for that routinely, but A1C is not the whole story. That’s your three month average of your blood sugar and it can be based on like it’s something like the life of your red blood cell, which is not quite the same in everybody. So it can be a little bit skewed. So it’s not a perfect measure. None of these are perfect measures, right? But fasting insulin, most doctors won’t test for this. It’s super cheap. If you pay for it out of pocket yourself,
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on like using Life Extension or one of those lab services, I literally think it’s like $20. And if that is out of the optimal range, you’ve got some work to do. And so if you know that your fasting insulin is really high, you’re gonna wanna change some things with your diet, and that might be part of the things that are making you resistant to lose weight. Also using a CGM as part of this, they finally approved them for over the counter use continuous glucose monitor.
So now you no longer need a prescription. I’m not sure exactly when that started or if it already started, or if I can just like go into Walgreens now and buy one. I’ve tested them in the past. The service I use is NutriSense. So if you go to heelnourishgrow .com slash NutriSense, you’ll get a discount, but it’s really great for learning just about how certain foods affect your body. If you’re getting, you know, these huge glucose.
excursions during the day. I hate to call them spikes because we shouldn’t be afraid. Like there’s a reason sometimes that your, you body takes in some carbs or sugar and it as long as it responds in the proper way, as long as it comes back down quickly, that’s a thing. As long as it’s in response to exercise, that’s a thing. I remember one time I was snowboarding and I was wearing a continuous glucose glucose monitor in
glucose went up to like 190 or something. Well, that’s because it’s a very intense bout of exercise and your body needs energy. So it’s pushing it out into your body. It’s very, very interesting. And it just can give you a lot of insight. So what I like about NutriSense is that it includes support from dieticians and it has a really great app interface. You can ask questions all the time. Just as a really good way to learn about your body, to learn some things that could mitigate some of these blood sugar things. And the blood sugar thing, again, like I said, is related to hunger.
it’s related to satiety. So if you can get those things in line, that would definitely help you lose weight and lose fat. And that’s what I just said, lose fat leads right into my next point, which is body composition. If you can get a body composition reading before you start your journey and after it is really helpful because for example, if I would have started this whole weightlifting thing without, now I would have known that I’m stronger. I would have been able to see visually in the mirror that I am looking different, right?
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but I wouldn’t have this thing as the scale was creeping up that I would be freaking out probably like, my gosh. I mean, I’d tell myself all the things that I know because I know it’s like, okay, well you are really focusing on weightlifting and you are eating at a bit of a surplus so that you can build muscle. And I would have known that but I still would have seen the scale creeping up and I wouldn’t have known for sure that it was muscle. So what the beauty of was getting these body composition readings as I’ve been going along in this journey is to being able to see
in numbers, you know, I’m a numbers person, right? Being able to see that I actually am gaining lean mass and losing fat over time has been really, really helpful. So even though the scale is creeping up, it’s creeping up because I have more muscle on me now. So I think that’s pretty fantastic, but I don’t know that my little brain would have been able to handle that without a body count. So pretty much the gold standard is hydrostatic weighing. You basically never find anybody doing that anymore. I remember I got it one
probably like 25 or 30 years ago when I was out in Arizona one time they had one of those mobile units that would go and you’d immerse yourself in water. That was kind of the gold standard back in the day. Well, now there’s a couple of other easier things that approximate muscle that are super accurate. So a DEXA scan is one. A DEXA does have like a tiny bit of radiation that you get when you get a scan. So some people don’t like it for that reason, but it’s very minimal. And if you go to a facility that focuses on
this particular type of body composition scan, it should be very, very minimal radiation. Or you can do a bod pod. And a bod pod is literally what it sounds like. It’s like it’s a little pod that you get in, and the air displaces around your body weight in some magical way. It knows the difference between body fat and body muscle, and it spits out a number. So those are the most accurate ways. I also have a body composition scale.
that’s with things again, heelnursery .com slash with things. Pretty much if I use it and I’ve used it for years and I love it, I will try to become affiliated with them just because it gets you a discount and it helps me with my free content. Like I quote unquote, you put out this stuff for free, right? And you never get paid for it. But when I get paid for it, is just knowing that I feel like I’m doing good in the world. And if occasionally somebody uses my link and I get a little bit of commission off of that and
Cheryl McColgan (01:00:00.75)
It is a very little bit for the most part. That just helps offset the cost of hosting the podcast and the recordings and all that stuff. So anyway, I always just like to throw that in, because sometimes I think people just don’t even know. And the same thing in my husband’s business. He’s a financial advisor, and he’s been in the business for over 30 years. He’s amazing at what he does, but he’s literally all commission. He doesn’t get paid unless he…
like does things, he doesn’t get a salary, he doesn’t get anything like that. So all the information, all the knowledge and all the getting up at 4 a to study the financials and to know the market and all of that, none of that is paid. He only gets paid if he then talks to people and they do something. So I just think it’s kind of interesting to mention those things very once in a because I don’t think people in our traditional job that just go to work and get a salary don’t think of those things in terms of how other people get paid for what they do.
Anyway, that was an aside. So the body composition scale with things, KeelNurseryR .com plus with things. It is useful. It’s interesting. It also does this other thing called. So that basically does bioelectrical impedance to make a guesstimate at body fat versus it has to do with the amount of water in your body and what holds more water. Can’t ever remember if it’s fat or muscle that holds more. But anyway, it gauges that.
And it also does this pulse rate velocity thing, which is related to your cardiovascular health. So that shows trends over time as well. So like if you’re doing more cardio or working more on your heart health, theoretically, it will show you over time that that is improving as well. For the body fat, I don’t find it to be super accurate, unfortunately. And I’ve been using this thing for years, so think I can speak to this. I will say it tracks trends pretty well.
If over the year it says that my body fat is down, that is pretty much correlated with what I found to the more advanced measures that I’ve tried with that. But on a day -to -day or a week -to -week basis, it might, I think this whole time that I’ve been slowly losing fat and gaining muscle, it’s basically said like gaining fat and week -to -week it kind of changes. It might say stable or whatever it says. It’s not always accurate, but it is a trend. So if I look at the very long -term trend, and I think I can go back.
Cheryl McColgan (01:02:20.088)
Definitely two years at this point, maybe three or four that I’ve had on this most recent one, because I had a different one before that didn’t have this tracking thing. But so over time it has shown muscle mass in a straight line going up. So ever since I’ve been working on eating more protein and then more recently with the weight training, it does show over time muscle mass has increased. But like when I really look at on day to day, month to month, has that shown that I’m
tracking in that way, not necessarily. So I just don’t find it to be super accurate, but as a scale, it still works fine. anyway, have that supplements. already talked about that. We talked about tracking. Let’s see, anything else on here?
well we’re already an hour in so whatever it is I should probably stop. well the final thing and if you go back in my previous content you’ll know that I’m a huge proponent of fasting and the reason that that started for me I’ve told this story several times on my content but my dad had cancer and I learned about autophagy and the Nobel Prize in 2016 and one of the most
ways that they thought at the time that autophagy was the most stimulated was by fasting. And so I started this as a practice. I’ve done it for years. I would say the last couple of years as I’ve gotten older and as I’ve learned more about this protein stuff and as I’ve worked out more all these kinds of things that has shifted over time where I still do an intermittent fast most days but I have not, I think the last extended fast I remember
I just did this hike when I was out in Utah that I talked about on my stories and Instagram. And I had done the same hike the year previous, because it’s a peak flower at the end of July. So I knew I did at the same time. And Peter was out of town and I hadn’t done my five day fast in a really long time. And he was out of town. And I remember I did that hike, which was a really intense hike. And it was like 60 something hours fasted when I was in the high. And it was amazing. I actually felt amazing. It’s like fasting.
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It’s just so unbelievable in so many ways for a lot of different things. And you can go back and look at a lot of my previous content on that if you want to hear more about that. My thinking on that has shifted. And I think the older you get that this possibly this prioritizing protein and preserving lean muscle is possibly more important. And then also recently,
I have been hearing some studies and some content and I’ll have to get the researcher’s name for you guys. But anyway, finding that resistance training in particular is a big stimulator of autophagy and same with exercise in general. And they even think that something like a half an hour of moderately intense exercise might be the equivalent to like a three day fast in terms of autophagy, which just blows my mind. I really need to find that study because I’ve heard it said a couple of times.
Now, and I just, find it hard to believe, like how can torturing yourself for three days to get this great autophagy that we all thought we needed to do that before and now they’re just telling me I just need to go exercise for half an hour, which I’ve been doing all along anyway, and I get the same amount from that. It’s just crazy. And some of this stuff is like, you know, we don’t know everything, even every study that they do, there are conflicting studies and like the ways that they do it. The one thing I will say,
that is consistent over the years in all the research I’ve read is if you’re gonna fast, truly fast. These kind of like fasting mimicking kind of things, or I’m only eating 500 to 600 calories a day, that my friends is calorie restriction. That is not fasting. If you’re going to fast, don’t eat. If you’re going to calorie restrict, restricting yourself to like five or 600 calories a day long -term is just gonna mess with your metabolism.
it’s going to slow down because that’s what your body does. Your body’s like, I’m only getting a little bit of calories and I’m going to slow down. Whereas when it gets no calories, it revs you up. There’s a definitely a study on this. Dr. Jason Fung has cited this one a million times, but it’s like your body hypes up and actually expends more calories when you’re truly fasting because it’s like, okay, I’m in survival mode. I need to go out and run and find some food. And so it’s like revving you up so that you can go do that. Whereas if you’re just eating very little calories,
Cheryl McColgan (01:06:40.172)
your body’s slowing down, because it’s like, this is all I’m going to have, I need to conserve it. So if you’re going to fast, truly fast, that is a lot of the problem with the studies that come up with different conclusions about fasting, is a lot of them weren’t even truly fasting to start with. They were doing some kind of like the severe calorie restriction. anyway, I would say if you’re going to fast, truly fast, intermittent fasting is definitely amazing. A certain number of hours a day where you’re not eating.
and you’re just drinking water, getting good sleep, delaying maybe your breakfast a little bit, or if you can, it’s actually more circadian rhythm aligned to stop eating earlier in the evening if you can do that. Socially, it’s kind of difficult. I always kind of just prefer to delay my breakfast for that purpose, but if you can do it the other way, that’s actually a little better. And it becomes also a means of calorie restricting because if you can only eat during this certain eight,
to 10 hours a day, that’s automatically gonna compress the number of calories you eat. And fasting does also have a lot of metabolic benefits. So I’m still a fan. It’s just, you gotta put everything in line with your goals, right? And so since right now, my goal was more this muscle building phase. It’s been easier for me to start eating a little bit earlier in the day so that I can get in instead of just having two meals, maybe have like two meals, but then there’s like a 40 gram of protein something.
Because when I was waiting until later in the day and I would just get my two meals I was finding it really hard to hit the protein goals. So you just got to make it work for whatever you’re doing and whatever your goals are. But my, like I said, my thinking on that is definitely shifted a bit. And I would say that I’m doing less extended fast now, still doing intermittent fasting. But maybe that’ll maybe that’s a again, something for another day where I can go into more depth on that. But that’s kind of my thoughts on the fasting.
And I think, yeah, so I’ve got definitely a lot of links I need to add for you in the show notes, but I hope that this was helpful. I hope that if nothing else, it helps show you like how I’ve come to think about things and how I’ve changed my thinking over time when I’ve learned new information, learned new ways of thinking, heard about new studies, had different goals.
Cheryl McColgan (01:08:58.848)
So the main point is, would say, if you’re struggling with this, go to your doctor, get some numbers checked out, make sure your hormones interline, make sure your thyroid’s okay. If all that’s good, get your sleep in order, get your stress in order. Those are underappreciated sources of weight loss resistance. And then try some of those things we talked about. Try more protein.
prioritize protein. Don’t eat anything else until you eat the protein. I guarantee you will find it’s hard. Like if I sneak something else in there, if I had a treat that day, if I had like a little, say I made some sourdough bread and I had a piece that just wrecks my ability for the rest of the day to get my protein in. It’s really difficult. It doesn’t make me eat more anything like that for me. Some people can cause cravings if you’re not used to eating carbs. I don’t get cravings, but I do find it difficult then to meet my protein goals. And I think just long -term
If you’re doing that over and over again, and so you more carbs in a day and you’re not hitting your protein, that just negatively affects you over time. Doing it, you know, if it’s a particular day or a couple days a week, that’s probably not going to be meaningful. But if it’s a consistent thing over time, that’s going to like negate your goals. So I’d say definitely prioritize protein, move every day, find some kind of movement that you like and do that. Definitely more steps, more activity each day. I’m not saying like no cardio or anything like that. I’ve focused a lot on the weight training for this episode.
but it’s only because that that is the thing that most people are missing. And it’s the thing that I never liked and I still don’t really like, but that I’ve been making myself do and it has made me see results. So that I definitely want to share with you and make sure that you give that a try if you haven’t already. Yeah. So if you have any questions, as always, leave them in the comment section below. If you’re watching this on YouTube or if you are listening, make comments or rate it on your favorite podcast player. can always reach me
info at heelnourishpro .com with any questions. I always try to get back to people or address questions like on this show. So again, I think with people being older and having weight loss resistance, this other thing that we didn’t talk a lot about on this episode, and I think I’ll save this for another day as well, but the weight loss drugs that are out now and how they’re helping people, some of the cautions about them, some of the things that could really help. I mean, if this point,
Cheryl McColgan (01:11:15.02)
You have literally tried every single thing. You’ve been down the road of all the things that we talked about here today. You’ve done them for a couple of months at a time. You’ve been super consistent. It’s still not working. Well, like I said, again, change things up. Maybe you could, you know, talk to your doctor about one of those things. And I think that there is a certain way to approach that. If you’re going to go on those, again, I’ll save a more in -depth conversation on this for later.
but I would just strongly caution you, you’ve got to eat protein and you’ve got to lift weights. If you’re going to go on one of those drugs, any of the GLP ones, it’s crucial because in all the studies, people that did not focus on that, a lot of muscle mass is lost and that just hurts you over time. You don’t burn as many calories. You’re weaker. It sets up this cycle over time of like muscle mass over time going down and down and down and your calories that you’re burning every single day going down and down and down.
But I do think there’s a case for it. And I do think in certain people, maybe that is the way to go. And I think I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Actually, my thinking on that has changed somewhat as well due to some interviews that I’ve heard recently and some new research that’s coming out, some new anecdotal evidence from people that are using it in a different way. So yeah, anyway, this ended up being a much longer episode than I ever anticipated. But I guess that’s what happens when you’re off the mic for a while. just, you know.
had the need to get things out there and to try to address this in a way that is like not just simplistic, again, calories and calories out. That is not the whole story. So I wanted to try to touch on the parts of the story that are more nuanced and that people often leave out. So if there is anything here that I talked about that you’d like to hear more about, also let me know that. Always looking for new show ideas and new guests that I can bring on that are experts at a particular area. There’s so many of the people that I mentioned here today and that people
that I’ve heard interviews with that I would love to have on the show. So if you know any of them and you want to put in a plug for doing interview here, I would love that. now that we’re, gosh, we talked about summer almost ending. Now that we’re to be going into fall and all of my events kind of for the summer are over, the kids are going back to school. It will be time for me to start approaching some people again for more interviews and more content to put here on the show. So.
Cheryl McColgan (01:13:41.43)
Anyway, it was great being with you again. I hope to hear from you and let me know in the comments, like, what did you get out of this? What are you going to try next? Are you struggling? Are you doing awesome? Just tell me all the things because it helps me along on my journey to, hear other people’s perspectives and to hear about new things that I should learn about. So until next time, have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you again soon.
Don Moxley shares his journey from being a collegiate athlete to becoming a sports scientist and working in the cannabis industry. He emphasizes the importance of movement, strength, energy production, and resilience in both athletic performance and longevity.
Don also explains the importance of heart rate variability (HRV) and its relationship to overall health and mortality. He highlights the value of wearing a heart rate monitor and understanding different heart rate zones for optimal training. He shares his experience with HRV and how it can be used to assess cardiovascular health and resilience. Ways to improve HRV include lowering inflammation, improving cardiovascular fitness, optimizing sleep, and managing trauma and stress to improve HRV.
We also touched on autophagy and the role of spermidine in longevity.
The best way to reach Don is on LinkedIn. He is also on X(Twitter) and Instagram.
Spermadine Life and ModeMethod are products he mentioned.
Takeaways* Movement, strength, energy production, and resilience are key factors in athletic performance and longevity. * Heart rate variability (HRV) is highly related to mortality and overall health. It’s a key indicator of health and performance. * Wearing a heart rate monitor and understanding heart rate zones can optimize training and improve performance. * Micronutrients play a crucial role in longevity and should be considered alongside macronutrients. * Exercise enhances the endocannabinoid system and brain function, leading to a longer and healthier life. * Lowering inflammation, improving cardiovascular fitness, optimizing sleep, and managing trauma and stress can improve HRV. * Autophagy is essential for cellular health and longevity. * Spermidine is a compound that promotes autophagy and can be obtained from certain foods. * Industrialized food may be deficient in essential micronutrients, highlighting the importance of a balanced diet and supplementation.
Watch on YouTube:
Show Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.43)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Don Moxley and we just had a lovely little pre -interview chat all about our things in common. Don went to The Ohio State University, was a collegiate athlete and is currently traveling around in RV, which if anybody that’s listened to this podcast before or read my blog will go back to the little thing that I call the Vegabond adventure. We did that for a little bit in a suburban, not an RV. But so lots in common, but…
What I’m really excited about is Don knows so many things about health and wellness and sports performance. And he’s got some awesome things to share with us today. But before we go into all that, Don, if you could just share a little bit, I shared briefly about your background, but if you could go into some detail and, you know, how did you get into this work? What makes you passionate about health and wellness and what you’re doing today?
Don Moxley (00:50.472)
That’s a, it’s a great question. And it’s, and, and literally you can’t separate the journey from the destination. It’s so, I grew up, share, I grew up in Eastern Ohio. We grew up in the strip pits over in Belmont County and I had every intention. I was a decent high school wrestler. I was, you know, I qualified for the state tournament twice, but never want to match there. But when I went to Ohio state with every intention of going home and feeding beef, Cabo for the rest of my life. But.
Cheryl McColgan (00:56.558)
I’m sorry.
Don Moxley (01:19.08)
I got to Ohio State, I was good enough to walk on the wrestling team, but it was a struggle. I was injured all the time. And I was one of those wrestlers that used to cut a lot of weight. I cut from 220 to 177 and hence the injury problems. But when I finally, you know, I was injured my sophomore year, I’m thinking, okay, what do I have to do to finally get going? And I had this kind of unique interaction with several people.
Cheryl McColgan (01:32.302)
wow.
Don Moxley (01:47.848)
in my life that basically said, you’ve got to get stronger. and now remember Ohio state hired their first strength coach in 1977. This is 1982. So this is right there. And the strength coach worked with football. They didn’t really know what wrestling was at the time. And, so I started exploring what does it take to get stronger? And, and then I found myself, Cheryl sitting in one of my animal science classes, animal science, nutrition, six 61 non -ruminant nutrition.
which is not a cow or a goat, but a pig. So it has a stomach like a human. And I’m thinking, well, if this is what we should be doing and farm animals, maybe this is what I should be doing for myself as an athlete. This is before we had sports nutrition as part of the athletic department. And I just, I fell in love with it. I fell in love with human physiology. I wound up changing my life around. And from the standpoint, I went from a guy who couldn’t get on the mat.
because I was injured all the time to where my last year I captained the team and, and wrestled really well and won a big 10 title and, and was, was way more successful than I should have been. so that kind of started it. I finished up grad school shortly thereafter. I did my grad work and exercise. Fizz, started working as, you know, an early personal trainer, a friend of mine.
was working with the Chicago Bulls and this is the Jordan Bulls back in the day and they called me because Brad Sellers who was the seven foot center on the foot on the basketball team back then and Dennis Hobson who was the NCAA player of the year from it from Ohio State back then went to play for the Bulls and Al Vermeel who now lives close to you there in Cincinnati calls and says hey I need someone to train my guys and so this was my first introduction to this kind of work.
About the same time I started working as a professor, I started teaching the exercise sciences there in Columbus at Columbus State Community College. And then that started a nearly a 30 year run as both a professor working in small schools, teaching primarily, doing a little bit of research. But at the same time, I always kept a foot working with a stable of athletes.
Don Moxley (04:09.416)
I also worked in the industry. So if you’re into fitness and you don’t own a heart rate monitor yet, you’re kidding yourself, go get one now. But I had a chance to work for Polar Electro, the company that makes the best version of that, which was just an eye opening experience. Because Cheryl, back then we were teaching people to measure their heart rate with two fingers on the carotid, which when you start to use tech, it’s a joke. It’s just an absolute joke.
Cheryl McColgan (04:32.078)
Yeah.
Don Moxley (04:38.6)
And so fell in love with, you know, started using tech to measure performance and do pro, you know, work like that. So big change came in 2015. I get a call from the, the now wrestling coach at Ohio state, Tom Ryan. He says he’s got an athlete that he’s struggling with. And, and Cheryl, I’m one of these guys in my house. We lived in a little town outside of Columbus called Granville. And in my house, I had a human performance lab.
I don’t know why everybody doesn’t have one. I had one. and Tom had been over the year before and I’d helped him achieve some goals. He was trying to work on. And he says he’s got an athlete that he’s struggling with and brings this kid over. And this is on a, this is nine o ‘clock in the morning on a Sunday morning. And he had wrestled a dual meet at six o ‘clock at night on a Friday night. So had nothing really in between those two times. He comes in, we wire him up. I started to do the testing.
It becomes immediately, to me, I immediately see this guy’s heart rate variability measurement is horrible. It’s essentially when he walks in on a Sunday morning, he has an HRV, which is a stress measurement response that’s equivalent to someone being in a room when a lion walks through the door. It’s a fully sympathetic response. And so we started talking about what’s going on. And I, then I,
did some testing and I said to the coach, I said, listen, what’s your problem with this athlete is that he’s maladapting to your training. He’s not adapting, he’s maladapting. And I said, you have to stop training him like you think you should train him and start training him in a manner that he’s prepared for. And so stepped in, the team had a lot of things happening with it right then.
This kid wound up turning himself around in the last month of the season. We helped him achieve all American status. Ohio state won a national title that year because we had three other, four other tremendous wrestlers on that team. and so all of a sudden I’m at Ohio state. Tom says, I want you on staff. So I go working on back with the wrestling team as a sports scientist. in 2017, we measured three and a half million data points.
Don Moxley (07:02.504)
on a wrestling team, we measured everything. And I ran correlations and I was looking at what makes a difference because so much of strength and conditioning and performance and nutrition and the adjunct fields, I say are dogmatic. They’re more religious than they are science, okay? And science means,
We measure the impact of everything we do. Is it positive? Is it negative? And again, with that athlete I was telling you about, Kenny, he was maladapting. And until we put a measurement in place that we could correlate workloads, recovery, things like that against, you’re just gonna run this kid in the ditch. So this is what we did with the team. We had a great run. I left Ohio State in 18 largely because, and this is the, this is what can be the funny part of the story.
While I’m at OSU, I have coaches calling me from around the country. Hey, what do you know about THC, cannabis and HRV? I said, I don’t know anything about it. I said, my guys are NCAA athletes. It’s against the rules. When I had a really good friend that I worked with at a wearables company out now in New Mexico who had gone to work in cannabis in Oregon. And he’s sending me notes saying, what do you, do you see this? And.
I’m looking at some of the research, I’m like, okay, this is really interesting. Well, he calls me one day, he says, you want to work in cannabis? I said, yep, I need to understand this. I need to know what’s going on. And he makes me an offer. It’s the proverbial offer. You can’t refuse. It tripled my pay from what I was making at Ohio State. So that was easy, but it meant I had to move to Florida. I moved down to South Florida. I lived in Palm Beach, Florida.
And I tell people I was selling weed in South Beach. But I was the director of applied science for a cannabis brand, a medical cannabis brand down there. And the amount of learning that took place was epic. It was absolutely epic. And when you finally pierce the veil of cannabis and what’s out there, the amount of knowledge and the amount of information is ridiculous. There’s so much there.
Don Moxley (09:26.792)
It’s a legit field. And I tell people, you know, Cheryl, listen, I taught the exercise sciences for 35 years. The number one benefit of exercise, the number one thing we should teach, the chapter one of exercise 101 should be the enhancement of what’s called the endocannabinoid system. It’s part of your nervous system that’s named after cannabis. You produce a molecule that’s called anandamide.
called the Zen molecule, that this literally it is, it’s what we go for. And we also produce a thing called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which catalyzes learning. Kids who exercise are smarter than kids who don’t. And so, today when someone asks you about health and wellness and all these things and you say, well, you need to exercise.
Unfortunately, we’ve brainwashed people to think exercise is about losing weight, which is the worst goal in the world. Worst. The benefit of exercise is that you produce anandamide, you produce BDNF, you do the things that you need to live a long life. You do the things that prevent you from ending your life too early, I should say. So that’s an important part. So.
have my little stint down in Florida, just do an amazing amount of learning about cannabis. And one of the guys I worked with down there calls me one day and says, you know, what are you doing? And I said, well, I’m looking for a project. And he said, what do you know about autophagy? And I said, well, I have a passing understanding of it. I said, I don’t have a deep understanding. He said, have you ever heard of a thing called spermadine? I’m like, nope, that’s a new one to me. He sends me this Ted talk from Austria.
that’s all in German. So I’ve got to, I’ve got to translate the whole talk. and I learned about this molecule called spermadine and, and I was like, okay, this is really interesting. And I said, what do you want me to do? And he says, I want you to do the same thing for me that you did in Florida. I want you to teach people about these things. So, three years ago, I went to work for a company called spermadine longevity labs. We have a product called spermadine life.
Don Moxley (11:43.816)
And the research shows that spermidine is critical in the autophagy process. And for your tribe that’s listening, you can’t address longevity, either health span or lifespan, without addressing autophagy. You cannot separate the two. And we now have research that shows that spermidine, this unique molecule, is critical in the autophagy pathway.
it methylates some of the key genes that drive autophagy in the cell. So there’s the short introduction, if you were looking for one. You know, started off as an athlete. I always keep a stable of people that I work with. I’ve become expert in this area of heart rate variability, understanding stress, understanding how it impacts you.
Cheryl McColgan (12:19.53)
I
Don Moxley (12:38.024)
but at the same time we now, and we’ve actually developed a product that if you go to a, a website called mode method .com, you’ll see a product there called HRV plus it’s a cannabis and fish oil product that I developed that we sell through our company. And we also have the spermidines and things. Again, we talk about that more as we go.
Cheryl McColgan (12:58.062)
Okay, first of all, Dawn, I am obsessed with your background. This is like right up my geeky little brain alley, everything that was in your background. College athlete as well, almost went into athletic training, ended up with psychology degree, so I focus more on the kind of brain part of the sports performance. But my goodness. So.
Don Moxley (13:13.672)
Good for you.
Cheryl McColgan (13:20.494)
I just don’t even know where to start. But since we’re gonna focus mostly on heart rate variability, I already feel like I need to talk to you again sometimes so we can go into some of the sports performance stuff, because there’s just not enough time for all this wonderful knowledge. But you mentioned, I think one thing that could be useful for some people listening, and then we’ll pop on to the HRV subject more deeply, but you mentioned way back that you were injured a lot.
Don Moxley (13:27.208)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (13:45.806)
in high school when you’re an athlete. And I think a lot of us, you know, the now middle aged getting over 50 kind of thing, you know, our bodies certainly experience injuries more easily. And I think it might just be useful to know what you learned during that time that helped you become more resilient because you went from being kind of injured, you said in your sophomore year and always being hurt to, you know, winning and having a really successful senior season. So what was it that you did during that time? Was it nutrition? Was it the way that you train? What, what,
Don Moxley (13:56.36)
Mm -hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (14:15.726)
or was, you know, what combination of factors? I’d love to hear all about that.
Don Moxley (14:18.888)
It was all the above. And you can’t, and as an athlete, you can’t not look at everything, but the two major elements were one, I stopped cutting weight. So, and again, you know, my young, I’m at six foot one, I would start my first two seasons around 240, 250 pounds, 230, 250 pounds. And I would either cut to 177 or 190.
I was the smallest person in my family. My younger brother who was five years younger, six, nine, you know, a biscuit over 340, you know, and a two -time state champ wrestling champion. I mean, a really talented wrestler too. Went on to play football at Ohio State. I had no business cutting weight like that. Huge mistake. Number one. Number two is since I was cutting all that weight and this is back, remember we’re starting this in the late seventies, early eighties.
The whole concept of strength and conditioning has not really bought into the general, you know, may you of the general public. And it was emerging. So we started learning about lifting. We started learning about that stuff. So number one, stop cutting weight. Number two, pay attention to the food that goes in your head. Where is it coming from? What’s going on? You know, college kids, you know, they’ve got a hot furnace and they can burn about anything that goes into it.
When you reach 40, 50, 60 years old, it’s not quite the same. You’re not burning quite as hot. So you got to pay. But the other thing that has really come to really inform my position lately is the role of micronutrients. Cheryl, so much of our nutritional information is based on the macros, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and water. And that’s
Cheryl McColgan (15:50.286)
Yeah.
Don Moxley (16:13.608)
Listen, that’s fine. I don’t want to minimize that at all. But when you start talking about longevity, we’re talking about micronutrients and we can spend more time talking about things like spermidine and NAD and nitric oxide. And again, the micronutrients that will be in our food. But to go back and answer your question, you got to look at everything. Stop cutting weight. I became an absolute gym rat. Spent a lot of time in the weight room and I went to where I didn’t lift.
to where by the time, as I was finishing up my summer cycle in 1985, so I was probably, this would have been August, late August, early September, 1985, my last workout was what happened to be the most, so I squatted, I doubled in the squat 840 pounds, and the next day I doubled in the bench 480 pounds. So I went from didn’t lift to was a gym rat and really strong, which was my superpower wrestling.
I was able to convert that into wins and, and fell in love with the field. I just fell in love with exercise, FIS and all those things that go with that. So that was the transition. And, and this is one of the big challenges for athletes. Can you move? You know, most athletes in college were pretty good athletes in high school. Their challenges, can they make the transition to the stress load of the collegiate demand?
and not break, okay? This, you know, cause it’s injury that ends your career. It’s injury that finishes that you don’t make it. So literally everything you have to do has to be about resilience, building resilience. In fact, when I lecture on this now, I talk about the physiological aspect of performance. And the first thing you’ve got to be able to move. So you got to have, you know, functional movement capabilities. Once you have functional movement capabilities, you add strength to that. There’s no use adding strength to bad movement.
because it just doesn’t work. You gotta get good movement first. Add strength to that. Build your ability to produce energy. Understand cardiovascular work. Understand your electron transport system, your ability to produce ATP, which is where it’s all at, which consequently, those first three things apply directly to longevity as well. If you want to live a long life, and when you get to 60, 70, 80, 90 years old,
Don Moxley (18:39.848)
You have to be able to move because if you can’t move, you fall, break a hip and die. You have to be strong. If you’re not strong, you fall, break a hip and die. You’ve got it. We don’t die when we run out of energy. When we run out of time, we die when we run out of energy. So everything’s got to be about mitochondrial performance, that part of the cell that makes energy. And then finally, I’ve added a fourth element to that physical and its resilience, your ability to withstand stress.
have it be a you stress, a positive stress, not a distress, your ability to do that and recover, this applies to a college athlete, this applies to that college athlete’s parents, this applies to that college athlete’s grandparents. That line is very consistent. And so, it’s taken me now what, 40 years to kind of get on top of this. The first part though,
was stop doing stuff that hurt me. And you know, there’s a lot of athletes that need to do that. There may be distance athletes that just get off on putting into miles, but if they’re creating so much cortisol and they’re creating, you know, challenges there, you’ve got to make sure that what you’re doing has a payback. You know, probably five years ago, I feel like I’ve stopped looking at performance.
physiologically and I start looking at it now economically. Okay. Economics is about return on investment. What do I put time into and what do I get back in return? Well, so much training when someone’s going in the gym every day and just burying themselves, they may, you know, there’s a dopamine hit on that. There’s, you know, there’s no doubt that they feel good, but there is a, they’re paying a physiological price. and you can’t ever forget that. So.
You know, this is part of the challenge as we work our way through this. Can I move? Am I strong? Can I produce energy? And do I have resilience? That’s very much a human guideline from athletics through aging.
Cheryl McColgan (20:51.15)
Yeah, I wish that this is something that I would have learned much earlier in my life because I still think that my body is suffering slash recovering from 17 years of distance running, which if I would have just put all of that time and energy into weight training, I’d be in a much better place now. But.
Don Moxley (21:01.128)
Don Moxley (21:08.136)
And when you did your distance training, did you wear a heart rate monitor?
Cheryl McColgan (21:11.886)
course I did I had the polar I had the one that went around your chest the very old school one. yes, I’m all about the geeky technology for sure.
Don Moxley (21:13.544)
Good for you.
Don Moxley (21:17.448)
There are, but the thing is, and what drives me crazy, Cheryl, is the number of people that I see training at elite college levels that are not wearing a heart rate monitor. And I don’t think, listen, I don’t think there is a single piece of equipment that’s more valuable. I think it’s the single, and when you understand physiology and you understand zone three, zone four, and zone five, what you get and what it costs you to train in each one,
Most of us train in zone four because that’s where we feel it. It’s also the zone that we pay the biggest price in. So this is, and this, whether you’re a distance runner or whether you’re a college wrestler, energy is still the same. And you can never forget that.
Cheryl McColgan (22:02.894)
Yeah, I love this. And it’s such a simple tool and now heart rate monitors are much less expensive than they used to be and it’s a perfect thing to really enhance your training without a lot of money. So that being said, you mentioned some things already about the heart rate variability and I really wanted to get into this a little more deeply because it’s something that I’ve been looking into more lately. And some of the research on it that I’ve seen basically says,
that it’s, you know, you can’t tell if it’s causative, because they can’t do a study like that, right? They can’t wait till we die and see what our heart rate variability was and if it was related, but it’s highly related to mortality, all -cause mortality, and you are probably way better on the research than I am, so I would love to hear your thoughts around that.
Don Moxley (22:46.472)
Well, we know the moment before you die, your HRV will be zero, okay? I know my Olympians are greater than 100 in that particular measurement that they take. And there’s lots of measurements. We’re not gonna go down the deep HRV rabbit hole, but that one that we see with most products, we’re all in between, okay?
Cheryl McColgan (23:07.054)
Yeah.
Don Moxley (23:13.032)
and you’re always wanting to push HRV away from zero. Okay? Now, it’s not like blood pressure where everybody falls in this relatively tight window. It’s not like that. And it’s very individual and it’s something that you got to pay attention to, but it’s a relatively new variable. You know, we, when I was working for Polar, now almost 30 years ago, they were integrating HRV technology into their wrist worn products because,
We didn’t have cell phones were just coming on the market. Smartphones weren’t out yet. We were still using Nokias and flip phones and things like that. But now we carry a computer lab in our pocket with our cell phones. And with good Bluetooth, these things connect and talk to each other. So we’re walking around with the lab and we’re learning more about HRV every day.
We’re able to go in and for your audience, let’s talk about HRV for just a moment. Heart rate. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (24:15.918)
If you could define it, I think that’d be great, because probably a lot of people are like, what are you even talking about right now?
Don Moxley (24:20.808)
Yeah. So heart rate, HR, heart rate is the number of times your heart beats a minute. So if your heart beats every second, you have a 60 beat per minute heart rate. But with heart rate variability, it changes in its variable. So instead of being beep, beep, beep, high variability sounds like this. Beep, beep, beep.
beep, it’s variable. It’s still 60 beats a minute, but it’s variable. And what we’ve learned, so the Russians were the first to really describe this in the, in the early sixties with their cosmonaut program. They had a cosmonaut that had an appendicitis while in space and they were able to diagnose the problem looking at heart rate variability off of a wired EKG they had on this guy. so the, the Russians really started to get on top of this.
Cheryl McColgan (25:05.454)
no.
Don Moxley (25:18.376)
Finland, which is right next to Russia, it’s kind of like Junior Russia up there. Well, they were, their tech is outstanding and they had phenomenal, they had phenomenal cardiovascular training athletes. The Finns, Pablo Normi and just their, their, their, their cardiovascular athletes were phenomenal. And they started to use, and by the way, that’s where Polar’s from. Polar is based up in Northern Finland, close to a little town called Oulu, which is where Panas, excuse me,
Nokia was based. So it’s like Silicon Valley of Europe. So this is where we started to see this technology come into wearable tech. And I saw some white papers come out of Polar back when I was working with them. I’m like, wow, this is interesting because Cheryl at the time, we were prescribing exercise. We would either do a maximal test, find out what your maximal heart rate was, or we would do the 220 minus your age and apply equations to that. And so,
That was, that’s how we would do it. And I’ve never been comfortable estimating down. I’ve never, I’ve never felt comfortable with that equation, but with HRV, we can measure the onset of cardiovascular benefit. Where does it start? And this is that zone one, zone two area. And then we can estimate up. And this was to me, this made a ton of sense. So I started looking at that technology now with, and again, over the last 30 years,
wearable technologies has gone through the roof. I mean, the amount of tech that’s come. And I personally believe, look at you, yeah. I personally believe that it is your primary key performance indicator. When I look at one thing to measure health and performance, well, let me take it back to athletics. In 18, we qualified our entire starting lineup for the nationals, 10 guys, first time in school history. We had eight All -Americans, most in school history.
Cheryl McColgan (26:51.822)
Hehehehe.
Don Moxley (27:15.144)
I could have told you day one of the tournament, the two guys that would not make All -American because their HRV scores were too low. They did not have the resiliency necessary to win the five matches over three days that you have to win to be All -American. They didn’t have it. My other guys did. And we were seeing this data emerge over about three years. So, and again, you can apply this to…
Joe Baggadonuts just waking up every day to go to work and make a life and you want to live long. You know, it’s been funny, Cheryl, that in the longevity space, I talk about the three thirds of your life. You spend your first third learning. You’re in school, you’re growing, you’re trying to figure out what you want to be. You spend the second third of your life earning in service to others. And so this is work, but…
You know, we were talking before we started recording. My daughter moved out. We only have one child. My daughter moved out of our house two years ago. and I looked at my wife and I said, we’re done. I said, she’s not coming back. She’s going to get a job and we’re done. And we started our third third. we were empty nesters. It’s now our third. It’s what we want it to be. And, and I want my third third of my life to be as vigorous.
and fulfilling, if not more so, than the first two thirds. You know, I had a great first third. We enjoyed it as a great kid growing up. College was fun. My second third, being married for my wife and I’ve been married for 33 years now, raising a child that you’re proud of does cool things. But now we’re going into third third. And I want that to be vigorous. So I’m constantly looking at what’s going on with HRV, because the more I can push that up,
The closer I, the farther I am away from zero and the better off I am.
Cheryl McColgan (29:16.078)
Yeah, and so since you brought that up, I mean, one of the things I think, AuraRing, a lot of people are familiar with this tool. And really, that’s probably what finally got heart rate variability more seriously on my radar, because I’m imagining that my polar, I had several iterations of it in all the years that I was running, and it must have had HRV. But for some reason, there wasn’t the focus on it that there is now. And first of all, I’d love to have that.
baseline now, but I don’t think that Polar would still have my data from like 30 years ago. So that being said, now I have this and what I’ve started to observe are, you know, what kind of habits or that I have have an effect on heart rate variability due to the research on this. What are the things I tell you that is where I notice it the most.
Don Moxley (29:59.848)
Have you stopped drinking yet?
Cheryl McColgan (30:04.718)
honestly, and I think I’ve mentioned that before on the podcast. It’s like some nights I like my ring thinks I’m dead. So that yeah, that’s one of the huge contributors to poor heart rate rate variability. But I’d love it if you could share with people some of the other things that can affect it in both. Let’s start with the negative and then we’ll bring it up to a higher note on what you can do to improve it.
Don Moxley (30:24.936)
Sure. Well, anytime that you’re doing something that’s going to create stress on the body, both internally and externally. And so I’ve had so many friends of mine come to me and say, thanks, you’ve ruined my drinking habits because I have my HRV. And I’m like, well, have you stopped drinking? And ironically, when I moved to Florida and was working in cannabis, I stopped drinking down it because I was looking at, I was looking at HRV.
And if I decided I wanted to modify my personality, I would do it with cannabis. because you wake up the next morning, you feel great. You’re not, you know, and, by the way, it boosts your HRV. If you do it right. If you do it right now, it can lower it too, if you do it wrong. but, but that’s, that’s when it really affected me. I essentially stopped drinking when I moved into the cannabis field. and so, and since then, so.
Cheryl McColgan (31:05.294)
I always wondered about that, good to know.
Don Moxley (31:21.352)
Let’s talk about what affects HRV. The number one driver of poor HRV scores is inflammation. Okay? So anything that you can do to lower inflammation will improve HRV. By the way, alcohol consumption, pretty big driver of inflammation, bad food. You know, we talked a little bit coming on that you’re very much into the keto lifestyle. Yes, ketogenics. If you’re producing ketone bodies,
you’re probably lowering inflammation. Those are all good practices. We talked about the variability. Well, the more time that I can put between heartbeats, the more opportunity I have for variability. So improving cardiovascular fitness. So being a former runner, I’ve got a feeling yours is down in the high 40s, low 50s, your nighttime resting heart rate.
Cheryl McColgan (32:16.782)
It was 48 last night.
Don Moxley (32:18.472)
There you go. So you’re, you know, you’re fit. You’ve probably got a VO two greater than 55, 60 in that range right now, which is a really good place to be. I talked to a lot of people and they’ll have a nighttime resting heart rate of 75 and they may be exercising, but they’re not doing the cardiovascular work that they need to build the mitochondria.
to drive the electron transport system, to do the things that you need for that low resting heart rate and high variability. That just tells you there’s resilience there. There’s a place you can work. So lower inflammation, improve cardiovascular fitness, get to that. One of the number one drivers of poor HRV is poor sleep. And when you look at things like depression and you look at a lot of these health problems,
They’re so aligned with poor sleep. In fact, the one wrestler that I was telling you about, one of the first things we had to do was I had to fix his sleep environment. And, you know, it was, I, so we could wire these guys up for 24, 48 hours at a time. And I’m looking at his nighttime sleep. And then I said to him, I said, so your girlfriend’s living with you. He goes, yeah. And I said, I kind of need you sleeping in a bed by yourself. I said, I don’t care what you do.
Cheryl McColgan (33:35.054)
Yeah.
Don Moxley (33:41.928)
before you go there. I just want to get your business done and get into a bed by yourself. Girlfriend was not happy with me at all. Kid turns around, makes all American. All of a sudden everything takes care of itself, right? But yeah, this was, so sleep is critical. You know, Cheryl, I don’t know if you’ve ever talked about it on your podcast, there’s a thing called sleep divorce, where couples will choose to sleep in different beds. This is a very,
Cheryl McColgan (33:49.966)
Yeah.
Don Moxley (34:10.343)
This is a wonderful practice to figure out what does it take. And we were talking before, my wife and I live in an RV now. So we have a king size, I don’t have two beds in this place. I have one. We have a king size sleep number bed. But one of the little tricks we’ve learned is we have that sleep number bed. We put a regular king size fitted sheet on the bed, but then we use separate sheets and blankets for she and I. So if I turn over, I’m not pulling her blanket off and things like that.
So this is just a little trick we’ve picked up along the way that just improves our sleep environment. So that person in bed with you is not waking you up. And respecting that person that’s in bed with you, you know, if, listen, and the thing that we cannot gloss over, trauma is a bitch, okay? Trauma is rough. And when I was in Florida, this was one of the biggest learnings I had.
So I go down there with this great background in HRV. And then I go down and I learn about this what’s called an endocannabinoid, a cannabinoid that your body makes called anandamide. We talked about a little bit of girl, the Zen molecule, but in your brain, you have a fear sensing organ that’s called the amygdala. Okay. In, in dogs and in mice, if you fear condition them, you put them in a cage and elect and shock them to where they become fearful.
And then if you harvest their amygdala and measure, there is a, there’s a drop of an anandamide that does not come back. Okay. That this is, and if you think about Vietnam veterans, when we took kids from the States and we dropped them in Vietnam, the closest thing you can get to a snake pit that there is, it’s, and, and it’s just about pure survival because remember that, that HRV system is about helping you survive. Okay. If you’re born in a rattlesnake pit.
The only way you survive is through hypervigilance. Okay? You’ve got to be vigilant all the time. If I take you out of the rattlesnake pit and I put you in a house full of bunny rabbits, you’re still vigilant. Okay? It doesn’t come back. Okay? So when you’re looking at HRV and someone with chronically low HRV, you have to pay attention to trauma. And so this is where, listen, you talked about getting your degree in psychology.
Don Moxley (36:37.512)
understanding, breathing, understanding. I don’t think the anandamide comes back to the amygdala. Once you have the hypervigilance, that’s you. It’s part of your existence. But recognizing your environment, knowing that meditation is critical, knowing that you won’t naturally recover, you’ve got to plan your recovery the same way you plan your training. If I’m going to train for 30 minutes today, I’m going to get 10 minutes of
breathing and meditation in the morning and 10 minutes of breathing and meditation at night. That’s going to drive the recovery side of the HRV. So let me go back and recap. We talked about the fact lower inflammation. Do whatever you can when it comes to diet, exercise, things like that. Number two, exercise in a manner that’s going to boost the amount of time between heartbeats. Improve cardiovascular fitness, improve mitochondrial performance. These are all critical.
Number three, fix the sleep environment. Have to fix the sleep environment. Number four, pay attention to what’s going on with trauma and stress in your life and begin to engage in behaviors to counteract that. Those are four key elements you should start to take a look at to improve HRV.
Cheryl McColgan (37:58.222)
Well, and since you mentioned that lowering inflammation is part of this, and as you mentioned, most people know, you know, ketones are very anti -inflammatory promoting all that good stuff. So that’s one way to do it. But I kind of wonder if some of that benefit in lowering inflammation is not only because ketones are a signaling molecule, but maybe also because it promotes autophagy. And since that’s one of your…
favorite topics as well. I’d love if you could just talk a little bit about autophagy because you mentioned the spermidine and I have not done a ton of reading on that yet. And I’m going to imagine that probably most of the audience here has not either and maybe hasn’t heard you speak before. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that molecule because it sounds like it’s something that you can take either as an adjunct to a healthy thing or maybe to counteract some things that you don’t do as well. Like get that in there.
and then maybe promote these anti -inflammatory properties through autophagy, through some of the other things that you mentioned.
Don Moxley (38:57.672)
So let’s talk about autophagy for a minute. So autophagy, it’s also called autophagy, self -eating, the Latin is self -eating. And what we know is that this is an evolutionarily preserved process in all animals, okay? That most people fast, but they don’t know why they fast. Well, fasting is a relic that’s in every major religion in the world. People who fast are healthier than people who don’t. Well, the reason is is that,
When we’re eating and we have food available the whole time we’re up, we’re constantly sending signals to our cell through insulin production and IGF that say, build, keep building. But when we fast, what we do is we cut down on that signaling. And all of a sudden we don’t have that signaling going to the cell and the cell says, what’s going on? Maybe we need to clean ourselves up a little bit. And…
When your cell is making, when a cell is doing what cells do, it’s usually making proteins. Okay, this is what cells do. And, but not all proteins are made correctly. And this is important because if it’s not made correctly, it’ll just sit there in the cell and will never, and it will be unproductive. And if you think about a disease like Alzheimer’s, there’s a buildup of tau plaques. These are proteins in the neurological cells.
Okay, what we know is that when you engage in fasting and you boost autophagy, you clean the cells, you lower inflammation and you improve longevity. All made, you know, there’s a great book called Blue Zones. And when you look at the Blue Zones, fastings, first of all, they raise their own food, which is really important. They manage stress very well. They’re not looking at iPhones 24 seven.
And they have spermidine -rich diets, this crazy molecule called spermidine. So we’ve known about spermidine for hundreds of years. The guy that invented the microscope described a crystalline structure in his semen. Now, this brings a whole nother question is, why didn’t we give the microscope to a woman instead of this guy? Because we would have been much farther along now if we had. But.
Cheryl McColgan (41:16.206)
You
Don Moxley (41:21.096)
It didn’t get named for another 200 years. A group of Dutch scientists named it spermidine. There’s sperm and semen. This structure was in there. Let’s call this spermidine. We all through the early 20th century into the 80s, the 1980s, we were looking at it. They thought it was cancer related. They could never figure it out. But in 2016, we gave a Nobel Prize to a Japanese researcher who described the genetics of autophagy.
This was really important. And when we start to understand the genetic triggers to autophagy, a researcher in Graz, Austria died by the name of Dr. Frank Medeo. Frank started looking at using spermidine extracts with senescent cells. So cells, a senescent cell is kind of like a zombie cell. It’s no longer duplicating anymore. It’s still alive, but it’s not doing what cells do. It’s just existing.
throws off inflammatory markers. It’s kind of like the apple that ruins the bunch, right? It just, it gets bad. Well, Frank started treating senescent cells with sperminine and reversed their, and reversed it, reversed the senescence. We keep looking at this and all of a sudden sperminine, we used to refer to it as a calorie restriction mimetic. It mimics fasting. Well, we have a paper coming out anytime right now.
that basically shows it’s not just a memetic, it’s critical. So some of the other memetics to fasting, we’ve heard of resveratrol. This is what Dr. Sinclair talked about in his book on longevity. Resveratrol works through what’s called the sirtuin genes and boost autophagy that way. We’ve probably heard of metformin. It’s a diabetic drug that is being studied as a longevity drug.
So it works through another pathway that’s called the AMPK pathway, which is the same pathway that exercise impacts. When you exercise, you engage the AMPK pathway and it drives autophagy. And then finally, there’s a third memetic in there that’s called rapamycin, which is an antibiotic that they found on Easter Island that blocks a protein production, a protein production protein, I should say.
Don Moxley (43:42.824)
called mTOR. So when you block mTOR, it boosts autophagy. But with all of these other memetics, what we’re starting to see with some of our most recent research, and we’re talking research that’s been done in the last 12 months, is that spermidine is critical for all those other pathways to work. And this is what’s really important. So we extract, so I work for a company called Longevity Labs. We have a product called Spermodyne Life. It is an extract from,
European wheat germ, so we get ours from wheat germ in Europe. We can’t find wheat germ in the United States that we can harvest spermidine from. It’s so low. In fact, in Europe, we go out and buy wheat germ, spermidine -rich wheat germ. We bring it into the factory, we test it again, and we reject nearly 70 % of what we buy and bring in because it’s not rich enough. So we get the really good spermidine -rich, and that’s what we run our extraction process on.
so sperminine is, is, is a molecule that in the absence of sperminine, you don’t get autophagy, whether you’re fasting or exercising or anything else. This is going to be the important part of what comes out of this most recent research. So it’s kind of like vitamin C. We didn’t know about vitamin C until, you know, 1492. What’d we do? We sailed the oceans blue. We put.
We put a bunch of people on boats in Portugal. We sent them across the Atlantic Ocean. They go into the Caribbean. This is Columbus’s journey. Do you not look how long it took Columbus to get across on that journey? 33 days, 33 days. But a hundred years after that, by 1592, we’re in the age of piracy and people are living on boats for extended periods of time, years at a time. And they developed a condition called scurvy.
Cheryl McColgan (45:23.118)
I forget.
Don Moxley (45:39.912)
which is a breakdown of cell walls that’s related to a lack of vitamin C in the diet. So this is the reason they started carrying limes on boats and the British sailors, they called them limeys because they had limes on them. But the people on the boat that didn’t need the limes, the sailors that ate the rats, okay? The sailors that ate the rats make their own vitamin C. And if you ate the rat on the boat, you didn’t get scurvy. So this is understanding micronutrients and going clear back to the…
beginning of our conversation, the role of micronutrients, we’ve started to see this development of these vitamins and we have a whole list of them now. We fully expect spermidine to have vitamin status at some point in time. That you have to make a dedicated effort to add it to your diet or else you’re not able to run all the physiological processes that lead to long life, good health span, good lifespan.
Cheryl McColgan (46:35.662)
Is spermidine a compound that your body can manufacture in any way or is this something that is required to get from our diets?
Don Moxley (46:43.016)
It looks like it’s required to get from the diet, particularly as you age. So it needs to come from food sources. You know, our product is a food extract. It’s a natural food extract. So, and when we look at people who live in blue zones, their diets are high -spermodyne diets. You know what, Cheryl, when we grew up on the farm in Eastern Ohio, we had two one -acre gardens that we fertilized with our barn. And…
The tomatoes and the beans and the corn that came out of that garden were ridiculous. Okay. I’ve never eaten anything like it since. Okay. You can’t get tomatoes like that even at Whole Foods. Okay. They just don’t have them. And so if you’re raising your own food, that’s a different story. But when we live in an industrial food environment, which we all do,
We have to take a look at, okay, what’s the impact of that? And what are the extra micronutrients that I need to get into my system? One of them is spermidine. You know, one of the other ones that we’re going to start talking about a lot is NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, which is critical in energy production. We actually just created a supplement for that too. So, you know, it’s this balance between industrial produced food versus what’s critical for good health span lifespan.
Cheryl McColgan (48:07.246)
Yeah, that’s such a, you know, that’s a whole separate topic about how our industrialized food is not supporting our health any longer and how deficient so many foods are in all kinds of nutrients. And, you know, you just took me back to I was little girl on a farm in Louisiana and those gardens and the orchard that we had there, it just doesn’t exist anymore, unfortunately, unless like you said, you’re
growing your own food, but you know, we had our pigs and our cattle. So yeah, it was all fertilized very well and very naturally. So we don’t get that.
Don Moxley (48:37.32)
And did you, did you suck the juice out of the head of the mud bug?
Cheryl McColgan (48:41.39)
Yeah, that I still never got into. People definitely love that down there, no doubt about it.
Don Moxley (48:48.968)
There’s got to be some nutrients in there. I hope so.
Cheryl McColgan (48:51.758)
Well, yeah, brain has a lot of nutrients. People are afraid to eat brains, but it definitely has some good health promoting things. So, whole nother topic. Well, Dawn, so since we mentioned your company, I just want to say the name again, Longevity Labs, and you shared with me before the podcast that we’ll have a code for everyone that you can get 15 % off. So, I’ll create, what I usually do is I create a special link and I’ll just say it here now so that people that listen to this will have this all set up when you hear the episode. It’ll be healnourishgrow .com.
slash longevity labs and that will send you to the link where you can get some of the products that Don discussed today if that’s of interest. But if people want to follow you personally, or I don’t know if you share about any of your RV adventure online or anything like that, but if people want to get in touch or find you, what is the best way to do that?
Don Moxley (49:40.808)
So if you want to get in touch with me, the best way to do that is through LinkedIn. I accept nearly all of my invitations on LinkedIn unless the invitation says, hey, the system put us together. You look like a nice guy. I mean, I don’t do that. I usually nuke those. If you send a note, say, hey, I heard you on the Hill Nurse Girl podcast. I’d like to talk to you. I wind up having conversations with lots of people talking about.
HRV, what you can do. So I still consult on it. So LinkedIn’s a great place to go. I used to push a lot of information through Twitter. Who knows where Twitter’s at now? I’m still there. I’m not pushing nearly as much information there. I am on Instagram. When we started the nomadic journey, I was putting a bunch of stuff up there. I’ve slowed down dramatically. I’m not.
I’m not sure the world needs another person talking about where they’re at. But if you, again, getting a hold of me, if you want to learn more about spermidine, you can go to spermidinelife .us. That’s important, spermidinelife .us. And if you want to learn more about HRV Plus, the product that we developed for improving HRV, that’s at modemethod .com, -O -D -E -E -T -H -O -D .com. That’s where that’s at. So I’m sure we’ll put all this in notes.
But that’s the best way to get me.
Cheryl McColgan (51:10.894)
Okay, awesome. Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and you are welcome back at any time to discuss any of these topics because this was so much fun and I just love all the knowledge that you shared today. So thanks again for joining us.
Don Moxley (51:24.36)
We’re going to have to do little little amplates, you know, and break it all down.
Cheryl McColgan (51:28.974)
Perfect. All right. Thanks, Don. You too.
Don Moxley (51:31.688)
Thanks, have a great day.
Dr. Meg Mill discusses the need to consider histamine issues when addressing gut health. She explains the role of histamine in the body and how it can affect various body systems. Register for FREE with this link for the Histamine Summit to hear more in depth discussions of this topic.
Check out my previous interview with Dr. Meg on migraines and headaches.
Takeaways
- Functional medicine offers personalized approaches to address health issues that conventional medicine may not be able to resolve.
- Histamine issues can affect gut health and lead to various symptoms such as digestive issues, anxiety, and hormone imbalances.
- Histamine intolerance can be caused by genetic factors, imbalances in the gut microbiome, and nutritional deficiencies.
- A low histamine diet can be used as an investigative tool to identify trigger foods, but long-term solutions should focus on addressing the underlying causes of histamine intolerance.
- Histamine intolerance can be associated with symptoms such as nasal congestion, headaches, fatigue, anxiety, and joint pain.
- The Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit provides valuable information from experts in the field to help individuals understand and manage histamine-related issues.
Visit Dr. Meg Mill online at MegMill.com.
Free Gift: The Essential Guide to Histamine Intolerance
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Meg Mill and she has been a guest on the show before so I forgot to look up the episode but that will be in the show notes so if you’re listening to this it was another great episode with her before be sure you go check it out. But before we get started we got a great new topic today which I’m super excited about and also a cool summit that Dr. Mill is running coming up so more on that later. But first Dr. Meg if you could just share with everybody.
your background, your PharmD, you now do a functional medicine practice. So I’d love for you to just share how you got into all that for people that didn’t listen to the interview yet. And then we’ll start chatting about our new topic for the day.
Meg Mill (00:40)
Yes, yes. Well, so I, like you said, I graduated with a doctor of pharmacy and then I actually went on to do a residency and was practicing as a clinical pharmacist. And I kind of have two reasons that I switched to functional medicine. And one was that I knew all the protocols. I knew what to do. We had what we should do and people just weren’t getting better. I’m like, okay, we’re putting them on more medication, but we’re not seeing them improve. It’s just like, okay, we’re sustaining this place. And then at the same time, I was having a lot of my own
health issues. So I was having, you know, a lot of digestive issues. I was having anxiety. I actually started getting panic attacks. And that was when I was at the point where I have to change. So I remember sitting, like my kids are playing on the beach and I’m sitting there and I’m like, okay, I’m here, but I’m in so much, like my stomach’s upset. I can’t eat anything. I, you know, I’m having all this anxiety. I need to make a change in my life. And that’s kind of when my journey shifted and I started to really look into more holistic ways of healing.
And that led me to find functional medicine for myself and finally get answers. I’ve been to like five different gastroenterologists I you know was we moved a lot at the time so I’d be like I’m gonna get an answer now when we moved to a new place and it just it was just not everyone said you’re fine you look like the picture of health of Listeners if you’ve been told that and you feel terrible go with your instincts because that is not true But when I finally found answers, I was like I need to share this with others. I opened my virtual practice
and functional medicine and really it’s been been able to heal help not heal really help other people heal so many different things and see these health transformations it’s been amazing.
Cheryl McColgan (02:23)
Yeah, and I’m sure a lot has happened over the last year since we last spoke. It might even have been longer than that at this point. But so I think you mentioned, you had some gut health issues before. Before we move on to the new topic, that’s such a kind of a, it’s really popular to chat about that right now. So I’m just curious, since we last spoke, is there…
maybe anything additional that you’ve learned in the last year or so or new practices that you’ve put into place to really support your gut health. Because I do think that that is such a good foundation for a lot of the things. And probably we’re going to talk about that more in an upcoming topic, but I’d love to just hear if you have anything sort of new to share or new thoughts on that since we last spoke.
Meg Mill (03:07)
Yeah, so I think a lot of it comes, you know, what we’re going to talk about some of this, because one of the things that I am finding is that more and more people have histamine issues in our world. And when you’re, when you have histamine issues, you actually have to look at gut health a little bit differently. So a lot of people are hearing from influencers and practitioners for good reason, but fermented foods, bone broth, probiotics. But if you have histamine,
issues, those actually can make you feel worse. So some of the things that we’re doing actually to help our gut can be making us feel worse or having flares and other things, you know, maybe you’re getting more anxiety, maybe your hormones are out of balance, maybe we’re having some of these other things happen because of some of the things we’re being told to do.
were our gut health. And so it’s tricky. I think a lot of times people just are out there saying things, you know, we’re in that world of information, which is wonderful. But then we hear, okay, I have to do this. I have to do this. You know, now the new thing is colostrum and that’s great. Colostrum can be good for a lot of people, but then someone that I was working with, we said, well, you know, colostrum is not what you need right now. And so we took her off of it because she had just heard someone say, everybody needs to go to the classroom. And she’s like, my gosh, I feel so much better.
because it’s not what she needed. So I think really my best advice is to get a stool test. I mean, stool tests give us so much information and we can look at your individual microbiome. We can really replete that bacteria that is low. We can get the invaders that we need. We can improve your digestive function. So it’s more about personalizing it to what you need than maybe just following just a general protocol because that’s what I see. Everybody’s a little bit different in what they’re needing.
are a little bit different.
Cheryl McColgan (05:01)
Yeah, and that’s such a great point because really things do need to be individualized. And so even if you’ve learned something new in the past year that worked for you or one of your patients regarding gut health, that doesn’t mean it’s gonna necessarily work for the next person. So I guess that being said, we should just, you mentioned it, histamine. So let’s talk about it. That’s kind of your new passion at the moment. And I would love for you to first just maybe start for people, you know, they hear this.
word histamine. And the first thing that probably comes to mind, especially this time of year, if you live in Cincinnati, like I do, is antihistamine because the pollen is insane. But I think people have kind of a sense that it’s sort of like a reaction maybe in your body histamine, but could you just kind of give a broad definition of it and then maybe go a little bit more detail into how it relates to your overall?
Meg Mill (05:49)
Yes, yes, absolutely. So, you know.
Histamine we generally think of as allergies like you’re saying but it’s actually so much more we’re finding more and more research on How it’s affecting so many different parts of our bodies because we actually have four different types of histamine receptors in our body So it’s actually an overall body issue and we can get into that but it’s actually what we call a bio Genic amine which is the scientific term but it actually the purpose so when the immune system detects an allergen
or an invader, its histamine is released from our mast cells and our basophils and it’s actually part of our immune response. So it increases the permeability of our blood vessels which allows our immune cells to reach the affected area more.
quickly and it’s kind of like cortisol where I feel like if there’s purpose but it gets a bad rap because there’s so many negative symptoms but we do need it for immune defense. It actually regulates our gastric acid secretion to help us break down foods. It can affect our neurotransmitter activity so it can affect serotonin, norepinephrine. It’s part of our body’s response to repel allergens and also can even cause bronchoconstriction in our lungs so if you breathe something in you’re
it prevents it from getting deep into your airways, and it actually creates an inflammatory response. And so in the purpose of an acute situation, this is important because we need to increase vascular permeability to allow the blood to flow to the area that needs help. But the problem is when we start to see this happen long -term, and we’re starting to get this long -term inflammation because it’s not being turned off.
Cheryl McColgan (07:33)
So similar to the same thing like inflammation gets a bad rap. It’s very important process in the body, but if it’s a chronic long -term thing rather than acute, so just to remind people acute sort of what happens in the moment, like you get some pollen in your nose and you sneeze, that’s an acute reaction because it’s just like maybe a one -time thing. Whereas like if it’s more of an extended period of time, your body can kind of almost go into overdrive. Is that how you would describe it? When it’s more like of a chronic condition that causes the issue.
Meg Mill (08:01)
Yes, so I like to think of it like a bucket. I mean, it’s just a good way to give an analogy. So think of your body like a bucket with holes in the bottom. And so as long as we’re pouring things in and draining out, so you need to fill the bucket, drain it, fill it, drain it. And as long as that’s happening, your body’s in balance and you’re using histamine for the purposes that we need to, and you don’t really feel the effects. But what starts to happen is if you either get holes in the bottom,
the bucket or you get an overflow of things filling your bucket up or both. And so when we’re looking at the plugs, like if we’re getting plugs in the bottom of that bucket, we’re looking at a breakdown in the way we’re processing histamine. So we process histamine in two ways out of our body. And the first one is diamine oxidase and the other one is histamine and methyltransferase. So the diamine oxidase is in your gut and then the histamine and methyltransferase is a
a process of methylation. So we need to be able to methylate to break down the histamine. And so what starts to happen is when we start to get different things happening in the gut, we can either have, well, we can either actually first have genetic factors that are variations in the way we produce the DAO enzyme. But then we also can have an imbalance where we start to get what we call dysbiosis. And we start to get this imbalance of this good and this bad bacteria.
and it can create.
different problems. So the DAO lives in the mucosal layer of the gut lining. So if we have issues with that mucosa, we start to get a compromised DAO. And so we can’t break down the histamine that we eat from our foods well. And then we can also start to get a leaky gut, which can also cause more inflammation, and it can actually cause more down regulation of the DAO. So we need to have those good DAO enzymes in order to break down the histamine.
We also can get nutritional deficiencies because DAO requires certain nutrients. So like vitamin B6, copper, vitamin C.
You need to be able to make sure you’re actually digesting and absorbing those nutrients. And so we need to make sure all of these factors are happening in order to break down histamine in our food. So we have histamine in some foods and we’ll get into that. They’re often healthy foods, but we need to make sure when we eat those foods that we’re breaking it down. If that happens, you’re not getting symptoms. If not, you start to get the symptoms.
Cheryl McColgan (10:40)
Okay, and I definitely have some follow up questions on what you just described, but before we do that, I think what you just mentioned is, you’re getting some histamine from foods. Are foods the only source? Are there some foods that more commonly cause this issue than others? Or where else might you find histamine? Because I think, again, going back to the pollen analogy, or example, everybody knows about pollen, but I think fewer people know what are histamine causing foods, or are there other things outside of food that can cause this histamine response?
Meg Mill (11:11)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, even even things like stress, actually, so stress affects everything so stress.
Cheryl McColgan (11:17)
Nobody has that.
Meg Mill (11:20)
So stress can actually stimulate the mast cells, so it can lead to a release in histamines. So that’s one thing. It also can modulate the immune system and lead to an imbalance in the TH1 and TH2 immune response. So that’s something that we’re not even maybe thinking is bothering us. We have the histamine -rich foods, which we can get more in depth, but I’ll just go through some of these other things and then we can talk more about the foods. But there’s also environmental, so think of your outlet.
our seasonal allergies, they can cause the release of histamines because our immune system has tagged those as invaders, even though they’re not some of that’s dangerous to us. So that’s an important point here to make is that what can start to happen, and we see this, so one of the things that can cause a big factor for causing histamine intolerance. So right now we’re kind of switching gears and we’re talking about what fills the bucket up and we’re looking at these things. And one of the things that can be a big factor,
factor is mast cell activation syndrome. And so what starts to happen is you get this immune dysregulation. You can get some nervous system dysregulation, immune hypersensitivity, and we start to see the mast cells release histamine from everyday things. So…
you may just start to react to so many more things than you should be. We see this, it depends on the person, but we can see it really vary and your body starts to react to everything. And so some of the things that can start to cause that are toxins, mold, we can have other environmental factors. And then we can even have illnesses like viruses like EBV, we have tick -borne illnesses.
We see we’re seeing this more and more in COVID. And so we’re starting to see our immune system have to deal with other assaults that are going on, which is causing it basically think of it getting angry. So it’s like, okay, I’m dealing with this. I’m doing this to this. And the imbalance gets off and it starts to just overreact. And so once it starts to overreact to things, then it’s releasing more histamine and then you’re getting more of these histamine symptoms.
Cheryl McColgan (13:39)
And before we move on to the food, there is another thing that you mentioned maybe a minute or two ago that I kind of wanted to bring up for people. You said something about methylation. So for example, now these genetic tests are a little bit more common that people will take and they learn maybe that they’re a poor methylator, for example, me. So is that the same sort of pathway that has to do with maybe being more sensitive to histamines? And so can supporting your methylation…
pathways with things like methylated B vitamins or other things, can that actually help you become more resilient in this histamine process or is it like a totally separate process altogether?
Meg Mill (14:18)
It is. Nope, you are correct. So it’s a little bit more complicated than that, but that’s the first step. So we need histamine and methyl trans -rays is active in the breakdown of histamine within our cells of the body. So it works by methylated histamine and forming it into N -methyl histamine, which then is excreted in the kidneys. And so we do need the methylated folate and the methyl Bs.
order to methylate well if you have that MTHFR. So we’re hearing a lot of, okay, I have MTHFR. Now I do think it’s interesting because I feel like people are now taking MTHFR as like, I have MTHFR. Like it’s something that is like terrible that we have. And really it’s just a variant. So what we’re looking at is how can we overcome that variant in your body? And so what we’re doing is, you know, we’re giving you methylated B vitamins, methylfolate.
in order to overcome that. So you want to be careful if you have this to have regular folic acid, but as long as you’re taking the methylated folate, we’re upregulating that. Now, when it comes to the breakdown of histamine, we have to be careful because N -methyl histamine can be more active. There’s different forms of histamine that are more active. And so we want to make sure that the whole pathway is actually your ability to
you’re able to excrete it out the whole pathway. So sometimes if you’re up regulating that and you’re taking, let’s say a methylated B complex and you’re up regulating methylation, but down further, you have like a monoamine oxidase variation, you may actually be blocking it further down the pathway. And so sometimes we have to look at that full pathway and make sure that things like B2, like riboflavin can help.
open up some of the parts on the lower part of that pathway. So we have to make sure that that whole pathway is open. It’s a little bit complicated to get into like eight that people probably don’t want to hear like each piece of it, but you have to just really the gist is if you take the B complex that’s methylated and you’re like, okay, I feel more anxious. I feel like my symptoms are getting worse than maybe you have a block further down in that path.
Cheryl McColgan (16:43)
super interesting. I’ve never heard that part of it before. All I’ve heard is, for example, I had this advanced test that I actually did a full podcast on one time. And that’s when I learned that I was a poor methylated and I should be taking the methylated, which I haven’t actually started on yet. Bad, bad, bad practitioner here. But it was because my, I’m going to forget the thing. You know, it’s very related to cardiac health. This number was a little bit elevated and he thought it was because of my
Meg Mill (17:12)
How much is deep? Was it? Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (17:13)
Yes, thank you. Yes, my homocysteine was a little elevated, so he thought that taking those bees might help. But that’s a good, all that’s to say that that’s why it’s kind of important if you know you have something like that to work with a practitioner, because for example, if I go on this, which I should try this, go on the methylated bees, then I should notice are any symptoms getting worse or better related to that. And then if I’m working with a practitioner,
like yourself, you would know that, okay, maybe that MAO pathway is not totally open. So let’s maybe like tweak something or do something with that. So I just think that’s like a good point for people. Like once you know these things, definitely work with somebody so that the things that you try, you don’t end up making things worse. Right.
Meg Mill (17:58)
because it’s like you’re again we’re hearing a lot of information and it’s
Like, okay, I need to do this and then we do it and is that right for you right now? And I think that’s what you always want to ask. Like, is that right for me? And is that right for me right now? And what I’m doing? Like if you’re taking something and you’re reacting to it, then you should question like, okay, should I actually be taking this? It doesn’t make me feel better. Does it make me feel worse? And maybe get some of that intuitive body feelings to see what how things are actually affecting you.
Cheryl McColgan (18:30)
Yeah, and actually that’s another great point that you said about is it right for you right now because I’m noticing that for many years I had really bad seasonal allergies and then somehow over the years they just got a whole lot better and really hadn’t bothered me for years until this year which I had been away living in another state for a while and so maybe my body got a little used to a different set of allergens and then coming back here my body’s like whoa, wait a minute. But you know, so if your system is…
activated in some way or you’re feeling different, adding some of these additional things on right now might not be the right moment to attack that. So I think that’s just a great point. And again, another reason to work with a practitioner so you have somebody to bounce these ideas off of, you know, when you’re dealing with health issues. But anyway, I would love to go back to you mentioned some of the environmental factors, other things, I think, you know, one really obvious thing is if you have, if you know you react to histamines,
one of the easiest to avoid maybe are certain foods. So I’d love it if you’d share a little bit about what you found to be the most activating foods for people with this issue. And how would somebody know that they’re reacting to histamines? Like what kind of symptoms would they be experiencing after eating a histamine food, for example?
Meg Mill (19:45)
Yeah, so it can, that’s where it’s a little bit tricky here, cause it can vary. So you can have the outlet, like you could find that you have a runny nose, you can have itchy skin, your face could turn red, you could have flushing, but then you could also have things like a rash come out. You could feel more anxious, you know, maybe a day within that day of eating, you could get a headache. So myo grains can be a big trigger. You might have IBS symptoms. You might like one more. And I think that’s where we’re like, we think of, okay,
just that allergy type reaction, but a lot of these can be overall body reactions that you might not be associating with food. And so that’s where actually one of the things that I have people do is print out a blank calendar. When we’re using the low histamine diet, I like to use it as an investigation tool, not a long -term strategy. And I think a lot of people can get hung up on this diet as like, okay, I have to follow this. It’s a complicated diet. I follow it exactly.
It’s really, it’s a good starting place to see if these foods are bothering you and if they are, we can see which ones, why, and it can give us a lot of clues and we can pull them out for symptom relief, but we’re ultimately looking at why is your bucket filling up? Why are your, you know, why are the grains clogged? And that’s what we need to do long -term in order to reverse this. But when we’re looking, it’s a really great investigation tool. So when we’re seeing,
There’s different categories. So we can see high histamine foods. So high histamine foods are fermented foods. We have aged cheese, we have cured meats, alcohol is another one. And then we have histamine liberating foods. So these are foods that are gonna like liberate histamine from your body. So we see strawberries, tomato, banana. Then we also have foods that can inhibit DAO. And so those can be actually something like tea, like black tea.
We also, caffeine can block DAO. So we’re looking at these different categories. And as you’ve noticed, some of the foods that I said are healthy foods. And so it can be surprising, even avocados are another one. So things that we’re eating maybe on purpose for different reasons that are valuable might be actually bothering you. Another thing you have to be very careful that makes histamine intolerance tricky with the low histamine diet is that,
freshness counts. So we need to make sure that you’re, it’s not necessarily a great idea to meal prep unless you’re gonna flash freeze because once you cook meat in different foods then histamine can actually grow in the food. So sometimes actually avoiding leftovers over 24 hours can be a really good thing if we’re exploring this diet. So I think that’s something that that’s kind of you’re not thinking about how long your food has been out and even restaurants because
you never know when they cooked it. So like that’s another thing people say, well I actually got food out and I reacted to maybe something that’s not typically high histamine but it might have to do with the freshness.
Cheryl McColgan (22:57)
Interesting. Yeah, my husband would be very happy to hear that because he’s not a big leftover person. So I don’t think he reacts to it. He just never thinks to use them. So anyway, that’s just an aside.
Meg Mill (23:02)
Thank you.
Yeah, well, no, I’m like, no, I can’t, I’m not gonna eat like, I’m like, will you be eating that because I won’t be eating after 20? I mean, I do have histamine issues. I have genetic, like I have some of the genetic variants, you know, I have
But I guess that being said, all the symptoms that I have are under control. So I’m not really having issues, but I also am just careful, you know, careful about the basics. I don’t have to really avoid the foods at this point because I have worked on gut health for so long. I’ve worked on so many of these things, but I still do, maybe I’m just, you know, I still do watch leftovers. Too long. Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (23:46)
So meal preppers out there, sorry about that if you haven’t have histamine issues.
Meg Mill (23:52)
If it’s in your schedule, then just put it in the freezer till you’re ready and then.
Cheryl McColgan (23:56)
Got it. So all that, so I think you probably, you mentioned that you were having this issue yourself, which is often how we all get into these paths of these little health rabbit holes we go down. And you started a summit this year, and I think probably partially in relation to exploring some of these new things, can you share with the audience a little bit about what the summit’s gonna be about, what kinds of things you’ll be sharing and…
you know, how they can listen in and learn even more great health tips from you and your guests.
Meg Mill (24:29)
Yes, yeah. So it’s called reversing mass cell activation syndrome and histamine intolerance summit. And we are going to be talking about both. So we’re going to be talking all about histamine, how it affects your body. And then we’re even going to get into mass cell activation and how you know if you have it, how it’s diagnosed and how this is affecting more and more of the population. I think one of the things that I just kept seeing is I’ve had the history, but I’ve been seeing more and more people come to me with histamine issues. And it’s like all of these, like we’re talking.
about unrelated symptoms that once we look at it through this histamine lens, we put these pieces together and it’s sort of like everything starts to clear up. So I have interviewed 50 experts in this field. We have some top names in the functional space that are going to give us great information. It is June 18th through the 24th and it’s a free event. So come, listen, learn. There’s going to be so much more information than you can.
even absorb because we have a lot of great speakers and a lot of great information.
Cheryl McColgan (25:33)
So just so when people hear this, I can create a special link to it. And so let’s say it’s gonna be healnourishgrow .com slash histamine summit. And that will be where you can go and register to join for free. And you said you have 50 guests. Are you allowed to kind of like preview or give a little share of some people that you have talking and the kind of topics they’ll be covering?
Meg Mill (25:58)
Yeah, so we’re going to talk with, so Neil Nathan is big. He wrote the book Toxic and he is big in this space of, because mold can play a role. We didn’t even get into that, but sometimes mold can play a role in really how to look into that. We have Carrie Jones, who is the hormone expert. So hormones are a big deal. And that’s even why you sometimes will have histamine issues at certain times of the month and not.
other times because we’re more likely to have histamine issues when we have higher levels of estrogen. Estrogen can be histamine promoting and DAO enzyme inhibiting. So we look at the hormonal balance. We’re going to talk about fasting with Cynthia Thurlow and J. Bin Moore on there talking about even how Lyme can impact this. And there’s just so many great experts that really are sharing such different insights. We’re coming at it from a lot of different angles.
to give you things about what we can do about it, how we can get this figured out, and then also how you can really manage it in your life. Becky Campbell is another one who is a big in the histamine and mast cell space.
Cheryl McColgan (27:14)
Before we wrap this, I just want to again for people, so they might be hearing this and they’re thinking, well, I don’t think I have a histamine problem. I don’t need to listen to this. But number one, just because you don’t have it today doesn’t mean you might never have it. I mean, we hope you never have it, but it could happen in the future or doesn’t mean that people that you know and love and care for might not have it. So just to kind of wrap it up again.
What are some of the top things that people could be looking for in their experience, in their life, in their health, the way they’re feeling that might indicate that this is something for them to maybe go to the summit, hear it, learn a little more about it so they can see if it’s something that might apply to them? What would you be looking for?
Meg Mill (27:54)
So you’re looking at like nasal congestion, sneezing, asthma, difficulty breathing. Those are kind of the ones you typically think of. But then headaches and migraines, I see it in so many of the people I work with with headaches and migraines have underlying histamine issues. Fatigue, so even if you’re having unexplained fatigue, heart palpitations, dizziness, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, PMS, irregular periods, flushing, joint pain, sleep disturbances, high or low blood pressure,
pressure, hives and vertigo. So you’re, as you’re seeing anxiety, depression, those are other ones. So as you’re seeing it’s, it’s a lot of different issues. And that’s where I think I’m trying to bring more awareness that, okay, if you’re having some of these symptoms, especially if you’re having more than one of those things, you want to look at it from a different lens and see, okay, can histamine be playing a role in what I’m feeling? Because when we look at it through this lens, we can do the right thing.
in the right order to really get a lot of different things to clear up at the same time.
Cheryl McColgan (29:00)
Yeah, and you just listed a list there, but the one that stuck out to me was fatigue. So basically pretty much anybody listening to this right now should go to the summit and learn more about this and see if this is something that could help you because, and you’re saying a lot of this, I mean, you named off a whole bunch of things that, you know, like, for example, I could do that. I could look at and be like, okay, maybe this is really what it’s been all along. So that’s, that’s really great. So again, for listeners, be sure to go to heel nourish, heel nourish grow .com slash.
Histamine Summit and you can register for free and then you can learn more about this and hopefully get yourself feeling better. I know after listening to this I’m going to be going in. Not that I wouldn’t have before because I’m a geek and I love learning about all this stuff, but some of the symptoms I’ve had lately, I think I should definitely go listen to this. So Dr. Meg, any final thoughts? Can you first tell everybody where they can follow you, where they can contact you, learn more about your work, all that good stuff and any final thoughts that you want to leave people with?
Meg Mill (29:57)
Yes, so I have my website is Meg Mill .com. Just -E -G -I -L -L .com. And I actually offer free discovery calls. So if you have any questions, if you’re curious, like, okay, does this apply to me? Reach out and I’d love to talk with you. I’m over on Instagram at Dr. Meg Mill. I also have a podcast called A Little Bit Healthier and we talk about all sorts of different health issues over there. And yeah, just I would love to see it this summer. I can also share and give you the link.
to I have a free guide on histamine intolerance and that gives more complete food list because a lot of the low histamine diets aren’t accurate or confusing and so I took a lot of time creating this guide so I can also link that too and that’s a resource that I’d love to share with everyone.
Cheryl McColgan (30:44)
Okay, amazing. Definitely I’ll add that to the show notes. So Dr. Meg, always such a pleasure to talk to you and see you on camera and learn about what you’re doing. I just love your work. So thanks again for joining us today and I will be listening over at the summit.
Meg Mill (30:58)
Thank you so much for having me.
In this episode, Cheryl provides an update on her personal health and wellness journey, as well as the recent changes in her life. She discusses her move from Utah back to Cincinnati, her husband’s open heart surgery, and the challenges of managing her online business. Cheryl also shares her experience with consistent weightlifting and the positive impact it has had on her health.
Takeaways:
- Consistency in weightlifting can have a positive impact on overall health and well-being.
- Focusing on the positive and finding silver linings in challenging situations can help maintain a positive mindset.
- Support from friends and family is crucial during times of change and recovery.
- Changes in algorithms and search engine rankings can significantly impact small publishers and online businesses.
- Expressing gratitude for the blessings in life can help shift focus from challenges to the positive aspects of life.
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Connie Zack, co-owner of Sunlighten, shares her journey into the infrared sauna business and the benefits of infrared sauna therapy. Influenced by her brother’s health turn around, Connie left her job in pharmaceuticals to bring infrared saunas to the market.
Infrared sauna therapy has been found to have numerous health benefits, including detoxification, reducing inflammation, improving cardiovascular health, boosting brain function, and promoting relaxation. It also has positive effects on the skin, improving cell turnover, reducing fine lines and wrinkles, and giving a healthy glow. Connie shares her personal experience with sauna therapy as well as what she has learned about infrared therapy over the years.
She shares how infrared heat can improve cardiovascular health, enhance athletic performance, aid in weight loss, and promote relaxation.
Learn more about Sunlighten and be sure to mention Heal Nourish Grow to get an amazing discount.
Watch the episode on YouTube
Takeaways
- Infrared sauna therapy has numerous health benefits, including detoxification, reducing inflammation, improving cardiovascular health, boosting brain function, and promoting relaxation.
- Infrared saunas can improve skin health by accelerating cell turnover, reducing fine lines and wrinkles, and giving a healthy glow.
- Sunlighten saunas are designed for efficiency and provide separate wavelengths of infrared light for maximum effectiveness.
- Infrared sauna therapy can be a proactive tool for maintaining health and preventing age-related issues.
- Using an infrared sauna can provide a relaxing and meditative experience, allowing for mindfulness and stress reduction. Infrared saunas can improve cardiovascular health by increasing blood flow, improving circulation, and promoting relaxation.
- Using an infrared sauna before or after exercise can enhance athletic performance, reduce muscle soreness, and aid in recovery.
- Infrared saunas can contribute to weight loss by increasing core temperature, burning calories, and boosting metabolism.
- Choosing a high-quality sauna that emits low EMF is essential for maximizing the health benefits and ensuring safety.
- Sunlighten offers a range of sauna models, including portable options, to suit different needs and budgets.
Episode transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.814)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Connie Zach, who is one of the co -owners of Sunlighten. And she said such an interesting story and background about how she got into this business. Her brother was having some health issues and I think it would just really be great to share with everybody. Not only how you got into this, but obviously some of the benefits of sauna in particular, infrared sauna, because this is all of a sudden, I mean, I’ve known about it for years and have wanted one for many years.
but I think in recent podcasts and just internet, social media, everybody is all over infrared sauna, otherwise known as photo biomodulation, say that five times fast. And so Connie is going to obviously share with us a bunch of that information today. So welcome and would love to just have you share about what got you into all this. I think your brother had some stuff, so let’s hear about it.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (00:56.034)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I’ve been super excited all day, so excited that it’s time. So this started over 20 years ago. My brother was chronically ill, had chronic fatigue and vertigo and fibromyalgia and a host of other conditions over general malaise and a lot of pain.
Cheryl McColgan (00:59.79)
Yay!
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (01:18.914)
He tried everything he could. It wasn’t until he went to his dentist where his dentist said, Jason, I think you are leaking mercury into your body from your fillings. And I would diagnose you with heavy metal toxicity without any like blood work. I think that’s what’s going on and you need to figure out how to get this out of your body. And the dentist had done some research on infrared and shared it with my brother and said, there’s technology. I’ve been reading some articles in Asia and
this wavelength can help detoxify the body and pull the mercury out. And I think you should try it. And so that’s what my brother did. He bought it in for its own at the time. It was really only one on the market and it was antiquated, but you know, it started to make a little bit of a difference. And I watched his transformation and was amazed. And simultaneously I started doing my own research. I was at Procter & Gamble on the pharmaceutical side and
I was really driven to make a difference in this world in the healthy aspect of life and thought I was doing that in pharmaceuticals, but I was really just putting a band -aid on everything. And once I started to do the research on infrared and the host of studies that had already been done specifically in the cardiovascular arena, I mean, it’s just, it’s still when I think about it, it was my blog only because my job at PNG, I was in the cardiovascular division and we were bringing anti –
We were working with all the big giants out there and trying to find a way to develop drugs that would help the body while providing as little adverse events as possible. It’s just really, really, really hard. First of all, it’s really hard to bring blood pressure down and stabilize that just in itself. Anyway, that’s a long answer to the story.
When I saw all the great science and I saw my brother’s transformation, I eventually left my wonderful job at P &G and brought sunlight into the market and the rest is history.
Cheryl McColgan (03:22.446)
That’s such an interesting way to hear about it that your dentist brought it up. So that’s very forward thinking of him at the time. I think we are all a little bit more in the health space, at least, aware of heavy metal toxicity and that it can be a real thing. But I’m sure at the time you must have heard that and thought, is this for real? Is this legit? And maybe your background gave you a little bit different perspective. But I also would have thought, you know, hearing about a light therapy at that time, before you dug into the research, I mean, you had to think like, this is a bunch of…
hokey, lumbo jumbo, right? What was that experience like?
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (03:50.178)
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, yeah, my brother used to say, because I did that for years. I mean, I was just like, what, what, what, whatever, you know? I mean, especially coming from my corporate background, even though it was on the scientific side, I was on the medical and the MD side. I mean, it was just very, very different. And my brother kept saying, come over and see me and like see this and experience it for yourself. And I was like, I would remember the first time I got to the sauna.
I got in and I swear I got in for 10 seconds. I’m like, nothing’s happening. I opened the door, he screamed up and he’s like, close the door and sit. I did it for 45 seconds. I’m like, I’m not sweating, nothing’s happening. And he’s like, oh my gosh, you’re crazy. But I mean, I was so skeptical. I’m like, what? I just don’t get this. So it took me a while. The cardiovascular studies, especially with coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure and just seeing,
the markers, the key markers such as triglycerides and systolic and diastolic blood pressure and some of the endothelial pictures of changing in the lining. I mean, just with infrared, not with other, nope, not with drugs. I mean, and I was so, I mean, I had just been so trained in the pharmaceutical that I was like, and furthermore, on the side effects standpoint, there weren’t any side effects, right? These people were like getting healthier hearts and.
They felt great physically. It wasn’t changing because pharmaceuticals, antihypertensives, will typically affect, not typically, always affect something else in the body. It’s just pick your poison. Are you going to have to go to the bathroom more often? Are you going to have lower libido? Are you going to be fatigued? You’re going to have to alter something. Yes, it may be at a lower dose. It may not be significant, but it still changes your body. So yeah, I was blown away.
I loved the fact that this was natural, you could do in your own home, it was working with your body, and it was making significant changes without taking another medication.
Cheryl McColgan (05:58.318)
Yeah, I think that is what’s really exciting about it because people are becoming more aware of the negative side effects of pharmaceutical interventions and sometimes even have, you know, a lot of, um, you know, conspiracy theories with all of that stuff and, and do, does the industry really have, you know, our best health interests at heart. So it’s kind of nice to have this thing that has no side effects. Like you said, you can do it in your home. It’s really simple. Um, people that,
have cardiovascular disease can safely use it. So that’s all really exciting. So when you were first researching then, it seems like it was mostly focused on cardiovascular. Since then, there’s been even more and more research down the road and it affects so many body systems. So could you maybe just share some of your favorite sort of like a broad area of improvement, let’s say from the therapy and kind of what you could expect if you started to…
use this on a regular basis. And obviously with the caveat, as usual, that we’re not medical professionals and we’re just sharing information here. So yeah, I would love to just hear about what else you ran into after the cardiovascular stuff.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (07:03.65)
Yeah, that is such a loaded question. So I, you know, when you said the word favorite that that because there’s so many benefits, but when you said the word favorite that just it drew me to where I just was. What is she? So like a couple last week I was in California at an amazing, amazing YPL Longevity Summit with like all the world’s leading experts and fields relating that kind of lead up.
Cheryl McColgan (07:05.742)
I’m sorry.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (07:32.29)
into longevity such as sleep and Alzheimer’s and you know mental health and hormones and I mean just more depression I mean they just get list goes on anyway at this summit Dr. Hyman shared some great new information on longevity switches and how there’s really four key longevity switches.
in the bodies and ways, I won’t go into obviously all the science, and ways to be informed about that and how it works, and then how your take home, how to help either improve the switch or decrease the switch. And what was really interesting to me is two of the switches that he talked about that are so key, two of the four, heat therapy, such as sunlight and therapy.
it needs to be used as an option, not just a needs to be, but it’s an option for regulating and activating the switch to decrease the rate at which you’re aging. You can’t stop, obviously, the chronological clock, but you can impact your biological clock and you can slow down the rate at which your chronological clock ages. So that to me, just the whole concept of…
You know, being in control, I get really, I have little patience for just accepting, well, that just comes with aging. I just, I, and that like puts my whole body, I’m just like, oh, that makes me just heebie -jeebies. I just don’t like that. I’m like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t believe it. And so I love this whole concept and, and infrared can really help. Cause so let’s break it down a little bit. So the way.
Cheryl McColgan (09:01.07)
I’m going to go to bed.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (09:21.826)
you know, infrared can help one of the many different ways is by activating your heat shock proteins, you know, and that ultimately is going to slow down the rate at which you age. It’s going to decrease inflammation, otherwise known as inflammation, but now we’re in everybody’s calling it the aging because it’s the number one reason that you age. It’s also infrared is going to be able to help.
your brain function is by detoxing the body, by clearing up the mental fog and just the overall toxic load. Because I feel I bring up brain, because that’s another one of my favorite things lately is I feel that there’s so many things going on now, post -COVID, that everybody is running a million miles an hour.
they were overstimulated with our brain. We really need to make sure we’re stressed. We really need to make sure we’re taking control and taking care of ourselves and treating ourselves with kindness and great wellness tools and infrared, you know, sauna, sunlight, sauna is a great way to do that because it really helps to decrease cortisol and helps you stress less and manage the stress as well as…
the detoxification relief and getting purging all those toxic elements like my brother, you know, going back to, you know, having metal toxicity, but there’s, you know, lots of other toxins, you know, that can, that we were exposed to 700 ,000 chemicals every single day, you know, and, um, we need to get those out of our body. And it, so it shouldn’t be just a normal routine, right? It should be just corporate it part of your daily lifestyle. If you can only do it a couple of times a week, that’s fine, but just getting into your lifestyle versus doing it.
as a treatment for something once in a while.
Cheryl McColgan (11:17.55)
Yeah, and once it’s once your health has already been negatively impacted, I mean,
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (11:22.786)
Right, right. I’m not sure if you wanted to share your story, but I’d love to hear your experience and everything that you do. But once you’re having to respond, it’s a different path than using as a proactive tool to be healthy, to decrease inflammation, I’ll say it the right way.
to decrease inflammation, to detoxify, to de -stress, to allow the body to be in a parasympathetic state. These days, I just feel like that’s so needed and so good for us, is to just sit, breathe, absorb the healing energy, and have mindfulness. All things that…
Separately independently are good for us, but if we can do them all together, I mean wow what a wonderful experience What a great thing to do for our body mind and spirit
Cheryl McColgan (12:25.326)
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s probably one of the most underrated. You said, you know, maybe sharing a little bit about my experience, my experience with the sauna specifically. I think I mentioned, I mean, they’ve been on my radar for so long. I can’t even, for much longer than this whole, you know, recent kind of frenzy about the infrared. And part of that is just because of my overall, you know, interest in health and wellness, but also due to, you know, family history, there’s a lot of…
everything in my family, a lot of cancer. My mom had a heart attack at a pretty young age. She’s a smoker, so hopefully that’s not, hopefully that’s more related to that. But you know, learning about something that I could do that’s so simple. And it is, I mean, you know, if you get a full -size sauna, it’s a financial investment. But you know, if you can afford it, I mean, I’d rather do that and have my health than.
be dealing with cancer treatments and stuff like that down the road. So for me, it makes sense. I totally get that it can be, you know, cost prohibitive for others. But I think one of the most underrated benefits of the sauna is simply having this new ritual. I’m very into rituals in my life around health and wellness and going down in the morning and just, it’s almost, it’s almost like a meditation practice, right? So I just go in there and I stay for a pretty extended amount of time, but it’s my time to just.
not feel like I have to do anything else. Like I don’t have to be exercising and listening to my pod, you know, the other podcasts that I listen to to keep up on everything. I can literally just lay there and just soak in the healing, you know, basically, and get caught up on some of my podcast stuff or sometimes I’ll just, you know, listen to some nice music. But I think the most underrated aspect, this is a long answer to your question, is just the relaxation aspect of it. And because it’s in some ways it seems like it’s definitely a little bit intense, right? Like it’s the heat. And so you kind of have to
I find toward the end of my session, I have to focus a little to kind of, you know, stay in there, but it’s, that’s all really good. That’s all part of like a meditation practice. So I think the relaxation aspect is, is absolutely amazing. And, you know, I didn’t really cover this up, but you can see I’m a little red in my face right now, because I actually did my sauna before this, just kind of have it fresh in my mind. And, um,
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (14:36.642)
Awesome!
Cheryl McColgan (14:39.566)
The skin, like can we talk about skin benefits from red light and infrared? Because I think that’ll definitely interest people a lot too. So it’s a lot of your internal wellness, of course, but there’s also some external skin benefits as well.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (14:42.178)
Yeah.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (14:52.738)
Yeah, yeah. So I want to build on two things. I’m going to answer your question, but I want to also come back and tie into because I heard a talk from Peter Atia at the at the YPO Longevity Summit and I want to tie into something. Yeah, so I want to tie into something he said. I think you’ll I think you’ll enjoy it, but I’ll come back to what he said. So first, let’s take a talk to the skin, but let’s take a step back because I want to I want to break down the.
Cheryl McColgan (15:05.166)
One of the ones I’m usually listening to in there, by the way.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (15:22.37)
infrared spectrum because that helps people understand the different parts because we’re bringing up we’re talking about photobiomodulation, we’re talking about infrared, we’re talking about heat, we’re talking about light. Let me break it down and let’s also let me explain the difference between the infrared spectrum and traditional heat. So I’ll start there and then we’ll kind of drill down and then just stop me if you want me to clarify any of the parts of that. So.
Cheryl McColgan (15:40.974)
Yes, love.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (15:48.834)
What’s the difference between infrared and traditional? So traditional heat is hot air and you get hot because the air is hot. That’s simple. And typically when people think of traditional heat, they’re usually speaking of hotter temperatures because it takes hotter temperatures for you to get hot because you’re waiting for the air to get hot. So it’s just, you know, experience. So infrared.
is a spectrum within a spectrum. So it’s a spectrum within the spectrum of light that comes from the sun. The majority of the sun’s light is in the infrared. Let me say that a different way. Infrared constitutes about 55 % of the sun’s light. So within infrared, there’s, let’s call it four different parts, which is the far infrared spectrum. And that’s delivered to the body.
via heat, okay? So you’re feeling it. And then mid -infrared is also heat, but it’s a little bit hotter. That works on your joints and your tissues. Let me go back to far infrared and say where it works. So that is absorbed by your water molecules and it helps to heat up your core temperature. And by heating up the core temperatures where you get the myriad of different health benefits.
and next to mid -infrared is the near -infrared. Okay, so now we get into the light category. And this is one of the aspects of infrared that makes it special is that you get so much for one spectrum. I mean, it’s absolutely magical the way the heat works with your body and the light works with your body and they all, each part of the spectrum.
impacts your body at a different level and provides different benefits. So you can do just Far and Front. That’s what we studied for, like when we found out when my brother got well from detox, we really focused on Far and Front. It wasn’t until 10 years later that we discovered, you know, MID, NIR, and RED. Okay, now I’m back to NIR, which is part of the photobiomodulation category, but it’s also known as NIR and FRORET. So it has two different names.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (18:04.194)
It is light. It can be delivered by heat, but it would be so incredibly hot that we would get burned. So in order to get the right frequency and the right quantity, you need to convert it to LEDs. You need to convert it to light. Near infrared is invisible light. So when you’re inside, for example, the sauna behind me, which has all four, there’s LEDs that are clear.
And then there is one light that is a different color, just so you can tell it’s on and it’s active. And it penetrates the skin, in which we’re going to talk about the benefits of why that matters in a second. And then right next to that is red light, which also penetrates the skin. The difference is two differences between red light and near and far. I get this question. It’s probably one of the most commonly asked questions to me out of everything. What’s the difference between red and near? The big, huge difference is two things. One is red is visible and near is not.
And the second is near infrared goes deeper into the skin than red light does. Do they have the same benefits? They pretty much have the exact same benefits. There is a benefit to delivering both together because you do have different depths of penetration into the skin. So you’re getting kind of twice the impact and there’s a benefit to that. So skin, get back to your question. So there’s two.
Um, things I always like to talk about with skin and benefits of, um, infrared in general. When I say in general, I’m talking about the entire spectrum. And I have a favorite saying we opened it, um, some light and day spa 2008, which is a day spa that’s downstairs in our corporate headquarters. And we opened it up so that to showcase our technology. And I spent, um, about a week down there and we had our saunas down there and I spent a week down there just in the, um,
what’s it called, not waiting room, but in the like, the, where you check out that area. What? Yeah, yeah, exactly. The lobby. Just sitting, we had like a bench and I just kind of sat over there away from everybody just to listen to people and kind of just hear the conversations without them knowing, you know, why I was there. And the common thread that I loved so much that I heard was people that use the sauna came out and they’re just, they were glowing and they,
Cheryl McColgan (20:03.214)
lobby kind of thing. Like the lobby kind of thing or just the yeah.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (20:27.778)
just kept talking about how great they would feel and oh my gosh, I can’t wait to come back and do this again. So on the farm for red category with your skin, if you purify the body, the skin will follow, right? So you have this beautiful radiant glow because your body is cleaner and lighter than it was before because of the farm for red detoxifying the body and elevating the core temperature, increasing circulation, getting more oxygen to all of your tissues.
All of that provides such a beautiful glow to the body. And then the near and the red light have a topical, have a direct benefit to the skin. So they’re penetrating. They’re kind of like when you do exfoliation, but at a deeper level to your skin, and you’re just really, really working hard to get the dead skin cells off and just get it really purified and clean, but at a deeper level.
you were not able to do that. You’re not able to exfoliate as deep into the skin as red light and near infrared is able to. But when it does that, it accelerates cell turnover and so it eliminates fine lines and wrinkles. It boosts collagen. It helps with elastin. It just helps give your skin that younger looking healthy glow on the outside. And then far and far does it on the inside out. So I love the combination of somebody’s…
If skin is your goal, I wouldn’t stop at near and red. I would do near and red and I would do it all because there is nothing better than that just really clean looking. You can’t get that same kind of inner glow from detoxifying your body with red and near. You really need, you know, the sweat coming from from farm for red. So.
That is a long answer, but it helps with all sorts of different skin conditions too. So if you have different types of things going on it, because it just the way it gets your circulation going and it gets low. So often so many people I call it getting stuck. It’s just their body as far as, it’s like a car that is not operating fully.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (22:46.434)
perfect way, our bodies that happens, and infrared is such a great way to get it back on track.
Cheryl McColgan (22:52.654)
Yeah, and I think the one thing that you mentioned that I like about the efficiency of is particularly some of the models that you have because it has all of those things in one container, which quite literally, right? But I guess one thing that I’ve heard, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this, that some people feel like that the infrared, well, not the infrared, but more the red light.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (23:05.314)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (23:18.382)
therapy for skin that it may not be as effective in a sauna setting. Because what you typically see they’re promoting is like standing in front of a panel or having the little mask on your face or something like that. So if you were to want to utilize the sauna in the most effective way possible, you’re already getting the far infrared, you’re getting the heat, all of those things that you mentioned, is there a way?
to more efficiently use the technology that’s in your saunas? Or do you feel that just having them in there, that that is actually enough? Because that’s the one thing I’ve kind of heard as a negative, is like, well, the panels don’t really do anything because maybe you’re not close enough to them or something like that.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (23:56.834)
So I’m not sure I understand the question, but let me answer how I think you’re asking. But if you don’t, please stop me. So in the impulse, we have separate far infrared heaters, completely separate mid -infrared, completely separate near, and completely separate red. So.
Each wavelength is separated out independently. You can use it independently or we have six different programs, which we can talk about too, where we have done in the background, we have blended it all together based on science to accomplish six different health goals, such as relaxation, detoxification, weight loss, anti -aging, pain relief, and cardiovascular. So those are the six different programs. As far as efficiency, I don’t…
think there’s a better product on the market for efficiency than impulse because we have strategically placed all of the panels in the right location so that you can be close to them. I mean, I, for example, I just had my sauna and I get right up next to it. There’s no reason. I mean, it’s not, it’s not this massive. I mean, it’s, it’s nice size cabinet, but it’s not, it’s not like a room where you’re, you’re too far away. And what’s great is you don’t.
have to be standing. You can be comfortable while receiving the wavelength into your body. Because the way light energy works, there’s a certain distance. But as long as you’re within that distance and your body is receiving it, you’re getting the benefits. The other thing that I love is that
Light energy is a, how do I say this? It’s not temporary, it’s not the right word. It is a, like a short and sweet type treatment. Meaning that only so many joules of energy, of light energy, only so many, let me use a different word, only just so many doses, a different layman term, only so many dose, you can only receive so much into your body at a particular moment in time. And it,
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (26:12.162)
does not take very long. So, and while you’re in the sauna, you might as well check that box, right? You might as well like get that done. Okay, got my red light, got my near infrared light, done. Like I got my 10 minutes and I’m good. Now the rest of my time, I’m gonna sit here and I’m going to do breath work or I’m gonna do mindfulness or I’m going to meditate, or I’m going to journal.
Or my big thing my big new thing. Sorry I got so excited because I just got back and so I have all these new things I’m gonna try and I’ve been doing Focusing based on what I learned, you know in LA at the longevity summit was the importance of mobility and the endless how quick you can How quickly you can move your body
to increase your mobility. And one of the best ways to increase your mobility is doing it in a elevated, like heated environment, because it’s going to soften the muscles, it’s going to increase your flexibility. And so I can check my red light, my near and far light, get done. Now I’m going to spend the next 10 minutes doing, you know, some hip stretches and some shoulder stretches and these new things I learned. One of my favorite things I learned, can I share? Or not learn, okay.
Cheryl McColgan (27:29.678)
Yes, please. I was like, I already stretch in there, but I’m if there’s a new level, I’m ready for it.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (27:34.05)
Well, so I love this exercise that he started us with. We did it. It was called a morning experiential workshop. I think we started like 6 45 before the conference started and we’re all in a circle. And he’s like, OK, so the first thing I want you to do is to squat down to the ground, but without using your hands. So get down to the ground and get into a seated position, but do not touch anything. And that sounds so simple.
You know, and but I kind of was looking around. I mean, like most people, you know, were not able to do that. And I just I made a mental image. I thought, OK, I am always going to be able to get down to the ground and get back up, by the way. You know, but that’s such a simple thing that that, you know, we always want to be able to do. Nobody wants to like be sitting down and be like, oh, no, I can’t get up. And so.
Cheryl McColgan (28:14.286)
I’m sorry.
Yeah.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (28:31.842)
That’s something that the more you do it, then the more your body gets trained, right, to do that. And then you can get down, get up really easily, but not without, you know, without reaching for help. So that’s my newest thing is I’ll stand up and then get down to the ground and then stay down there. Cause they were talking about the importance of getting your body, you know, your hips sitting on the ground versus sitting in a chair. Cause we sit in chairs so much that it’s important to, you know, change the positioning for hip mobility.
So anyway, that’s just a new thing.
Cheryl McColgan (29:02.702)
Yeah, no, I highly recommend everybody stretching there. I used to teach hot yoga for many years. So when you say about loosening up in the hot room, I’m very familiar with that. And that is another great use of the sauna. In fact, I just had a really hard workout last week where he had me doing something that was like really tapped into my hamstrings in a totally new way. So the next morning when I got in the sauna, I was…
you know, doing some hamstring stretches and man, I could hardly straighten my leg at first, not even kidding. And then just within a, you know, couple of short minutes in the sauna, I was like loosened up again. So I can definitely attest to the benefit of that for sure.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (29:45.09)
That’s the other thing that near infrared on that note, I forgot, I don’t think I mentioned this, but when we talk about being tight, specifically like with those, I call them the, I don’t know why I call them the hard to reach areas, but it just goes back to when I was training for a marathon, like my knees, my feet, the back of my neck, like those kind of just, those areas more like on the bone, near and red.
are really, really good for decreasing inflammation in those areas. I mean, there’s lots of studies even on fractures, you know, and like muscle loss and wounds. It just really helps to put the bone and body back together as well as decrease the inflammation that’s causing that pain on the body. I mean, I used to, my feet used to, and my knees, oh my goodness, after a long run, they used to hurt.
so badly, I was so tight. And then I would, barely would take me forever. My sauna is my basement, so I have to go down the stairs and it would take me forever to get down the stairs. You know, like, oh, I’m coming, I’m coming, sauna, like wait for me. I don’t know, I get in, I would put my feet and my knees, there’s a way you could put both of them right directly up against the LEDs. And literally, I would start to feel.
Cheryl McColgan (30:54.126)
Hahaha
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (31:11.746)
like it just start to like relax and I could feel the blood flow and everything starting to come back to normal. I’m like, oh my God. Cause when I would go down there, it felt like it felt tight, but also like pins and needles. Like it was just like glass. It’s about it. Like a glass was, you know, like located inside my knee and my feet. It was so painful. And when I was done, I could just run up the stairs. It was amazing. It was amazing. It was a key, key part of my recovery. Like I really credit, you know,
Cheryl McColgan (31:35.566)
It really is amazing.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (31:41.346)
my sauna for helping me through that entire process. I can’t imagine going training for any athletic event or anything like that where you’re really putting a lot of stress on your body without having that as a solution at the end.
Cheryl McColgan (31:54.67)
Right, so that, okay, so there’s another great benefit. So we’ve talked about cardiovascular, we’ve talked about using it for training and sports related things, we’ve talked about several things already, but the one thing we haven’t talked about yet, and a lot of people that listen to this podcast happen to be interested in this topic, and that is weight loss. And you mentioned that that is one of the programs on impulse. So when I’ve gone digging around,
in the research before, I haven’t done like a whole research review, but it’s been more challenging to maybe find some good stats on what it really does as far as weight loss. Is it burning calories? Is it having a different effect, like balancing your hormones that make you not as hungry? Or is it maybe a combination of all these factors? So I would love for you to share some of the things that you’ve learned about that over the years, how you feel it impacts weight and…
Maybe, I don’t know if there’s, I’m sure there’s something around mood too. There’s like literally thousands of studies now at this point in time compared to 20 years ago. So we’d love to hear anything that you’ve read that you find of interest in those areas.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (33:00.162)
Yeah, of course. So weight loss specifically, we’ll start there. So there was a study, oh my gosh, it’s been a long time ago. It was a great study done in Canada by Dr. Beaver using our sauna, using at that time it was a signature sauna. So that’s Far and Peret specifically. And he showed that the patients in the study were able to reduce their waist circumference.
which is really powerful because a lot of fat and, I mean, this can really, really alter your mood and alter how everything is mobilized when you start to have stuff stored there. So that was one clinical study specifically as far as how it works for weight loss. A lot of times this is easier for people to understand. So if you can remember, I talked about with Pharma for Red,
the way it’s absorbed into your body, it’s absorbed into your water molecules, and it starts to increase your body’s core temperature. So your core temperature elevates. And as that’s happening, your body is working to cool itself down. That energy is converted into calories. So you are burning calories while you are inside the sauna. So.
That’s another way to burn calories while, I mean, the great benefit is, you’re inside this wonderful environment and you’re burning calories. It’s like, that doesn’t suck. I mean, that’s a pretty great place to be. So then the other thing when you talked about mood, by being in there and by elevating your core temperature, you’re also increasing your energy levels.
Cheryl McColgan (34:32.59)
Yeah.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (34:53.986)
And so that helps to change your mood in a positive way. I want to give the analogy. It’s really mimics exercise. So exercise is an active cardiovascular function. You’re actively cardiovascular conditioning your body, right? You’re helping to make the heart healthy, increase blood flow, increase oxygenation, increase circulation. Infrared does the same thing in a passive way.
So you’re getting, after I run or after a walk, your body is more alive and more awake and you increase your circulation or after hot yoga, what you used to teach me, you just feel so much better because you’re moving the body, you’re getting everything flowing, so you’re helping to get waste out and just get your body back to homeostasis and back to just normal flow.
And that’s what happens when you use infrared. So you just naturally feel better and feel like, oh my goodness, I’m so glad I did that and I can’t wait to do it again. And that’s one of my favorite parts. So the mood swing, there is a mood, definitely a mood swing. Leigh Ann Rimes, I always think of her when I think of mood because she has Arsenault and she has publicly shared, I’m not sharing anything private, she has publicly shared that.
She struggles with depression and she struggles with mental anxiety. And she said there’s times where she feels like the world is just all against her and she’s in a really, really dark place and she’ll go inside her sauna. And she’s like, all of a sudden, wow, everything is removed. And she’s like, I’ve totally got this. And she comes out in a totally different place. She calls it her happy place. And because when she’s done, she’s like, oh my gosh, I feel so much better.
Cheryl McColgan (36:45.166)
Yeah.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (36:50.082)
And it’s because of the way it’s working with all of our body systems. So the light energy, I’m talking about that for a second, because this is really important, maybe visually, I’m such a visual person, maybe there’s other people listening better as well. It is needed by our bodies to function. Our bodies are really solar panels, right? And you activate a solar panel with light. And so we need light energy.
to activate our body’s solar panel. We need light to activate our mitochondria, which are all over our body and affect absolutely every single system of our body. And if our mitochondria are not healthy, then, I mean, it’s gonna affect everything. And it really affects energy. And so when we introduce, you know, PDM, near infrared light, you know, red light.
as well as infrared light that’s converted into heat. Well, you know, that whole spectrum, when we introduce this into the body and effective body systems, we’re activating all of our powerhouse cells and we’re getting the flow of our water. We’re increasing our core temperature. You know, we’re increasing the flow and oxygen. And you just kind of picture everything accelerating, you know, as far as the normal system, we’re just accelerating everything. And then if there’s anything that’s stuck, we’re getting it unstuck so that…
We are healthier when we’re done overall. It’s not one, that’s why, and I remember getting back to my brother, you know, when he was telling me all this, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And it does still sound like that all these years later. I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. You can’t possibly do all that. But when you understand how heat and light energy works to the body, and it’s a natural, it’s a natural part that has been around forever. You think about the sun.
Cheryl McColgan (38:24.59)
you
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (38:43.522)
You know, it’s been around forever. And the way the sun works the body with their circadian rhythm, you know, when you wake up to the sun, you go, you used to go to sleep to the sun. And there’s, there’s a reason for all of that. There’s a reason that our body craves light and so much has changed over the years. We’re now inside all the time. We’re not outside working in the fields and we’re not getting all of that sunlight. And so we’re not getting, you know, this natural healing that we used to get.
But instead we’re exposing ourselves to all these different plastics and we’re exposing ourselves to where we’re not taking the action to get rid of what we’re being exposed to. So we need to get back to the root cause and getting everything out of our body.
Cheryl McColgan (39:26.574)
And I think for people that haven’t experienced a sauna yet, you can kind of think of it. I mean, because I think what you said and what a lot of thought leaders have been talking about lately is how we really evolved in the sun.
And so your body needs all that, which you just expressed. But if people can think of a day where they spend the day at the pool or on the beach, there’s so many reasons why that makes you feel better, including that you’re grounding, you’re getting rid of the negative or the, sorry, the positive ions in your body. It’s kind of the opposite. Like the positive ones are the bad ones, but you’re, you know, you’re doing that grounding process. You’re getting the light. So if people can just like, and imagine that every single day that you got, and if you live like right now, you,
PNG, I’m in Cincinnati, Ohio. So this time, yeah. I’m in Indian Hill right now, so kind of up north by 275, so yeah. Yeah, when you said PNG earlier, I figured you’d like, oh, you’ve got to know Cincinnati really well.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (40:09.826)
in Cincinnati.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (40:14.498)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to work at off. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I know it. I know it well. I used to live my home where actually we started the business in the basement. It was in Hyde Park. We used to walk to graders. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that’s so funny.
Cheryl McColgan (40:31.886)
Nice. Love it. That’s so good. Yeah, but so for people that haven’t experienced it, that’s what it’s like. And you can, so if you’re for here, weeks at a time with no sun, just imagine that you have a space that you can go into and while you’re not like seeing some light and you’re not outside having fun with your friends, you get some of the same sort of feelings. And I actually feel like there’s gotta be some endorphins involved. Probably if I, you know.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (40:41.954)
What was this?
Cheryl McColgan (41:00.078)
went on to Pubman and put endorphins and sauna or infrared, I’m sure something like that would come up. So anyway, well Connie, this has been awesome and I want to be respectful of your time, but I do want to give you the opportunity to just follow up with anything that we didn’t touch on yet or anything about this. I mean, everybody knows, you know, well.
Not everybody, but anybody who watched my Instagram stories, they’ll have seen that I have this on it. I’m so happy to be back to it. I was away for a few months and I didn’t get to use it. And so now I’ve been in it every single day again. And yeah, just anything that you’d like to follow up with at the check. Oh, one thing I do want to touch on, because one of the whole, everybody knows I’m an obsessive researcher. And so, one of the reasons I landed on Sunlighten was.
due to some of the things about your materials, the quality, low EMF, which is really important. So I would love to just have you chat a little bit about the technology and the quality of Sunlighten, because I do think, you know, now you can go on Amazon and buy a sauna that’s like manufactured in China or something. And there are many, many reasons that you don’t want to do that. But I would love for you to chat about that part of this a little bit so that people don’t get sucked into a bad and potentially dangerous product if they want to go down this road.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (42:12.002)
in.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (42:17.986)
Yeah, of course. So the most important part is the quality of the infrared, so the quality of the heat that you’re receiving. And we have a patent on that. So the reason I bring up the patent is just the peace of mind that you’re getting the highest amount possible at the exact right frequency that’s going to be absorbed into your water molecules. Because…
I mean, there’s no way you can research the quality of infrared. I mean, because, you know, any, let me put it this way. Any sauna is going to have a level of infrared. Any sauna. You turn on, you go outside and you’re getting infrared heat. So it’s impossible for you to delineate between one infrared sauna and the next. And I would essentially…
What makes the difference with Sunlighten is that years and years and years ago, we started doing the research on the highest quality, how to develop the materials to deliver the highest amount of infrared into the body without fillers, so without anything else. We just wanted to take the spectrum and take out all the noise and just deliver the healthiest part, and that’s what we’ve done. So that’s what’s…
most important. The other thing is on the whole spectrum aspect, if that’s a route you want to go, where you want to get far, mid, near, and red in one place. So, Knightman has a patent on that. So, be very wary when people make claims that they’re giving you all of that because we have a patent on delivering two or more independent wavelengths or more in one place. So, if they’re making claims of that, there’s some compromised quality there.
So those are two technical aspects that make sunlight indifferent. As far as safety and the materials, man, we go through just extensive links to test our saunas for EMF, to test our saunas for all of our materials are tested. I mean, we use the highest quality wood. We use basswood, which is hypoallergenic and fragrance free. You know, our eucalyptus is sustainable and renewable. I mean, every,
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (44:40.13)
Our basswood comes from Wisconsin and an amazing company that we work with there. So all of our materials were extremely intentional on picking them out and sourcing them and vetting them to make sure they’re safe, healthy, high quality. And then we go through this extensive quality control process. When you put your sona together, every single part of it has a tag, not literally, like it has been checked.
So for safety and for quality control and something that’s just really super important to us. I’m happy to, if that’s ever a concern, I’m personally just reach out to me. I’m happy to answer any questions because we don’t take, I mean, we take that so serious that we do not take safety or efficacy, you know, or quality, I mean, we just take it so seriously. It’s really important to us because this is, this is about wellness. This is about developing the highest quality product.
and making you and this world a healthier place because of what we bring to market. I mean, we want everybody to be able to feel great so they can do as much as possible in this world. And we take it very seriously. So thank you for asking me that question because sometimes I forget about, because I take it for granted, but I mean, yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (45:57.966)
Well, sometimes I do too, because I’m quite obsessive about it. And I just know that I go down that road, but not not everybody has the time or interest to do that. And I think, you know, especially now you mentioned all of our environmental toxins, like we’re exposed to so many things. The last thing I want to do is get in a hot box that’s releasing a bunch of VOCs into the air and EMA and just, you know, really taking away any of the benefit that you could potentially get from this technology. So.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (46:25.954)
Yeah, there’s not, oh sure, there’s not a lot of woods out there that you can heat without some type of toxic chemical or toxic substance being released. And I know this because we’ve been doing this for so long. And when we started this, we did not do everything ourselves. And so we bought from other, you know, from manufacturers and they…
Cheryl McColgan (46:26.478)
Yes, I really appreciate that about your company.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (46:51.458)
told us, oh, this one is great. And then our customers would get like, oh my gosh, my eyes are itching or I’m sneezing or I’m having this reaction or this, I’m like, oh my goodness. And then I started doing research. Wood, there’s actually a toxic chemical or toxic, what’s it called? Toxic wood chart. I mean, there’s, then that just has to be, they have to report events that people have had with.
that type of wood and then, and that’s not being heated. That’s just regular wood. So imagine that heating it, you know, so you can be, you can rest, be rest assured that, I mean, the woods that we use are extremely safe. And, and when they’re heated, they’re completely, there’s, you know, there’s not a lot of things going on, you know, a lot of glues that are, you know, are lots of different materials. It’s very safe and it’s a great experience. And I mean, I highly, highly recommend it on that note.
You know, because it’s important to me that people have access at all levels. And so we do have other products. I’ve been talking a lot about the four different wavelengths and it is ideal. So that’s the bar. I mean, that’s for sure. If you can’t get there, that is okay. We have other products to choose from that it’s not a sacrifice. It’s a great starter place. The Solo is my personal way, favorite way to start. It’s a lie down portable model.
It’s what the study, it’s the product that all the studies were done with at the very beginning, 10, 15 years ago when we first started this. So it’s a great choice, easy to use, you can plug it in, plug and go. So that’s a great, great option. And if you have any questions about that, just email me. I’m happy to answer them, those questions. So I don’t want to seem as though it’s like just.
Because like you said, it’s a serious investment to get the product that’s behind me and you don’t have to do that. I would rather, in fact, I would rather you get started and get healthier and get on your road to recovery and taking care of yourself and then get impulse later than just wait.
Cheryl McColgan (48:56.846)
Yeah. And that’s a great point because that’s what I ended up doing. So I was moving around and things and whereas the solo, you can really take it with you. It’s not like a built -in thing. So it’s portable and it’s the least expensive one. So I think that’s an amazing point and why I wanted to bring that up because no matter what it is, I mean, you’re still a purchaser, still investing in your health, but there are like different levels that you can go to.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (49:05.858)
Right.
Cheryl McColgan (49:18.638)
really take advantage of the same technology. It’s just like some of the other stuff is convenience, like it’s got the fun lights and it’s got, you know, like a little, it’s got speakers, which is great. But you know, that’s all kind of just extra fluff, right? It’s not, you’re still getting all the benefit from the other model that you mentioned. So Connie, well, thank you again so much. Can you, so sunlightin .com is the website. If you go to my website first.
heelnourishgrow .com slash Sunlighten. It’ll take you there. It’ll give you like a special discount. Or if you call in, if you have questions, just call in and ask them all the things. They’re really great. I went through this process myself when I was finally making the purchase and just mentioned heelnourishgrow and they’ll make sure that you get hooked up with that. But yeah, Sunlighten .com. Connie, if people do want to get in touch, do you mention emailing? Do they do that through the website or what’s the best way to kind of keep up with you and learn more about what you’re doing?
personally if you do that any social media or anything like that.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (50:17.922)
Yeah, you could do, I mean, there’s so many different ways you can do it on social media. You know, you can you can tag me. You can reach out, you know, directly to me. My email is CZAC at Sunlighton dot com. I do want to mention for the for the discount just back to that, because that it’s really important. We’re giving up to six hundred dollars off for the listeners. The key to unlock that discount is to mention Hill Nourish Grove. So make sure that you mention that.
Otherwise, you won’t, it just, that it’s not something that we just offer. So just, it’s just really important when you said that. And I am here as a resource. I’m happy to answer questions and happy to do a deeper dive at some level too, that if you guys have a lot of questions, just ask your questions and I can come back and answer all of them. Whatever you need, I want to be a resource and enlighten everyone on infrared.
Cheryl McColgan (50:52.206)
I’m sorry.
Cheryl McColgan (51:17.966)
Yes, I like that turn of phrase there. So thank you again for joining us today. This was an amazing overview. And like you said, if you want to go down the rabbit hole, there’s a lot more technical stuff you can go into with all of this. I think this is a great introduction and I really appreciate you being here to share that with anybody. So thanks again, Connie.
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (51:20.066)
Hahaha!
Connie Zack – Sunlighten (51:34.434)
Of course.
In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast, Susan Salenger discusses her book ‘Sideline’ and the issues women face when navigating the healthcare system. She shares her personal experience with unnecessary surgery and how it sparked her interest in women’s medical decision-making.
To write this book, Salenger conducted interviews with women who had different diseases with a variety of treatments and found common themes in their behavior and decision-making. Learn more about the importance of being an informed patient and advocate for your own health along with actionable tips you can use at your next doctor’s appointment.
Get the Sidelined book here and visit Susan’s website here.
Takeaways
- Women often put themselves last when it comes to healthcare decisions.
- Getting a second opinion is crucial, especially for complex or serious conditions.
- Women tend to describe their symptoms in an emotional way, which can lead to misdiagnosis or inappropriate treatment.
- Tips for doctor visits include making a written list of symptoms, doing research on the diagnosis, and reframing what the doctor says. Be an informed patient and advocate for your own health
- Research and question medical advice, especially medications and treatments
- Consider the funding sources of scientific studies to identify potential bias
- Personal research can help evaluate the risks and benefits of treatments
- Gaslighting in healthcare is a significant issue for women
- Strength training is important for women’s health and can help prevent frailty
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
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Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
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Episode 85 Transcript
In this episode, Renee Jones shares her weight loss journey and techniques she found to deal with emotional eating. Renee shares her background of yo-yo dieting and her eventual discovery of emotional eating as the root cause of her struggles. She explains how she found what works for her body through a specific software program and emphasizes the importance of an individualized approach to weight loss.
She provides practical tips for overcoming emotional eating and maintaining weight loss, including the HANG acronym for addressing emotional hunger. She also shares the role of coaching in helping others resolve emotional issues and live authentically.
Connect with Renee at PackYourOwnBag.com.
Takeaways* Emotional eating is eating for any reason other than hunger, and it often involves using food as a way to soothe or cope with emotions. * Finding what works for your body is crucial for successful weight loss and maintenance. It requires self-reflection, experimentation, and paying attention to how different foods and eating patterns make you feel. * Practical tips for weight loss include facing your emotions instead of using food as a coping mechanism, creating rules and boundaries around food and finding alternate activities or behaviors to replace emotional eating. * Coaching can be a powerful tool for weight loss and personal growth, helping people resolve emotional issues and live more authentically.
Watch the episode on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines, extra bottle for a penny
Drinking Ketones
Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life
Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow
Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
YouTube
TikTok
Amazon Store
Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Podcast Chapters00:00 Introduction and Background
03:20 Discovering Emotional Eating
06:32 Finding What Works for Your Body
09:29 Practical Tips for Weight Loss
16:21 Replacing Unhealthy Behaviors
18:54 Renee’s Coaching Approach
23:14 The Power of Authenticity
24:07 Getting in Touch with Renee
Podcast TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:00.874)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Renee Jones and we are going to talk about something that’s a very popular topic at the beginning of the year and that is weight loss. Renee has had a very interesting background as you heard in her bio, but now I’m gonna let her share in your own words, Renee. How did you get into this work and kind of, but maybe start with the background. I think you said for 40 years, you were kind of just like yo-yoing around. So I’m really curious to hear about your backstory, like what sort of things you tried, what were your challenges. So I’ll let you take it away with your introduction to your history there.
Renee Jones (00:37.652)
Okay, well, thanks for having me for a start. But my first diet was when I was 10, and I know that sounds awful, but my mother thought, you’re a bit young, but if we start now, maybe you’ll learn how to do this. And the problem was, I didn’t know what I was doing. She’d been heavy all her life, so she didn’t know what she was doing.
Cheryl McColgan (00:49.902)
I’m sorry.
Renee Jones (01:02.192)
And we sort of would start and stop and then we’d say, oh, do you want to do the diet again? Yeah, okay. And we’d start over again. And it would go for a while until we either got fed up or went somewhere, you know, either visiting family or holiday or something like that. And it, you know, it just went on. I didn’t learn how to first believe that I could keep the weight off that I lost.
but also what was really good for my body. It was usually sort of a whatever the diet of the day was. So I think we tried them all, honestly. I think there are two diets I have not tried. And one of them was that HCG thing. And the other is the Whole30.
Cheryl McColgan (01:50.499)
Mm-hmm.
Renee Jones (01:55.636)
Because I’ve done something close enough to that. I thought, got the idea. I’m good. But that just went on.
Cheryl McColgan (01:55.992)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (02:00.114)
Right. So out of those ones, and so out of those ones that you tried, you never really found, I mean, did you ever feel particularly good on any specific diet, or was more just like, you’re kind of waiting for this mental shift to happen where it was became more clear to you what needed to change.
Renee Jones (02:20.248)
Um, actually that didn’t come until I was staring down my 50th birthday, because I didn’t know what, what call myself. But when I was doing research, because I was about to be 50 and I thought things change for women, if I don’t lose the weight now, I’ll never lose it. And I discovered that this term emotional ater, I thought, oh, that’s what I am. So.
Prior to that, I was probably never satisfied. I was always hungry. And I thought with my New Year’s resolution that I was gonna make it happen, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t stay on track for very long. And started at New Year, had to restart every month. And by the time we got to April, I actually needed a bigger size. And I thought, this is going the wrong direction. And I thought,
I can’t do this by myself. I just can’t. So I tried out a short program where you buy the material, read it, do the exercises. And what I realized was that this person knew something that I did not. So I eventually hired her as my coach and she helped me get there. And she introduced the idea that, oh, yes, you could lose it and keep it off without doing the yo-yo thing.
So that’s how I got to that point.
Cheryl McColgan (03:55.626)
And so was it the, so you heard emotional eating and she was the one that you really found that kind of meshed those two things together with a program in the emotional eating and kind of tackling some things. One of the things that struck me when you said you were an emotional eater, but then you said you were always hungry. So maybe if you could share with people now, what is the idea behind emotional eating? Because the hunger that you had was obviously not a physical hunger.
it was some kind of emotional state. So if maybe if you’d go into that a little bit more for people that haven’t heard that term before that don’t really know like how to conceptualize that, I guess.
Renee Jones (04:30.028)
So I call emotional eating, eating for any reason other than hunger. Right. If you’re hungry, you may actually need something to eat. It could be emotional hunger. But often it’s it is just that and we have to figure out how to deal with that. Now.
It could be eating for joy, as in a holiday, right? It could be eating for sadness. It could be boredom. It could be sad, mad, frustrated, exhausted. I just need something to make me feel better. So that’s what I think of as emotional eating. And for me, what I found out, I mean, I lost my weight on one diet, right?
But two years later, I was still struggling with it, trying to keep the weight off. And I was tired, hungry, and cranky all the time, which was not good for my dear sweet husband, right? So I did some more research, because that apparently is what I do. And I found a software program that tells you what your unique nutrition blueprint is.
And I looked at those results and I thought, that’s never gonna work for me. But, you know, I’m at my goal weight, so we’ll give it a shot. And I was absolutely amazed because I lost two pounds that week. I have never lost two pounds in a week. And I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t hungry, so I wasn’t cranky. And what I learned from that experience is that everybody’s different.
It can’t be a cookie cutter. It has to be what works for your body. And I finally found what works for my body. And that was 10 years later, I’m still doing the same thing because it works for me.
Cheryl McColgan (06:32.958)
And so what you said is it is so individual and everybody needs to kind of experiment for themselves or find these programs that help them discover what works best for them. But because I know everybody’s thinking, because I’m thinking I hear, well, what was it that you found that worked for you personally in this scenario?
Renee Jones (06:48.328)
Seriously, it’s a software program that I have and I just run it and it asks you a bunch of really awkward questions. And I think you could do it yourself if you would take enough notes because essentially it asks you questions about how do you feel after a meal like this? How do you feel after a meal like this? And it asks you some weird questions like, you know, how white is the white of your eye? Odd questions that
Cheryl McColgan (07:07.761)
Mm.
Renee Jones (07:17.912)
Obviously, I don’t know enough about science to deal with that, but it’s just something that I now give all of my clients because It helps you find what works for you
Cheryl McColgan (07:30.666)
And do you think it’s honing in on any specific aspect? Cause you say tired, hungry, cranky. To me that sort of would signal maybe some blood sugar regulation issues. Does it try to hone in on those things? Or is it really just a more holistic thing where it’s, I know you said like the whites of your eyes, for example. So that might not be as much blood sugar related, but is there any particular aspect you feel like it’s trying to hone in on?
Renee Jones (07:52.82)
I think blood sugar is a big part of it, absolutely. I also think, you know.
My cousin can’t do the same diet I do. She just needs more of some things than others than I do. I need a little more protein, good fats and fewer carbohydrates, whereas she needs more carbohydrates. So it kind of zones in on, okay, what, how does your body run best? And you know, we’re all such a mixture of
families and heritage that we’ve got to figure out, okay, what does my body actually need? And I mean, you can say, how do I feel after I have a heavy meal or a light meal? Do I do better with breakfast? Do I do better with an evening meal is the largest meal? And those things will give you an idea. If we can pay attention to that and take enough notes, we can figure it out ourselves. But I was in a hurry.
Cheryl McColgan (08:59.599)
As are most people when they finally get to that point, right? Like you’ve had it. I’ve tried all this stuff. I’m ready. I’m ready now. So that, that is great though. I think that, so that self reflection part, I always think can be useful. It’s sort of no matter what kind of, you know, challenge you’re facing. It’s like, that you’re saying you got to kind of quiet things down enough to really get to that point. So going back to the emotional eating, once you found this coach, you started working on these things, you found this great software program.
Renee Jones (09:02.64)
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s get this figured out.
Cheryl McColgan (09:25.954)
But at the end of the day, you still have to do the work. So I like to try to find some kind of practical takeaways or tips in these interviews for people because you’ve done it, you’ve kept the weight off. Can you say what may be some of your most important, either new habits that you found or kind of in the tips and tricks category of things that have really helped you maintain that weight loss?
Renee Jones (09:29.108)
Absolutely.
Renee Jones (09:46.585)
Sure.
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that had the biggest effect on me was recognizing that I was trying to stuff down my feelings and follow it with a food chaser. And my mantra when I was losing weight and still now can be, face your stuff, don’t stuff your face.
Cheryl McColgan (10:14.361)
That’s awesome.
Renee Jones (10:16.176)
Because we do, it’s like, I want to feel better, let me put something in my mouth. And that’s common. It comes from birth. Because you have a baby and it cries, we put something in its mouth. It’s a real soother for us. But we just have to find a different soother. Now, I do say it’s not hard to overcome emotional eating. But you do have to get the hang of it. And hang is an acronym. So the H, am I actually hungry?
If you’re not, what is your A? What is the attraction to food in that moment? What do you want it to do for you?
The N is what do you actually need in this moment? Because maybe you need to walk around the block or to play with the dog or get a hug, right? What do you truly need right now to make you feel better? And then the G is go, go get that. Because that will soothe you more than food ever possibly could.
Cheryl McColgan (11:17.674)
Such an amazing acronym and it makes me think of how you could really apply that to any addiction like process because my minor is actually in addiction studies and what I’m thinking of when you say that is it’s the same thing for when you’re looking for an alcoholic drink or people who are looking for drugs as a soother or sexuality any other behavior.
Renee Jones (11:37.364)
shopping.
Cheryl McColgan (11:38.974)
It’s shopping, online shopping. Like you do not need something else from Amazon, right? It’s probably like you’re feeling something else, but identifying that isn’t always so easy. So I love that. That’s such a great acronym. What else did you learn about yourself in this process?
Renee Jones (11:46.202)
Yeah.
Renee Jones (11:51.4)
So.
Um, that I was not addicted to peanut butter, but I used it a lot to soothe myself. So I had to actually stop buying it for a period of time, which really upset the dog. Cause I’d get some, he’d get some, it was great. But sometimes you have to make a clean break with a food that you cannot say no to.
Cheryl McColgan (11:59.286)
Hehehehe
Cheryl McColgan (12:11.741)
They do love that.
Renee Jones (12:22.5)
Even today, it lives in the garage, in a refrigerator out there, because I need a few steps to think about what I’m doing, because it’s so easy to go back to it. And honestly, it was tied to my relationship with my grandmother, because she and I had a bond around peanut butter and chocolate. And particularly after she was gone, if I needed her,
If I needed the love and encouragement that she always gave me, peanut butter would sort of soothe it. But in that quantity, it’s not a good idea. So sometimes we have to say, okay, I can’t keep this in the house for a period of time. And the good thing is that other places will keep it for you and they’ll keep it fresh and they probably have your brand. And they even call it a store.
Renee Jones (13:24.24)
They will store it for you until you are ready. So you just kind of have to figure out what. Yeah, absolutely. Making rules for yourself can be good. Like the kitchen is closed after seven or after dinner or whatever it is. And I don’t go back in there except for water.
Cheryl McColgan (13:28.042)
Yeah, that’s another great practical.
Cheryl McColgan (13:50.018)
Did you find that you were able to follow that? Because I think some people set those and it’s like an easy mental switch where other people kind of, they don’t follow their own rules kind of thing. Was that an easy transition for you or?
Renee Jones (14:03.96)
It became easier over time. I had to practice it. And honestly, do I go back into the kitchen in the evening sometimes? Yes, because I take a vitamin before I go to bed. But I can do that with water. So it’s something that you… Whatever will work for you, if you don’t like rules, don’t do that. Because that will be your reason for breaking your commitment to yourself.
So we don’t want to do that. We have to find ways that work for us. Sometimes people say, you know, I have a family and they have food that I don’t want to take in. Okay, so what we do with that is the foods that are good for you, you put in the refrigerator or the pantry at your eye level and you put them in a clear container. So you can see it. And if it’s pretty, all the better.
You put other foods, I mean, I’m only five foot three, I’m a short little woman, so my husband’s stuff goes up here, because I’d have to get a step stool to get to it, right? Or you may choose to have a cupboard that’s just for the stuff that’s off limits for you, or your own stuff. And if you take it, that’s really kind of like stealing, isn’t it? You have to find ways that click your brain into.
Okay, what will make me stop this? How can I create a hard stop before I do something that I don’t want to do when I’m in my best self?
Cheryl McColgan (15:47.266)
So when you were discovering this, and so far we’ve just talked about food, but you were kind of in this journey discovering what was gonna work for you. And you mentioned, you know, in your hang acronym, finding the thing that you really need, you mentioned like go for a walk. So I think activity really for a lot of people can be a great replacement for some of these other kind of less healthy behaviors. Did you find there was any kind of particular thing that you were drawn to? Did you start exercising more or dancing? Or was there anything that kind of…
seem to work for you as kind of like a little trick to take your brain away from that.
Renee Jones (16:21.596)
You know, I take a walk every morning and I chose to do that because I had a puppy at the time and they were better when they’d had a walk in the morning. So I have made that a daily thing for the last 10 years and it’s good for me and it’s good for them. Right. But I also found that sometimes I just needed to sit down.
Cheryl McColgan (16:33.439)
Yes.
Renee Jones (16:49.776)
and journal out what it was I was feeling. Face it. And to be honest, my coach and I did a lot of work that wasn’t anything to do with food. You know, we may have talked about food for a session, maybe two, and the rest of the time, we were dealing with the emotional stuff that gets in the way. Because once you deal with that, and you resolve it,
You’re not as likely to jump for a Twinkie or whatever, right? If we face our stuff, then we get free of it. And that is probably the best thing I learned going through this process.
Cheryl McColgan (17:37.898)
And in your bio, I read that you’re a counselor yourself. So were you already a counselor prior to this journey that you went on with the weight loss? Or is this something that you came to after having gone through this process for yourself?
Renee Jones (17:51.316)
Well, I got the degree, you know, a number of years prior. And then what I did with that was I took it to be a hospital chaplain, which I call rapid therapy. It’s about all you have time to do with people is help them figure out what’s going on in their life and how that’s gonna change things. But I hadn’t thought about shifting over to coaching until I went through this. I thought, this is what I do all the time.
Cheryl McColgan (18:06.934)
Right.
Renee Jones (18:20.368)
So I did a kind of a slow start and didn’t leave chaplaincy until after I’d been in it for 20 years.
Cheryl McColgan (18:30.77)
And so now though, you are working with people in a coaching capacity. Could you kind of share how you do that? I’m assuming a lot of it’s online or that people have access to that, even if they’re not down there in Texas where you are. So can you just share with people how you work with them or any programs or things that you do to, you know, kind of help people with their weight loss journeys?
Renee Jones (18:54.124)
So I have a kind of a three-point structure. We talk about your body because we need to get you on the nutrition plan that works for you. So we do that first. We talk about the foods that are difficult or challenge you in some way. But then we go on to all that stuff and it is kind of just digging it
getting it out of your system, as it were, and helping you figure out, okay, what is it I’m trying to do with this food? What are the emotional needs I’m trying to meet? And when we resolve some of those issues, they’re coming up for air, and it’s fantastic, because pieces of their heart get healed, and that’s just a wonderful place to be. And then what we’re trying to do is get you into your best self.
most often. Because when we’re living out of our best self, we just make better choices.
Cheryl McColgan (20:02.414)
How do you find that people take that process? Do they feel that it’s more of a, and I know this is partly in how you set it up obviously, but does it feel more like therapy in some ways, or does it feel more like coaching or, I’m just, it’s just kind of like, I think all of that is so valuable. And I guess my brain automatically goes to that some people might hear that and think, oh, I don’t wanna do that. I just wanna lose weight. Do you know what I mean? So can you maybe share a little bit more about that?
Renee Jones (20:30.652)
Well, sure, I shifted from being a counselor to a coach for a particular reason. And that was because my experience of having been counseled in years past left me with a lot of the stuff. Now there, I understand things are changing now, but what I saw in my coach was we’re gonna resolve stuff, not just make ourselves feel better about it.
So I call it much more coaching because they kind of take you from here and go forward. Counselors meet you where you are and help you look back at things. If we have to do some of that, they want to do that. That’s great. I can do that. But I’m much more interested for them in getting the things resolved in how you’re going to live today, tomorrow, next week. Let’s get you back.
Cheryl McColgan (21:26.696)
Yeah.
Renee Jones (21:27.032)
up to the life that you wanted to live, not the one you just sort of fell into.
Cheryl McColgan (21:32.522)
Yeah, and that’s a great clarification. Cause I think that really good coaching can be so empowering. And I just didn’t want people to hear that and think like, Oh my gosh, we’re going to go dig up all these, you know, past issues, like we do in counseling. And like I said, my, my background’s in psychology too. So I know exactly what I was thinking about that. But, um, I think it’s great that transition, because I think coaching when done really well can be so powerful and it can really.
Renee Jones (21:51.785)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (21:56.802)
help people in a way. It’s kind of a different paradigm that a lot of people haven’t experienced if you haven’t been on a sports team before, you haven’t done some of those things, it’s kind of a new experience, right? Like something that people aren’t as used to.
Renee Jones (21:57.82)
Yes.
Renee Jones (22:09.264)
Yeah, yeah, but it’s, you’re right, it’s so empowering, it’s so powerful. And I think, you know.
Cheryl McColgan (22:15.094)
So if people do, sorry, go ahead.
Renee Jones (22:19.457)
I just think it helps us be more authentically who we are.
And most of us are carrying around a lot of masks and covers just trying to get through. But if you can be just yourself, it’s so much easier.
Cheryl McColgan (22:40.83)
Yeah, totally agree. I had a great teacher that was really yoga actually, that was very focused on that. And just noticing that, are you the same person with everybody that you interact with, like with your boss at home? And are you a different person in all of those? Because it really speaks to authenticity and how exhausting it can be to kind of play those different roles. And I think that a lot of times feeds really into that emotional eating because you’re trying to soothe yourself from being constantly
at odds with yourself, disjointed, right? It’s kind of weird.
Renee Jones (23:14.992)
Yeah, yeah, but we do it so much and that’s not that’s just not good for us. We’re much better being who we are.
Cheryl McColgan (23:25.214)
Yeah, I love that. And so I think that’s a great place to kind of just leave this for people, to find a coach or find a book or some kind of way to empower yourself to find some authenticity. And it just makes, not saying that everything just becomes rainbows and unicorns then, but it does make just making the, as you mentioned earlier in the interview, making those decisions on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s about what you’re eating or what activities you’re doing, it makes it so much easier when kind of everything’s in alignment. So all that being said,
Where can people get in touch with you? Where can they find you online? Where’s your website? Do you have any programs coming up? Tell everybody all the ways to learn about Renee.
Renee Jones (24:07.2)
My website is packyourownbag.com. I’m on Facebook at packyourownbag, Instagram. I think maybe even YouTube is packyourownbag, but it’s pretty easy to find, Renee Jones.
Cheryl McColgan (24:23.05)
and they just reach out to you and you have a form that they fill out to work with you or how does that work or just get in touch and you guys will figure it out.
Renee Jones (24:29.808)
Yeah, we usually have a chat because I want them to be comfortable with me. I don’t want to, you know, just say, okay, we’ll start tomorrow. That doesn’t usually go well. So I figured you give them one, one session of here’s what we, what do you need to do that sort of thing, introductory sort of thing. And then we start after that. If they’re, if they’re comfortable and I’m comfortable.
Cheryl McColgan (24:41.046)
I’m sorry.
Cheryl McColgan (24:54.346)
Amazing. Well, Renee, thank you so much.
Renee Jones (24:55.016)
So I do have some three month programs.
Cheryl McColgan (24:58.234)
Oh, awesome. Yeah, because I think sometimes too, maybe if people can’t afford or commit to a one on one relationship, sometimes online programs or self guided source of options are a great way that they can still, you know, meet their goals and maybe make it work for their lifestyle or their finances a little better.
Renee Jones (25:17.224)
Yeah, yeah, I have a video course that is essentially what I do with people. They just have to do it on their own and some can do it very, very well.
Cheryl McColgan (25:19.03)
Well, thank you so much, Renee.
Cheryl McColgan (25:29.578)
Awesome. Well, everybody, all the links for Renee will be in the show notes. I hope you have enjoyed getting to know her today. And I think the focus on emotional eating is something that we haven’t often talked about on this show that much, but I think it is really a valuable tool because we all do it. Every single person to some degree, whether you’re trying to lose weight or not, there’s an emotional side of food. So it’s good to be aware of it and to learn more about it. So thank you so much, Renee.
Renee Jones (25:56.884)
Thank you for having me.
In this episode, Dr. Michael Biamonte discusses his background in nutrition and naturopathy, as well as his interest in understanding the role of nutrition in health. He explains the importance of lab tests and how they can provide valuable insights.
Dr. Biamonte focuses on thyroid function and the challenges of diagnosing and treating thyroid issues. He also delves into the topic of Candida overgrowth and the symptoms and causes associated with it. Additionally, he shares his experience in using computer software to analyze patient data and develop personalized treatment plans.
If you’re interested in optimizing health with labs, Dr. Biamonte provides valuable insights and resources. Connect with Dr. Biamonte at www.health-truth.com, on his Facebook page and on YouTube.
Takeaways
- Lab tests can provide valuable insights into a person’s health and help identify underlying issues.
- Thyroid function is often misunderstood, and traditional medical approaches may not adequately address the complexity of thyroid issues.
- Candida overgrowth is a common problem caused by factors such as antibiotics and medications, and it can have a wide range of symptoms.
- Computer software can be a powerful tool for analyzing patient data and developing personalized treatment plans.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:28 Focus on Lab Tests and Analysis
07:16 Understanding Thyroid Function
13:28 Identifying and Treating Candida Overgrowth
29:17 Using Computer Software for Data Analysis
36:49 Working with Dr. Biamonte and Contact Information
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:01.288)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I have Dr. Michael Biamonte with me, and we are going to chat about a variety of topics. One that is kind of interesting and unusual that he said they just started learning about recently. Anyway, before we get to that, I would love it if you could just tell everyone in your own words a little bit about yourself and how did you get into this whole topic of nutrition.
drbiamonte (00:28.554)
Well, let’s see, I’m a clinical nutritionist. I’m a naturopath. I’m certified in New York State, which is where that’s where my license is. And I got into nutrition because I was very curious as to why medical doctors poo-pooed it.
I had a relative who had cancer, who was ill, and I kept asking the doctors, well, what about vitamins and what about, this is back in the 70s, I said, what about Leutriol that I’ve heard about from Mexico? And they said, no, well, that’s all baloney. None of that works. None of that’s good. But I said, but couldn’t, wouldn’t giving him vitamins help his body even if it doesn’t cure the cancer? Wouldn’t it still help him be healthier to try to?
fight the cancer a little longer and maybe live longer and they just poo-hooed it. And around that time I started running marathons. So there was a great interest around, and this is again in the 70s. So this is all these things were in their infancy back then. Billy Rogers was first winning the New York Marathon. Carlton Frederick’s was on the radio talking about vitamins and talking about the dangers of too much sugar. Adele Davis had her book out. So.
this was all kind of new. And I wanted to know why these doctors were so adamant that all this stuff was a waste of time. So the more I started studying it, the more I started to tweak on the fact that, gee, you know, if all this nutrition stuff actually works the way they say it does, I could see this being a problem for doctors and drug companies. I could see where they wouldn’t want this to be around. And…
Cheryl McColgan (02:11.584)
Yeah, that’s some conspiracy thing you’re throwing out there a little bit, right?
drbiamonte (02:15.79)
Yeah, well, it’s common sense though, in a way. I mean, it looked like with Candida, people are constantly asking me, why is it that medical doctors don’t recognize Candida? Why don’t they know even a quarter about it, a quarter of what you know about it? I said, well, can you imagine if a medical doctor came out and said, gee, people, you know those antibiotics I’ve been giving you? Well,
Cheryl McColgan (02:18.576)
It’s all of the money, right?
drbiamonte (02:41.634)
That’s really what caused this candida that you’ve been fighting with for 20 years that’s caused you not to be able to continue in school, lose your job, go on disability. I said, can you imagine the lawsuits that we’d have going back and forth? So yeah, follow the money works. Follow the money works.
Cheryl McColgan (02:55.475)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (02:59.572)
Yeah. And so you got so interested. I love that you got into this because, you know, it wasn’t making intuitive sense to you. You saw somebody in your life that was struggling with their health and you’re thinking, okay, well vitamins, minerals, something’s got to help this. What you put in your body has got to be of some use. Plus you’re into the sports and marathoning. And when you do that, you learn, you know, you need to fuel your body in a certain way. So when you went to school for this, what was it that you decided to focus on? Like what was your primary area of focus at that time?
drbiamonte (03:28.662)
Well, I was very analytical when I was young, maybe more so than now. Now I tend to be a bit more open-minded, but back then I was very black and white about things. So my major in nutrition school was interpretation of lab tests, because I felt that lab tests was something definitive. And it showed you black or white, what was going on. And it gave you a marker that you could come back to.
Because later on, after I graduated school, my first gig, so to speak, was working with engineers at Grumman Aerospace, who were all systems analysis engineers. They were all people very well trained in aerospace physiology, but they were engineers. So they truly taught me the true scientific method, which an engineer works, that’s the engineer’s Bible. So you have a parameter, right? You see the parameter, the parameter’s incorrect.
You do something to tweak it, you come back and watch the parameter again. So if it gets better, you know, you were right. If it doesn’t get better, you know, you need to tweak it again. Something else is the reason it’s very, it’s common sense in a lot of ways. But I felt lab work was the thing to concentrate on. That’s what would, um, separate me from the other people out there. And I, so I studied, um, Jim Seema’s work and, um, uh, Ken Brockman, Ken Brockman was, um,
a barnstorming chiropractor who was using kinesiology to further understand blood work. So what Brockman would do was an example. Brockman would be kinesiologically testing somebody and if he found their anterior pituitary was weak, he’d look in the blood work and he’d try to find something about the blood work that could relate to their anterior pituitary. And then when he would fix the anterior pituitary, he’d go back and see if the blood work corrected.
And Ken Brockman did this for years with all blood chemistries. Like anything, like if you went to get a standard blood work up, and we called it an SMA 24 or 26, or a ChemPak, with a CBC or WBC. It’s pretty much standard routine blood work. So he perfected this in that blood work. And that’s one of the things we eventually then used, we incorporated in our computer model of the human body was a lot of Brockman’s work and Jim Seema’s work.
Cheryl McColgan (05:58.016)
Very interesting. I love that. But so, you know, like you said, it makes a lot of sense and it’s very, a very engineer way to approach things like let’s try to fix this and then see what that matches to. And yet for some reason, that’s not how a lot of traditional medicine approaches things. They kind of go off on here’s a symptom. This is the drug that we have that can treat that. You know, that’s about all they think of.
drbiamonte (06:19.598)
Well, yeah, unfortunately, traditional medicine doesn’t really always have to do with science. Traditional medicine has become, doctors nowadays are becoming advanced salesmen from the drug companies. They have the salesmen from the drug company come and tell them what the latest drug is and what it treats, and they become extensions of that. They don’t have to do that much with science, unfortunately.
Cheryl McColgan (06:47.688)
which is why it’s so great when you can find practitioners that are more functionally inclined or that do things with labs. I think your work is really interesting in that way, which kind of leads me to one of the things I was reading about your background and I thought was an interesting topic because I’ve heard so many people talk about it in many different ways, but you have this piece about learning your labs with thyroid. And I think that this is an area where people really struggle because
they’ll go to their doctor, they have some of these classic symptoms, low body temperature in the morning, which somehow everybody seems to know about except for the doctors and they’ll have, you know, some other symptoms like being tired or having trouble losing weight. And it just seems to be sort of a quote unquote classic thyroid symptoms. And then yet when you go get some labs from your doctor, they’ll be like, well, everything’s normal. So I think there’s some more.
subtle things maybe there that you could speak to and maybe give some people some information about you know how should they be going about learning whether their thyroid really is you know if it is truly fine or if there are some things that they could do to better optimize the function there.
drbiamonte (08:00.17)
I became interested in thyroid and adrenal function because of my specialty being Candida. That’s the one thing that a Candida ravages in the person is their thyroid and adrenal function. You can be pretty much guaranteed that in any Candida patient that you treat, who you treat successfully, the very first thing you have to do after you have handled their Candida and you’ve repopulated their biome correctly is deal with their adrenal and thyroid dysfunction.
And unfortunately, blood work can really lead you down the wrong path because blood work is very, let’s say, what they test typically for thyroid is not enough data to really base anything on. The typical doctor looks at your TSH or maybe your T4 and that’s all they look at. The best test, the least expensive test for your thyroid function.
is your body temperature. Because everything that your thyroid metabolism does is the end result is your body temperature. That’s the whole reason your body produces thyroid hormones to keep your body temperature at a certain level. That’s the end result. So if your temperature is low, if it’s below 97.8 consistently, then you have functionally low thyroid. And now what you need to do now is reverse engineer.
to find out why it’s low. You already know that it’s low, your temperature’s low, it’s a fact. Ideally, your temperature should be above 98.2, 97.8 to 98.2 is a gray area. If it’s consistently below 97.8, your thyroid’s too low. So now you have to find out why. So here is what I’ve done in my thyroid programs is I’ve combined the work of three people. One is Dr. Eric Rindt.
whose website you can find. He is the expert on using your body temperature to understand thyroid and adrenal function. The next person is Dr. David L. Watts, who’s the owner of Trace Elements, Inc. His laboratory has been performing hair mineral tests, and they’ve been studying the mineral ratios between different minerals for like the last 35 years. And he has come up with the ratios that are involved with your thyroid hormone receptors. So…
drbiamonte (10:26.442)
Essentially what Dr. Watts has proven is that calcium and copper act as governors or suppressants to your thyroid hormone activity. This has nothing to do with the level of hormone in your blood. When your thyroid hormone goes to your tissues and goes into your cells to work, calcium and copper are there to down regulate it so it doesn’t do an excess, let’s say. Zinc and potassium are there to upregulate it. So the…
the ratios of calcium to potassium and zinc to copper give you how sensitive your thyroid hormone receptors are gonna be. So if you could have excess thyroid hormone in your blood, it doesn’t make any difference because if those receptors are blocking it, you’re gonna be functionally still low thyroid. The other person’s work that I’ve incorporated is Weston Childs, who’s been studying thyroid for years and years and years. And you can find him on social media, very interesting.
the data he’s come up with on blood tests. He looks at things that the average doctor would never think of. For instance, he has equated leptin levels with thyroid hormone, and very importantly also is insulin levels. Excess insulin suppresses your T3 activity. And so he’s put together a blood test that goes through all of these parameters. Like he looks at reverse T3, he looks at T3.
which a lot of doctors don’t do, but he also looks at a lot of other things which can be antagonistic or synergistic to the thyroid hormones and how they work. And it’s not all about the level in your blood. Although I will admit, most labs have, their reference ranges for T3 are incorrect. Your T3 should be more up around 3.5, and a lot of labs don’t go that high on it. But.
that what’s most important is the interrelationship between all of these things in terms of how they work or work against your thyroid hormone the level in your blood is that is only a small part of it you can have totally normal levels of thyroid hormone per your doctor and yet be totally functionally low thyroid because as i said earlier they don’t understand your temperatures they don’t understand the mineral ratios in your body and how that affects the thyroid hormone and they don’t understand things like insulin
drbiamonte (12:47.998)
If your fasting insulin is high, it depresses your thyroid activity. They certainly don’t look at reverse T3, which is a huge problem. And again, the labs will tolerate much higher levels of reverse T3 than are really correct. Labs will tell you if your reverse T3 is 25, that’s okay. But we have found that’s not true. It needs to be more around 10.
So when you have discrepancies with labs, that makes this even more complicated. That makes the doctor even more right in his wrongness.
Cheryl McColgan (13:24.332)
So how do, knowing all these factors that can be used to determine thyroid function, I think the temperature is a really interesting one because have you heard the same stat that’s something like, just the average body temperature in general through the whole population has gone down over the years. That’s something that I’ve heard recently. Can you corroborate or not on that?
drbiamonte (13:46.067)
How could it not, if you look at how people are living, you look at the food people are eating, you look at all the drugs they’re on, just prescription drugs alone, when you look at the effect of a lot of prescription drugs on thyroid activity, there’s no way it couldn’t be dropping.
Cheryl McColgan (14:03.736)
Okay, so knowing that and knowing that there probably is a level of undiagnosed thyroid issues out there, how can people go about finding a doctor that looks, you know, how do they find a doctor that looks at all these more progressive markers? Because in the past, I’ve had this thing, I’ve definitely had low body temperature for a very long time. And I’ve had doctors, you know, look at my thyroid, the traditional doctors look at that before and they’re like,
everything’s normal and yet I feel like…
drbiamonte (14:34.082)
They’re right. Everything that they’re looking at from their perspective is normal, but they don’t look out of the box because most of them, once they get out of medical school, they don’t open a book or a journal up for the next 50 years. Maybe next lifetime they might do that, but not in this lifetime. They’re done pretty much. They don’t learn. That’s the problem. You don’t see them going to continuing education seminars that often. It’s only those that are trying to branch into another field.
Cheryl McColgan (14:48.696)
Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (15:00.512)
So how do people find somebody that, right. So how do people find it?
drbiamonte (15:03.946)
Look on social media. Go to social media, look for doctors who are writing articles about things. That’s the best way. That’s the only way I know of it. That’s how I found other people that I’ve worked with is on social media and seeing what they’re saying and what type of articles they’re writing and what they’re talking about. Because other than that, well, other than that, you can go to the health food store and ask there if they know practitioners.
drbiamonte (15:32.567)
I would say that would be…
Cheryl McColgan (15:32.861)
Yeah, because it’s a challenge. It’s challenging even functional doctors, finding ones that specialize in certain things, it’s always a challenge. So someday that’d be a great business idea for somebody is to get kind of a black book of progressive doctors with their different specialties.
drbiamonte (15:53.538)
You know, I actually think over the years, from time to time, someone has come out with us with something like that. But I’ve never really followed it through. I know I’ve been asked to join such publications. But I really don’t know what’s ever happened in the long range. But yeah, it is difficult. That’s why a plus point could be the person’s website. See what they talk about, see what their articles, read their articles. I know that’s how a lot of people find me, is because they find excerpts of my articles online.
and then they eventually go to my website and they start reading and then it all makes sense because then they start seeing what was left out in their treatment.
Cheryl McColgan (16:31.656)
Right. And I do find that podcasts are actually a really good resource for all of this sort of thing, too. I know that some of the ones that you’ve spoken on before and ones that I listen to and that get to be known as kind of more progressive, they often have people on that just either have different ideas or can point you to resources to read more about these things for yourself so that you’re not just stuck with the traditional medical model.
drbiamonte (16:58.367)
That’s a good point.
Cheryl McColgan (17:01.548)
So we talked about the thyroid and obviously there’s a lot of factors involved in that. And so maybe like looking for these out of the box practitioners going to your website, reading the resources there more about thyroid. But you mentioned your specialty is actually Candida. Do you feel like that there are more people dealing with that than maybe they even know? And are there things that people could be on the lookout for to know whether they might be, you know, struggling with Candida and not even know it?
drbiamonte (17:30.954)
And usually at any given time about 30 to 40 percent of the population has Candida overgrowth.
Cheryl McColgan (17:38.22)
Wow, that’s a lot.
drbiamonte (17:40.262)
And primarily people get Candida overgrowth from antibiotics and other medications. It’s iatrogenic, it’s doctor induced. So what I tell people to do is if people are curious as to whether or not they have Candida, you look for the basic symptoms of it, which would be bloating, gas, digestive discomfort, constipation, diarrhea, cognitive problems.
rashes, indigestion, allergies. There’s a whole list of prominent symptoms the Candida patient has. But kind of what’s more important is looking at a timeline, developing a timeline. And go back to find a point in your life when you were healthy and you had no real problems. And then slowly come forward to the point where you started developing a lot of problems. Then go back slightly and look to see what was going on.
before you started getting sick? Did you take a lot of antibiotics? Were you in an accident where they had to give you prednisone, cortisone? Did you take chemotherapy for some cancer perhaps that was being treated? Because something has had to have triggered the candida. And usually what triggers, because you have to remember candida is a microbiome imbalance. Your friendly bacteria dies off, the friendly bacteria is what controls candida.
So once that friendly bacteria is compromised, then the candida starts to grow. And candida is a very slow progressive problem. People can have it for 10, 20, 30 years. It doesn’t go away by its own. It only gets better or changes. I’m sorry, it gets worse or changes. So if a person can say, well, you know, about six months before I started having all these problems, I was on these antibiotics, now they’re onto something. If you can equate…
Unfortunately, it isn’t that you take the antibiotic and then that next day you have Candida with all the symptoms. It’s not that easy. So, because it gradually develops. But if you can equate on a timeline that a few months before you started to develop your core symptoms or problems, that something, you did something or something happened that would have affected your intestinal bacteria, there’s now a good chance, especially if you have a lot of the symptoms of Candida, that that’s what your problem is.
Cheryl McColgan (20:00.756)
And then once people know that they have Candida, what’s sort of some of the steps does it really require working with a practitioner? Are there things that people can do on their own to start to work on the Candida getting under control or to improve their symptoms?
drbiamonte (20:15.766)
Here’s where we enter the maze. Because the first thing the person who says, well, I have Candida, they’re gonna go online. They’re gonna find Candida forums and Candida boards that they’re gonna talk to other people. They’ll compare their symptoms, their situation, and it will either confirm that they have it or perhaps make them a bit skeptical that maybe they do because they’re not the model case like all these other people. But then they’re gonna get hit with all the social media on Candida, all the home remedies.
Cheryl McColgan (20:18.232)
Hehehe
drbiamonte (20:46.878)
And the home remedies really don’t work. They can help for a while, but they really don’t work. And the primary reason why the home remedies don’t work is because candida is very mutative. And when you take anything, whether it’s prescription or herbal or natural, whatever we want to call it, to try to kill the candida for more than 21 days in a row, the candida mutates, it becomes drug-resistive, and it switches species. So a person will start off taking…
3 lakh or whatever the problem the product is initially they’ll get better They’ll write testimonies how great the product is if you follow them for the next couple of months. They’re gonna relapse Because the candida is gonna mutate against that product and come back
drbiamonte (21:33.238)
And that’s what one of the major problems is. I would say the next major problem is the probiotic scam, I’m gonna call it. If you listen to the companies that talk about probiotics, you would think that if you had Candida and you took probiotics, it would go away. But that’s not true. If that was true, I would be playing golf half the time, rather than seeing 60 to 70 patients a week with Candida. It doesn’t work.
Cheryl McColgan (21:54.444)
Hehehehe
drbiamonte (21:59.894)
And there’s a very simple reason why. Theoretically, probiotics protect you against Candida. That’s true when they say that. But what they’re not telling you is that once the Candida is gone, I’m sorry, once the Candida is established and the probiotics are unseeded, so to speak, the probiotics can’t come back until you remove the Candida. It’s like musical chairs, you see? You’ve gotta remove and then replace. If you don’t ever remove the Candida, the Candida keeps repelling the probiotics.
and it stops them from re-inoculating your intestinal tract. It just repels them, like when you were a kid and you had magnets and you were playing with the different polarities on the magnet. The one magnet pushing the other one away, that’s essentially what happens. So they’re gonna start hitting into all of this, unfortunately. They’re gonna see a lot of things that are gonna be very helpful or hopeful and then when they try it, it’s gonna fail. And they’re very typical that they go from doctor to doctor.
By the time a lot of patients come to me, they know more about Candida than most of the doctors do. Trial and error in their case. How I learned what I learned about Candida, the data that’s in my book, The Candida Chronicles, which you can get on Amazon, is a lot of that data came from listening to people, hearing what they did, what didn’t work, and then taking that information and going and hitting the textbooks on mycology and fungus and yeasts.
and figuring out why that didn’t work with the data they gave me. It was obvious it didn’t work, so there’s got to be a reason. So again, as I used the term earlier, it’s reverse engineering. What happened with people? So I learned from my patients’ experience what worked and didn’t work.
Cheryl McColgan (23:46.904)
So it sounds like it definitely would be a case where this might be good to work with, not just a practitioner, but somebody who’s very experienced with Candida. And without giving away all the secrets in your book, it sounds like, you know, it’s going to be a thing like you might need to do something for a couple weeks and then change.
drbiamonte (23:56.67)
Oh, no, no. I have no problem. I have no problem with anybody talking about what’s in the book. What’s in the book is the is the way to get rid of Candida. I learned it the hard way. It took me 20 years to finally say, well, this is what’s really going on. Because I kept wanting to do with the with the vitamin companies are telling me to do you see, and in this in this field, unfortunately,
Vitamin companies and nutritional companies are no better in certain ways than the pharmaceutical companies there’s every major vitamin company we work with has a rep who comes to you and they tell you just like they do with the drug companies and the medical doctors here’s our new supplement this does this and this and then it’s up to you and practice to use it and see whether or not this is true or the methodology is right or wrong and I kept wanting to look for an easy way an easy solution
and listen to these people, but I couldn’t do it after a while because it didn’t work. And it was like, who am I fooling here? Now this is not working. So I had to listen to the patient of why it didn’t work and then go back and figure it out. And some of the key things that I talk about in the book is number one, probiotics don’t work until you first remove the candida. The second is you must rotate the antifungals that you use. If you don’t switch the antifungals around every few days,
that your candida is just going to become drug-resistant. They’re going to stop working. The next thing is that there’s a list of vitamins and nutrients which feed candida and make it worse. There’s another list which stop the antifungals from working. People don’t want to believe this, but what I tell the person who doesn’t want to believe this is go get the inside insert to a box of ni-statin.
or ketoconazole, which are two very popular antifungal drugs, and read the mechanism of action. When you read on ketoconazole, ketoconazole works by blocking Candida’s uptake of vitamin D. That’s how it kills Candida. It stops Candida from getting vitamin D. So now do you think a Candida patient is gonna benefit from taking vitamin D if this drug kills it by blocking the vitamin D?
drbiamonte (26:16.338)
Let’s look at niestatin. Niestatin works by blocking Candida’s ability to absorb iron. So now I gotta be thinking, Candida must need vitamin D and iron to live. So am I gonna, is vitamin D or iron gonna be good to give a Candida patient? And yet the paradox in this is so many Candida patients are anemic. Why? The Candida’s taking their iron. So the doctor wants to help them, wants to give them iron. What happens? The Candida gets worse.
Cheryl McColgan (26:38.783)
Mmm.
Cheryl McColgan (26:44.556)
Very interesting.
drbiamonte (26:46.21)
These are the pitfalls the patients are gonna come up against. And luckily for them, I’ve already done it the wrong way for many, many years to the point where I then learned by default what the right way was. They can just get my book and save themselves a lot of trouble. In fact, buy two copies, one for the patient and one for their doctor.
Cheryl McColgan (27:04.936)
Right, that makes a lot of sense too, because part of the trouble with all of this stuff is getting the word out there. And like you said, maybe if one of these people that haven’t kept up with everything had their patient bring in something that really helped them, maybe they would maybe learn something new.
drbiamonte (27:20.566)
Doctors tend to be very stubborn. They can be very dogmatic. And don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are medical doctors, but I joke all the time, what does MD stand for? Is that mental deficient? Or I’m not clear on that. But they’ll be the first sometimes to tell you stay away from doctors. Doctors will make you sick. It’s doctors can be very, they can’t be wrong a lot of times. They’re very stuck in being assertive and right.
So when you try to teach that new dog old tricks, it sometimes doesn’t work. You have to be very subtle with the doctor when you’re trying to show him something. Because he’s the authority, you see. So when you try to come up against what he’s telling you, it’s usually not gonna work. So you have to be very subtle. But that’s the problem, doctors don’t wanna learn new things. The why I’ve been doing this for years, well, how many people have you helped? Well, I’m not really sure about that. Well, maybe.
You take a look at that and see if it’s working.
Cheryl McColgan (28:21.2)
Yeah. And that’s such a challenge with our medical system in general, which unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s an easy answer to that, but.
drbiamonte (28:28.706)
Well, the medical system is based on a few rules. Number one, don’t kill the patient. Number two, don’t cure the patient. If you kill him or you cure him, he’s not there to buy your prescription. That’s what the medical system is actually based on. Unfortunately, but true.
Cheryl McColgan (28:45.512)
Yeah, and we’re back to follow the money, unfortunately.
drbiamonte (28:49.89)
Yes, but I’m back to follow the money. That’s true
Cheryl McColgan (28:53.784)
So before we move on for the day, because I want to make sure I respect your time, I am really curious to hear more about the computer software program that you’re involved with. And I think this must have maybe come out of some of your work with the engineers that you talked about. But I’d love for you to share how you’re using computer software to analyze some of the data that you’ve gotten from your patients over the years.
drbiamonte (29:17.858)
When I got out of college, with all the data I amassed on interpretation of blood work, I wanted to come up with a way to do it where it would be standardized. So I was, and this is back in 1984, so I was looking for people who worked with computers, and what I wanted to do was put together a program where we would enter the parameters from the blood work or a hair mineral test or a test like the organic acid test, enter the data and the computer would just automatically go through a series of algorithms.
and then come out with what was wrong and what supplements the person needed to take. This way it would be standardized. So I was going around Long Island, passing out my business cards, and I was in a health food store and I was telling the woman there that this is what I was trying to do, and she told me, well, you have to go speak to Dr. Santoro because he’s already doing this. He already has a computer that’s doing this. So I called this doctor up and I found out that Dr. Robert Santoro…
I’m sorry to say the late Robert Santoro was an aerospace physiologist at Grumman Who had developed the life support systems on the lunar module? That was that the thing that landed on the moon the bug like thing He developed the life support systems in there and he was also a naturopath. He was an aerospace physiologist and a naturopath and I spoke to him. He invited me over to see what he what he was doing. I was just blown away because His son was a PhD in computer language
His son had set up a Fortran, it’s called Fortran computer language, which is basically table driven. Instead of you writing up a whole program, you have tables which have different algorithms. So this was ideal for what we were doing because the more you learn about the body, you have to put more data in and you can’t keep rewriting the program. So with the Fortran language, you just inserted tables where you found something new.
So if you found that B12 did something different other than what we know, it was just a series of steps you add to that rather than having to redo the whole thing. And so I worked with him for quite a few years. And what we did was essentially take Harper’s biochemistry and Guyton’s physiology book and load them into this computer in a way where it could re-simulate someone’s body. And then we put all the data from Dr. Brockman and Jim Seema and all the other…
drbiamonte (31:41.394)
more avant-garde scientists, we put all that data in there. And then we had vitamin companies that were helping us, Neutral West, VM, Nutri, Metagenics, Neutrodyne, all of these companies were helping us. And they would give us product information, which we loaded into a product module. So the computer would get your test results.
and it would do a mock-up of everything your body was doing. It would simulate all your biochemical pathways, your hormones, your physiology, everything that was known to man at that time. It would re-simulate that and then it’d find where it failed. So if something failed, it would then go to the product module and find what nutrient or what nutritional formula was needed to fix that.
drbiamonte (32:32.306)
And then the more times you would have this run on you, the computer had a retest module. So it would go back and it was look at your previous tests.
So this is how it works. And to my knowledge, there’s still nothing even like this because it’s using, back then it was using this, um, these simpler forms of artificial intelligence, which by, by now, by now what we have, um, blows away what we started with would put the work that’s been done, but it’s still based on the same concept. The computer can look at your lab work and it can tell, it can figure out what’s happening. One story I can tell you, we had a patient.
Cheryl McColgan (33:03.793)
Oh, I can imagine.
drbiamonte (33:14.151)
And the computer indicated to us, and see the computer can’t, you can’t talk in terms of disease using the computer system. The commentary that it gives you is only physiology because you could then be accused of practicing medicine without a license if it comes out and says, talks pathology. So the computer would just quote Guyton or Harper’s Biochemistry or whatever would quote it.
And on this one person, it was explaining that the person’s hyposalal stalk, which is a part of your spine that goes into your brain that vibrates, wasn’t properly stimulating the hypothalamus to release hormones or communication to the pituitary gland on this patient. So the computer explained exactly what was needed to do to fix this. And the person was, I don’t really know, this sounds hoogy doogy. They went to some…
some clinic, I think Mayo Clinic somewhere, and in the Mayo Clinic, they ran all these, they ran thousands of dollars in tests, and they told the person, we think there’s something wrong with your hypothalamus.
drbiamonte (34:26.438)
So as an example of what it could do, this computer pinpointed exactly what was wrong with the hypothalamus where at the clinic, they just had a vague idea of something was going on involving it.
Cheryl McColgan (34:38.356)
And so what, I mean, did you happen to know what the outcome was in this specific case? Did they, were they able to figure out something to help or, or did the computer come up with something to help?
drbiamonte (34:46.186)
Yes, actually the product module had products that helped the body to stabilize the hyposyl stalk and the hypothalamus and the person went on these formulas and thereafter they were fine.
Cheryl McColgan (35:02.06)
Very interesting. And I’m surprised, again, this seems like a very intuitive and common sense way to approach problems like that, take a data set and especially utilizing the technology that we have nowadays. You might need to approach some companies with that.
drbiamonte (35:02.975)
Yeah, for sure.
drbiamonte (35:23.594)
Well, we already have, and that’s where you get into the other end of things, where there are companies that once they hear you have a product module, they want to be exclusive.
Cheryl McColgan (35:35.001)
Mmm. Well.
drbiamonte (35:37.274)
So that doesn’t always pan out.
Cheryl McColgan (35:39.716)
No, I was just thinking from a patient’s perspective how useful that would be if it were more widespread, I guess.
drbiamonte (35:45.078)
Well, what we’re actually doing with the model is we’re going to be using it as a teaching tool, because we want to make it a standard instrument for all certified nutritionists, all clinical nutritionists. We want them to have access to this so they can use it on their patients, because it’s an incredible teaching tool. I found what I learned in the years that I was developing this model
from studying all the biochemistry and then aligning it into the computer, I learned more than I did in my whole eight years in naturopathic school.
Cheryl McColgan (36:20.04)
Yeah, no, this sounds like an amazing program. I’m glad to hear that you’ll be sharing that with other practitioners so that they can help patients a lot easier. Until all then, until everyone has access to such things and they don’t certainly have all your years of experience, can you just share with how you work with people, where they can find you, and if they’re interested in learning more about optimizing their thyroid or fighting Candida, what are the best ways that they can do all of that?
drbiamonte (36:49.022)
They can easily find me online and then online there are contact forms they can fill out that will come to us. They can describe their case and what’s happening with them and then we’ll get back to them and we work entirely virtual so we can see patients anywhere in the world.
Cheryl McColgan (37:08.32)
Fantastic. And what is the website again? It’ll be in the show notes, but I just want to make sure that we say it here.
drbiamonte (37:13.262)
My main website is health-truth.com. And I have two other websites. I have the New York City Candida Doctor and the New York City Thyroid Doctor. Those are the other two websites.
Cheryl McColgan (37:18.304)
Love it?
Cheryl McColgan (37:27.032)
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge with us today. It was really interesting learning about your background and I love hearing about these stories where people actually take data and turn it into something that’s a little more actionable than just seeing it and thinking, oh, that’s interesting. So thanks for doing that and I appreciate you coming on today.
drbiamonte (37:48.526)
Sure, my pleasure, absolutely.
In this episode, Dane Johnson shares his personal journey with a mysterious gut issue that caused his health to rapidly decline. He shares the challenges he faced, the various treatments he tried, the eventual diagnosis and the impact it had on his life. He discovered a colitis new treatment and a way to approach Crohn’s that is helping people all over the world.
He learned a lot on his journey to return to health and emphasizes the importance of mindset, positive energy and helping others. He also introduces the SHIELD program, which focuses on building a customized lifestyle for healing and offers a supportive community for individuals with a variety of gut health issues.
Find Dane and more about the SHIELD program at the Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle website.
Takeaways
- Healing starts in the mind and requires a decision to prioritize your well-being.
- Creating a positive environment and surrounding yourself with positive energy can have a significant impact on your healing journey.
- Journaling and tracking your symptoms, diet, and emotions can provide valuable insights and help you make informed decisions.
- Building a supportive community and seeking guidance from experts can provide the necessary tools and resources for healing.
- Customizing your approach to healing and focusing on consistency over perfection can lead to long-term success. Emotional intelligence is crucial for success in both personal and professional life.
- Developing emotional intelligence requires self-awareness, empathy, and effective communication.
- Emotional intelligence plays a significant role in building and maintaining healthy relationships.
Watch on YouTube
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Dane’s Story
17:14 Lessons Learned
23:19 The Importance of Mindset and Positive Energy
32:42 The SHIELD Program, Colitis New Treatment and Community Support
35:40 Emotional Intelligence in Relationships
38:51 Conclusion and Call to Action
Episode TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:00.958)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the HealNourishGrow podcast. Today I have Dane Johnson and he has a really both heartbreaking but of a it ends up well kind of story. And so I’m excited to share him and his knowledge with you today. We’re going to talk about a lot of things related to gut health, but specifically IBD and Crohn’s and colitis. So Dane, welcome. If you could just start by telling people.
How in the world you got into this because it was kind of a sad story the way that it started out.
Dane Johnson (00:35.493)
Yes, it was. And Cheryl, thank you so much for having me and bringing me on and sharing this story and what we do with your community. And everyone out there who’s listening, who might be dealing with chronic gut health issues, IBD, I dedicate this talk to you. This talk is for you. And I hope we can get some life-changing results and get some big aha moments today. And so yeah, it was a very sad story for me. And some of the reasons I’m so passionate about this and I’m here today is because I was diagnosed with
ulcerative colitis, then Crohn’s, then ulcerative colitis. The doctors couldn’t make up their mind. I got my first symptoms at 19 years old. It nearly killed me on my 27th birthday. So I turned my birthday’s November 24th. So December 11th, 2014, I nearly passed away in the hospital two weeks after my birthday. I was in the hospital for a month or six weeks straight at that time. I suffered for a lot of my 20s and I…
You know, I would drop down to 120 pounds from 185. I, you know, had 25 bloody bad mood today, extreme cystic acne. I’d been on all the medications the doctors told me to. I never wanted this. My parents didn’t know what to do with this. I never dealt with any major health issues. My family never dealt with any Crohn’s, colitis or IBD growing up. We didn’t know anything about chronic disease. And, you know, it just hit me like a ton of bricks and we didn’t know what to do about it.
So we went to every different holiday. We flew around the country into different Mayo Clinic in UCLA and Cedars-Sinai and saw different naturopath doctors and tried different diets and read all the big books, the SED diet, the low FODMAP diet, the fruitarian diet, and paleocarnivore style. And I just kept getting more sick and more sick and more sick. And my mom was trying to take care of me. I mean, a lot of us can, you know, mothers out there and people out there know what your mom’s gonna try to do for you.
And she, you know, at one point lost her job trying to take care of me. So I wouldn’t lose my career. Cause I was so lucky at 23 years old. I right after getting, you know, uh, my, my final diagnosis of KUF IBD before they weren’t really sure I moved out to, to Los Angeles to pursue a dream and acting and bottling and doing commercials and all that. And I was a kid from the sticks. I, it was from the woods. I was in from Virginia and all of a sudden it happened. I was a nobody. No one found me. And I.
Dane Johnson (02:52.645)
went out there and made this thing happen at a young age and with no money in my pocket, tons of debt, no experience, didn’t know a soul in California. And at the same time, current’s class became life threatening. So it was a very ironic moment in my life where I remember just thinking, how could God be so giving in one hand and so taking on the other? It was the biggest irony of my life. Being meeting different clients and working all around LA and Miami and New York and…
I had all these agencies interested in me in Europe. And then all of a sudden, you know, I can’t control my bowel movements. I’m losing blood left and right. I’m anemic, I’m low on electrolytes, I’m fainting. And if you can see that little scar if you’ve seen the video right there, I was losing control of my vision and fainting. I was just hanging out with a buddy and cracked my head open on the side of a table. I mean, all these horrific experiences. I was massive shame, losing control of my bowel movements, scared to be, leave the house.
Crohn’s Disease CauseI could hardly walk, just stuck on a toilet. And I was 23. I mean, it was just, it was torture. And so in one moment I was building this amazing life I never thought I’d have. I was raised in Haymarket, Virginia, in the middle of the woods. We had, we were just good old boys out there. And I just always had these dreams and I went after them.
I just went after them and then it was taken from me and one fell swoop and my mom did everything to try to take help me and she would travel with me when I was living in Miami or New York and she’d get me my own apartment and she actually lost her job trying to help me keep mine. And she ended up starting a 501C nonprofit based on that experience. I mean, it poured every dollar she had and all this. And I didn’t come from a wealthy family. So when we were spending $2,000 on functional lab work and $5,000 for
round trip flights and hotel rooms plus consultations with different doctors and different professors who wrote books on IBD and gut health and still not getting results. It just seemed like there was nowhere to go and I became so angry because my parents couldn’t give me an answer. These GI doctors with all these degrees and a hundred different alphabets behind, letters behind their name couldn’t give me answers. I had already been on Remicade. I’d been on Tivio. I’d been on TPN feeding to…
Dane Johnson (05:17.817)
I’ve been on prednisone on and off like Skittles, 60 milligrams, drop down, back up to 60, drop down, back up to 60. I’ve been on obviously mesalazine. I’d been on 6-MP, which gave me drug-induced hepatitis. My liver started shutting down. I did methotrexate, that didn’t work. So I was a young man who was willing to do everything. I just wanted my life back. I said, well, God just gave me this great gift, and now I can’t even walk. Doc, give me whatever you gotta give me.
I was not this against the grain guy who was gonna go out and heal myself with gluten free AIP style diet. I was no sir give me what you have let me get back to this life I’m only 24 once. I’ve got this one shot now I’ve got a I got a casting for a new movie who would have thought little old me might be in some movies oh wait I can’t walk I can’t be away from a bathroom I just lost 40 pounds.
Cheryl McColgan (05:51.24)
Ah!
Cheryl McColgan (05:55.822)
All right.
Dane Johnson (06:12.833)
Now I’m hiding from my agents, I’m hiding from my family, I’m hiding from friends, and I’m supposed to be the cool guy online. This is right when social media started hitting. So what does my agent want me to post? What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to be the cool guy, the hot guy, the hip guy, the influencer. Behind closed doors, covered in cystic acne, throwing up, 20 to 25 bound moments a day at least. I didn’t sleep through a night without using the restroom for about eight months straight.
My clothes don’t fit. I can’t work out. I can’t leave the house. I’m in severe pain. Pooping sometimes felt like I was trying to poop class. And it was just, and everyone out there who can relate to this, it’s like, we all know it’s like, well, you’re just supposed to go to the doctor’s, right? If you get sick, you go to the doctor’s. You get really sick, you check yourself into the hospital. Been there, done that, still sick. So I start looking at this like, is this it? Is this what I was…
meant to do? Is there nothing else I can do? Mom, dad, what else? They write a check. Don’t get anywhere. What do I eat? Mom’s researching day and night. Okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to eat that. We’re going to take this random supplement. Let’s go to Whole Foods. Drop by everything we can find that Google says at Whole Foods. Just take everything in the supplement side and every organic food. Get it. That’s not 800 bucks. I’m still just as sick. I couldn’t figure out what is was and if Chron’s disease cause.
Dane Johnson (07:39.641)
It was the most painful thing I’ve ever been through my life. And it was a prison I didn’t know how to get out of, and no one knew how to get out of. And I wanna share the keys to what helped me get out today. And I wanna share the keys to success because eventually I did. And December 14th, right around there, 2014, I nearly died in the hospital. And I was on two or three different antibiotics. I was on…
Infused I was on 200 milligrams of infused prednisone, which is about a little over three times the dose They’d ever give you orally I was on a TPN feeding tube and then it was a doctor in Florida who had an idea that there was an active Virus in my body, which is why I was crying I was dying and I wasn’t getting better from the not eating being on antibiotics being on massive dose of steroids It wasn’t working. No one could figure out why the doctors were scratching their head. Why is this kid so sick?
And I had lost consciousness at this point. I was, I was in dream land. They had me on three grams of Dilaudid as well, which is basically legalized heroin. So I was floating on a cloud talking to the wall, right? And, and so when this one doctor suggested I needed to be on a chemotherapy antiviral, that’s what’s actually saved my life. It was about 24 hours later, I snapped out of it, right? Became conscious. Oh, my, my markers started calming down. I started being able to eat.
And then about a week later, I checked myself out of the hospital. And then I was housebound for a year. So I was bed rested from there for three months. It took me about a month to get off the couch and start being aware. So I just sat on a couch. My mom and sister took turns living with me. So my mom had to get back to work. I mean, we were a middle-class family. She couldn’t just stay out there. And cause I wanted to live in California. My whole family was from East coast. I didn’t want to leave my life in California. That to me was the ultimate failure that I would to go on disability, live back with my mom. And, and, and to me, I just.
because I had so much going for me in California at that time that I felt like I built this life. I was very happy with it. And she didn’t want to see me lose that either because it was like that hope that you’re going to be able to get past this. Don’t give up on your dreams. And so her and my big sister took turns living with me. And I was actually grateful for that because I got so close with my sister. And just, you’re on a couch all day long. I mean, we were watching anything we could watch. I was watching space exploration.
Cheryl McColgan (09:56.321)
and
Dane Johnson (09:57.845)
I learned everything there is learned about the Antarctica and about the planets. I don’t remember much because I was so hip up, but it took me about two to three months to be able to start walking again. And then during that time, I got myself off methotrexate. I still was on the antivial. I got myself off the chemo therapy. I got myself off the antibiotics. I got myself off. I was trying to figure out the Chron’s disease cause.
Took about four or five months to get completely off prednisone. So I got down to about 10, 12 grams of prednisone that I had to just slowly be on. Coming off too quickly really caused problems. And then I was dealing with extreme depression. I mean, when you have that much toxicity, to this day, I think that one of the reasons I got so bad mentally, I mean, obviously you get that bad when you go something like that, that you just get into a depression, but I felt so sickly. You ever been not so nauseous, but imagine like a spiritual, like a nauseous feeling spiritually, like you just.
Everything just lost its color, lost its taste, lost its hope. It was just a very bleak energy everywhere. Every cell in my body was bleak. And I remember just feeling like I just hated waking up and being conscious because I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t want to feel anymore. It felt so bad. And I think that had a lot to do with coming off the painkillers and coming off the drugs. I mean, my body was so toxic, so overwhelmed that I had to start releasing.
And I remember I was actually after my first Epsom salt bath, I did a lot. I started doing skin brushing and then the bottom of my feet were actually all the skin was falling off my feet. And I think that was because my body trying to drain those toxins. I also had no fat where your body stores toxins because I’d lost 60 pounds. So it was being stored in my muscles. And so I had such muscle cramping. So I was doing, I started doing Epsom salt baths about six weeks into being home. And then a lot of skin brushing, a lot of breath meditation.
very specific about what I was eating. A lot of broths and just a little bit of light meats. It couldn’t handle fats. My pancreatic enzymes weren’t working. Just a host of problems. I mean, it was a tight bundle of problems. And it was about nine months, 10 months in that I started being able to go on long walks and ride a bicycle and get to the grocery store and get my own groceries.
Dane Johnson (12:14.493)
I got back up to like 150 pounds. I’m 6’2″, so it was a light still. I would usually walk around at 180, 185. Today I’m like 188. And started going back to the gym. And I remember my mom said this, she goes, you’re crazy, what are you doing at the gym? You almost died. I said, ma, just the act of going to the gym every day, I went to the gym 27 days in a row, 140 pounds, and I could barely walk with a cane.
It wasn’t because I was working out. It was the act of getting out of the house and getting in a routine and being around that good energy. See, one of the brilliant things of being that sick is it taught me, I was life-threatening, backed into a corner where at its primal basics of survival, you start becoming aware of the need to feel good. Like part of healing is just searching like a mouse looking for cheese of good energy.
You just are looking, you can’t just ignore it anymore. You can’t just turn on Netflix and ignore it. You gotta get around positivity. So when I went to the gym, I saw some of the guys I knew from the gym, because I was a big, big gym guy, right? I just loved going and exercising, running, whatever. So just going and being around that energy, just putting on my headphones, just saying, it’s 11 a.m., I’m gonna go there. I’m gonna be able to ride my bike, just being able to sit on a mat and meditate for 30 minutes, then go home. Just being in the back of a yoga class, you know, and just being on my hands and knees and going.
Just the act of being there and I started feeling better. And then all of a sudden I started getting 5% more done at the gym, 7%, 8%. And I found reasons to smile and I found reasons to laugh. And so when you’re back into a corner fighting for your life or you’re really in a deep depression or if you’re in a hospital right now, you got to find something to laugh about. You got to find what’s good. You got to share what’s good.
And when I started changing my mindset that I was no longer going to be sick or depressed, when I started with that and said, I’m done, that’s when my life changed. So it really starts with a decision in your mind. And then from there, if you have conviction, you will manifest it. You will create it from there. And so that’s what I did. And it was every single day. And I really learned the bare basics of where does happiness come from? Where does emotional and spiritual depth and healing come from?
Dane Johnson (14:29.077)
You know, what is it that makes us happy? Is it, is it our fitness? Is it the perfect body? Is it fame? Is it money? Or is it being able to talk to those that you love and find a reason to laugh and be of value to them, you know, what makes humans feel good when you feel of value to others, I was feeling so depressed because I was such a burden to everyone around me. So I woke up and said, I got to start being a value to others. I call a buddy and he goes, Oh my God, are you okay? Man, tell me.
Don’t worry. I’m great. This is what’s good. This is what’s good about my growth. Even though I was still very sick. This is what’s good. This is what’s good. Tell me about your life. How are you? How’s that girl? Are you going to put a ring on it? How’s the career? Oh, this is what I think might help you. This is what I might think help you. I started trying to be of value to others instead of just being a burden. And that made me feel good about myself. That made me feel like I had a purpose to live. Humans don’t feel good unless we feel of value to others.
Cheryl McColgan (15:04.228)
Hehehe
Dane Johnson (15:20.921)
That’s why when we create success, one of the things we always want to do is give. I want to buy my mom a house. I want to build a new water supply or help create electricity in India, Africa, or third world country. As we create success, we just want to be more valued. I started learning and becoming aware of what it meant to feel good and what happiness, emotionally and spiritually, how to make that trade. What were the limiting beliefs around food? Why did I feel I needed gluten? Why do all humans feel they needed fast food? Why did I…
Crohn’s Disease Dietfeel like I needed alcohol. And why did I feel like I couldn’t live without, you know, the McDonald’s or Papa John’s or Doritos or donuts or bagels? Because that’s what I grew up on. I mean, when the first gluten-free diet was ever shown to me, I said, there’s no way. There’s no chance. Everything eats gluten. I was raised on cereal and Papa John’s and Subway. I worked at Papa John’s pizza from 14 years old to 18 years old. So what do you think I ate? You know? It was time to figure out the Crohn’s disease diet.
Cheryl McColgan (16:18.09)
Well, and that’s an interesting, I mean, gosh, having gone through that, what a traumatic experience, but I’m sure at this point, you know, you’ve looked back, you’ve had so many lessons from that on just life generally and happiness and all of that. But I think for the, you know, the health part of it, what were the lessons that you sort of learned about, you know, was there anything that you were doing at the time that you feel like was exasperating the condition or…
you know, because you mentioned gluten and that’s immediately where my mind goes to because that’s such a pervasive thought process lately that people have like a lot of people that’s like demon or gluten’s the devil and a lot of people are like no it’s still fine and it’s just it’s a big debate and you know there’s been all these books like wheat belly and all kinds of things so I would just love to hear you know having gone through that most dramatic experience almost that anybody could go to with your gut.
Like, what did you take out of that? And you went to all these experts. Like, eventually, was there some light bulb where you kind of like figured it out, at least for yourself?
Dane Johnson (17:25.037)
Yeah, great question. And so now I want to give you some of the defining moments and what I call universal truths that help me heal. And so if you’re listening right now, maybe grab a pen and paper and write these down if you’re chronically sick or need something because these are life changing. Number one, I decided that the way I was going to make a decision on what was physically like food, for instance, what food was good or bad was I had to, I was going to do things that could only help me and couldn’t hurt me. So that was my first rule. Can this potentially hurt?
can this potentially help? So if it could potentially help and not hurt, I was gonna do it. So first I had to go look at the obvious ones, prayer and purpose. Could it hurt? This is exactly, when I got that deep, I had, this is my first rule. Prayer and purpose can’t hurt, can only help. Okay, meditation can’t hurt, can only help. Putting on Bob Marley, turning off the scary movies, getting myself in the parasympathetic nervous system can only help, it can’t hurt.
Gardening getting out in the Sun putting my feet in the soil can only help it can’t hurt reducing my any arguments reducing any anger pain resentment like I Forgave my father and we started getting a lot closer when I got chronically sick a lot closer So that was obvious to me and a lot of you guys are saying well, and give me the unobvious It’s unobvious for a reason and it’s a journey you have to go through for a reason So stop trying to go around it and go through it. Okay, so here’s the next thing healing starts in the mind
So what we just said, those are all mental aspects. Okay, and when I started looking at what really changed my life, I didn’t find the perfect Chron’s disease diet. I didn’t find the perfect supplement. That all came when I did these things first. So these are your first steps and then all of that will become more clear. Here’s the next one with diet. What’s more important than if you’re gluten-free or you’re looking at the vegan versus meat war going on right now? Here’s what I want you to do. Here’s more important than any of those questions. Only eat what you cook.
When I started meditating and clearing my mind, I said, what’s the most empowering thing I can do that reduces the risk no matter what I choose? Oh, eggs are bad or they’re good or chickens bad or good or brown rice or white rice or lettuce or nuts and seeds. Oh no, I gotta have my own homemade yogurts and raw milk. Oh no, I gotta have more sauerkraut. No, the lac vasillus is hurting me. No, it’s too much histamine. All that stuff, first thing you do, only eat what you cook. When I started spiritually healing, I was now in a energetic place to do that.
Dane Johnson (19:46.741)
I don’t know. I was also, I found a place to go to school. So find a place to get trained. I went back to school for natural medicine and I was dealing with my natural professors, asking them questions, going to people who would study this for 10, 15, 20 years, looking at how they ate, look at how they made decisions around food. And a lot of it, there’s so many better questions to ask yourself before we get in the argument of, this is bad and this is good, okay? The quality of the food, the manner at which it’s prepared, is it local, is it seasonal? How do you mix food? Okay?
One of the things that I found when I started researching different diets, like when I looked at all the diets and understanding of the carnivore AIP, and I saw all the research there, then I looked at David Klein’s self-healing Crohn’s colitis on the fruitarian diet, and only eating 20 bananas a day. And then I looked at the bone broth diet, and then I looked at, and then I tried the low FODMAP, and I did SED, and then I did Gundry’s low lectin, and I found beautiful nuggets in all of them. All of them had great points. And then I cherry picked them.
and I customized them to myself. That’s when my life changed. So I actually found that I could do styles of vegan fruitarian at certain parts of the day, and then I journaled on them, and then I did styles of AIP carnivore, maybe for lunch or dinner or on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and then I would journal on them. So the biggest thing I would recommend next is you have to journal. I journaled for 187 days, everything I ate, how I felt, my exact symptoms, so am I at a symptom tracker?
And then I started being Dr. Dane twice a day. And my patient Dane came in and told me the truth. So five minutes more in the name, okay, Dane, did you eat that crappy food and you should have? How’d you really feel? Did you notice a difference in bowel movements? Oh, you saw more blood today. Do you think it was about what you ate yesterday? Do you think it was the stress? Do you think it was about sleeping? So I was using my intuition to say, what do you think? But before I was too upset, stressed, angry, I didn’t have a place to really get a vision of what was going on. So I couldn’t empower myself to understand. Okay?
So that’s another thing you have to do right now, right then. You got to journal. If you’re really ready to heal and you’re not journaling, ask yourself why. Why would you not journal? How hard is it? I’m talking five minutes morning, five minutes at night. Okay? And if you need the journal, just shoot us, just write us info at CronesPlace Lifestyle and say, hey, Dan, can you send me the journal? I’ll send you my journal for free. I built this when I was housebound. I wrote it up, I rewrote it, rewrote it, and said, this is what I want to track. Okay? And I got one around here somewhere. If I can find it on my desk, nope.
Dane Johnson (22:07.377)
I can’t find it, but I put it in a three ring binder and every day and it just it did the things I need So that was big. So again healing started in the mind. I did what it could only help me couldn’t hurt me I journaled every single day so I could get more intuition I only ate what I cooked and that gave me more intuition on what I was gonna eat So as and then I had a community of training so every day I was getting trained in natural medicine functional medicine lab work I was I was so I was looking on the outside I was reading three to four hours a day reading can only help you can’t hurt you
These are all beautiful things I learned when I was chronically sick is that, do you know why beauty reading is a must? If you are in a mentally tough place right now where you’re dealing with depression, okay, and you are in a bad place, you must read. Okay. Here’s why you cannot have all your negative thoughts in your head going on repetition over and over again, and read a page at the same time.
If you get in your head, what happens to your page, your place in the book? You lose it. Aha. Wait, I can’t read and think about all my problems at the same time. If you, and how much does it cost to read a Tony Robbins book?
Cheryl McColgan (23:19.03)
Nothing.
Dane Johnson (23:19.621)
How much did it cost to read the best doctor’s books in the world? Mark Hyman’s books. How much it cost? How much? Five bucks? It was so I…
Cheryl McColgan (23:27.854)
people don’t even think about you can go to the library. Nobody does that anymore, but you don’t even have to buy the book.
Dane Johnson (23:30.713)
My legs hurt!
And that’s why I say you gotta start with the spirit. When my spirit healed, there was obvious answers. I was just too angry and upset with my parents and the doctors and God and so anxious and scared. And when I got all that energy down and I could see through the fog and I could see clearly and I was convicted and I decided I’m done being sick, I’m done being a victim, I’m done, I’m gonna heal. The steps became obvious. It wasn’t obvious how to get there, it was obvious what to do next.
I’m gonna say it again. It wasn’t obvious how to get there. It was obvious what to do next. Should I start reading every day? Yes. Why? Because there’s wonderful information and people have already been through crazy stuff like this in the future. So I was reading Jordan Rubin’s book, Who Healed Himself of IBD. You wanna hear about manifestation? I talked and did an hour long call with Jordan Rubin. I’m gonna partner with him next year. And his books helped save my life. What? That man’s books helped save my life. And it wasn’t just his.
telling me what supplement to take or on SBOs or HMOs or probiotics or the maker’s diet. It was his story. It was his energy. It was his spirit that allowed me to feel like if he can do it, if I can do it. He’s the only one who I’d read who had gone through what I was going through. I hadn’t met anyone who had been sick and gotten better like me. I didn’t meet anyone who could relate. I never met a doctor who could relate. That’s one of the reasons I started my company because we’ve been through it. We’re going to help you go through it. We’re going to help you do it with you.
We’ve gotten massive success. Okay, I’m symptom surgery, drug-free, I wanna weigh 185 pounds, I can eat what I want. I could go eat an entire large Papa John’s pizza with gluten, with dairy, go run 10 miles, and then go hang out with my kids and be fine. Not because it’s not good for me, that’s all trash and it’s inflammatory and it’s bad for you. But my body is so strong, my shield is so strong, my digestion is so optimized, my microbiome is so optimized, my body can handle that stress.
Dane Johnson (25:27.161)
That’s what healing is about. A normal person can handle the inflammation. It’s not that it’s not inflammatory. Their body can handle it until it can’t. Right? A shield, that’s why I call the program shield. So we’ll talk more about that later on, but that’s how I came at it. I had to rebuild the body and step one, step two became obvious. So when I started reading, I started looking, how do I build this energy? I started going to bed at 10 o’clock. My house was perfectly clean. I didn’t watch any scary movies. I didn’t put on anxious music. I only listened to Bob Marley.
I let the sun in, I got my feet in the ground, I started journaling, I started planning, taking care of plants and gardening. And the one thing I used to laugh about is like, trying to watch a garden grow is like trying to heal. If you look every single day, it’s like, Oh God, it’s a good take forever. But three weeks later, you’re going, wow, I can’t believe how much this has grown.
Right? It’s like the gr- And that’s why I love taking care of the garden. I was like, by the time this tomato plant gru- gets tomatoes, I’m gonna have no blood.
Cheryl McColgan (26:17.634)
That’s a great analogy. I love that.
Dane Johnson (26:27.257)
By the time these strawberries come out, I’m gonna gain 10 pounds. Not gonna happen overnight, but if I put time and focus with every day. So I’d wake up, I’d make a mucosal healing tea, hot tea with different herbs. I like peppermint and chamomile, and I put a little slippery almond, marshmallow root, and then maybe slice of ginger. And I go out and I grab my book and I always read. I found little things that helped me read because I didn’t like reading, right? I found that if I had a highlighter, I read better.
Because as I read something that was like, aha, I would highlight it. And then I might even go to the back of the book and write it as a star in the back of the book. So I’d go out in my garden. I’d see that first sun that get that sun in my eyes. I’d have my robe on. I’d have my tea. I’d have a little bit of Bob Marley in the background. I want to love you. You know, and I’d be on my patio. So I created an environment that was like a vacation. If I take a billionaire and they were on a vacation, how much of that energy do they want to, they want to do on their vacation?
They have all the money in the world. They want that same energy. They want positive energy. They want a quiet morning. They want to wake up with the sun. They want to be around a garden. They want to have a book that inspires them. It doesn’t, I don’t care how anything, so you start learning about what success is. The poorest man can have such better energy in his life than the richest man because of ignorance of how energy and spirit and the earth works.
So when I got chronically sick and although everything was seemingly taking away from me, everything was seemingly taken away from us, I started realizing what to have was. It was an exchange of energy that you don’t need a lot of money for. That you don’t, I couldn’t be away from a bathroom, but I could still love. I could still smile. I could still get that Bob Marley around me. I could get that sun around me. I could get those plants around me. To this day, I still take care of 70 plants. When I was 25, I took care of 200.
How many of you are feeling this energy right now? If you can feel this energy, say right now with me, I know you can’t hear me, this is a recording, but say amen, say thank you, say yes, because that is the energy you’ve got to absorb it, you’ve got to eat it. That’s your vitamin, oh man, Ben Azzati, shout out to him, that’s his vitamin G, right? That’s the vitamin G we’re talking about. You’ve got to get that positivity. I started going to church, why? Because I just knew I needed, I wanted to put my hands in the air, I wanted to be grateful, I wanted to sing.
Cheryl McColgan (28:35.874)
Vitamin G.
Dane Johnson (28:48.913)
Because I was done being sick. Not because I was trying to, you know, argue about anything. I need, you gotta get positive energy around you. No more negativity, no more victimhood, no more anxiety, no more fights. No more. I can’t only what I can. Those who say they can, and those who say they can’t are both usually right. When I’m feeling down, get a book, go for a walk, get that sun, get on the phone and make someone stay better. Find a reason to smile, find a reason to laugh to this day. When I get on the phone with my team, the first question is what’s good.
You start your day with what’s good, always. You tell someone a problem, you tell them three solutions afterwards. Do not tell people, do not enroll people in problems without then enrolling them in solutions. This is all I learned through chronic suffering, almost losing my life and more pain than I ever thought I could take. You know, pain to purpose, diagnosed with purpose. You can do this. You have to tap into your divine power as a human. And as you do it, step two and three will be obvious.
So that was another one. Get in a community where you can learn, where you can grow, where others around you are doing what you’re doing. That’s our program. In our program, you can talk with everyone in our program. We don’t have this whole thing where you can’t talk to each other. We are a free governing community with over a thousand members of moms and elders and children of all creeds, all races, all cultures, all diets, all talking to each other, all focused on solutions, all cheering each other on.
No diets, only a lifestyle. Build your lifestyle, forget a diet. Build your plan, your unique plan. Cherry pick from each other. That’s it. That’s the energy. And when you learn this, I want you to take a step back from this. This is what gave me my power to just be convicted as all can be. I started thinking, okay, Dane, imagine right now. Everyone imagine with me. Imagine you’re not sick at all. Imagine you’re free. There’s no more sickness. You’re safe. You’re safe. Now imagine trying to create your very best life.
family, business, wealth, lifestyle, travel, vacation, hobbies, relationships, friendships. How much of this energy is needed or desired to build that very best life?
Dane Johnson (31:04.273)
Should you be focusing on positive energy? Should you be eating more specific? Should you be around people who have common goals? Should you be reading books and training? Should you be getting up in the morning with the sun? Should you be putting down all the anxious, scary stuff and just listening to good energy and positive vibes? Would it be better if you cooked your food? If you had a billion, trillion dollars, would you have someone be giving you local food or fast food? How would you eat? How would you exercise? How would you communicate?
What kind of relationships would you want? Would you want to make their day better? Would you want to help them? Okay, now come back to right now. How much of that can you do right now? 98% of you building your best life are practices you can start instilling right now.
Colitis New Treatment and Crohn’s New TreatmentCheryl McColgan (31:51.746)
And I think that’s, Dane, the perfect segue to talk a little bit, because you mentioned it briefly about your program. And I think one of the most underrated, I have a video about like the four C’s or the five C’s, something like this. But it’s one of the most underrated things in any kind of goals, I believe, is community. So you mentioned your community, you mentioned the SHIELD program. And I want to be really mindful of your time and mine as well, because I’m actually recording another show today. But.
Dane Johnson (32:14.789)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (32:18.826)
I would love for you to share a little bit more about your community, about SHIELD, and how people can get involved, because I think you’re right. It’s not a lot of times, especially specifically for challenging diagnosis, there’s not one specific thing that’s going to automatically make you feel better. It’s a conglomeration of things. It’s often things that you have to figure out for yourself, as challenging as that seems.
but it can be made less challenging by having a supportive community. So I’d just love for you to share more about that before we wrap up today.
Colitis New Treatment: SHIELDDane Johnson (32:49.409)
Yeah, 100%. Thank you so much, Cheryl. So, and the SHIELD program, the basis, the big headline is, I built what I needed when I was chronically sick and failing to get any results. That’s the basis and theme. And my family almost went broke trying to heal me. We spent over $30,000 in the first year without getting results. And so everything was about trying, how can we get the best results in the most cost-effective way? So when you come into the SHIELD stands for Supplements, Herbs, Imagination, Exercise, Lifestyle, and Diet.
Six pillars of health build your shield. Okay, metaphorically build your shield because the cure for all disease is the ability to respond to adversity, not eradicate it. The ability to respond. So in the shield program, you will get a private coach. I believe that having one-on-one support is vital. Okay, you have to have a one-on-one coach. Our coaches have Crohn’s colitis, they’ve healed it. They only see Crohn’s colitis, they specialize in it. We see about 120 Crohn’s colitis clients a week around the world. And we have coaches all around the world. Okay, so it’s included in that.
You’re going to get a customized plan, a colitis new treatmenet. So you want to start, as I was mentioning earlier in my own story, you’ve got to start with a proven system, something you can repeat. So number one, start with consistency over perfection, something you can repeat. Try to get your pro your protocol first thing in the morning, the last thing at night, and then as you journal, as you get experience, you then start customizing. Some of us need to focus more on probiotics, anti-pathogens, binders, liver, liver gallbladder drainage product. Um, you know, getting rid of fissures, fistulas, hemistrictures by using, uh,
healing enemas or things of that nature. And so we need to then start customizing. So we’re gonna start you off the proven system and then customize based on the experience that you have or what you’re even telling us off the bat. So everything’s customized and we do what’s called food philosophy. So that’s the idea. The mission of food philosophy is to eliminate a diet and build a lifestyle. Because not one person listening or one person on this planet really desires a diet, we desire results. And then we wanna be free of a diet, be able to eat what we want. So we’re gonna treat you like an adult to be able to assess the risk of any food.
That’s what food philosophy is. To look at any plate of food and be able to assess its risk or your personal needs based on your stress, where you are, how far along you are in optimizing your gut. I couldn’t eat anything when I started. Now I can eat everything because I fixed the gut. Imagine metaphorically like a torn ACL. Once the ACL heals, you can start playing bat b-ball again on the court. You can start going for a run, not immediately. And if you do it wrong, it’ll get worse, right? So you have to do it in a right tempo and move it up, but you can do it, I promise. Colitis new treatment is going to include a lot of trial and error.
Dane Johnson (35:13.017)
And so you’re gonna have a customized plan with a coach. You’re gonna be a lifetime member. You’re gonna have access to the community We do live trainings every week. So I do a live on different topics every week. You can ask questions We can listen any recording. I’ve done a live for the last two years. It’s complimentary for free. There are no hidden costs You can also do lab work. So we also have lab work We can get and interpret stool analysis mold analysis organic acid tests viral load panels We work with dr. Armand MD and in Germany on that
He built us a very customized viral panel we think is connected to IBD. And we can do parasite detoxes. And we also do trainings on alternative therapies like BPC. I just did 240 million stem cells in Cancun and how did that work and how to utilize that and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, you name it. This is all we do. We’re trained moving 100 miles per hour just on Crohn’s colitis. And we have more testimonies than anyone in the world. This is an amazing feat for Colitis new treatment.
Doing it we post a testimony a week of someone getting rid of all of their symptoms with Crohn’s colitis We’ve over 500 testimonies with Crohn’s glass We also see IBS and other things like microscopic colitis and people with you know Other things like other issues going on with IBD or undiagnosed so you can reach out on that And then we work around the world. We have testimonies in India. We have testimonies in Africa Obviously all over Europe all over North America. We work with kids as young as six or eight. Those are very difficult
You need as a parent, you have to be very ready to learn this yourself because we’d be training you. And we’ve worked with 60, 70 years old. We’ve worked with tons of people post-surgery, people who had 10, 12, 15 surgeries, 40 years of disease with tremendous results. I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of the most extreme cases around the world, life threatening cases. And so this is what we do. We’re very passionate because we’ve been through this. Our families have suffered. Our families have spent thousands and thousands. We want to build a community where we just focus on customized answers and getting you trained.
So the last thing about the SHIELD program is it’s a place where you get trained. Even if you’re done with the private coaching, you have the program, you have the live trainings every week. We have multiple doctors on staff, also acting as professors doing trainings on nutrition and supplements and Chinese medicine and chiropractic medicine. And then we’re also looking at Ayurvedic. I mean, you name it, we’re doing it. We’re here to learn, we’re here to grow. You’re a part of a team. You are part of a place where you’re always gonna be able to learn. We have a phone app coming.
Dane Johnson (37:30.265)
We have a new subscription model where I was just telling Cheryl about. So stay tuned on that. You’re gonna be hearing about that. And if you are interested in this, what we do is we set you up with about a 45 minute to 60 minute free session with one of our IBD specialists. So your IBD specialist has had severe Crohn’s Glycem self, gone through the worst of the worst, and they’re gonna do a free call with you to talk about your case, your needs, how the program works. And so that link is below in Cheryl’s show notes.
As you can click that, you can schedule a free call and ask us your questions and really get a sense of us. Because the two things I want from now, if you wanna learn more about us, is we want trust and integrity. I wanna earn that from you. I wanna show what’s possible. And I wanna help because I’ve been in your shoes. My family’s been in the shoes. This is my life mission. And I’m so, so excited about what I do and how to do this. And I just let, there’s so much you can do. I promise you, there’s just a million things we can do. Even the toughest cases. You can find a Colitis new treatment.
They’re hard, they take time, it’s not easy. It’s not a drive through for healing, but you can do this. And just remember healing is possible. Start with the mindset. Look at those foundations we talked about. Start journaling and set up a call with us and stay tuned for more because there’s so much possible. And Cheryl, thank you so much for having me on today. And I wish we had all the time in the world to keep breaking down how to get results, but we’ll go in more depth. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (38:51.678)
Well, you’ll just have to come back. And I won’t schedule anybody after you this time. But I think it’s so wonderful that, number one, I think it would be obvious to anyone, whether they’re seeing or hearing you, that you are so very passionate about this subject. And it’s just amazing to me that this, what you’re doing now, all came out of such a very painful and scary time in your life. So I really just wanna acknowledge you for.
Dane Johnson (38:57.068)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (39:17.39)
turning that around and then creating something so wonderful out of this. And I think there’s lots of things in what you said today that even if people don’t have Crohn’s or colitis, that I think they can come away from this, having learned something and being able to implement it in any challenge that they’re dealing with really.
Dane Johnson (39:34.153)
Yes, thank you so much Cheryl. Remember guys, and you’re right, anyone, any disease, turn pain to purpose. The universe works the same for all of us. If you’re dealing with another disease, start with your mind, build a system you can be consistent with, get into training, get in some kind of community, learn from others, customize your own plan, okay? And find a place to keep it up because you’re just gonna learn and grow, learn and grow. It’s the same in fitness, the same in marriage, the same in kids, same in career, the same in building a business, the same in Cheryl building the best podcast in the world. It’s all the same. We learn and grow together.
God bless guys, I am here for you, healing is possible. Turn that pain into purpose.
Cheryl McColgan (40:07.414)
And Dane, really quick, it’s all in the show notes, but tell people where they can find you and where they can follow you.
Dane Johnson (40:12.961)
Yes, Instagram, Crohn’s CRO HNS colitis, C O L I T I S underscore lifestyle, or you can follow me personally, Dane Johnson one. So that’s Instagram, the website is Crohn’s colitis lifestyle.com. We’re also on YouTube, it’s youtube.com slash Crohn’s colitis lifestyle, where you can see more testimonies or how to’s grab it now or get in our email list. When you go to our website, we’ll send you our six tips to healing. So you can start there with some protocols. And then our healing journal where you can
get the journal that I used for about seven months straight. And so that’s that template that you can start filling out. We’re gonna have you fill that out when you join the program guys. And you can click on all that in the show notes, but we’re excited to see you. DM us, let us know how we can serve you. Thank you so much, Cheryl, for having me.
Cheryl McColgan (40:58.306)
Thank you again, Dane, so much. I appreciated this and enjoyed talking to you today.
In this conversation, Dr. Jessie Hehmeyer discusses her background in chiropractic medicine and nutrition. She emphasizes the importance of finding one’s why when it comes to weight loss and shares tips for taking action and making sustainable changes.
Dr. Hehmeyer explains the role of nutrition and movement in weight loss, debunking the myth that weight is purely genetic. She shares a success story of a client who was able to shift to a healthier diet and improve her overall health. She also introduces her upcoming group program for weight loss and encourages listeners to have compassion for themselves and seek support in their weight loss journey.
Connect with Dr. Hehmeyer at Well Empowered
Takeaways
Finding your why is crucial for making sustainable changes in weight loss.
Nutrition plays a significant role in weight loss, accounting for about 80% of progress.
Movement, particularly strength training, is important for preserving muscle mass and increasing metabolism.
Weight loss is not solely determined by genetics; the environment and lifestyle choices have a significant impact.
Working with a functional medicine practitioner or joining a group program can provide support and guidance in the weight loss journey.
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/hlMk_ca3GI8Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Personal Interests
01:59 Professional Background and Training
04:10 Approach to Weight Loss
06:02 Finding Your Why
07:39 Taking Action and Making Changes
10:36 The Role of Nutrition and Movement in Weight Loss
17:22 Genetics vs. Environment in Weight Loss
21:34 Success Story: Shifting to a Healthier Diet
27:33 Group Program for Weight Loss
29:07 Final Thoughts and Encouragement
30:47 Where to Find Dr. Heymeyer Online
Episode TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:00.974)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Heymeyer. And before we get into all the wonderful knowledge that she has to share with us, I kind of just wanted to touch a little bit on her bio and her background because she has some amazing trainings but then she also has some personal interests that mimic mine of like hiking and yoga and all that fun outdoor stuff. So Dr. Heymeyer, can you just…
Maybe first share with people kind of what, like what you like to do in your spare time when you’re not working and sharing knowledge about weight loss, what do you like to do?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (00:35.31)
Yeah, I well, yes, as you said, I love hiking, love hiking and love yoga, love strength training, love, of course, being with loved ones. And I love traveling and I love cooking beautiful, delicious, healthy meals for both myself and others.
Cheryl McColgan (00:39.28)
I’m sorry.
Cheryl McColgan (00:59.198)
And where do you hike mostly? What part of the country are you in?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (01:02.41)
Well, funny you should ask. I actually work remotely, remotely from Switzerland. So most often I hike in Switzerland. In the States, when I’m here, I do like to get, I do like to get to Arizona. So I love hiking. I love desert hiking. I really never thought that I would find desert hiking as compelling as I do, but I just, I really adore desert hiking. But really I’ve never met a mountain I didn’t like.
Cheryl McColgan (01:09.724)
Oh wow!
Cheryl McColgan (01:29.846)
Yeah, well, I just named off two of my favorite places there. So maybe we can talk offline a little bit about some of our favorites. But I’d love to just start to get into some more of your professional background now that we’ve talked about what you like to do for fun. But you have chiropractic training, you have nutritional training. What was kind of your progression of you started in one place and then what propelled you to kind of do these other trainings as you started working with people or just things that you learned along the way?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (01:34.403)
Ah!
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (02:00.546)
Fundamentally speaking, I would say the answer to that question is a deep devotion to evolving, evolving personally and evolving professionally and expanding my ability to contribute. So how I made my way here is I like to say straight lines are boring. And out of undergrad, I went to UCLA undergrad, and it really should have been a tip for me where to focus my attention. Because I say that I…
chose my classes around what worked well for my workout schedule, which actually is quite true. So after graduating from there, I made my way back to the suburbs of Chicago, which is downtown Chicago at that time, which is where I grew up in the suburbs and moved downtown Chicago after college. And shortly after returning to Chicago, opened up the first boutique strength training facility in Chicago in the Lincoln Park area, for those of you who are familiar with.
Cheryl McColgan (02:32.011)
I’m sorry.
Cheryl McColgan (02:52.588)
Oh, wow.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (02:55.318)
with Chicago and it’s still here to this day. So 21, 22, 21 and a half years later, it is still there and some of the first trainers are still there and I ultimately after about four years sold my half knowing that I wanted to continue to learn more and expand my capacity to contribute. Made my way back to graduate school as you mentioned, got first a degree in chiropractic medicine and then went.
immediately into a master’s in nutrition and functional medicine. So it’s always been my focus, even though, you know, the word chiropractor, people often think about aches and pains. I’ve actually never focused in that area. I’ve really practiced functional medicine since the day I got my license.
Cheryl McColgan (03:41.67)
That’s so exciting and I love that progression. It has a, again, somewhat similar track to my own interest and how things progress, but I don’t like straight lines either, apparently. So, so I think what attracted me when your team reached out about having you come on the show is obviously Heal Nurse Show is, and just by the name you can tell, it’s everything health and wellness related, but in particular, I really love your focus on functional medicine. And when this episode comes out, it’s a time of year,
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (03:51.426)
So boring. Who likes that straight line?
Cheryl McColgan (04:11.31)
where people tend to focus on weight loss, kind of the New Year’s resolution, sort of probably the number one New Year’s resolution is to lose weight and or get in shape, two of your things that you’re very focused on. So when you start to work with someone that comes to you saying they’d like to lose weight, can you just share how you approach that and how sort of the functional piece comes into that work relationship?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (04:35.406)
Yeah, absolutely. So I approach that with equal parts are heart and science. So the functional part is very much the science based. However, I have learned that information does not produce action outcomes rather information by itself doesn’t produce outcomes. What produces outcomes or new outcomes is new actions.
Right. And so it really is marrying both heart and science in guiding people in authoring a whole new relationship with their body, a whole new relationship with themselves, a whole new relationship with food and beverages and using science to make effective changes. And by effective, I mean, changes that are going to produce outcomes, the outcomes you want. Right. So it really is this.
journey of taking both of these essential components of heart and science and, you know, determining what the path forward co creating the path forward.
Cheryl McColgan (05:44.526)
Yeah, and I love that you mentioned the science of it in creating, you didn’t say the word habits, but that’s the way I always like to think of it and the way that I really focus on when I’m trying to help people or help myself with things that I wanna change. So from the sort of heart part of it, what kinds of things are you talking to your clients about when it comes to weight loss?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (06:03.694)
So fundamentally speaking, one of the most powerful questions I’ve seen that shapes people’s journey is people getting very clear on their why. And in particular, what I like to say is their what and how it’s connected to their why. So we don’t buy what we do, we buy why we do it. And the what part might be reducing alcohol consumption.
or shifting nutritional habits, right? That might be the what. And those in and of themselves may or may not be compelling to people. Some things might be more compelling than others, whatever the case may be, it’s when people get very clear on their why that not only are they able to make changes, but they’re able to sustain them over time. So I work with people through a process that I call authoring your vision of vitality.
otherwise known as authoring your intention for your health in your life. Right. And through this process, people get very clear on what their why is. And that begins to shift the experience itself. Right. It begins to shift this area from an experience of self-aggression to one of self-love. Right. It changes it from…
stick on the back, people beating themselves up over and over again to ultimately that experience of carrot dangling and going towards something that’s really compelling and exciting.
Cheryl McColgan (07:41.054)
And without giving away your secret sauce, because we’re gonna talk about something a little later in the program, about how people can work with you, of course, because that’s always part of this. But if somebody is just starting to think about this, what are some of the, maybe your two or three top tips on how to dig into your why, how to figure out what that really is?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (08:00.714)
Yeah, so one tip would be to envision yourself in five years from now. So actually, like, you know, listeners, how old are you right now? Got that? Okay, how old will you be in five years from now? Got that? Okay, now, I’d like you to tell the story of you in five years from now thriving, like,
What is it like to be you? What’s it like to get dressed in the morning? And what’s it like to engage in your life? Whether it’s going to work or caring for loved ones or your children or just out there in the world. What is it like to be you with your health as you intend and desire it occur? And I actually invite you to do this exercise. Like you might even pause this conversation for a moment.
and take out a pen and paper, I know that’s super old school, or, you know, a laptop, whatever your, you know, your preferred way of writing is, but actually tell that story and tell it in first person present tense, right. So for me, that would be I’m 52 in five years from now. And, you know, my body is resilient, it’s strong, you know, whatever it is there, there for you to say, like you want to say those things in this
five-year future in first-person present tense. So that’s one exercise.
Cheryl McColgan (09:29.91)
I love that. And just as an aside, I would like to encourage people personally to use old school pen and paper because there is some psychological like brain evidence as far as like pen to paper that’s very different than typing. And I find this when I write as well. It’s a totally different process.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (09:44.694)
I love that you say that, Cheryl. I feel so, like sometimes I feel like so old school saying that, but you’re exactly right. Like there is science behind using pen and paper. And so for those of you who that seems like a foreign concept, you know, just try it on. Like try it on and see what you notice when you do it. Right? So yes, you’re totally right. Pen and paper does allow for neurological connections to be made in ways that fingers on a keypad does not.
Cheryl McColgan (10:14.606)
I know it’s so crazy, but it’s true. And I’ve definitely tested it for myself. So after they’ve gone through the process of kind of envisioning where they wanna be in five years, and I love this because I have one that’s kind of like 10-5-1 that I do backwards, but after they’ve envisioned that, what would be like their very first step to figure out how are they gonna move forward from where they are now, how to get to where they wanna be in five years?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (10:16.671)
Mm-hmm.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (10:36.334)
Uh huh. Well, one thing is they might need more information, right? They might. And that’s when, you know, like this data and science really comes in. So maybe they really don’t understand what is going on with their body. Maybe they’re, they’re struggling to figure out, you know, why am I not losing weight? Oftentimes people come to me and they say, listen, this used to work for me, what I’m doing. It’s not working for me now. Or, you know, I feel like no matter what I do.
the needle on the skill is not moving at all. So in that case, we’re gonna get some information to understand what the physiological barriers are to their weight loss. And there are a few that are pretty common that are often overlooked, like just not looked at in a more traditional approach. So when someone walks into my virtual front door, these are all things that we’re gonna be touching on and looking at.
in assessing what’s at the source of their weight loss challenges and also guiding their next steps ahead. Now for other people, maybe it’s clear. Maybe they do know one or two things they could do that they’re not currently doing that would make a difference. And if that rings true for you, your listeners out here, my encouragement would be to just start with one thing, just one foot in front of the other.
You know, one of the problems with the inherited all or nothing approach is that it really is based on a myth that we can make tremendous, drastic, huge changes and maintain them, you know, rapidly, right? It’s just so far not true for 99.9% of the population, right? So let’s honor that and look at, okay, what’s the next step you could take? You know, just to share in an area of my life.
Cheryl McColgan (12:17.449)
Hahaha
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (12:27.666)
right with writing and sitting down and writing it’s like okay I started with creating a habit of just 15 minutes a day you know electronics off focus for 15 minutes a day that seemed for me like I could do that I could do that right it’s like the equivalent of like getting up and walking around the block when you’re interested in doing a couch to 5k or something like that right so you know just look for yourself at okay if your goal is to reduce drinking maybe you just start by counting the number of drinks you’re having in a week
Cheryl McColgan (12:47.727)
Right.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (12:57.738)
Right, if you know it would make a difference for you to bring some more vegetables into your life, maybe you’d start with just actually recording how many vegetables you’re currently getting, the amount of vegetables you’re currently getting as a gateway to the next step.
Cheryl McColgan (13:16.422)
That’s such good advice and something that people have heard me bang a pot about is starting slow because my background is in psychology and so I kind of approach it from a mindset place usually rather than a totally physical place with weight loss and stuff. I think you got to get your head right. So those are some amazing tips and I love to hear somebody else echo that so it’s not just me. You can believe it. Dr. Jessie says it.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (13:39.274)
No, you’re totally right, Cheryl. 100%, absolutely.
Cheryl McColgan (13:44.186)
Awesome. So it’s again in the new year, we’re starting we talked about weight loss and one component of that of course you mentioned nutrition and then one component of that traditionally has very much been movement based just eat less move more that’s kind of what everybody’s heard. Where do you kind of fall on that and do you have any more nuanced thoughts about
of how people can approach that. And again, keeping in the back of your mind that whichever one you’re going to choose of those to focus on, or if you pick both, which could be kind of a lot at once, that you’re starting slow. But do you have one side or the other that you kind of believe feeds more like progress, I guess more quickly?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (14:21.542)
Yeah, absolutely. So in the way of progress, we’re going to talk about like, okay, what is progress? In this case, we’re talking about progress being movement on the scale, right? When I work with people, it’s never just that. But anyway, for this conversation, we’re using that as the metric. And 80% of that is going to be coming from nutritional shifts, right? Not just what, you know, the quality of the foods you’re consuming, the quantity of the foods and beverages you’re
and the consistency with which you’re making those shifts. So nutrition is about 80% of the conundrum. However, it’s certainly not the full story. So we know movement, if we’re just talking about the number on the scale, we know that if we do not do strength training and we only make shifts to our nutrition, we’re going to lose weight indiscriminately.
which means we’re gonna lose muscle mass as well as fat. And we do not wanna lose muscle mass. Muscle is metabolic magic, right? So increasing your muscle mass actually increases your resting metabolism, which means you burn more calories while you sleep. And that is the magic of muscle when it comes to weight loss. Now there are tons of other benefits as it relates to muscle. And actually I would say that’s part of the magic, right? When we increase our muscle mass, we increase our insulin sensitivity, which plays a role in our weight loss also. So lots of other great things, muscles.
does. So that’s true. And then also, there’s just the truth that for most people, their mental health and well being is playing a role in their habits in their cravings in their, you know, over indulgence, which is different than indulgence, right? So we know that movement is a powerful way to positively impact our mood.
So it’s kind of like, okay, yes, nutrition is 80%, but if we really look at the totality of the pie, it ends up being like 150%, right? All of it together, right? It makes no sense, but it’s true, right? So yes, nutrition is going to most markedly move the needle on the scale. And I don’t know of a way people who are struggling in this area of life can produce meaningful weight loss and sustain it without mastering.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (16:49.61)
nutrition and the relationship with food and beverages and all those things.
Cheryl McColgan (16:54.446)
Now this is, if you’re up for this, and we can always cut this out, but I think there’s kind of an interesting trend right now, or interesting conversation about, who is it like that one of the head of the, maybe it was like the American Diabetes Association, somebody like that said that weight is all genetic, something to this effect, and kind of in my opinion, this is purely my opinion, not whatever Dr. Jesse’s gonna say, but really just pushing the agenda of pharma.
with the weight loss drugs that are coming out that people are using them for weight loss, not the diabetes. So I would just love to hear your take on that if you’re up for that, whether it’s genetics, whether it’s diet, what are your thoughts around that whole thing?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (17:31.222)
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (17:36.59)
So my thoughts are, well, I’ll tell a little story, which will give away my thoughts. So a couple of years ago, my husband and I were watching, I don’t know, some documentary. And it was a documentary that had video footage from the 1950s, 1960s, something like that. Right. And it showed this little clip where there were people.
Cheryl McColgan (17:41.534)
Ehh…
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (18:03.114)
Going through, it was actually, it was like Neil Armstrong on the back of a car going throughout America. And you know, here he is in Iowa and here he is in Utah and there he is in California. And you know, just different glimpses of America with, you know, Neil Armstrong floating about saying hello and waving. And the thing that I was struck by was that no matter what clip they showed, there wasn’t anyone.
who was markedly overweight that I saw, right? And this was all throughout the country. So if we look at that and see that, you know, okay, yes, there were some people who are overweight at that time, you know, but it was exponentially less than it is right now. And we do know factually speaking, genes do not evolve that quickly, period. No way, no how does not happen in a couple of decades. Then we can kinda…
reach the conclusion that what he is saying is just not true. Yes, there are some genetic tendencies. Certainly, you know, you can look around and see people who have bigger frames and smaller frames and have naturally a little more muscle mass or less muscle mass. Of course, that’s true. But to say that, you know, obesity is really, you know, purely the result of genes is a far cry from the truth. I definitely see people who
have had a long, you know, more or less since they were born, right, they were born into a family for whatever reason, their family did a great job at, let’s just say, emphasizing education or, you know, things like that, but maybe they didn’t make health as much of a high priority in their household. And so their genes as a consequence have been exposed to pro-inflammatory foods for four decades, right? They, from out of the gate. And so that will affect
the epigenetic expression, right? Our genes live in the environment that’s both inside of us and outside of us. And so that will affect what we’re manifesting from a health perspective. And it definitely, you know, for someone who has four decades of marinating and pro-inflammatory foods, so to speak, is just an example. It’s a whole level of inertia that’s hard to, that is not present for someone who…
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (20:28.158)
you know, they won the lottery on that front, their family did emphasize nutrition, you know, none of us have anything to do with that we arrive where we arrive, right. And so it’s, you know, someone who just has a decade of, of nutritional habits to undo, so to speak, and physiological impact to undo, that will be there’s going to be less inertia present, right. So it fundamentally I am with you that the
Cheryl McColgan (20:36.846)
Right.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (20:57.066)
genes are, you know, exponentially less important than the environment we are surrounding our genes with.
Cheryl McColgan (21:07.57)
And that being said, I do want to end it on a positive note because you’re right, however you grew up or whatever you were exposed to in terms of diet and nutrition is not something that you created for yourself. And so when you become aware of this later in life or it’s causing you issues, want to have some way is it possible to change? Is it possible to change that paradigm? Is it possible to take your epigenetics in another direction? And I think that the science does show that it is possible.
So I’d love to hear and maybe even have a patient example without showing or without sharing a name or anything of somebody who maybe has come from that kind of background and then was able to shift into a healthier, less inflammatory food kind of pattern and find some success.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (21:48.926)
Yeah, absolutely. I would love to share that. So what comes to mind is a woman who I began working with her about two years ago. Now we have shifted to we see, you know, check in every twice a year right now. And ultimately, she’ll be moving to a once year check in. But you know, where we started is she arrived at my virtual front door. She was about 20 pounds.
overweight. She was exhausted, even though she was sleeping about eight hours a night. Her liver enzymes were elevated and she had done all of the appropriate workup to make sure it was nothing, you know, quote unquote, scary, right? And that was that’s important. We always want to make sure that’s done. It wasn’t but you know, ultimately, the answer was we don’t know it’s not scary. Go on your merry way. So you know,
we did a wide variety of assessments of what was going on with her body. One of the things we found was that for her, inflammation was out of control, right? Some people show up at my virtual front door and say, I’m really inflamed, and I’ll say, how’s it showing up in your body? And they might say, oh, my joints hurt, or I have these rashes, or whatever it might be. But more often than not, there aren’t any obvious signs of inflammation. The only way we know
if inflammation is playing a role in how someone’s health is or isn’t, is if we actually get the numbers. And so there are lab tests that let us measure inflammation. So we measured her inflammation. It was super duper high and quite frankly, like higher than I would have expected for her. And we also got to see a number of nutrient deficiencies that were playing a role in her
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (23:47.066)
liver function. And ultimately, over time, we replenish nutrients, we supported her detoxification pathways, we hit down that inflammation in a major way, both with nutritional shifts, as well as with targeted supplementation. Sometimes we can just do it with nutrition, but hers was just like so out of control. It was, you know, feeding this vicious circle of inflammation, which was one of the reasons she was struggling to lose weight because when inflammation is high,
It is like, you know, it really puts the brakes on our metabolism. That was actually my, the thesis for my master’s was on that very topic. And so, you know, over time, not only, at first we just saw her number shift and I let her know, I was like, listen, you know, this is gonna take a second to right the physiological ship, so to speak, right? It’s gonna take a second. And when people have really high inflammation, I get it, right? It’s like,
Cheryl McColgan (24:37.655)
Alright.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (24:44.414)
it’s gonna be six to eight weeks, sometimes even three months of someone consistently taking actions before they start to see the scale move in a meaningful way, right? We’ve gotta undo that inflammation, and then all of a sudden the body just kicks into gear, and it’s like, oh, wow, huh, now I see it, right? And that was very much the case for her. And so what was so cool for her is over time,
Yes, she lost the weight. Yes, her energy absolutely went through the roof, like in a wonderful way, not in a hyper way. One of the things that she said was she’s like, oh my gosh, I actually thought I was sleeping well before, but now I know in contrast, I really wasn’t. So there were quite a few things we did that led her to a place where her energy was, in a great place, her focus was in a great place, that was part of it was just like sense of energy and part of it was mental focus.
Cheryl McColgan (25:19.391)
Hahaha
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (25:41.89)
her weight, she’s at a place where she feels great. Another cool thing that we, about maybe six months ago, she said to me in passing, when she came to see me, she was on medication for anxiety, and she was doing well with them. Like we weren’t looking to shift it, we were, you know, keep, stay on those medications, they’re working well. And ultimately, she said in passing, she’s like, oh, you know, I stopped those medications, I stopped my, you know, anxiety meds because I just didn’t need them anymore.
And so that really validated that inflammation wasn’t just playing a role in her energy, it wasn’t just playing a role in her weight loss, but it was also creating brain inflammation that was impacting her mood. So that’s someone who is just a great example of what’s possible.
Cheryl McColgan (26:19.427)
Mm.
Cheryl McColgan (26:26.018)
Yeah, I love to hear such a positive story. And just to give people another resource because I think that the connection, again, my background in psychology, I’m always geeking out about stuff like this, but the connection between mental health and nutrition and diet is very real. And maybe, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it yet, but Dr. Chris Palmer has a book out called, Brain Something Anyway, Harvard Doctor, really profound work on the connection between
nutrition and brain health. And so if people are out there and they happen to hear this, it’s not saying go off your meds or do anything like that, but definitely nutrition is something to look further into for mental health.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (27:06.798)
Totally so well said. Yeah, love that
Cheryl McColgan (27:10.234)
So that’s Dr. Chris Palmer, I’ll leave a link for that. So we talked about this before we got on the air, Dr. Heymeyer, that for people that are looking to lose weight, I mean, you mentioned some great things like testing’s a good thing to do because I think nutritional deficiencies are fairly common as well as high inflammation. But if people don’t test, they might not know that. So you had mentioned you’re starting a group.
in February and I would love to hear more about that, what’s involved with that, what they get out of it, are they getting testing, are they getting coaching, what does that all look like?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (27:42.254)
Yeah, so what it will look like is it’s going to be a small group. So I’m going to cap it at 15 max. And I’m actually toying up keeping it even a little bit smaller, but we will be it’ll be a little bit of a hybrid approach. So we’re going to start with some one on one work. And yes, we’re going to do some testing and then we’re going to shift into group work. So it really marries a combination of honoring what’s true for you and your
your unique physiology with some of the common barriers and challenges that people encounter in making changes that produce the outcomes and sustaining them over time.
Cheryl McColgan (28:24.334)
And how long does the program run for? Is there also, you mentioned it’s a group, so are there group meetings too where people can kind of share and get support from the group?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (28:30.218)
Yes, yes, exactly. So we’ll shift from some one-on-one work into group work and the group work will occur so twice a week and I’m sorry, twice a month rather, and the entirety of the program itself will be six months.
Cheryl McColgan (28:47.302)
Very cool. Well, before we wrap up, are there any final thoughts that you had that we didn’t talk about? And again, we were kind of focused in this conversation on weight loss since it’s the beginning of the year, and that tends to be, again, a big goal for people this time. So anything that we didn’t talk about or mention that you think is really important for people to know if they’re trying this on their own, and I always…
do recommend like have at the very least have an accountability buddy or have a coach or work with a functional medicine practitioner or something like that but if they’re just trying to do this on their own any other final thoughts on things they can be aware of or think of or that might be really helpful.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (29:22.334)
I would say a few things. One is have some compassion for yourself, right? We inherited a lot of things in this area of life around our body and food and, you know, our weight that simply put don’t serve us, right? We didn’t invent this disempowered relationship. We inherited it. And so like fundamentally speaking, it’s not your fault, right? And
Also, if this is an area that you know mastering it would powerfully impact all of your life. I really encourage you to take it on. You know, just like Cheryl said, in whatever way you see is the next best step for you, I’m going to be a champion for that. But know that you absolutely can triumph in this area of your life. And that might look like you.
partnering with someone like Cheryl or myself or another resource, or it might look like you just putting one foot in front of the other to get going and then reaching out for support as you find that you’ve got information missing and find it would be useful. But my commitment is you thriving because I know when people thrive, not only did they bring their best selves to life, but they also inspire others to do the same. And that to me is what it’s all about.
Cheryl McColgan (30:47.522)
So true, I love that. And so where can people find you online if they wanna work with you, if they wanna join the program, if they just wanna follow you on social media, if you even do that, where can they connect?
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (30:57.858)
So you can find me at wellempowered.com and that’s where you can schedule a complimentary consultation and learn more about working together, whether it’s one-on-one or as part of this upcoming course, please do that there. And then online, I’m mostly on Instagram at Well Empowered.
Cheryl McColgan (31:14.53)
Thank you so much for taking the time today. It was lovely to meet you and I can’t wait to hear at least a little bit more about your hiking adventures in the podcast.
Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (31:21.914)
Awesome! Yeah, thank you so much, Cheryl. It’s been such a treat to be with you in your community.
Cheryl McColgan (31:28.058)
Thanks again.
In this episode, I interview David Milburn of HypoAir about indoor air quality solutions and filtering. We discuss the problem of mold in homes, the impact of HVAC systems on air quality, and other air quality issues such as odors and off-gassing. We also talk about the importance of air quality as well as the detection and monitoring of air quality. Finally, we discuss different air purification solutions available and exciting developments in air quality technology.
In this conversation, Milburn also shares the importance of determining the correct size of HVAC filters and the challenges homeowners face in finding this information. He provides tips for requesting allergy-friendly rooms in hotels (I didn’t even know this was a thing!) and addresses air quality issues in malls and commercial spaces.
The conversation concludes with a reminder of the importance of maintaining a positive outlook on indoor air quality and an extension of a sale on Hypoair’s products. Go visit Hypoair with this link to take advantage of these savings!
Takeaways
Mold is a significant air quality problem in homes, especially in modern construction where homes are built tightly and trap mold inside.
HVAC systems can contribute to air quality issues if not properly maintained and equipped with the right filters.
Odors and off-gassing from furniture and other sources can also affect indoor air quality.
It is important to be aware of and monitor air quality in your home, and there are various indoor air quality solutions available, including air purifiers and ventilation systems. Determining the correct size of HVAC filters is crucial for optimal air quality in homes.
The tonnage of an HVAC system plays a significant role in filter selection.
Using incorrect filter ratings can lead to strain on HVAC systems and increased energy costs.
Regular filter changes are essential for maintaining air quality and reducing dust in HVAC systems.
Hypoair plans to expand air purification to other home systems and offers products for healthcare facilities.
Working with hospitals and corporations can be challenging due to their lack of concern for air quality issues.
Requesting allergy-friendly rooms in hotels can help improve air quality during travel.
Malls and commercial spaces often have air quality issues due to cleaning products and fragrances.
Maintaining a positive outlook on air quality and taking proactive steps can help improve overall health and well-being.
Hypoair extends a sale on their products to listeners of the conversation.
Watch on YouTube
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
01:22 The Problem of Mold in Homes
04:09 The Impact of HVAC Systems on Air Quality
06:29 Other Air Quality Issues
08:05 The Importance of Air Quality
09:43 Dealing with Odors
23:24 Detection and Monitoring of Air Quality
30:25 Choosing the Right Air Purification Solution
39:26 Exciting Developments in Air Quality Technology
41:42 Determining HVAC Filter Size
42:32 The Importance of Tonnage in HVAC Systems
43:15 The Impact of Incorrect Filter Ratings
44:19 Expanding Air Purification to Other Home Systems
45:02 Hypoair’s Products for Healthcare Facilities
46:14 Challenges of Working with Hospitals and Corporations
48:25 Applying Hypoair’s Technology to Homes
49:42 Requesting Allergy-Friendly Rooms in Hotels
51:32 Air Quality Issues in Malls and Commercial Spaces
53:14 Maintaining a Positive Outlook on Air Quality
54:11 Closing Remarks and Sale Extension
Episode TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:00.97)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by David Milburn of HypoAir and I’m really excited to share his knowledge with you guys today. I’ve heard him on a few different podcasts and he’s just such a wealth of knowledge on indoor air quality solutions and filtering. And I just thought you have so many interesting things to say that I’d love for you to share it with the Heal and Nourish Grow audience. So welcome David, and if you could just kind of introduce yourself and let us know how you got involved in this space.
Milburn (00:24.294)
Thank you.
Milburn (00:28.742)
Well, that’s very kind of you. I do not like listening to myself speak. Hopefully we can help some people. We’re basically on this journey with you guys. We’ve been doing air quality for about 15 years. And basically every week we hear about a new situation. We’ve never heard it before. So we’re kind of in that same process of just trying to discover solutions and trying to basically unmake how unnatural our homes are.
Cheryl McColgan (00:33.358)
..
Milburn (00:54.83)
and try to bring them into a more natural state. So we’re kind of on that journey with you. We love having these conversations we learn from you. We learn from our customers. We hear the situations they deal with, and then we just try to find solutions to that. But yeah, our guiding principle is basically how can we bring in what’s happening outside? So what are the natural processes outside, bringing them inside to make our homes more natural because they’re very unnatural, and that’s leading to a bunch of unintended consequences. So.
Cheryl McColgan (01:22.538)
Yeah, the indoor air quality solutions conversation, I’m sure we’ll get to that later in the podcast. But I think one of the things that’s topped on my mind today is because I couldn’t sleep very well last night, which is unusual, thankfully. But I ended up listening to yet another podcast because that’s how I keep up to speed on all the latest news and all the latest technology. And they brought up the mold conversation again. And I know this is something that I’ve heard you talk about before. So I think it’s really important for people to know that there are…
Milburn (01:44.059)
Mm-hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (01:52.098)
some ways that they can deal with it, that they can improve their indoor air quality above and beyond what their HVAC system’s doing. So maybe you could start by just kind of sharing with people a little bit about why the way we build houses now can create this situation and the things that you’ve sort of found that can mitigate that.
Milburn (02:09.681)
Yeah.
Absolutely. So the understanding about mold is growing kind of across the board and one of the reasons for that we’re finding is basically Humanity we’re kind of in this experiment of modern construction and then one of the biggest consequences of that is very unnatural concentrations of mold and so Mold you’re gonna find outside you walk outside in a forest you walk outside in a city You’re gonna find mold but the concentration is really small. So with a lot of air quality issues It’s the dose that creates that poison
It’s the concentration that begins to overwhelm the body. And so if our homes are made of materials that mold loves to grow in, dry wall and whatnot, and then we seal them up as tight as we can for energy efficiency, what we’re doing is trapping mold inside, both the living and the dead spores. Both can carry the mycotoxins.
and then it’s able to grow out of control. There’s no natural predator, there’s no natural process that’s suppressing it. And so especially if you’re in a place with humidity, you don’t even have to have leaks in the house to have mold problems. It’s just how the home was built and where it’s built. So, you know, we have clients where new construction, top of the line, really expensive home in Florida within a couple months.
It’s just fully contaminated with black mold. And it’s really sad, because we hear all the horror stories. And so mold is not the end all be all, burn your house down and start over. If you find it, you’re gonna find mold kind of.
Milburn (03:40.986)
you know, in new furniture, you’re gonna find mold and mold sampler test kits, you know, before you even take a sample. So mold is gonna be all over the place, but it’s the concentration that matters the most to us. And then all of our bodies are gonna interact with mold differently. But you mentioned the HVAC system. A lot of people know no one ever taught them about the HVAC. So maybe you move into a house, you’re renting or maybe when you buy a house, no one ever even told you to change the filters. So we have people that have spin.
Cheryl McColgan (04:06.818)
Yeah.
Milburn (04:09.002)
$100,000 on biohacking equipment, and then they’ve never changed the filter in their HVAC system. Or maybe they’ve spent $5,000 on plugging HEPA air purifiers, and they’ve got the cheapest possible filter in their HVAC system. The problem is that HVAC system is moving exponentially more air.
then thousands of dollars worth of HEPA plug-in products. And then HVAC system is a damp, dark environment that is prone to harbor mold, or at least distribute mold. And then one of the other challenging things that we find is the HVAC system is almost always located in an unfinished part of the house.
Cheryl McColgan (04:45.002)
Yeah.
Milburn (04:45.406)
So you might have this nice new home, and then you’ve got this unfinished attic, and that’s where they put your HVAC system. Or you’ve got an unfinished basement that floods. That’s where the HVAC system is. So a lot of times these HVAC systems are, it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind. You don’t really see what’s happening behind that vent. But a lot of times that’s gonna be the root of your air quality, either benefits or problems.
And with something like mold, a lot of times mold’s gonna be growing in or around the HVAC system. Or if there’s any type of leak, any type of humidity issue, then that mold can take root inside the HVAC and then be distributed through that system. Or in the case of maybe you have a leak in a bathroom.
and sometimes that mold can then get back into the HVAC system. So if you have an unhealthy HVAC system, that’s a hard thing to overcome. So if someone has central layer of any kind, we say start there with the air quality solutions conversation because you can undo that, you can mitigate it, you can take steps to be preventative in the future. And then with our technologies, you can upgrade that into the air purifier. But not everyone has central air. So central air is relatively unique to North America for homes.
And so a lot of places you might have like a window mounted system, maybe you have no AC, maybe open your windows. And in many cases, that’s great, you know, to cool off your house, but maybe you live next to a train station or a steel factory. So we have those clients too, where it’s, um, your unique situation, where a home is, how it was made, what’s going on there is going to kind of dictate.
the steps you need to take to make it a more natural environment. But to us in North America, at least, mold is the single greatest air quality problem that we’re facing right now.
Cheryl McColgan (06:29.174)
Yeah, and a lot of people, I think it’s an interesting thing to just bring more awareness to because I think a lot of people hear, oh, mold. In this one interview that I was just listening to, it’s actually a really high-level, really popular podcast. And he threw out the word, it’s like a conspiracy, really, that there’s that much kind of hiding of what is happening and what you described, like the more efficient the homes we get, the more mold problems we’re seeing. And nobody really wants to take accountability for this. And then-
Milburn (06:53.062)
Mm-hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (06:58.146)
People hear that and they think, well, I don’t have allergies or I’m not sensitive to mold, but some of these health problems, it runs the gamut, right? So I’ve heard, like you were saying, the horror stories where people are just completely debilitated and having all kinds of very, very serious health problems, or it can just go to, you’re really fatigued all the time. And that’s it, and you don’t know why. And it could be something as simple as that your indoor air quality is poor. So I do like to bring that up because
Milburn (07:08.378)
Mm-hmm.
Milburn (07:17.674)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, mm-hmm right
Cheryl McColgan (07:25.022)
if you’ve ever been experiencing a health problem where, you know, your diet’s dialed in, and you do all these things that we talk about on this podcast, right? You’re pretty darn hardcore, while your air might be one of the final things that you just really haven’t addressed yet. And so that’s why when I heard your interview before, I got so excited, because I thought, my gosh, of all the things I’ve addressed, I do have to help with filters and stuff like that, but I didn’t even know that a solution that could work at the HVAC level even existed until I heard your podcast. So that’s why I was really excited to share this.
Milburn (07:35.299)
Yeah.
Milburn (07:52.302)
Yeah, yeah, and air quality typically is kind of maybe the third piece on the journey. Like maybe you start with food and water, and then air quality is this kind of distant nebulous third, but we breathe the equivalent of a swimming pool every day. And the way we try to describe it is that air quality is one piece of the puzzle.
Cheryl McColgan (08:05.314)
and
Milburn (08:13.35)
For some people, it’s gonna be a really big piece. You were sleeping poorly last night, maybe because you were worried about whatever or watching too much news, or maybe because it was air quality. So it just depends. It’s not the silver bullet for everything, but if your air quality’s bad, then there’s a lot of other consequences to that. And air quality takes a lot of different forms. Sometimes it’s chemicals, sometimes it’s…
you’ve got an old throw rug and every time you walk on that rug you’re breaking off little pieces and those particulates get getting into the air and they’re irritating you. Sometimes it’s mold in the HVAC, sometimes it’s a messy smell that’s indicating mold, sometimes you can’t smell that at all. So your air quality is tricky and so that’s why a lot of people it’s kind of further down the list or they wait till they have a problem or they wait till there’s a wildfire or something along those lines but as much as possible we’d want to just be preventative and the majority of
falling in situations that are really unhealthy, so really bad situations, but probably a good 20% of our clients, there’s no problems, and they’re just trying to be proactive, and with something like mold, you set aside all the health issues, it can be really expensive. So just try to get ahead of that so that your house doesn’t get contaminated with something that’s gonna cause you money down the line, but just by introducing natural processes into this,
Cheryl McColgan (09:24.686)
Great.
Milburn (09:36.238)
relatively unnatural indoor environment that can then combat mold continuously. That’s our approach.
Cheryl McColgan (09:43.054)
So one of the things that I’ve heard you say, and it’s interesting because then you brought up the wildfires, which unfortunately we’ve had a lot of in North America this past year. But so for example, one kind of like low level thing could be open your windows more often, right? Just get some circulation. Because one of the issues with the houses are now, they’re built too tight, so they’re just holding all that in. So open your windows more often. What about for people that have allergies or live in an area where there’s a fire going on? Then what’s kind of your next suggestion after that?
Milburn (09:54.832)
Hmm?
Milburn (10:11.382)
Yeah, yeah, one of the biggest pieces of this whole puzzle is just connecting air quality with how you’re feeling and just educating yourself on what’s happening inside and around your house, because air quality is not like a green, oh, you have good air quality, and then it’s red, oh, you have bad air quality. Well, the green, but there’s pollen in the air, and now you’re reacting to pollen. Or maybe…
There’s mold, there’s particulates, there’s chemicals. There’s a lot of different pieces to that, and a lot of times we oversimplify it. And so with the outside air, in general, across the board, it’s cleaner than the indoor air, statistically. But, that air quality at rush hour?
in close proximity to a road is 50 times worse than an hour before. So it’s very dynamic. So there could be a part of the year where, yeah, you open the windows and you’re getting a specific type of tree palm that you’re reacting to. Or during a certain time of year, maybe there’s a lot of boats at the port and you’re kind of near the ocean and the wind of flow is pulling that to you. Then the air quality outside could be worse than the indoor air.
especially if you’re taking proactive steps. So part of that is educating yourself. You know, wildfire being an extreme example, maybe it’s a thousand times worse than normal. In that emergency, you’re going to seal up the home as tight as you can.
and try to mitigate it until you can get through that emergency. But in general, fresh air is going to be a good thing. Our ideal scenario is to try to filter that fresh air as it comes in, in some way. So we have nanofiber window screens for clients that maybe the only way they cool their house is to open the windows. But you know they live near a high traffic area, they live in the desert and there’s high particulates, so you can try to trap some of those particulates on the outside.
Indoor Air Quality SolutionsMilburn (11:56.398)
and still get the fresh makeup air in and vent some of the bad air. Because it’s not just about bringing air in, you have to actually push air out. So you wanna push the bad stuff out, you know, like a kitchen exhaust fan, you wanna exhaust humidity like in the bathrooms. But sometimes air purification is simply exhausting the bad and bringing in better air from outside. But yeah, being aware of what’s happening outside, it’s gonna change throughout the day, throughout the year. It’s very, very much related to proximity.
relatively new, not real new, but newish, where the HVAC is gonna incorporate bringing in outside air in, and that’s commercially required by law in most of America, but homes are gonna have HRV or ERV systems that are pulling air in from outside and then mixing in with the indoor air. That’s a good thing most of the time, but we have clients where the place where they’re bringing air in is where their neighbor smokes. So now they’re bringing smoke in from their neighbors.
as a the goal was to bring in fresh air but now they’re mixing it in with cigarette smoke and so you’re kind of getting a net probably problem with that indoor kind of make of air and so yeah it changes a lot depending on where you live who’s around you and one of the things we haven’t touched on yet at all is multifamily because you know you mentioned like you’re being really careful people listening this podcast are being really careful maybe with what they’re eating what they’re drinking maybe cleaning products they’re using
Cheryl McColgan (13:15.862)
Yeah.
Milburn (13:25.274)
But if you live in a condo, you’re breathing the same air almost that your next door neighbor is. And so their decisions are affecting your indoor air quality. And there’s ways to mitigate that, but sometimes you’re gonna be having cigarette smoke or marijuana smoke coming through the floorboards. So as much as that floor feels solid to us, to chemicals and air, it’s not. It’s gonna eventually penetrate that. So yeah, there’s lots of…
unique scenarios and that’s one of the things we often say is just hyperware.com slash consult reach out to us we’ll give you specific individualized recommendations because yeah for some people it’s opening that window it’s literally that’s all you’re doing for air quality don’t buy our products just open your window and you know you’re renting the place for a few months you don’t have a lot of money
Cheryl McColgan (14:05.674)
Yeah.
Milburn (14:09.638)
there’s ways to mitigate that. For some people, that’s not really an option. You gotta keep that window closed or you have to only open it maybe at nighttime and then you’ve gotta purify the air the rest of the time. So there’s different kind of challenges depending on where you live.
Obviously, temperature is going to be a problem for a lot of people during the winter. You can’t just open the windows to get fresh air. And so there’s lots of factors that come into this. But yeah, our indoor air in general is much more contaminated than the outside air. And the big reason for that is outside, there’s all kinds of processes that are breaking down chemicals that are removing particulates that are killing mold, killing bacteria, killing viruses. But inside, there’s almost none of those processes in most of our homes.
Cheryl McColgan (14:28.718)
Right.
Cheryl McColgan (14:54.85)
Yeah, so you mentioned, let’s see, we’ve mentioned mold, we’ve mentioned forest fires, you mentioned particulates, viruses, any other kinds of indoor air quality issues that are maybe things that people don’t think of, there’s off-gassing from some furniture, and that’s why, you know, now it’s a big thing to go with organic mattresses, because your mattress actually off-gasses, and then you’re spending hopefully eight hours a day in there getting some good sleep. But what other things have you, just in your research,
Milburn (15:18.954)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (15:25.238)
designing these products to deal with certain scenarios, are there some unusual things that people don’t think of in terms of indoor air quality solutions?
Milburn (15:32.326)
Sure, and I’ll just some of those and real quick just to use mold as an example though. So mold is going to be something that’s living. So it’s growing, it’s reproducing.
As it grows, it’s gonna be off-gassing chemicals. So you mentioned off-gassing. Mold is gonna off-gas mold VOCs. We like to describe that as the body odor of mold. It’s not true, but it just kinda helps with the kind of the analogy there. So it’s off-gassing this body odor, and then it’s also sweating. And again, that’s not true either, but it’s creating liquid mycotoxins. Those are chemicals. That’s not a living thing. And so you can kill the mold.
But then you would still have the particulate, so the piece of the mold that’s left. You could potentially have the off-gas VOCs, those don’t last too long. But then those liquid microtoxins can last for years.
So even if you killed all the mold in the house, you could still have a liquid chemical that is literally used as a bio weapon that can be there for two, three years later and still be toxic. So even though mold is like one thing, it’s actually composed of living, dead, particulates, off-gassing chemicals, and liquid chemicals. So it does get rather complicated, and for each of those things, sometimes there’s a different approach on how you deal with it. Maybe use an enzyme cleamer for like a leftover liquid mycotoxins,
or use carbon for the mold of VOCs. So there’s different approaches, maybe to the different components. But as far as unusual contaminants, I mean, we hear it all. I mean, like the neighbor next door is making spices in the bathtub. And that’s just what they do. And so there’s spices coming through the HVAC system. Or carpets are gonna be a really big one. Homes are built in really weird ways.
Cheryl McColgan (17:08.063)
Hahaha
Milburn (17:21.226)
So sometimes a bathroom doesn’t have an exhaust fan at all, or maybe the exhaust fan pumps the humidity up and into the wall. And so it looks like it’s working, but it’s actually just pumping the humidity into your wall. Or we had one of our research team was able to help a lady that was really sick in our house and discovered that the water heater had no functioning vent. And so you can purify that air, but really the water heater is pumping toxic
fumes into your house and the better way to do it is to fix the vent. So they fixed the vent and it cleared up the air quality issue. So sometimes it’s not necessarily about purification as much as kind of putting on your building inspector hat and getting to know your house and trying to address where some of these issues might be compounding or leading to problems. Yeah. I mean, we, we see a lot of kitchens where maybe the kitchen was built on the bottom floor in the middle of the house with no vent.
So you’ve got bedrooms above it, you’ve got living rooms and everything around it. And so everything you’re cooking in the kitchen in the gas stove is producing particulates and chemicals. And it’s just going throughout your house. And so it’s just not a good situation. Maybe there’s ways that you can mitigate it. Maybe you open a window.
you know, in the living room or you kind of cross ventilate, but you’re getting that bacon grease, you know, you’re getting all those fumes kind of in your house. And so like there’s lots of those things that, you know, I think intuitively a lot of us understand after time with your house, but
Cheryl McColgan (18:44.63)
Thank you.
Milburn (18:54.49)
being a little bit more intentional with that is a good thing. But yeah, I think a lot of people are understanding the problem. You know, you buy a new car and you got the new car smell. I think people are now realizing, okay, that’s a chemical. Maybe that’s not good for me. Or, you know, you add a, you know, fresh rain smell to your detergent. Well, that’s not actually fresh rain smell. That’s like a synthetic chemical, right? So I think the understanding of, okay, so a lot of these things are contributing to air quality problems, but then the gap is really how do we practice.
Cheryl McColgan (19:13.558)
Hehehe
Milburn (19:24.058)
deal with that. And same with something like mold where it’s like yeah I know it’s a problem but okay you live in Florida what do you do you know you’re just gonna remediate the house every few years that would not be our approach you know we just want to have active mitigation but yeah I mean almost everything you’re bringing to the house including the people and pets are gonna be contributing to the that air quality problems but now we just need to add that natural mitigation.
Cheryl McColgan (19:40.898)
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (19:47.37)
Speaking of, you brought up odors, which I think is an interesting one because some odors might just be annoying, but some of them could be, you know, potential health hazard. But are there ways to deal with things like odors, whether it’s, you know, say you moved into, you know, you gave a scenario of an apartment might be the more common one, but there might be smoke smell or pet smell or something like that. Is that really related to air quality? Is that just more like an annoyance kind of thing?
Milburn (20:06.386)
Thanks for watching!
Milburn (20:13.83)
I mean, yeah, I mean, to your point, there’s odors that are not going to cause you any health issues, but are definitely not going to be pleasant. You know, you could have a bunch of like ammonia, basically, from a lot of cat pee or something like that. You know, maybe it’s not going to cause you health problems, but it’s not going to be very pleasant. And so, yeah, there’s all kinds of ways that you can do with that. And as an aside, we have over 250 free articles on our site that go into very kind of niche scenarios.
Cheryl McColgan (20:25.611)
Right.
Milburn (20:42.874)
including things like pets or carpet care. You know, someone, you know, we hear this story actually somewhat frequently where someone bought a home or they’re renting a home and the person before them didn’t smoke, but the person before them did and maybe that’s 10-20 years ago and maybe they just did kind of like a mediocre job painting over it or something, but you can literally have some nicotine in the walls that’s still causing you problems like 20 years later.
And so there’s sometimes there’s unique either products that you can use to address that specific contaminant or with something like pet odor or a lot of like cigarette smells, marijuana, just natural smells as well. You know, we do have a product that’s a iodine and copper based patented formula.
non-VOC, non-toxic that would actually break down those chemicals. So when it comes to something like odor, you kind of have a couple options. One is to exhaust it. That’s probably the easiest and well, actually the first option is source control. So if you can address the source of it, but aside from that, the next one is exhausting it. So if you’re cooking or you’ve got an animal, if you can exhaust those odors, that’s the quickest.
The next one is absorbing it. So that’s where something like activated carbon come in. So activated carbon is good, but it’s costly. It has minimal kind of longevity because once it absorbs the chemicals, then it’s full. We recommend carbon for the HVAC system because it’s minimal cost, but you can have a big benefit from it because of the amount of air going through your HVAC. And you’re only looking at a couple of dollars a quarter.
and yet almost all the air you’re breathing is going through that. So you can get a little bit of chemical absorption there, and then you’re gonna throw away. So it’s basically gonna capture it, throw away. The third option is basically breaking it down. So breaking it down on a molecular level, you can use something like the iodine copper formula of ours, just total clean. You can use something like our Air Angel, which has the APCO technology, use hydroxyl radicals to rip it apart. So you can use natural process to actually break down the chemicals that are the source of those odors.
Cheryl McColgan (22:53.502)
Awesome. Yeah. I think we, you knew this a little bit. I have a new house. So I’m learning some of these things about this particular house. And there’s a few very interesting things with the HVAC systems, the some leftover pet odors, some different things. So some of this is definitely well-timed to deal with these things. And again, I think some of them are not really a health hazard kind of thing, but then on the other hand,
Milburn (22:58.665)
Mm.
Milburn (23:07.89)
Mm-hmm.
Cheryl McColgan (23:19.33)
the kind of HVAC things that have been pointed out so far are essentially a health hazard. So when it comes to that, do you, does any of your technology, so most of your technology I feel like that I’ve heard in the past focuses on mitigation or just keeping it clean to start with, but is there anything that deals more like with detection or warning you of problems, whether it’s carbon monoxide or other things that I’m not even thinking about?
Milburn (23:24.927)
Yeah.
Milburn (23:47.3)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is a hope and dream of ours, but I’ll tell you what we have now. One of our, and I didn’t really talk about this much, but our background is with commercial applications, so large scale hospitals, sewage plants, casinos, aerospace. One of our aerospace clients,
Cheryl McColgan (23:51.238)
Yeah.
Milburn (24:07.814)
spent $15,000 on one room trying to find a chemical and they couldn’t find it. And they are one of the biggest companies in the world. They know their stuff. And they could not find the odor. So trying to find chemicals in a house is very expensive and not really practical. We’ve rented multi-thousand dollar VOC sensors and taken them into a casino on a Friday night and they’ve registered zero parts per billion.
VOCs. And so, yeah, so not quite accurate. I think we can be safe to say that. So anything that says T VOCs, so total VOCs, as far as the sensor, I don’t think there’s any way that it knows. When it comes to what is available on the market, as far as what we have, we recommend a $5 humidity sensor. So cheap and affordable.
Cheryl McColgan (24:38.613)
That seems definitely wrong.
Milburn (25:05.198)
but get an understanding of how the humidity in different rooms of the house, not just in one spot, but different rooms in the house is changing throughout the year, that’s gonna be to us one of the best mold detection tools to get to know a house, especially a new home. Because that way you can determine, okay, this bathroom here, it’s not venting sufficiently. Maybe I need to run the exhaust fan more. Maybe the exhaust fan doesn’t work. Maybe you’ve got a teenage daughter that showers twice a day and it’s just too much humidity.
take further steps. There’s a lot of more sophisticated moisture meters for indoor air quality solutions and with something like mold a lot of it comes down to moisture management. So mold management, moisture management. You can’t always get rid of the humidity but at least if you know where it is you can take steps to mitigate it. So we were big fans of humidity meters. We certainly recommend carbon monoxide detectors. It’s a small cost.
big benefit potentially, right? That’s something, a great example of something you can’t smell, but could have obviously very dangerous consequences. And that could come from something like a water heater. But yeah, so carbon monoxide detectors, smoke detectors, obviously really good ones. A CO2 sensor, not quite as affordable, but CO2 can be an indicator.
of ventilation problems. So sometimes in like high-rise apartments or places like that, that might be a bit more sealed or you’re trying to reduce the amount of outside air. Maybe you get a CO2 sensor and that’s just basically going to give you an indication of are you getting enough of outside air? Are you getting enough ventilation?
Particulate sensors are pretty good. So you can find particulate sensors that look for PM10 or PM2.5. Those are kind of a bit more buzz terms, but to kind of put it into perspective, the human hair is around 50 to 100 microns in diameter. A PM10 sensor is looking for 10 microns. PM2.5 is 2.5 microns.
Milburn (27:12.286)
In general, those 2.5 are gonna be the ones we’re most concerned with, because the larger particulates, your body’s gonna be able to handle them. They’re gonna be heavy, they’re gonna fall out of the air. You’re gonna be able to vacuum them up. But the smaller ones, in general, are gonna be the harder ones to capture our own bodies, as well as to filter with an air purifier. So something like a PM2.5 sensor, especially if you’re in a city, could be a really good one, because those PM2.5 particulates are the ones linked to lung cancer from cigarettes,
or from diesel exhaust. And so yeah, particulate sensors are gonna be good ones. When it comes to mold, we do like Gotmold. It’s a company that does, sends based like an airborne sampler. And so if you’re trying to prove to a spouse or a landlord that you have mold and how much you have and the types you have, we see that as probably the most practical option for like testing. So Gotmold.
And I think we’ve got a discount, HypoWare or something like that, HypoWare 10, something like that, gives you 10% off maybe. But we’ve known them since they founded and they really know their stuff and they’re trying to make it accessible because a local molder mediator might charge you a thousand bucks and they’re charging like $300 or something like that. And it’s at least the same quality if not better.
But yeah, chemicals are tough. Anything biological, so bacteria, viruses, you can take little Petri dish kits tests, but really you need a lab. And the sample collection process is just hard for a lay person. You know, you don’t do this all the time. It’s hard to get really an accurate reading. And a lot of times those kind of surface swab tests are gonna lead to a lot of false positives. Not to say that they aren’t an excellent tool, but we just see them kind of misused a lot.
and people coming back with like really high readings that don’t give it accurate view of their home. So I guess that would be a few but we’ve for years explored some of the best sensors on the market.
Cheryl McColgan (29:11.718)
Mm-hmm.
Milburn (29:20.034)
like multi-thousand dollar sensors that go on your house, you know, to measure the outside, you know, nitrous oxide and, you know, sulfur dioxide and particulates and all this kind of stuff, but they’re just not practical yet. So the human nose or dog’s nose is far better than what technology can achieve right now. And even those can be easily fooled by what you’re around all the time.
So it’s tough, yeah, it’s tough. We hope in the future to have more devices that can give people actionable data. But the reality is that those devices, even though they don’t work that well, are far more expensive than the solutions. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (30:03.322)
And so for people that I know I’d love that you have on your website basically just schedule a consultation You can describe your situation and you can help them choose the product match that’s best for them But if you just had to describe, you know, you mentioned the angel air already and then I know that you have also an HVAC Unit, can you kind of describe both of those a little bit and address what they actually do for you? And this is outside of obviously like you said very specific situations
Milburn (30:25.476)
Yeah.
Milburn (30:29.986)
Sure, yeah. So general advice, we’re gonna say, if you have central air, so any type of vents in the house, let’s use that. Even if you’re renting, that’s gonna be the most effective and cost efficient way to purify the air throughout the home. So, and we can dive into that more. But that aside, we’re gonna say start with the bedroom. This whole conversation can be a bit overwhelming. At least try to create a safe place in that bedroom. You mentioned mattresses. There’s a lot that you can do in the bedroom to try to create.
a minimal exposure to toxins and contaminants, and then try to create that safe place where the body can naturally detox. Because if that bedroom is bad, then sometimes trying to figure out how to purify the kitchen and your car and the garage and your office and everything is secondary to you getting that bedroom right. So start with the bedroom. Something like the Air Angel would be a good fit for basically any bedroom in North America to give you a broad spectrum of coverage. But if you do the HVAC,
our hope is that you don’t need any plug-in units at all. That’s not always the case. Sometimes you have a bathroom with mold problems, or you’ve got an unattached garage, or you’ve got two dogs that sleep in the laundry room and you need extra effort there or something like that. But in general, if you’ve got that HVAC system, we want that to be the purifier for the house.
And so to put it in perspective, if you buy a thousand dollar HEPA air purifier, plug in one, and you run it on turbo speed, and it sounds like a jet engine, your HVAC system of its average home is probably going to move 10 times as much air as that turbo speed thousand dollar HEPA air purifier. And yet the HVAC industry basically looks as your HVAC purely for the purpose of energy and temperature change with some somewhat minor modifications that could be your primary air purifier.
and the volume of air that goes through that is so much greater, partially because the fan is bigger, partially because you’ve got a duct system, partially because that fan is further away from you in general, so it can be louder and yet you don’t hear it because it’s further away. And so if you do have that central system, one of our units, $900, right now it’s on sale for 630.
Milburn (32:43.574)
So we can lock in that price for anyone listening to this, but that one unit can cover up to 2,400 square feet. And so with no replacement parts for life. And so you’re basically taking the bones of your HVAC system and then converting that into the purifier. And you just have such a bigger scale of benefit than having a bunch of plugin units. Now we have those plugin units and we have different types. Our units typically don’t have any type of
Cheryl McColgan (32:44.522)
need to get on that.
Milburn (33:11.738)
HEPA or mechanical filters. We’re not trying to do what everyone else is doing We would probably make more money if we just put out a big bulky HEPA air purifier with a lot of bells and whistles And made it look cool, but that’s not what we’re trying to do We’re trying to basically move the kind of conversation forward. So our units are typically very small
And right now we’re focusing on polar ionization for the core technology for the home. And that basically requires no replacement parts for life. It can kill something like mold in the air and on surfaces. It can help with particulates that carry the micro toxins. It’s just very broad in its application. But if you don’t have the central layer, you’re basically going to have to look at each room as a separate zone.
While if you bake cookies in the kitchen, you might smell it in the master bedroom You could have really bad air coolant in the master bedroom and relatively okay in the kitchen or vice versa And so each room is going to be separate if you don’t have that central solution So we would prefer that central solution, but we work with people around the world Singapore Dubai, you know Europe, you know, you name it South Africa and most those places you don’t have central air So in those cases you’re looking at the bedroom priority
And then any type of AC system or heater that has vents, like a window mounted system, you can convert that into an air purifier because a lot of times those are very prone to mold growth, to poor air quality. So you want to try to make sure anything that’s blowing air, we want to piggyback on the airflow and improve the air quality going into the system, inside of the system, and coming out of the system.
Cheryl McColgan (34:43.146)
I think one thing it would be important to mention because you did mention the sale. And I do have the link on my website for that, or you can use Heal Nourish Grow. If there, if you happen to hear this later down the road, that sale isn’t available anymore. But the thing I heard you say is that even if you’re renting, even if you have a central, like that’s the preferred one. I think I heard you tell somebody before that you can actually take that with you. Is that, am I remembering that correctly? So even if you installed the central solution in a place that you’re renting,
Milburn (35:03.964)
Yeah. Yep.
Cheryl McColgan (35:10.142)
you’re not throwing that money down the drain. And because it’s a system that’s no replacement parts for life, you just keep taking it with you to wherever the next place is.
Milburn (35:15.926)
Yeah, yep, yep. So there’s a couple ways to go about it. So let’s say you’re in an apartment that’s 800 square feet. Typically that’s below the cost-efficient coverage of the installed version.
Not to say it’s not done. We have smaller rooms that have it installed, especially in medical facilities. But if you had, say, like an 800 square foot apartment or less, we still want to make sure that HVAC system is healthy. And so what you can potentially do is put an air angel near the intake where the filter is for that HVAC. And that’s kind of a way of.
kind of modifying that system without even installing inside of it. And so you’re kind of where the air is going back into the system, you’re purifying that, you’re sanitizing it, and you’re getting into that airflow. And then as the air is coming back out of the system, now it’s cleaner, and you’re able to mitigate some of that problems. So sometimes it’s not even installing in the HVAC, but it’s just being aware of where it is, what it is, how can you make the most of it.
And sometimes it’s as simple as churning your thermostat to be a fan on or have a minimum amount of airflow. And maybe you don’t buy anything from Hyper, but you just change the filters more regularly, maybe add carbon there, maybe run the air more often. Sometimes just that alone can help distribute humidity and the dry out surfaces and help mitigate potential problems. So it’s just kind of being aware of that HVAC system, but getting to your point though, we have people in New York.
They’re renting an apartment. Their HVAC system is shared with the floor. So it has like a common plenum. They don’t even have a isolated system. So they have installed in the docks leading into their apartment. And typically it magnetically attaches. It does need power.
Milburn (37:03.322)
And anyone that wants to get into that, we can help about 50% of our clients install it themselves, but it does require being wired into a source of power. There’s easier ways to do it as well, but it magnetically attaches. So you’re not cutting anything, you’re not screwing anything, you know, special tools. You’re not permanently damaging or having any sign of ever being there other than the system should be cleaner. So if you’re renting or you own, you can. Put it in there while you’re there and take it with you when you leave.
Cheryl McColgan (37:31.178)
And then in the more permanent situation. So for example, I would say I’m moderately handy. Like I just installed my own reverse osmosis water. That was the first thing I did. I got to hear talk about the levels, eating water and then air quality. So if I’m moderately handy, is that something I could install on my own or with working with the HVAC, do you just not recommend that for people?
Milburn (37:36.655)
Hmm?
Milburn (37:39.746)
Nice.
Milburn (37:51.978)
Yeah, we have a partnership with a master electrical company that does virtual consultations and we cover the cost of that. Typically we’re going to say as a company policy, we recommend a licensed electrician. We don’t want you to shock yourself, but probably 50% of our clients do it themselves. And so it’s probably a 10-15 minute install.
but it does require you to turn off the breaker and kind of some basic electrical safety steps. And so we kind of leave that to our clients what they’re comfortable with, but we do recommend someone that’s licensed and has the knowledge just for safety of the person installing it.
But that virtual electrician has been very successful in helping a lot of handymen, a lot of, you know, neighbors, you know, son-in-laws, you know, like mother-in-laws, you know, like all kinds of people to do it without problems. But if you don’t want to touch it, you don’t want to do it yourself, we typically recommend a handyman licensed electrician, smart home installer. Thousands of these have been installed through HVAC contractors, but they’re charging upwards of like $2,500 a piece. And typically…
Cheryl McColgan (38:36.48)
Right.
Milburn (38:57.146)
Their time is very expensive and their skills are unnecessary for this type of install.
Cheryl McColgan (39:04.438)
Okay, good to know. Any other, oh, I know, we talked a little bit. You mentioned before that a lot of your products have patents, and then you shared with me before we got on the call that, because I just asked if you had any exciting news come up. And I know you said some you can share, some you can’t, but what is it that’s making you get out of bed lately that you’re working on? It’s new, it’s exciting, and taking you somewhere different.
Milburn (39:26.946)
Yeah, yeah, and I’m gonna have to think about how I can share some of these things or maybe what I can’t. But our focus right now at Hyper is modifying existing systems in the home. And in the future, we hope to work more in the design of systems. So when you’re installing a new HVAC system, when you’re building a new house, the materials being used, you know, how you set up an HVAC system could be exponentially more powerful for air quality.
Cheryl McColgan (39:31.522)
Hahaha
Milburn (39:56.91)
with minimal changes when it’s installed. But yeah, right now the patents we’re filing are more along the lines of modifying existing systems. And I guess one of the things we’re trying to tackle that I think I can share, because we already have a patent on it, is when someone installs an HVAC in a house, or maybe you just buy one.
there’s almost no information about what type of filter you can put in that HVAC system. So as an example, when my colleagues in Vegas just put in like a $25,000, $30,000 HVAC system, he has no idea the tonnage of the HVAC, the him or the contractor have no idea the MIRV writing of the filter that it can handle. It’s just silly. There’s ways that an HVAC contractor could tell you.
um, the quality of Merv rating, but we’ve developed a solution to give people the data they need to make that decision and to know if their HVAC filter even needs to be changed when it needs to be changed. But to us almost as importantly is what rating of Merv can they put in that HVAC?
And there’s ways that you can increase the Merv writing without adding strain on the system. So just to step back a little bit, the filter you have in your HVAC, it’s kind of like you’re sucking a milkshake through a straw. So if the straw is too small, it’s not gonna work. So you don’t wanna put too much strain on that fan system. You’re gonna get decreased airflow. You’re gonna potentially damage the fan. So you can’t just throw in a HEPA filter in there because it’s too dense. Maybe you can’t even handle like a Merv 13. Maybe you can’t handle Merv 10
because of the straw size for your HVAC was too small. But we’re gonna be able to give you a simple and affordable way to determine what that is and when you need to change your filter. So we’re really excited about that because that’s gonna affect potentially, you know, hundreds of millions of households. Like it’s a really large scale.
Cheryl McColgan (42:00.606)
Yeah, but that’s very exciting because yeah, half the time you move into a house, you don’t know anything about any of the systems. I mean, if you’re lucky, they might have left the manual or something, but.
Milburn (42:05.798)
Hmm. Yeah, there’s almost nothing. You crawl in there and there’s like a bunch of numbers on the system, like serial numbers and stuff. Try to Google it. You’re not gonna find hardly anything. We’ve Googled it. Like we’ve tried to find it for commercial clients. They do not make it easy. The tonnage is one of the simplest things on the system. And a lot of times that’s not even apparent either.
Cheryl McColgan (42:18.039)
Yeah.
Milburn (42:32.502)
So the tonnage is kind of like the horsepower of your system. And if you had the horsepower, the tonnage, the dimensions of your filter and the square footage of your house, you can get a pretty good estimate of the Merv rating that you can handle. Not super accurate, but even if you could do that, that would be better.
But right now most homes, even with new HVAC systems, even with people that are really handy, and they get in there and they crawl around, they don’t even know what the tonnage of the system is. So there’s no way to calculate it using the existing data. And that leaves a lot of people just either going too high on the MIRV rating, so it’s putting too much strain, or maybe they’re going too low. Maybe they’re changing the filters too regularly, they’re wasting money.
or maybe they’re not changing enough. Statistically, it’s something like 80% don’t change them every three months, which is kind of the…
kind of the bare minimum recommendations for a one-inch filter. So most people aren’t changing them enough. And then you’re getting a bunch of dust in the system, which can increase the energy cost. So forget air quality, just the energy cost. You get dust in there, it makes it harder for the coils to work. So we wanna make sure those HVAC systems have the appropriate filters and that they’re being changed regularly. And we make that as practical and affordable as possible and hopefully save people money. And so that’s one of our goals this year.
And some of the other ones we’re still, some of the other ones I’m most excited about, we’re about to file the patents, so I could be super vague on those. But there’s a few other systems in your home and in the majority of homes in America that we’re gonna try to make into air purifying devices. And I guess I’ll leave it at that. But we’re really trying to think outside the box. And we’ve got probably another 20 or so that we’re,
Cheryl McColgan (44:00.75)
I’m going to go to bed.
Cheryl McColgan (44:10.271)
No.
Milburn (44:19.122)
prioritizing by, we’re just taking it one piece at a time. And so we’ll continue with our current products, but we’re existing, looking at other existing systems in the house that can be modified with great benefit.
Cheryl McColgan (44:34.314)
Before we wrap it up here, I do want to be respectful of your time, but it made me think of something that you said in the past too that I think really could be relevant to a lot of people that are possibly listening to this. A lot of people that are into this stuff could be in the healthcare space, and you mentioned that you do a lot of commercial applications. I think that your product, the way that you’ve described it, is really unique and that for places that need a higher level of purity like a hospital or a clinic or any kind of
space like that, people hearing this, they should definitely connect with hypoair because I think that they do have a product that’s far superior and does a lot of interesting things with some. We didn’t even talk about a lot of the virus, bacteria, those kinds of things. The way your system addresses those, I think, is also really valuable for a lot of people.
Milburn (45:06.13)
Mm-hmm.
Milburn (45:16.763)
Mm-hmm.
Milburn (45:20.178)
Right. Yeah. You talk about air quality problems, and then you talk about hospitals and it’s next level. So and we have, yeah, we have products. So like the H5 product we have, we use sometimes the same product, but sometimes a different shape of the same product for commercialized machines. And so for years, we were focused on these commercial applications because we saw how big the problems were.
Cheryl McColgan (45:28.814)
Right.
Milburn (45:47.23)
The thing that we didn’t understand was how difficult it is working with these big corporations and that in general they don’t care that the ice machine is green with slime, but they do care that they have to pay for someone to come and clean it. And the same is true of hospitals, you know, even ice machines in hospitals are feeding people really sick. They’re heavily contaminated. But the way that we were selling to them is to save them money on maintenance.
Cheryl McColgan (45:52.801)
Right.
Cheryl McColgan (46:14.432)
Mm-hmm.
Milburn (46:14.466)
So we can apply the same technology to a home and yeah, potentially save you money on maintenance, but you’re probably more concerned with not having slime growing on your HMI system, you know, mold and, you know, all this biofilm and everything. So the corporations were hard to work with, but kind of over the last few years, especially when the COVID craziness hit, basically we got too busy. We made the decision, we’re not gonna try to convince any business that they have a problem.
Cheryl McColgan (46:23.45)
Yes.
Milburn (46:41.866)
If a business owner knows they have a problem and wants solutions, we’re there. We’re happy to help. But for years, we were having meetings with hospitals and big hotels and everything. And they knew they had, I guess individuals knew they had problems, but as a corporation, they did not care to really solve them. And like literally, I remember one phone call with a hospital, they contacted us. They had a C diff, like a,
infection breakout in their hospital and they contacted us for help and the person in charge of the hospital for infection, basically prevention reduction, said that they were not interested in reducing their rates of infection. And we said, okay. It was like a really awkward call. There’s like a bunch of people on the call, like different companies and we’re like, okay. Well
Cheryl McColgan (47:30.926)
Why aren’t they calling you?
Milburn (47:39.238)
we’re here if you need us, like, it was, it’s just like super weird, like the mentality there. And so instead they ended up getting like a couple $80,000 kind of R2D2 UV robots that they would wheel into a room after the patient left and zap the room, maybe once a week. But in the interim, you know, all the people come in and go in, all the sick people in the room.
Cheryl McColgan (47:41.026)
Yeah.
Milburn (48:07.354)
There’s next to no mitigation. They’re just pumping in fresh air, which is a good thing, but just the mentality of all these, these hospitals and businesses are really tough. Uh, but yeah, all that to say any, if, if there’s individuals, you got a medical practice, dental clinic, you know, a biohacking facility.
you know, gyms, apartments, offices. We love working with those people because yeah, it can be very cost-effective and beneficial and simple. But yeah, it’s a hard thing to see. And so we hope in the future, so like with hotels, for example, we’ve worked with some of the most famous hotels in the world. And what they often do is they’ll install our products in a couple rooms or a couple floors or a couple maid service carts.
And then if someone complains, then they can move that person to the healthier room. And so our number one tip with traveling is just ask if they have any options. Because a lot of times, they didn’t want to spend the money to do it for the whole hotel because they don’t think people care. And a lot of people don’t. And so they do it only for a few rooms and they use different mattresses, different cleaning products, maybe products like ours. Maybe they have HEPA purifiers available, but they only do it for a few rooms and they typically don’t advertise it because they don’t want it to seem like
Cheryl McColgan (49:00.874)
Look.
Milburn (49:25.236)
the rest of the hotel is dirty, and you have to pay extra for the clean. And sometimes you don’t have to pay extra, but just ask. And so as kind of the mentality of consumers, us, changes, and we say, I’m not gonna stay in your hotel if it has mold, then they’ll take more proactive steps to change it.
Cheryl McColgan (49:27.33)
Right?
Cheryl McColgan (49:42.814)
Yeah, and that’s a really great tip. I never even thought of asking the hotel if they have a, what would it be like an allergy friendly room or something like that or.
Milburn (49:47.398)
Hmm? Yeah, yep. Yeah, for some of us sensitivities, hypoallergenic rooms, you know, things like that. A lot of times they have those. A lot of times they have even like Costco air purifiers available. Like it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but anything that can help cut the contaminants because the highest VOCs we have ever measured is in a hotel room after cleaning. And so a lot of times hotel rooms are going to have all the same issues of your home.
and then a lot more. So obviously you have all the people coming, bacteria and all that, but you have a lot of cleaning products that you’re not gonna be familiar with, a lot of synthetic fragrances, potentially a lot of mold. You stay in a really nice hotel, it’s by the ocean. A lot of times they’re leaving their windows open, they have a lot of moisture problems, they get a lot of mold. One of, I forget who it was, made the point that she is on a search for a hotel with hard floors.
And I never really thought about it, but basically all the hotels have carpets. Um, and so carpets are, are little kind of, uh, filters that don’t actually get rid of the contaminants. They just kind of absorbing and go walk around on it. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of hotels are basically designed for poor air quality. And then you also have the added, um, complexity of when you’re in a new environment, your nose is kind of, kind of beyond high alert. And so a lot of times people have the experience, even those that aren’t
Cheryl McColgan (50:42.092)
No.
Cheryl McColgan (50:45.52)
Mm-hmm.
Milburn (51:11.594)
super sensitive. In a hotel room they’re going to have that heightened sensitivity and they’re going to be really reactive. So yeah asking for a cleaner room is the first step. You can also take an Air Angel with you, plug it in, go out to dinner, and give it a chime to cut the concentration. But yeah a lot of times hotel rooms are going to be one of the dirtiest places you’re going to be.
Cheryl McColgan (51:18.71)
Yeah, that’s really interesting.
Cheryl McColgan (51:32.006)
malls are too actually. I rarely go in a mall anymore, but I often notice when I do go in that my eyes and my skin almost just feels itchy, but my eyes especially, it’s just really intense and I feel like there’s got to be something going on with the air or the chemicals or all of the above.
Milburn (51:40.518)
So, mm-hmm. Oh, there’s lots going on. Yeah, yeah, lots of going on in those places. A lot of times in the bigger commercial spaces, at least there are laws that require outside makeup air. So they’re forced by law to bring in outside air.
to exhaust the indoor air. If it wasn’t for that, it’d probably be a whole lot worse. So like something like a hospital, it depends on where it is, but they might have to change the air 20 times an hour. Like they got to pump a lot of air out. And something like a mall would be required to do that. But the smaller spaces especially, or obviously the more extreme examples would be like a perfume store.
where there’s a lot of fragrances and they are a lot of heavy concentration of chemicals, things like that. Especially if someone is dealing with like a mold issue at home, for example, they tend to be in that heightened state of reactivity to something like those fragrances. And yeah, so yeah, ice machines, restaurants, like there’s a lot of problems. But again, our goal is not for you to live in fear of these things. Our hope is that your bedroom, your home is a safe place to detox, to…
build your resilience and you can go out into the world and not be as reactive. But any place that you’re spending longer periods of time, ideally you’re going to be getting some, some sort of indoor air quality solutions there. So you’re not overwhelming the body.
Cheryl McColgan (53:14.954)
Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And I like that you brought it back to the positive because often of these things, when you go down these rabbit holes, it’s so easy to be like, what can I eat anymore? Where can I go that’s safe to breathe? And so I think the take home here is obviously just do the best you can with what you have to work with. You got to work within your budget and you got to work within, but you gave several great tips for much less expensive options and simpler things. Like just when you’re getting your yearly, you know, HVAC, or you have somebody come to service it, making sure that.
Milburn (53:22.875)
Totally, yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (53:43.03)
you know, that everything’s flowing properly and you’ve got, you know, changing the filter. That is the number one thing to take away from today. You’re supposed to change it every three months. So learn where your filter is and definitely change that to start with. So, David, I just want to really thank you for taking the time today. Don’t forget about the sale so you can take advantage of their amazing indoor air quality solutions. If you’re hearing this right after it comes out, they might still have that going on. I think that’s an awesome price for that’s far less than what you normally charge. And
Milburn (53:48.198)
See you.
Milburn (53:55.862)
Yes. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (54:11.03)
Thanks for taking the time today, I really appreciate it.
Milburn (54:13.014)
Absolutely and just reach out to us. So the current sale we’re ending pretty soon but reach out to us and we’ll extend the sale to you just for Making it this far and actually carrying that much So yeah, we’ll extend the sale to you and just reach out to our team and we’ll do that We never want it to feel like you rushed. You know, you’re super rushed to make a decision or you missed out Especially during the holidays here. So yeah, just reach out to the team and we’ll extend that sale price
Cheryl McColgan (54:25.569)
Awesome.
Cheryl McColgan (54:38.39)
Yeah, thank you so much for that.
Very generous, thank you. All right, take care.
Milburn (54:44.498)
Thanks guys, appreciate it.
In this episode, I interview Chris Burres about his background, the genesis of his book, and his decision to host a longevity summit. We discuss the main takeaways from the summit interviews, including the importance of mindset, sleep, exercise, and diet in longevity. We also delve into the significance of protein consumption for muscle health and longevity.
Chris Burres discusses the importance of mindset. He emphasizes the need to view aging as a disease and the possibility of rejuvenation.
Takeaways
- Mindset, sleep, exercise, and diet are key factors in longevity.
- The mindset of separating living infirmed from aging is important.
- Protein consumption is crucial for muscle health and longevity.
- The Longevity Summit provided valuable insights and information from experts in the field.
- Advancements in medical technology and the rapid increase in medical information provide hope for significant improvements in longevity.
- Aging should be viewed as a disease, and funding should be directed towards addressing the underlying causes of aging.
- The potential for rejuvenation and the ability to create a younger version of oneself using DNA are exciting possibilities.
Previous interview with Chris
Register for the summit for FREE
Learn more about MyVitalC and get 10% off your order with HNG
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
08:02 The Genesis of the Book and Personal Journey
21:01 The Decision to Host a Longevity Summit
30:10 Takeaways from the Longevity Summit Interviews
42:33 Importance of Protein in Longevity
45:11 Protein Consumption and Mindset
46:42 Final Thoughts and Revelations
49:45 Longevity and Medical Advancements
53:46 Aging as a Disease and the Potential for Rejuvenation
54:10 Conclusion
Episode TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:00.564)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heel Nourish Grow podcast. I am back today with somebody that I just thoroughly enjoy, Chris Vergevues on episode, I think it was 45. I looked it up and I didn’t retain it for some reason. But anyway, he’s here again with us today. And my gosh, we’ve been talking about all things geek prior to this and he has such a great new geeky project that I can’t wait to share with you. So Chris, before we get started with all the wonderful new stuff you’ve got going on.
I thought it would be great to just briefly give your background. Obviously I’ve read your bio, but touch on this element that you described that is so awesome for longevity and great for mitochondrial health that we discussed in the first podcast. Maybe just like a little recap for people. Definitely go back and listen to the whole episode, but that way they’ll kind of get where you’re coming from and then why you are now doing the cool summit that you’re doing. So anyway, that was a very long introduction, but thanks for being here, Chris.
Chris Burres (00:55.889)
Yeah, no, I like it. Cheryl, thank you so much for having me back. I’m excited. In some regard, it’s not surprising, not because of me, but because of the stuff that has been accomplished, which in a real way doesn’t feel like it’s because of me. It is, but you know how you just, you wake up on it. I’ll describe it this way, right? So let’s go back. We’ll talk about the molecule, right? And I’m holding up a molecule or a model of a molecule, obviously.
And if you’re listening, just imagine a soccer ball where the lines on the soccer ball represent the bonds between the carbon atoms. So it’s a spherical molecule of 60 carbon atoms. I’ve been manufacturing that it’s a carbon nanomaterial. I’ve been a happy -go -lucky carbon nanomaterial scientist since 1991. That molecule was actually discovered in 85. The scientists who discovered it won the Nobel Prize for that discovery in 96. So short 11 years from discovery to being awarded the Nobel Prize.
Uh, the material is amazing in all sorts of industrial applications. And, and if you would ask me, let’s just say, well, like even back in 2016, Hey Chris, you’re going to be in the longevity space with a health supplement. I would have said, Cheryl, you’re crazy. Like I got it. Like there’s no, in my mind, there’s no route from me for me from here, carbon nanomaterial scientist to there.
Um, and really what kind of changed that. And actually the publication had already happened. My business partner and I just weren’t interested in getting into the supplement market. When you think about delivering commercial quantities of a soccer ball shaped carbon nanomaterial, right? That sounds really complex and really sexy. Well, maybe not, maybe that’s not the right word. Maybe that’s just me. It’s like geeky. We’ll just go with geeky, right? And, uh, and, and then you’re selling them to these research institutions and they have the equipment to make sure that.
what you’re selling them is what you’re selling them or what you’re claiming to sell them is what you’re selling all this stuff. And then you think about the supplement market and like nobody tests anything. Nobody, you know, they just say they take everybody’s word for it. And, you know, when we first got in the industry, there were some challenges in the industry, which were not surprising, which were why we tried not to get into the supplement industry to begin with. So, so again, if you were back in 2016 said, Hey, you’re going to be in the longevity space. You’re going to have a longevity supplement.
Chris Burres (03:18.921)
No way that’s going to happen. And then really at the latter part of 2017, we did have this product on the market and it wasn’t for human consumption. It was not intended for human consumption. But one guy got on with a big YouTube following, started talking about all the benefits he was getting taking this molecule. By the way, we call it ESS 60 taking this molecule on a daily basis, all the benefits he was getting. And then our phone went from raining like two times.
a week with people giving us amazing testimonials about this thing they weren’t even supposed to be consuming. It’s a 10 times a day. We’re getting 10 phone calls a day. And so, you know, my business partner and I were happy go lucky carbon and a material scientists and we’re like, what do we do with this? Right? We’ve tried not to get into the health supplement market. We have a lab. We can do this better than anybody else. It’s actually our material was used in the original study where the test subjects live 90 % longer than the control group.
So we’re like the foundation of this industry. And that was kind of the beginning of 2018. We really started getting into the supplement market with our My Vital C, which is ESS -60 dissolved in olive oil. So that’s kind of beginning of 2018. And one of my first tasks, right, I, you know, Robert ends up doing, that’s my business partner for 34 years now, 33 years. It’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had actually.
And we get along and we don’t get along and then we get along and then we just get back to work, right? Like it’s just like, great. I disagree with you. You disagree with me. It actually probably doesn’t really matter. We’re both moving in the same direction. And so it’s been a really great business relationship. And so we’re finally get focused on the supplements. He takes care of operations and I’m kind of responsible for Mark. Hey, Chris, you’re the marketing guy. Okay. I’ll be the marketing guy.
Cheryl McColgan (04:45.49)
So you guys must like each other.
Chris Burres (05:14.313)
And the first thing is like, well, a 90 % extension of life is by the way, all of this is in my book, live longer and better. And I’ll talk a little bit about why I ended up publishing a book here in a second, but all these details are in here. It’s a great book. It’s got great lessons. I think it’s got great business lessons. And it’s an exciting journey about a Nobel prize winning molecule. So I’m responsible for marketing. The first thing is like, okay, a 90 % extension of life. Like you intuitively know that’s a lot.
Right? Like we just know that’s a lot because you don’t hear people talking about things that double the lifespan of living things. Right? You just don’t hear that. But, but how big is it? Like, is it actually big and how big is it? So I’m, I’m starting to dig into that, by the way, the next best way to live longer is calorie restriction. If you reduce your calorie consumption by 30%, you’re it’s well documented that you can extend your life by 30%. And, and I probably said this on the last show.
I call that the starve yourself one third to death diet. Nobody really signs up for the starve yourself one third to death diet. They, they need a marketing guy better than me, obviously, because that’s, that’s what I would have called it. Um, and so it turns out it’s a great, right? It’s a, it’s a great extension of life. And then I’m like, well, what are other things? Like what are other protocols? What are things you can do? What are these biohacker, these wacky biohackers? There’s the ones who, when we weren’t really selling it for human consumption.
Who were calling us and giving us testimonials about, you know, improved. I call it head to toe testimonials, improved hair growth, better, you know, fixing the nails. The one I like is, uh, one of, one of our contacts actually had a crab bite his big toe when he was five years old and split his big toenail. And from five to 65, that toenail was split. After he started our product, that toenail is no longer split. It actually grew together. Right. So literally.
From head to toe, we’ve got these testimonials and, and they’re, they’re pretty, pretty amazing. And, and it’s driven by these wacky biohackers and I can say wacky because I am one now. And so I’m doing wacky biohacking thing. I’m doing cold plunges and, and red light sauna and intermittent fasting and all of this stuff. Uh, and so it’s, it’s been an incredible journey and I, and I’ve been educating myself about this longevity. And I’ve always felt if you’re going to educate yourself about longevity,
Chris Burres (07:39.657)
One of the best ways to cement knowledge in your head is to share it, right? Is to teach. And one is it’s great to teach. It makes you feel really good. Other people are learning. And then two, you’re cementing that information into your head. So that was kind of the genesis of why I thought I wanted to write a book. And then that’s kind of a different story altogether.
Cheryl McColgan (08:02.622)
So Chris, you said the book was mostly about the molecule, but yes, my question was going to be, did you add in, my question was going to be about the book. So you said it was kind of about the molecule, but did you include any of this kind of your personal journey that you’ve started going into with the longevity based on what you learned from this molecule and the people that initially tested it on themselves?
Chris Burres (08:05.033)
I don’t know if you have any questions.
Chris Burres (08:10.217)
Say that again.
Cheryl McColgan (08:30.734)
Is that part of the book? Yeah.
Chris Burres (08:30.761)
Absolutely. So we were fortunate. I mean, the molecule was discovered. Yeah, yeah, we were fortunate. We were just the molecule was discovered here in Houston. That’s where we’re based. That’s where our lab is based. And we had the opportunity to go visit Dr. Smalley’s office and kind of have conversations with his grad students and really kind of incorporate their concepts into our first production equipment way back in 1991. That’s the first time.
we delivered commercial quantities of carbon nanomaterials was back in 1991. So yeah, I talk about that story. I talk about having conversations with his grad students. I talk about going to symposiums, right? Well, first off, so you’re a young college kid, right? And you’ve got access to this crazy molecule. By the way, the reason we got into the business is my business partner, Robert’s idea is that at the time the molecule was selling for $6 ,000 a gram, right? So think,
in terms of a packet of sugar, just to give kind of a reference point, $6 ,000 for that, right? So yes, this is something that we should be doing. But if you think about it today, right, if I had some molecule that had some study, there’s no, it’s a no brainer. You make a website and maybe you start doing social media because it’s super sciencey and geeky and you don’t expect, certainly you’re doing LinkedIn and you have all these kind of marketing strategies that come to mind. But back then there was no winner.
Like there was none. And so we actually had to use, there was a book, we bought it, Guerrilla Marketing Tactics. And, you know, cold calling all of the research institutions around at least the United States that would potentially do research on a carbon nanomaterial. By the way, in the early days, people would ask us, hey, this is really cool. This soccer ball shaped molecule. What do you do with like, what’s it good for? And our kind of running joke was, well, it’s really good for funding, right?
Because at the time, if you wrote a proposal about right about the molecule, about fulleranes, about nanotubes, you tended to get funded. And so that was the kind of the ongoing joke at that time. So I’ve got I got a little. Oh, so I think I got a little lost there.
Cheryl McColgan (10:50.522)
In the book, did you add anything about your personal journey into biohacking based on learning about molecules?
Chris Burres (10:54.313)
Oh, yes.
Chris Burres (11:01.257)
Excellent. So, so I can share with you, um, like in the story, I, I kind of incorporate experiences in my life. So, so I, unfortunately, I was actually present when, when my dad passed and he had a do not resuscitate. And that really is kind of conceptually, uh, associated with longevity, right? Um, you know, that, that situation obviously sucks. It’s just horrific. Um, at the same point, my dad was diagnosed with ALS.
And that’s a, that’s probably even more horrific than having to go through what I went through. Um, and so in some very real sense, fortunate that he didn’t have this long protracted, like horrible experience of a decline. He ended up passing quickly. Um, and, and I think that’s, you know, I think that’s the way most people would like to go. Um, I did this longevity summit and I interviewed 55 experts in longevity. And I think the best example and actually carried it into the, into the summit, no, no particular.
Uh, expert shared it with me, uh, the best example of how people would really like to live and then move on past this earth, whatever you think happens next is like a candle flame, right? So a candle and a candle flame just burns and it burns as bright as it’s going to burn until a very short period of time where then it’s out. And, and I think that’s what a lot of people are, are, are looking for. I also think that’s what people are looking for. And the opposite is not.
It’s not just what people expect. It’s what’s ingrained into our mentality. Right. So, and again, outlined in the book, we talk about sharing this longevity story with people. And when we share that story, a lot of people are like, well, I don’t want to live longer. Like, why would you want to live longer? Like, that sounds like horrible. And the reason is, is because currently we’re unable to separate living a debilitated
and decrepit life with aging. We can’t separate those two. We understand, our belief system is that as you get age, things get, as you age, things get worse. And that’s one of the things that I wanted to put the summit together for. Cause I think, I think it’s very different. I think we can worst case scenario, go out like a candle, right? Like be a burning bright light that attracts the moths of excitement and joy. That’s what we’ll call it.
Chris Burres (13:26.889)
until the very end. And I think that’s, that’s the worst case scenario. Things that are coming out. You look at Dr. David Sinclair’s book, Lifespan. I love the tagline, why we age and why we don’t have to. That book talks about that we can probably live forever. You know, but in terms of natural causes, right? That there’s some terminal velocity of aging that we’re rapidly approaching where each day we live, the medical community figures out how to extend our life.
by more than a day, right? And that means that there will be at some point, the last person to die of natural causes, right? Still, if you get hit by a bus, you fall into the Grand Canyon, whatever it is, like there’s no coming back yet. But you know, people are already talking about, hey, maybe we can upload our consciousness into a computer someday. And so there’s even coming back from that at some point. But for now, let’s just talk about natural causes.
I believe at some point there’s going to be the last person who dies of natural causes and it would really suck to be that person. I guess they wouldn’t know at the end of the day, they wouldn’t know that they’re the last person, but you just don’t want to, you know, it’d be great to be the first person to not die of natural causes ever, right? Like to not die. And we do think that that’s going to happen. And there’s a lot of evidence in that. I talk about that in the book. I talk about one time, how exciting it was.
When I was starting this business, this carbon nanomaterial business to start a business. And I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I cover why I wanted to be an entrepreneur in the book that the business was so exciting. I had overnight studying, right? So no sleep, went to an exam. And then on, on the drive from, uh, from the university of Houston to our lab, I actually fell asleep driving. Now nothing happened. Right. I woke up and realized the car’s in front of me.
Cheryl McColgan (15:16.142)
Mm.
Chris Burres (15:19.785)
were a lot closer than they were just, you know, what I thought were seconds ago. I was asleep. Um, and very fortunately nothing happened. But one of the things just to describe how tired I was, the bolt of, of adrenaline that came out of that was just almost mind numbing, right? So boom, I’m wide awake. This is never going to happen. And probably 15 seconds later, I was nodding again, right? Got to the office and I worked a full eight hour shift.
just because it was so exciting at the time, right? Driving’s boring, working at a carbon nanomaterial manufacturing, working at a, well, a carbon nanomaterial manufacturing startup business is exciting. And that’s how exciting things were back then. And you can tell like how I am now. I’m actually under the weather. I’ve experienced wheezing in my chest, right? So I’ve got enough mucus in my lungs to be wheezing, which is, I don’t know, unnerving to say the least. And then I’ve got a sinus cold.
But I’m working through it. I think that a lot of that is actually the product. You know, our most consistent testimonial is focus and energy during the day, better sleep at night. But I’m able to work through those things and somewhat, I’m just excited. I’m excited to share these stories, excited to talk about the book now, and especially excited to talk about what, you know, the same way that I would say, hey, Chris, you’re going to be a longevity expert and you’re going to have a health supplement.
No way, Cheryl, is that possible is the same way I would describe this summit that we’re probably about to talk.
Cheryl McColgan (16:57.172)
Yeah, and that’s, I was excited when your team reached out again because, you know, we had this conversation before and I always love hearing, cause you know, we talked about biohacking and kind of just being geeks generally before we hit record. And you know, whenever I learned part of my challenge in this space and doing the things that I do and testing things on myself is that, for example, when I was using my Vital C,
Chris Burres (17:11.113)
Yeah, yes.
Cheryl McColgan (17:22.446)
I was doing other things at the same time. And, you know, like I’m also using this Kenyon strap that’s got red light therapy that I’ve been using on my knee. And it’s like, well, I don’t know if that’s working, if time is working, or if I’d be that much worse off if I wasn’t doing it. So it’s just like all these hacks. It’s kind of a challenge because you’re like, was this thing really working or is it just a coincidence? So it’s always.
of interesting, but whenever I hear about a new thing, of course I immediately want to try it. So that was definitely the case with your molecule after our interview. I was like immediately like, oh my gosh, I have to take this. So it is fun to get excited about those things, isn’t it?
Chris Burres (17:56.713)
Yes.
Chris Burres (18:01.033)
And we’ll say, well, I’m happy to send you more. By the way, I have the same key on thing. Um, I’ve got a very, like a very specific spot on the bottom interior of my right knee. Uh, a button below the patella that just hurts. And it’s probably some tightness here and there. So I’m doing actually some block therapy was just something that I learned about, um, on the, on the summit. Uh, that was one of the great things, great and, and, and, and frustrating things like every talk that I.
that I orchestrated, I ended up with more homework. Like, I like, so, you know, I’m current, I’ve probably done, I don’t know, 15 hours of block therapy, which was not on my radar. It’s a little bit painful. Feels very natural. Actually, I’m going to do a follow -up interview with her tomorrow. So tonight I’ll be lying on a bamboo block, which, which is as bad as it sounds, but also a lot better than it sounds. Um, so yeah, I’m with you. I’m doing all sorts of different things.
Cheryl McColgan (18:34.286)
Right?
Chris Burres (18:57.865)
And I really am a biohacker. I last week started doing a subcutaneous injections of BPC 157 and TB 500. These are peptides that are known to have significant healing properties. And so I’m with you though, right? Like if it heals in over the course of two weeks, which may be the right timeframe, is that because I’ve had it for a year and now it’s time for it to go away?
is that because I’m doing this block therapy, which is loosening up my fascia, which I didn’t even know what fascia was, but it’s actually the lie that the the the the envelope that’s around basically like every nerve, every muscle, every organ, and it gets tight. And so you can imagine tight is not good, you actually want that to be nice and loose. Deep tissue massage can help but not at the same level as as this kind of what’s called block therapy.
which is amazing. Deanna is amazing. And so yeah, I’m with you, but you know, you try, you just do try some protocol and then you wait a while and then you try another protocol. And you know, if, if, if it’s a group of three things that you attribute it to, then you put that in your notebook and the next time that happens, you’ve got that tool. And again, this is all about making that candle flame burn, right? Cause I want to solve, I actually skipped this year’s half marathon. My wife and I typically run a half marathon every year.
Um, because of that knee pain. And so I really want to solve that. I’m not that keen on running that. Like, I don’t have to run the half marathon. I think it’s just a fun thing to push myself to do. Um, I’m not that interested in doing a full marathon. I think that’s less fun. Uh, like twice as less fun. Um, and so, uh, but you want, you want that candle flame to burn really brightly. And so you’ve, your body doesn’t heal like it used to.
Cheryl McColgan (20:39.47)
Hahaha.
Chris Burres (20:49.449)
So this biohacking is about how do we make our body heal like it used to? What are, what are these protocols that we can inject in my case, um, that, that will actually help us.
Cheryl McColgan (21:01.902)
Yeah, and I mean, I feel I love that analogy of the candle flame because so many experts now are talking more about it’s not just lifespan, but health span. You want to live the years that you’re living to the fullest. And I think, you know, these tools that we’re all using and that, you know, these books that are coming out, like I was reading Peter Attia’s new book, I’m sure you have to, I forget the name of it, but, you know, just all these longevity experts.
Chris Burres (21:26.729)
I haven’t read that one yet.
Cheryl McColgan (21:29.358)
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s well worth it. He’s, you know, he’s very interesting, dude. But yeah, all these things like the aura ring and all these things that we do to learn more about ourselves and how we can recover better. I’m sure knowing what little I know of you, I saw what little I know of you. If you’re not on video, we’re both just holding up our aura rings. But I’m just knowing what little I know of Chris, it didn’t surprise me when his team said, Hey, he’s doing a longevity summit. And so
Can you explain to people like, okay, you’ve shown that you have this personal interest. You obviously there was something in the marketplace that you’re feeling like that was missing or that you weren’t learning enough about personally. And I know if you’re like me, it’s like I’m part of the thing I love about doing the podcast. I get to talk to a bunch of really smart people all the time and learn about new things. I didn’t know like the injection you just mentioned. I’m totally going to have to follow up with you about that to learn about that because I got to get my knee fixed too. So.
What was it that made you decide I’ve got to do this summit? What like put a burr up your bonnet for that?
Chris Burres (22:32.105)
Yeah, the actual B. So I was actually at a marketing conference, Affiliate Summit West, which was in Vegas, which is always fun because everyone suffers. When affiliate marketing people get together, they party pretty hard. And I try to keep up. But I’m actually able to outperform because this actually works as a really good hangover recovery product. So…
We’re the, my wife and I are the ones who like stayed out until four and are actually at the conference at eight. Um, and, and I think, you know, in large part because of the ESS 60 molecule. So I’m at this conference and my wife is so much of a better networker than I, it’s just not even funny. So usually what happens is she networks with somebody. She introduces me. I start a conversation. I met this representative of a company called Health Means. Um, now Health Means, what they do is they do health summits and I’m like, Hey, we got to talk.
Cause I like, well, our best marketing strategy is get on a podcast, share the story. And, and then people understand that I’m like, if I sell it, that’s great. I’m not hawking some goods that don’t have any science behind them. And, and in reality, I’m just sharing the research that research is out there for people to go and discover. And so I arrange a call, get back to Houston. My first call is like, Hey, there’s three things that you can, well, there’s two things that you can do with us. One is you can be a sponsor.
And so a sponsor is, by the way, this event and my uncovering the secrets of longevity live beyond the norms event is absolutely free. So you’ll go to the link. I think we put together a link, right? Um, with longevity summit, uh, and at the end of your domain, what is that link?
Cheryl McColgan (24:12.558)
Yep. Yes. HealNourishGrow .com. HealNourishGrow .com slash longevity summit.
Chris Burres (24:22.441)
Excellent. So he’ll nourish grow .com forward slash longevity summit. And you can go for free, just got to give your email and your, uh, your, your first name. And as a sponsor, you’ll get an offer. Hey, do you want to get this free PDF file? And then that gives me potentially the sponsor. If that’s of interest to you, that gives me your email and then I can follow up. And if you’re interested in that free PDF or free video or whatever it is, then you actually can, I can follow up with you and there’s more.
value that you could get like maybe it’s peptides, maybe it’s the ESS 60 molecule or whatever. So that’s one way you could sponsor it. And then the other is you could speak on it. And I’m like, well, yes, like speaking, I like to do that. Let’s get me speaking. And then one of the things that I’ve just always kind of known, whether it’s from business coaches or conferences that I’ve gone to, is that if you’re going to get involved in something, be at the front of the class, right? So be the person.
Who’s running the particular event. And I’m like, well, so what does it take to be a host? And they were like, well, there’s an investment, right? And then you need to commit to interviewing 35 to 40 people. And I’m going to be 100 % honest with you. I thought I’d get to about 25 and then figure out what happens after that. Maybe they’re extremely disappointed and they want their money back or I don’t even know what was going to happen, but that’s what I felt I could do. And in fact,
If you had said six months ago, Chris, you’re going to put on a longevity summit. You need to interview 55 experts in longevity. And of those 55 experts, three of them are going to be Dave Asprey, right? The father of biohacking and right. The founder, the creator of Bulletproof Coffee. So a lot of people, I’m trying to throw out the things that they might know of. Dr. Gundry, who I was on his podcast quite a while ago.
Cheryl McColgan (26:04.27)
So exciting.
Chris Burres (26:18.665)
Um, he’s a former pediatric heart surgeon, uh, turned, you know, healer from the perspective of let’s get your diet, right? So he has four New York times, bestselling books. Um, and then Ben Greenfield. Now I think Ben Greenfield is a little lesser known, certainly well known in the biohacking and longevity communities, but that guy is such a, such a knowledge base. Um, he’s amazing. Uh, so, so I, three well respected people in the longevity and biohacking space.
And then just throw in Sergey Young, right? Sergey Young wrote a book, The Science and Technology of Growing Young. And Sergey is the kind of guy who actually hangs out with Elon Musk, with Tony Robbins, with Peter Diamantas, the creator of X -Prize. He’s an investor in longevity. So it was really cool to get, hey, you invest in this technology. What are you investing in? Like where do you see the value in it? Not only have you written this book, but what are you investing in?
So if you told me that I was going to interview 55 people, including those four people and many others who are amazing, I would literally would have said, Cheryl, I really like to set myself up for success, not for failure. I’m going to say no, because I don’t think I can do that. Like, I don’t think that’s something that I can do. Again, my mindset was I’ll interview 25 people and we’ll see what happens. And ultimately, and that’s exactly what I did. Right. And this is.
leveraging relationships. This is, you know, I had cursory relationships with Ben Greenfield, Dave Asprey and Dr. Gundry. Sergey Young popped on because, you know, everybody I’m interviewing, I’m asking like, hey, who else would you know that would be good, a good fit for this longevity summit? And so at the end of it now, I’ve got this amazing summit under my belt. It’s coming out. It comes out February 26. Again, it’s free. We release seven to eight videos.
every day for seven days. If you are unavailable on a particular day, you may want access to that video for 99 bucks, you get access to all the videos. So like you just get the folder and you have access to that kind of in perpetuity. And so it’s really cost effective. And in fact, it’s free if you have the time to actually participate during the day. By the way, they’re not released sequentially or anything. You just like…
Chris Burres (28:41.929)
Here’s the batch of seven or eight videos for today. So go listen to the ones that you want to. And then here’s the batch of seven or eight videos on the next day. Go listen and that’s absolutely free. You just need to give your name and your email address.
Cheryl McColgan (28:56.046)
Yeah, it’s amazing the amount of free content out there these days and the quality, because I’ve participated myself in a couple of these. In fact, I just recorded my presentation for the Keto Diet Summit. It’s sort of the same paradigm that you just described. It’s like, literally, if you can just show up that day for free, you get access. And the people that you just named, my goodness, I mean, all of those people are people that I’ve heard interviewed numerous times and just always come away with some new nugget of knowledge. So…
I’m really excited to, I mean, I got to set aside those seven days for myself because I got to see at least the ones you mentioned, but you know, they’re all really great in their own way. You never know. Even if it’s somebody that you, it’s not as well known or maybe that you’re just thinking like, oh, do I really want to hear about that topic? If you get into it, it’s surprising sometimes the nuggets that you’ll come away with.
So on that note, we’ll…
Chris Burres (29:49.417)
Yeah, I think there were nuggets from everyone.
Cheryl McColgan (29:53.644)
Yeah, and that’s why I say on that note, what were some of the things that you took away from your interviews or were there certain kind of either lessons or tips or things that stood out in your mind that you kind of were like, oh, I never, never thought of that before. Anything that you can share from that aspect.
Chris Burres (30:10.313)
Yeah, I think so again, I don’t think too highly of myself. I think highly enough of myself, not so like, oh, I was genius and I did this. I did do something pretty smart, which was I asked each of the experts, how long do you intend to live? How long can humans live? Do you believe humans can live and give us two to three mindsets, shortcuts.
to longevity or along health span that you would share, right? And so we aggregated all this data and that’s all pretty amazing. I’ll share some things that were surprising. So one is you think about asking longevity experts, how long do you want to live and how long can humans live? And then you end up on the, on the backside of this and across these 55 experts, only three gave the same age, right?
And this, I am sure, I’m convinced is related to the fact that people can’t separate living infirmed, right, in a debilitated state from aging, even experts on longevity, right? So if you think you can live, that humans can live to 120, right? And there’s really good evidence for that with Jean Clement, the oldest living human, 122. If you think that’s then, and you think you can do that like a candle,
Then really your, your target should be one 22, but it really was only the case in three people. A lot of what people answered was, you know, I just want to be able to, to, to keep doing what I’m doing. Like the way I rephrased the question, you know, when I share that these test subjects live 90 % longer and people were like, why would I live? Why would I want to live longer? If I changed the question to, um, if you had the same mental capacity that you have today.
Or you had the same physical capacity and you had the same not or and you had the same physical capacity that you have today. Would you then be interested in living longer? And then a lot of people end up changing their mind. And so I think that’s the that’s the the the where their disconnect is between all of these experts saying, hey, I think we can live to 120, but I don’t really want to get there. So I think that’s pretty important. In fact, one of the stories from and I don’t remember.
Chris Burres (32:31.113)
which one this was, that’s just a teaser. You got to watch them all now. One of the speakers shared, yeah, my uncle once who liked to drink bourbon and smoke cigars, his doctor pulled him aside and said, listen, you’re, you know, if you keep doing this, you’re going to cut 15 years off of your life. And the uncle was like, well, is that, is that going to be the last 15 years? The 15 years I’m not really interested in, right? Then that’s kind of the mindset. Like if I could just cut it a little bit shorter.
Cheryl McColgan (32:34.35)
Hehehehe
Chris Burres (32:59.209)
you know, and have some fun on the way, maybe that’s, that’s a, that’s a strategy. So, um, so I thought I found that incredibly interesting. Um, the other thing is when I asked each of them to give two or three protocols and we kind of aggregated this information. And so about 33 % mentioned sleep, not no surprise there about fifth, well, a little surprise for me. And I’ll talk about that. Uh, about 52 % mentioned exercise, 52.
percent mentioned diet and 46 mentioned mindset. And when I first heard, okay, wait a minute, 33 % mentioned sleep and 46 % mentioned mindset. Maybe they have it wrong. Like we know how good, how important that is. It’s good for us. It’s like important that sleep is good for our mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. You should never, ever, ever go without seven and a half to nine hours of sleep opportunity unless you’re at an affiliate marketing conference.
That’s the only time that it’s allowed. Right? So we know that you’re supposed to get sleep. But then I started thinking, and actually I thought about a story that Dr. Gundry told in the interview. He had this guy’s pretty high up in a social media company. And he had, you know, one thing Dr. Gundry said is that 100 % of the patients he sees, by the way, he sees patients six days a week still, right? So he’s seeing a lot of patients.
100 % of them have antibodies to wheat proteins. Right? So we really do need to understand what we’re sensitive to. They may not be allergic to gluten or any of the other lectins or proteins in there, but they’re sensitive to them and those are causing problems. So this, this particular, you know, social media guy is, you know, achy.
And Dr. Gundry kind of does the standard battery of tests to find out what he’s sensitive to. He’s like, you are sensitive to eggs, a bunch of other stuff, but eggs. And so you need to stop eating eggs. And the guy was like, well, I can’t stop all the other stuff. I have to eat eggs. I eat an egg omelet every day. And Dr. Gundry was like, well, you’re the one who’s hurting. Like you are technically right. You can keep eating eggs. And then I thought, you know, that is the mindset, right? It isn’t just the nutrition or diet, right?
Cheryl McColgan (35:09.038)
you
Chris Burres (35:18.665)
It’s the fact that you’ve got to be willing to make adjustments to your diet for your own health. And that can be a struggle for some people, for a lot of people. And so I really think that that mindset is even more important. It probably needs to be higher than exercise, diet and sleep. Cause there is some effort that needs to go into exercise. I also think, and we’re going to go back, we haven’t done it yet, but we’re going go back and split exercise into two pieces. Cause I think exercise really should be movement and exercise, right?
Cause there’s so many people who just, you know, if you say you need to go exercise, like I’m not exercising. Like I don’t, I’m not exercising. But if you say you need to go walk, there’s a, there’s a difference in that communication in what you’re actually saying. You need to just get up and clean your house, right? You need to get up and be active. That’s incredibly important. First, you know, more important than exercise, but then yeah, I eventually want to get to the point where you’re exercising. Um, I think something that was fascinating.
And by the way, I did about one hour of research for each of these interviews that ended up being, my goal was like 30 to 40 minutes and they rarely ended, you know, at under 55 minutes, right? I was really kind of wrapping these up and asking these kinds of standard questions. Um, and, and really had a lot more to talk about, but I spent an hour on each for the people who had more content, right? So for, uh, Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, Dr. Gundry, Sergey Young.
And a number of others that a lot of content that was out there. So there was a lot more information. I spent three plus hours and I’m learning so much. Like this is, you know, why one of the answers kind of the shorter answer to why I did the summit. Is that, uh, it’s quite selfishly, just like you said, I get to interview these people, right? I get to pack, but not only that I actually have to prepare for it. And preparing is adding information into my head. And then I get to ask questions about the information that I now have in my head.
And then I get homework after each talk basically about things that I need to go research. And so it really is about, you know, cramming it in my head, cramming information in my head. And then again, I just always believe in sharing content, in sharing whatever knowledge I can gain with people. Cause you know, these guys have big voices, right? They have big audiences, but people are going to find me somehow.
Chris Burres (37:41.225)
That aren’t going to find them. And when they find me, I want them to know about them. And I want them to know about what they’re saying, at least the parts that really agree with, uh, kind of with the way that I think. Um, so when you think about exercise, I was preparing for Dave Asprey and I watched a video he did on mind Valley and actually showed his six pack and he was like, yeah, I got the six pack with 15 minutes of exercise. Per week. Right. Not.
15 minutes a day, not 15 minutes, twice a day, 15 minutes per week. So he has some really revolutionary concepts and really has been talking about a VO2 max, how to increase your VO2 max. That concept has been out there for quite some time, which is, you know, run like a lion’s chasing you and then basically lay down. So get as comfortable as possible, get that heart rate down as quickly as possible. And you need to do that four or five times. And so you’re talking about less than a 30 minutes.
You know, effort, you’re not talking about, you know, two hours, like it takes to run a half marathon. You’re not talking about two hours. You’re just talking about less than 30 minutes and really the hard output, the hard work is, you know, in the range of one minute, right? The rest of the time, you’re just letting your heart rate go down. Um, and then he also talks about equipment and proprioception, which is so, so when you go to the gym, if you’re grabbing any sort of weight, your body is aware that that weight.
while it’s under your control, we’ll have movements and we’ll create momentum and you need to be able to manage that momentum. So you may be able to like pick up a hundred pound dumbbell for curls, let’s say, but your, your brain will only let you pick up 75 because your brain knows that that, that dumbbell is going to wiggle. And when it wiggles, you’ve got to be able to control it. And that, that momentum is over the a hundred pound threshold that your brain knows you can do.
So you end up lifting less lower weights. So there’s equipment where when you push or pull on it, if you stop pushing, it doesn’t push back. Right? So your brain is not tricked. Your brain is aware that it’s under no threat. So now instead of just being able to do the 75, because that’s all you can pick up, you’re actually able to do the hundred and well beyond it. And talks about, um, you know, dead dead lifters lifting significantly more.
Chris Burres (40:05.097)
on these pieces of equipment. And that’s how he’s able to get a six pack and are extremely short amount of effort. And so I think there’s a lot to be learned. His book is harder, smarter, not harder. And one of the things I asked him, cause I, cause this is kind of, I’m on a, I’m on a soap box right now about protein is that in his original book, I don’t remember which one it was. He talked about a protein intake of about 0 .5 to 0 .6 grams per pound of body weight.
And now he’s talking about one gram gram per pound of body weight, right? So a significant increase in the amount of protein consumption. And you mentioned Peter Attia. I was watching an interview that he was doing with with a protein expert and really the same number one gram per pound of body weight. And even the fact that you need to be consuming about 35 grams of protein in a specific instance so that your body will actually trigger protein synthesis.
And they’re saying, if, if you look at macros, people think of the macros, right? Protein, fat and carbs. And they think of it as a percentage, right? Hey, 30, 30, 30, or whatever it is. Like if you’re low carb, you’d change it. And they’re saying, no, no, no, that’s wrong. It’s gotta be a fixed amount of protein. And then you fill in the gaps with fat and carbs. Right? So the protein is the key thing. Cause when we’re younger, our body is incredibly adept.
at taking our existing, by the way, every muscle cell in your body is replaced every three months, right? So four times a year. And we’re aware like our skin sloughs off and we’re like, ah, our skin’s getting replaced, but our muscle actual cells are replaced every three months. That alone takes like 200 grams a day. Like it’s not a day, but it takes a lot of protein. When we’re younger, our body’s actually able to take the existing cells, break them apart and reuse.
those amino acids. As we get older, that capability diminishes significantly. And so that would put you on a path, you know, a sarcopenia path. That’s where you just muscle wasting as you get older, but you can overcome it by consuming a lot more protein. And so yeah, that’s right. Literally right now I’m like full. I’ve had enough protein this week, today, yesterday, whatever. But it’s, you know, it’s another one of these protocol experiments that I’m doing.
Cheryl McColgan (42:25.902)
Hehehehe
Cheryl McColgan (42:33.422)
Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned that. That’s one of my favorite topics as well. And actually the presentation I was just recording before talking to you, I’m talking everything that you just said. I should just like cut you out of there and put it on top because you said it more succinctly, but you know, the protein thing is really, and you know, that’s what I love about this space is that they all kind of, not that you want things to be an echo chamber because you definitely want to start thinking of things differently, but it’s like, it’s very small group. We think everybody knows these things.
But I say the same things that you mentioned every opportunity I get, because I just, I turned 50 last year. I’ve been weight training. I’m doing everything. Now that I really, I guess I always knew muscle was important, but I never really synthesized it in the way that I have the last few years listening to these experts and listening why you need muscle as you age and how important it is, not only to longevity, but the health span that we were talking about. So anyway, I’d love that you just.
gave that reminder to everyone. And it sounds like, you know, was there anybody in the summit that was also, was Dave talking about that? Were multiple people talking about, did you, did I read that you interviewed Dr. Lyon as well? She’s the big protein person. Maybe that’ll be your next summit if you haven’t talked to her yet. Gabrielle Lyon.
Chris Burres (43:47.337)
I, yeah, no, that sounds amazing. And actually I’m in the process of starting a podcast, so I’ll probably maybe reach out to Dr. Lyon. No, I didn’t. And I’ll be honest, other than kind of talking about protein consumption with a couple of the people in a very cursory fashion, it’s been my homework after the summit that’s kind of led me to the Peter Rettia interview and really digging into this. And there’s a little bit of irony here, right? So,
I interviewed 55 experts in longevity, including Ben Greenfield, Dave Asprey, Dr. Henry. We don’t need to belabor that. And after that event, I’m actually doing a diet that is discussed by Alex or Mozi. I don’t know if you know Alex or Mozi. He’s blowing up the internet. He built and sold a company called GymLaunch. He would actually help gym owners grow their businesses and grow their profit margins.
Cheryl McColgan (44:35.118)
I had to look in it.
Chris Burres (44:44.585)
He sold that company for $42 million and he did a video and here’s the reason I’m following him. One, I’m confirming it, it all matches up, but here’s the reason I’m following it. So he built and sold a $42 million company. So he’s a busy man, right? He’s had a six pack for 20 years. I would like a six pack for 20 years and he’s eaten cookies every day. So I feel like these are the three check things that I want.
Cheryl McColgan (44:59.054)
Bye.
Cheryl McColgan (45:07.948)
Here we go.
Chris Burres (45:11.497)
And his mindset, right? And in his video is like, look, if you want a healthy video, go watch something else. Here’s what I do. I eat one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And then I fill in and then I calculate a calorie consumption amount. If I want to add a little bit, if I want to maintain or I want to lose a little bit. And then I stick to the protein just like we, like I just described. And then I fill in the rest and I can fill it in with drinks. I can fill it in with donuts or cookies or whatever.
I’m like, well, what about health? Again, watch another video. Also, I just take a multivitamin. So, it’s a little bit ironic that I had to interview, I interviewed 55 experts with longevity and I’m basically following an entrepreneur. Now, it was in the gym business, right? Like, so he’s been in this, you know, kind of health and fitness space probably for 30 years. But yeah, that’s kind of my focus.
Cheryl McColgan (46:07.054)
Oh, I love this cookie diet thing. I’m trying to look this guy up.
Chris Burres (46:10.793)
Hahaha!
Cheryl McColgan (46:14.606)
Chris, I think we’re probably, I want to be respectful of your time. We’re kind of getting close to the end here, but let’s say we talked about the book, we talked about the summit, people are going to get in for free by going to healnourishbro .com slash nullengevitysummit. These links will be in the show notes. I’ll put the links to my vital C in there. Any final thoughts or revelations that you had coming out of this summit? I mean, obviously you’re starting a podcast now, so you must’ve enjoyed yourself. Anything?
else that you got from these interviews, like takeaways or just a feeling that you were left with that you’d like to share.
Chris Burres (46:48.777)
Well, um, first I want to share, um, there is a unique, if anybody’s interested in trying the product, right? Single longest longevity experimental results in history. The link is my vital C .com forward slash H N G. Right. So that’s a heal, nourish, grow H N G. And then there is, when you get there, you can find our product. You know, we’ve got different oils. We always recommend the olive oil and we recommend it for two reasons. We’re a science based organization and all the research is on.
olive oil right the ESS 60 molecule in olive oil. And then second, the highest concentration of the soccer ball shaped molecule ESS 60 is in our olive oil product. So that’s the thing that if you want to just try it, that’s what you want to try. We also have pet products and we’ve got some face serums and a skin redo kit that’s absolutely amazing. I don’t know if I sent it to you if I haven’t I will. And the other thing to share is on that page you can my vital c .com for slash H N G.
Uh, is there’s a 25 % discount on subscription. Yes, you can cancel at any time. Yes. Take advantage of that discount. Our customer service team has like 855 star reviews on Google. They are not trained to talk you out of it. Just take advantage of that discount. And that discount is also H N G. Um, for the book, I want to share something I’m pretty proud of. When you go to the HNG, myvitalc .com for us HND, you’ll find a link to the book.
The book is $20. It’s also available on Amazon if you want to get it. I’m working on the audio book. That’ll be out soon. But if you buy it from our website, you can get a signed copy. The signed copy is an extra $10 and that entire $10 goes to an organization called OUR, O -U -R, Operation Underground Railroad. You may remember there was a movie very recently called The Sound of Freedom about child sex trafficking and
Operation Underground Railroad is actually the organization created by the guy, you know, represented in that movie, who’s actually out there solving this horrific problem, right? So 100 % of the signature fee, the $10 or 15, if you want my co -author, that’s a whole nother story we didn’t even get into. My co -author is a two -time New York’s number one bestseller, right? It’s amazing to be a New York Times bestseller, but to be a number one bestseller,
Cheryl McColgan (49:10.926)
Oh, well.
Chris Burres (49:14.921)
That’s just a next level. So proud to be working with Dr. Jerome Corsi. But if you want both of those signatures as $15, again, the $10 for one signature or $15 for both signatures, all of it goes to Operation Underground Railroad. And I’m really proud about that. And then we mentioned the link, right? HealNurseGrow .com forward slash longevity summit. I guess the takeaway is…
I think so. So when people ask me, Hey, the two questions that I asked all the experts, how long do you want to live and how long can humans live? And I really do think that this is needs to be broken up into multiple parts. And I think that’s, you know, I didn’t really leave room for the, for the experts to do this. One of them I’ve always had as a target 125. Uh, I don’t need to change that yet. Uh, I’ve got plenty of time to change that yet. Um, I’m 54.
So I’ve got lots of room between here and 125 to say, yeah, I think it’s going to be longer. Um, so that’s just my current target. And I fit with the other experts where my answer is different. I think current technology as we are today, it’s about 120, right? So I’m pushing the envelope with the 125, but I think you look at what’s available. You look at how quickly information is changing inside the medical community.
And that number is going to dramatically change here very shortly. And to give you an example, in 1950, medical information doubled every 50 years, five zero years. Today, medical information doubles every 73 days. Right. So less than three months, we’re quadrupling our medical information every year instead of taking 50 years to double it.
Cheryl McColgan (51:01.23)
It’s amazing.
Chris Burres (51:11.561)
And think about this, that’s a fairly recent stat. I don’t even remember where it came from. Sounds believable. I probably should do some more research in it. But that doesn’t count AI, right? Because AI is extremely recent, you know, where it’s actually starting to get applied to things like medical. And it is, it’s getting applied to things like medical technology and medical outcomes and gene therapies, like all of these amazing things. So,
Chris Burres (51:38.173)
Ironically, I used AI to calculate in 10 years based on this kind of, obviously it has to be asymptotic, uh, relationship. And in 10 years, it should be about 15 minutes. Like every 15 minutes will be doubling our medical information. And so, you know, if there is a path for us to live significantly longer and forever, like we’re, we’re, we’re at the finish line. Like we just don’t realize it. We were at the finish line. We just don’t know it yet. Right.
because information is doubling so fast, is increasing so fast. And so I think it’s really exciting. I think, you know, what David Sinclair, the book I’m listening to right now is Mark Hyman’s book. I don’t remember the title, Growing Young, maybe. And it’s talking, it’s kind of parroting what Dr. David Sinclair said about, hey, we need to get the medical community to understand that aging is a disease.
and get funding for the disease of aging. Because the reality, the classic diseases of aging, which you know, cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, if we solve any one of those, we actually only extend our life by five to seven years because the next one is right behind it, ready to take over. And so the concept of funding these individually is spreading the funds that are available. And if we had just applied them to aging, we’d be in a much better place for
Cheryl McColgan (52:54.722)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Burres (53:05.447)
all of those diseases. And so, you know, that’s another thing that I want to make sure is a message that gets out there. Hey, aging needs to be looked at as a disease. It is something that we can solve. And if you want any proof of that, just to kind of wrap things up, we can take any cell of your body, right? And from that cell, we can take the DNA and create a clone of you. That’s a baby you. So all the information necessary to create a younger you.
is in fact in every cell in your body. And so we just got to figure out the right levers to pull and manipulate to make you younger. And I think we’re going to be able to do that.
Cheryl McColgan (53:46.19)
I know it sounds like a sci -fi book, what you just described, but it’s, I’ve been thinking for 20 years, like, why can’t they just regrow me some cartilage for my knees? I was thinking they’d have that figured out by now, but they still don’t, unfortunately. It sounds like you could use that too, Chris, but in any case, it has been amazing talking to you. As always, I appreciate so much you coming back to share this. I’m really excited for everyone to go.
Chris Burres (53:59.655)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (54:10.414)
Go visit the summit. I’ll probably have to do a podcast just about my takeaways from it after it goes on because the people that you mentioned, I can’t wait to listen. So again, Chris, it has been wonderful catching up and I wish you all the success and the best with your many new endeavors that you mentioned here today. And yeah, I’ll talk to you again soon, hopefully. Take care.
Chris Burres (54:31.433)
Thank you so much, Cheryl.
Guy Odishaw was a great guest the fist time and he’s back to share his knowledge about thermography. Guy told me about this technology in a conversation we had off camera, and knew immediately that I had to try it.
In this episode we discuss my results as well has how you can use thermography as a noninvasive technology to help you identify problems very early while you have time to prevent future health issues.
Guy is the founder of Bhakti Wellness Center and the cofounder of CerebralFit Brain Training.
Watch on YouTube
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Episode TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:00.37)
I need to get a shirt like that. Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I am back today with Guy Odishaw. He is, you’re actually the first guest I’ve ever had on twice, which is a great distinction. So excited for our show today. And I was, I was just, after I hit the record button, I was just telling Guy that I’m glad his
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (00:02.37)
Yes.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (00:14.707)
interesting
Cheryl McColgan (00:22.834)
Logo is showing because as you heard in his bio, he is part of cerebral fit. He talks all things brain health, which is one of my favorite topics. But today we’re gonna chat about something slightly different. It actually came up in our conversation either before or after we recorded last time. And I said, I feel like a lot of people don’t know about this topic, and I would love for you to come back and share this information. And so it’s all about thermal imaging. So I’m not gonna say too much about it other than I went and did it so that we could talk about this.
But first I’ll let Guy tell you about what it is, what we use it for, and why it’s not standard practice to use this imaging, because it’s kind of interesting. So I’ll let you take it away from here.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:02.99)
All right, thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to come back and talk with you and for going off and trying my crazy idea and the whole thing is very, very brave of you. So this falls kind of in the general area of bioelectric medicine as I define it, which is really when we use technology in the area of healthcare. So it’s a very big umbrella. But here, what to say about…
thermal imaging. So I just want to say a little bit about imaging in general. So most of us are all familiar with X-ray, and then, of course, MRI. And then depending on how involved in the health care system you’ve been, you’ve maybe heard of a CAT scan, a PET scan. If you’re really, in a sense, unfortunate, you’ve heard about a SPECT scan, because it’s a very specific scan for the brain.
And then there’s the kind of neuroimaging we do in our clinic, which is QEEG. So EEG neuroimaging So we have all of these different devices for doing neuroimaging and then probably well ultrasound I shouldn’t leave that out, you know, so a host that I haven’t mentioned, but these are common ones and And thermal imaging goes right in there with all of these other kinds of imaging We think of MRI is maybe kind of our gold standard. I think everybody think well an MRI
That’s the top of the food chain. But there are things that MRI does well, and then there’s things that MRI is terrible at. And so you’d only want to use MRI for what it’s good for and not for things that isn’t good for. And an example of this would be, MRI is really good at detail of anatomy, but it isn’t really good for function. Now there is functional MRI.
So that’s a little bit of a caveat there. But still, if we think of something like a concussion, MRI is not good at finding concussion. Unless the concussion has risen to the level of anatomical damage, then OK. And then if we have anatomical changes, it can spot it. But even then, it just spots the anatomical change. Versus, say, something like EEG, which is
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (03:24.13)
better at looking at function. So it’s highly, in the time domain, very good at spotting brain function. So we can see functional changes, which may correlate with a concussion. So it’s the whole thing of using the proper imaging for what it does well, and then not for what it doesn’t do well. So thermal imaging is basically, I mean, it’s a camera that is detecting temperature changes on the skin.
So when you go for thermal imaging, you’re just standing in front of a camera, looks like a regular camera, and it’s just gonna take a picture of you. And so that’s nice, and there’s no contact, there’s no harmful rays, whether it’s X-rays, or in MRI, it’s the magnet, or you’re doing a CAT scan or PET scan, and you might have to take a tracer, and then you’re taking a radioactive something, so that’s not necessarily great for you. In thermal imaging, you’re just having a picture taken. So there’s no downside.
It’s not very expensive. So you’re not paying $1,500 or more out of pocket for your MRI. You’re spending more in the hundreds for your thermal imaging. But again, what it does well is it detects temperature changes at the skin level and then a little bit deeper than the skin. But the deeper you go into the body, the less reliable the
Thermal imaging is because that temperature has to migrate to the surface, so it diffuses. So a deep source of heat or cold will look more diffuse on the surface, whereas something on the surface could be quite accurate. So that’s what thermal imaging does well. And one should use thermal imaging for that and not for anything else.
Cheryl McColgan (05:14.79)
Yeah, and one of the things that I think, I’m sure we’ll get to this at some point, but I think people are kind of maybe wondering at this point, well, why would I use this? And so the context of how this came up in my previous conversation with Guy were two reasons. Somehow we got on the subject of there being a lot of cancer in my family, and one of the applications that you mentioned that this could be really good for is detecting breast cancer. So very early on, it’s much better at detecting.
things early or if someone has previously had cancer, it might be a tool that you want to use to follow up on yourself a year or two, three years down the road and just make sure that things kind of aren’t progressing in a negative way. So maybe you can say a little bit more about that in the context of using it as a preventative tool. And then the other area of interest that we were kind of talking about is people that have chronic pain. So I was mentioning how I have this.
ongoing jaw pain, we were talking about it in relation to dental work. So maybe we could just kind of focus on those two things. There’s probably many, many other applications, but I think that those are two that are probably easy for people to understand and easy to see how they could, you know, maybe this is something they might want to try.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (06:26.338)
Sure. So one of the most common uses is, again, breast cancer detection ongoing maintenance. And so, again, just to say a little bit about what’s happening in the body that would make thermal imaging even be relevant. So what happens early in the process, even before there’s a tumor, the body is moving in the direction.
of forming a tumor, those cells that kind of disconnect from the local mind, the local activity, say in the breast, it’s breast tissue, that are no longer functioning as breast cells, but are now gonna be the beginning of a tumor. They’re gonna call into place increased circulation because they have a higher metabolic demand. And it’s…
On one level, it’s that change in circulation and circulatory system that can be detected by thermal imaging. So just the increase of blood flow, blood is warm. So it’s going to bring more temperature to that area. That’s what gets detected. So one of the first changes that can be spotted, thermal imaging in breast cancer, is the change in the circulatory system. And now the actual cells that are
you know, in potentially heading in the direction of becoming a tumor, there’s, there are too few of them and too small to even be called a tumor at that point, or even to be detected by standard. If you went for a mammogram, chances are at this early stage, they’re too small to show up. And again, this is one of the advantages to thermal imaging is it has the potential and I want to say potential. There’s a lot of factors here.
that can pro-con around this that maybe we’ll touch on. So just take everything as these are possibilities, statistical possibilities that lean in the direction, given the pro-con of it, the safety, the cost of it, that in general make it worth doing. Catching it before it really has risen to the level of being a tumor, where it’s still very susceptible to changes in diet and lifestyle.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (08:52.782)
to be able to change the course of those tissues and move them back into being healthy breast tissue and not continuing down the path of becoming a tumor. And so to me, that’s the biggest advantage of it is that early detection. And if you look at the literature, there’s quite a range, and again, take everything as statistical possibilities and not absolute, but you’re looking at the possibility of picking up something that…
could potentially become a tumor about eight years earlier than it presenting as a tumor. And then we know from the research that there are people who’ve had thermograms that showed a positive who did nothing, and that did eventually turn into a tumor that had to be treated in the standard allopathic cancer process. So we have these longitudinal studies that show that there is truth to this, because it’s actually turned out this way in many, many hundreds of thousands of people’s.
lives. So the ideal is we can we catch it that early, we make diet and lifestyle changes, and we avoid the unwanted, you know, arising of a cancer altogether. Or catching it anywhere along the line earlier is always better. So it may be progressed enough that there is a tumor there, but that thermogram is what gets you to go and have a mammogram, which then they confirm maybe
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (10:21.038)
years before you would have otherwise, because again, you’re detecting it sooner in its life cycle, and it may not have been palpable, even if you were doing a physical breast exam, to notice it yet, so early detection. And then the other place is, so let’s say, you’ve had a tumor, you’ve had it removed, whatever, chemo, radiation, surgery, whatever the process was, now you’re on the other side of it, and now you wanna…
kind of keep an eye on things. So again, thermal imaging becomes a safe and affordable way to do those preventative checks on a more regular basis because the medical community has its pacing of how often you do a mammogram and then it kind of drops off over time. But the patient might have a sense of kind of anxiety, which I see this, you know, pretty much 100% in my…
post-cancer clients is the ongoing fear of it returning. And so this is a way to kind of give you a little bit of a sense of kind of control and measure and being proactive, and you’re not just waiting for the scary news, you’re doing something. And again, it’s a very affordable way to do it. And it is medically helpful, can be medically helpful, but even if it isn’t, if it’s just psychologically helpful, that is…
highly valuable to the person going through this process.
Cheryl McColgan (11:51.45)
Yeah, I can, there’s a huge application there and just to share a little background with people. So because I do have that in my family and other risk factors for other cancers in my family. So for example, they’ve done my risk calculation and I probably have about it, depends on the model you use, these are all algorithms and all taking into account a lot of different things, but something like a 22 to 25% chance of breast cancer in my lifetime and on the yearly basis, I wanna say it’s like.
5% or something like that, but increased incidence over the general population, basically a one in four lifetime chance. So this is a big reason that I do a lot of the crazy health related things that I do because I’m aware of this and I’m trying to do the best I can to mitigate some of that. And so when you go to a high risk breast cancer group, which I had to establish a new one here in Salt Lake, their protocol for that is really a mammogram every six months and an MRI every six months. And because of what you said before, they each have their pros and cons.
For example, mammograms are awesome, but they’re not great on dense breast tissue. And then you have the MRI, but you do have to take a tracer. They think what you’re taking is safe, but they don’t really know. And then so adding something like this where it’s literally zero risks, it gives you peace of mind. I think this is a hugely valuable tool. And I’m kind of going through this process right now when I’m reestablishing this, thinking about, okay, am I going to use this as part of a tool?
Maybe I cut back the MRI with the tracer thing once every two years or something because I’m also doing this as an adjunct, for example. So there’s a lot of different ways to think about it, but I think that the mental aspect that you mentioned about it is absolutely a huge part of it. Because if nothing else, it makes you feel like you’re being proactive. It’s not super expensive. I’ll share with everybody the one I found.
here in Salt Lake to do the thermal imaging. They were having a deal. I just happened to catch it at the right time. So they did a full body for $200. I think, Guy, that you shared with me, you probably see anything from 200 to 500, depending on if they’re doing just breast imaging or doing the full image. But in the grand scheme of things, I know I realize everybody cannot necessarily afford that. But if you have a serious reason to do it, it’s often significantly cheaper than some of the other options. So.
Cheryl McColgan (14:11.238)
I think the mental health aspect is definitely huge. And I would love to hear, so when you’re working with patients or people in your clinic and they have this history of either increased risk or they’ve had breast cancer already, you mentioned, you know, trying to make things healthier, doing lifestyle changes, doing, you know, maybe different things with exercise. Can you share maybe some of the things that are maybe general recommendations? Obviously, that’s not medical advice.
but healthy behaviors people wanna do when they see, oh, I have this area of increased, it could be an early sign of something. What do I do with that information?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (14:51.458)
So I wanna just loop back one step and talk about the oral side, and then we’ll kind of jump into the, you know, what to do about it with some of these findings. Yeah. So the oral piece and the breast piece are not disconnected, although they can be standalone, but surprising the link between an oral infection. So let’s say a root canal that has become chronically infected.
Cheryl McColgan (14:56.336)
Oh, yes.
what we do about it.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (15:20.318)
A person can be subclinical in the symptomatic presentation. So maybe the person has a sensitive tooth, but they’re like, oh, I had a root canal and it’s just that. There’s a lot of ways to just kind of wave it off as not a big deal and you just go through your day with a little bit of a sore tooth, but so what. But what’s happening in there, and we see this in the thermal imaging, is people go in and their jaw will be just bright red.
and then the streak running down their neck and then down the sternum and into a breast. And that’s the infection moving through the lymphatic system that’s now going down and pooling in the breast. There’s a strong correlation between that and breast cancer. And so again, one of the reasons why we recommend the thermal imaging is to check out the oral cavity to make sure that you’re not one of those people. And you may not have that condition happening.
But a person may have a much smaller kind of smoldering infection in a root, and they didn’t know about it. Because it’s really non-symptomatic at all, or just so mild that you don’t think about it. And then you see it, and then you can do something about it. So that’s, again, the value of why have it done. And generally, I do recommend people do the whole body, because we can’t do it.
Talk briefly in yours, there was maybe a reason to think about some thyroid. But also, it can pick up neuropathies in the arms and in the legs related to a diabetic neuropathy or a post-chemoneuropathy or a back, a disc impingement neuropathy. And these things also are important to find because in the case of a limb.
kind of getting poor neural information, the tissues aren’t getting good instructions. And this is going to lead them open to something like a carpal tunnel or a cubital tunnel or any number of degenerative changes because those tissues aren’t getting the information that they need to continue doing their function on an optimal basis. And so we have a degradation of
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (17:47.17)
health. So thermal imaging has to show you a lot of things. And we’re going to talk today mostly kind of focusing on the on the breast health and oral health. So if the thermal imaging shows a either a hot spot, so probably inflammation, infection inflammation, something like that, it’s high metabolic activity, or a blue area, which is
low metabolic activity. Those are basically the two findings we’re looking for. There’s too much of something or not enough of something. And then, of course, we want to look in and find out more detail around the something, and then how to treat it. And I would say probably the most common way that this goes is then a person looking to functional medicine. And so, again, a visit to your functional medicine provider.
but that also could be a Chinese medicine provider, an Ayurvedic medicine provider, but somebody who’s gonna look at kind of diet lifestyle and then some type of nutritional support that isn’t merely food-based, but is into supplements or herbs, something of that nature. So that’s gonna be the number one. It’s gonna be lifestyle, diet, supplements. Go ahead. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (19:08.362)
Just to backtrack a little, I was just thinking when you’re saying this, because I’m like, yeah, if you take these images to a traditionally trained Western medicine doctor, they’re probably going to be like, what do I do with this? They’re not even going to know what to do with this. We’re probably looking in this, you know, you want to look for a holistic medical practitioner.
to see this new primary care doctor I established. And so I’m feeling if I took this, I’d be like, what is this? Like, why are you showing this to me? And then they don’t work with you on sort of the diet and lifestyle changes. Like you’re talking about to make sort of a treatment plan based on what we’re seeing on the images. And you brought up so many good points there about just function through the whole body. Like when I did mine, they did.
find a little bit like I’ve had back problems in the past. I think they mentioned that some like maybe degeneration. And then I think my left glute showed less thermic activity than the right. And they said, well, that could be like a little bit of spinal compression on the nerve or something. And then I believe in that same leg down to some thrombosis or something. And I remember my mom had some kind of vein issues and stuff in her legs when I was growing up. So, you know, it’s funny how it does, you know, it’s nothing that’s giving me pain. It’s nothing that
is a problem right at this moment, but it’s probably telling me like, hey, those are areas where we need to pay a little bit more attention going forward so that they don’t become a degenerative situation in the future. So just kind of wanted to backtrack there because you mentioned several of those things. We’re gonna focus on, as you mentioned, the breast health and the oral health connection, which I’m glad you remembered that because that’s actually how we got to both of those before. I think we were just talking about the tooth and you said, hey, you know, there’s a big connection there between oral health.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (20:44.128)
I’m out.
Cheryl McColgan (20:50.951)
and breast health. So glad you racked track on that.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (20:53.878)
Yes. Yeah. And so try and stay focused here, but you just opened up exactly that. Like the value of the thermal imaging is early detection of things that probably aren’t a big problem yet, but left ignored will be. And I mean, worst case, you go in, you have it done, you’ve got some information and then you ignore it. And then, you know, five years later, when you have…
that sciatic problem, you can look back and tell yourself, I told you so. Just generally, people are not good at prevention. They’re good at dealing with acute symptoms that are troubling them or threatening in the moment. People are good at that. They’re not good at prevention. But this is where thermal imaging really comes in and shines. We use thermal imaging with professional athletes.
Cheryl McColgan (21:28.101)
Right? Well, ideally we’re trying to do something about it.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (21:52.322)
so that we can spot the potential of an injury before it happens and do preventative care. And why? Well, because those athletes are worth a lot of money. And if you can prevent that injury, that’s potentially saving millions of dollars. So there’s a high stakes game. So they’re willing to use this technology that, again, that just the medical community hasn’t caught up to. And I like your point, like, yes, if you showed this to your…
primary care and, first of all, you should be careful because you never know when any one primary care, any one doctor has done their own continuing education and has a knowledge base. But in general, in general, the allopathic community, this is roughly nonsense to them. And so yes, you probably are gonna need to look at a provider who has self-selected.
Cheryl McColgan (22:23.21)
I’m gonna go.
Cheryl McColgan (22:33.066)
Absolutely.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (22:50.958)
to be in a niche and is paying attention to these things that allopathic medicine has basically pushed off to the side, and you want somebody who specializes in those things that are off to the side.
Cheryl McColgan (23:02.054)
And I’ll make sure that I share in the show notes, Guy provided me with a couple, when we were talking about this earlier, provided me with a couple of links to some studies, to one of them was a presentation at a medical conference, I believe, that you sent the link to. And so I’ll share that with people just in case, if you do decide to go down this road and you do have a doctor that’s more caressed, or even if you don’t, you’ve got some information on like, why are you doing this? And that way you can share that with people. So, well, now that we’ve given the background.
Should we actually share with people the image of what this looks like? And I’m not going to, I didn’t share all of them, but I shared the one that’s kind of the upper chest and the jaw, because that’s what we’re really going to primarily talk about today. So if you’re just listening to this on audio, you may want to pop over to YouTube at this point if you want to see the image. Otherwise, we’ll do our best to describe it to you. But guys, since you’re the…
expert in this situation. I’ll just let you chat about whatever you happen to be seeing here and just for reference, it’s my right cheek that’s the one that’s the problem child. So.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (24:05.854)
OK, so again, and just for context, the only data I have is this image. I don’t have a full report. This is just me looking.
Cheryl McColgan (24:16.774)
Right, normally in clinical history, you’d learn all about all, we’re just doing this for kind of for fun for people to see, number one, what the image looks like. And number two, if you’re presented with this information, kind of what is it that you’re looking for here?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (24:29.598)
And that without a lot of detailed information, there are some things that you can just immediately pull out based just on kind of normative data across looking at many, many thermograms. There’s just some things that jump out. So we’re looking at kind of these. So again, we have this range of red, kind of bright red to deep blue. And then it’s set against a temperature.
And depending on the equipment being used, that equipment can be more or less sensitive to fractions of degrees of temperature change. And so that matters actually when you’re going to do this is the type of equipment that the person has and how sophisticated. It does not need to be the most sophisticated. This can be done today. In today’s world, you can actually do a version of this with an attachment to your iPhone. And it’s…
equivalent to the thermal imaging that was the most expensive equipment 10 years ago now for $200 you can do on your iPhone. I mean, that’s just technology for you. So we’re looking here and we see some red kind of on the sides of your neck, but again with the carotid artery and jugular vein passing through there, we’d expect to see red there. So that doesn’t really jump out. Again, up on the temple, there’s a patch of red, but again, here we have vasculature that’s right close to the surface.
Cheryl McColgan (25:36.35)
That’s amazing.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (25:57.59)
that doesn’t particularly catch my attention. But on the side of your nose and cheekbone, that doesn’t necessarily just intuitively make sense. We’d expect some, but there’s more there than we would typically expect. So just me at a glance say, well, there’s probably something going on sinus-wise. And then we see down at the corner of your mouth and into your lower jaw.
Cheryl McColgan (26:20.606)
Mm-hmm.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (26:27.058)
a little red where we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see it. And we see a high contrast of blue, so deep blue, right next to an area of red. And there again, that brings up this question of like that. That isn’t normative circulatory thermal data. Something’s happening there. And then we see this kind of a little bit that’s running along.
again, probably like the side of your trachea. You don’t get anatomy in a thermal image. You just get thermal information. So you have to guess a little bit. But I would be thinking thyroid. But that would just be a just general. We would, of course, look into more and find out if that indeed is the case. And then the other thing that stood out to me was just the deep blue kind of by your armpits.
Cheryl McColgan (27:04.222)
We’ll see you next time.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (27:25.65)
And you’d have multiple versions that would show this better than these. But just as I glanced at these, those were the things that jumped out to me is sinus, jaw, thyroid, as, you know, there’s something, looks like something is going on there from the too hot standpoint. And then here in the axilla or armpits, the deep blue just brings a question.
Cheryl McColgan (27:57.062)
Right, and as you said, you don’t have a clinical history and you don’t have the full set of images, so obviously everything’s in context, right, just for people to remember. So you wouldn’t see this and necessarily freak out, but you might also think something. And the other question I was thinking was like, well, I can’t really tell which side of my face is this because it’s a reverse, because it’s a photo. Because I do have probably more inflammation on one side of my face than the other. And so that’s kind of interesting to me, just like whether it’s…
anything related to what we’re seeing there with the contrast.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (28:30.339)
Yeah. So I think good to just show the image so people have a sense of it, but also, you know, again, me just kind of taking a quick peek at it resonated with you for what they had kind of given, the information they had given you in the report. And
Cheryl McColgan (28:46.67)
Yes, because the people that read it, are they, I mean, I guess they’re obviously just specialized in this field, but they sent a report. I think they have three people look it over and kind of come to a consensus, or maybe they talk about it if they’re seeing things that maybe don’t make sense, but they send you kind of a full report afterwards. And so from that perspective, let’s say you were working with somebody at the clinic who you did see, for example, say a breast hot spot where you’re concerned like, hey, this is something that may…
be a problem in the future, how then would you begin to work with that person on the diet and lifestyle changes just in a general sense? Because it’d be specialized to that person and whatever their specific situation is, but just some overall things that people could, you know, and these are probably good practice. Like if you’re worried about this in the future, I know whatever you’re going to say, it’s going to be like, you should just be doing this all the time if you want to prevent cancer, right? So love to hear what those are.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (29:39.21)
Yeah, so a couple of things here in response. So one, any finding should be referred out to the appropriate medical professional. So if it’s oral to at least a dentist and maybe somebody higher up the food chain, if it’s concerned around breast health, probably to the primary care provider for some evaluation, and just to start that process.
As a clinician, it’s the responsible thing to do. If you see a finding that is outside of, in my case, like my specialty, then my responsibility is to refer that person. So that would happen is I would refer the person to the appropriate medical expert. And then also around this question of the functional medicine piece, I would also refer somebody to a functional medicine doctor for a full evaluation around what to do.
not my area of expertise. My thing is the bioelectric medicine. So I can say more about what I would do there. But, you know, if we’re looking at, you know, and you named it well, like a lot of the recommendations are going to be the standard thing that you could go on pretty much any blog today and read about in a top 10 list or anything else, right? We’d want to, you know, kind of look at exercise.
Cheryl McColgan (30:44.763)
Yeah. Right.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (31:07.214)
And I’m a fan of more moderate exercise, not extreme exercise. The downside of extreme exercise is it, it takes more out of the system than it puts in, so it’s a net deficit. And so I’m not a fan of that. Um, so I think moderate exercise is a, is a net gain in terms of building resilience and giving the body more resources. Uh, so it would be that looking at what form of, of exercise is a person doing. Uh, of course.
Mental emotional health and maybe exercise can be a place where both of those come and if possible, that’s great That’s an ideal form otherwise looking at what’s happening there Then looking from a nutrition standpoint all the standards. Can we cut down any processed foods? I’m a fan of kind of more of a keto flex type diet so it would be really looking at high protein high fat minimal carbs and
moving the body in that direction to kind of, you know, certainly sugar, you know, it’s just gotta go. You know, those would be the general recommendations that, and you know, the hope would be that would handle it. If we catch something soon enough, those changes can be enough to make the correction. And then if we need to kind of step it up.
Again, if a person’s further along in the process, if we’re not catching it really at its early stages, we’re catching it medium or towards the end of it turning into an acute healthcare issue, then we may need to step up and then moving into supplements. And we can get into our kind of dietary anti-inflammatories or we can move up into some of the more supplement-based anti-inflammatories.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (33:02.102)
Yeah, I don’t like to mention brand names, no favorites, but there are some really good nutrition-based anti-inflammatory, supplement-based anti-inflammatories out there today that a person could use. And it’s more potent than food, but it’s not moving to the level of a drug yet, in terms of being able to control inflammation. So I know that’s very…
Cheryl McColgan (33:05.906)
rain.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (33:31.574)
general, but that’s how the bulk of it is going to be. And then in the specific case, in any one person’s case, again, might order a panel, like a blood panel, and just look and see if there’s some low-hanging fruit in terms of, as a person low in vitamin D, if you’re here in Minnesota, you can pretty much guess that everybody is, so that’s a standard. I had a client who was just,
Cheryl McColgan (33:55.154)
it. Right.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (34:00.966)
you know right next to zero on B vitamins and That was because of the medication that they had been on and they’d been on that medication Really like the current doctor was three doctors back the current doctor really didn’t have any rationale for why That patient was still on that medication other than it had just been grandfathered in doctor to doctor and so those are first things we said is like
Cheryl McColgan (34:06.259)
Oh wow.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (34:29.474)
can we get her off that medication? And doctor said, yeah, makes perfect sense. There’s no current reason. It was a protein pump inhibitor, which is known to block bees, and got her off that, got her on a strong bee, and sort of marvelous change on her energy level and just general kind of functional capacity, getting her B vitamins back. So there’s things that are very specific to the individual.
versus just kind of a shotgun approach saying everybody should take D and everybody should take B. Not that helpful.
Cheryl McColgan (35:05.778)
Yeah, and that’s a great general reminder to people just like when you switch doctors or even if you’re with your same doctor, reevaluating, you know, doctors are great at putting people on medication. They’re not as good at taking them off. So
always taking that time to reevaluate, why were you on this to start with? Is it still serving you? Does it make sense anymore in the context of the changes you have made in your lifestyle or any of those kinds of things? I think that’s, I always like to have, there always are many takeaways when I talk to you, but that’s a good one. If nothing else, just talk to your doctor and make sure you still need the medication that you’re actually on. So what…
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (35:39.41)
And I’ll say the same thing for your functional medicine doctor. We encourage, I encourage my clients to have a review, whatever that is, annually, quarterly, whatever makes sense. But my doctor isn’t always the happiest when I send people for this, but they’ll come in and they’ll have a shopping bag full of supplements.
Cheryl McColgan (36:02.482)
Hahaha
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (36:06.37)
They’ll sit down with the doctor and they go through every one of those supplements and the question being, should I be on this? Is this still appropriate for me? Is this a good form of this particular vitamin or conglomeration of vitamins that I’m taking? Are there redundancies across these? And almost the answer is yes. Like, again, when somebody has, you know, it’s just not.
Many of my clients, not because I have suggested, it’s just what I see coming in because of the prevalence of functional medicine right now, is on average 15 supplements. The person is on 15 supplements. And I just think there’s a genuine question of, are all 15 of those necessary?
Cheryl McColgan (36:56.97)
That actually makes me feel better because as a person in this space, I’ll often hear about a new supplement or something. And just to call this out again, because I think this is important for people to notice, because there’s a lot of garbage supplements out there. Just always look for the GMP label, which means good manufacturing practices. That means at least the FDA goes in and looks at their factory. And it’s not a perfect system, but at least there’s some kind of regulation. And then even better is if the company gets third party testing and they…
those results. That way you know what you’re getting is pure. It doesn’t have any contaminants in it. So yeah, so just always look for that stuff before you try it. But then once I do that, that’s all clear, sometimes I’ll just try something just to see, just to see if I notice a difference. But at the end of the day, it’s like, okay, well I can afford to do this and it’s kind of entertaining because it’s kind of my job. But I can really say there’s only, I don’t know, maybe two or three supplements over the years that I can tell.
significant difference even after I’ve done it for an extended amount of time. So that probably just tells you if you’re exercising, you’re eating pretty well, there’s probably not a whole lot of extra stuff that you need. It’s just all kind of for fun or entertainment or testing and not to say that there are things that people could get benefit from, but I would just say in general we’ve kind of get sucked into this thing about taking supplements and it’s not necessarily something that you need to do.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (38:18.958)
Absolutely. I mean, there’s So much of it. I mean, it’s just constant, you know being marketed to peak performance brain take thymine and the average individual has no idea if they need more of that and
Cheryl McColgan (38:35.678)
No. And actually, you know when you can tell the most sometimes is when you go off of it. Because I will say there was one that I took consistently for three months. It was a nootropic. And the name is escaping me. I have to go back and look. Because I actually did, after I went off of it, I’m like, I need to get this again. Because about a month later, I was thinking, oh, this, I do think I can tell a difference. So sometimes it takes going off of it to see if it actually worked.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (38:57.932)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely, absolutely. Yep.
Cheryl McColgan (39:01.578)
Because when it’s an incremental improvement, you’re like, oh, yeah, I feel fine. This is the same, but it’s not always.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (39:06.83)
Well, that and our nervous system, just evolutionarily, we are wired to detect negative more than positive. And so when we’re taking something and it’s helping, we’re not really wired to notice that because there’s no evolutionary advantage to noticing that. But there’s an evolutionary advantage to noticing if something is bad for you, if it’s harmful.
Cheryl McColgan (39:18.279)
Mm-hmm. That makes sense.
Cheryl McColgan (39:36.846)
Yeah.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (39:36.894)
And so our nervous systems and our brain are just more wired for the negative than the positive. And so, yes, this is a really common thing that we see is people will start whatever it is, a supplement, a medication, one of our bioelectric devices, and they may not report that much on the positive side, but then they go off of it, that’s most often where they’ll be like, oh yeah, I got worse.
And that’s the reinforcing behavior is then they get back on it. And I would say it’s not uncommon for people to have to make that cycle three times to link the positive with the behavior. It’s just what we need as human beings is to, you know, we’ve got to go up, down, up, down a few times to be able to say, yep, okay, I got it. Me putting this pill in my mouth or me putting this device on is, is connected with the benefit that I get.
Cheryl McColgan (40:14.22)
Mmm, interesting.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (40:35.102)
a month later. And yeah, so it’s just the way we are. So yes, I think.
Cheryl McColgan (40:37.958)
Yeah. And sometimes it is hard to tell when you’re changing multiple things. That’s why you should really only institute one new tool so you can evaluate it instead of adding 5,000 things at once. Speaking of that, so we were kind of talking about these, to go back to the thermal imaging, you know, somebody finds something we’re talking about diet and lifestyle stuff, but then you also have a bunch of tools, devices and kind of brain training tools.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (40:54.998)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (41:03.794)
Are there any of those that you would use in that instance? Because I think you called out last time, and I thought this was really great, how we always think of our brain as just being sort of the cognition and the memory part. But really, when we have brain decline, it’s also affecting all kinds of body processes that are happening. And so theoretically, one of these things that we find on the imaging could be related to our brain health. So I’d love to hear how you use any of those tools when this is the situation with imaging.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (41:33.102)
Sure. So in your case, from our discussion, I had suggested maybe you try one of the red, blue, light mouth guards. And so the blue because of the suspected infection. So we still don’t know if that’s there. But it looks like there’s at least inflammation that may or may not be connected to infection. But we can say that there’s probably inflammation, and that’s the increased.
heat that we’re seeing. So using light for its benefits of mostly being pro-vitality, so increasing mitochondrial activity, decreasing inflammation, increasing circulation, so just pro-health. The blue is one of the few forms of light that we use that is an anti, and so it’s an antimicrobial.
So it’s going to help if you’ve got a bacterial or viral or fungal infection. So that’s the one thing that is kind of an anti. Otherwise, we stick with red and near-infrared, which are pro health. So again, if somebody does thermal imaging and it shows up, it looks like they’ve got a hot spot in the oral cavity. The recommendation would probably be red-blue, so that we’re kind of covering both sides of that. And again, the nice thing with thermal imaging,
it’s relatively affordable, especially if you’re just going to go in and have, say, one done, just kind of an, you know, just a shot of the, uh, the oral cavity. It’s low cost. There’s no downside. So it’s not like an X-ray where you have to worry about getting radiation. You could go in, you could treat with the mouth guard and then, and in three months go and check and in, and then in six months go and check and, and see, like, is it working? And hopefully the answer is yes. Then you have that confirmation. You’re not just.
Cheryl McColgan (43:27.518)
Mm-hmm.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (43:31.886)
kind of hoping that it’s working. And then, you know, for, again, if we’re talking about kind of changes in breast health and maybe we’re seeing something, the caveat being referral to the appropriate medical professional, referral to functional medicine or Chinese medicine or something where it’s gonna be handled. But then for me, like what part of it would I handle? It might be something like,
microcurrent therapy, or again, red infrared light therapy. So here we’d maybe move to one of our domes. And so you’d have a set of kind of panels, as I call it panel dome, that you would put over the chest and treat with the red infrared light. And that would again be about vitalizing the tissue so that it’s more resilient against any pathological process that is in place.
how can we give the body the resources it needs to defend itself against that? All right, so again, be more like on the pro health side than the anti-disease side. We’re just trying to vitalize the system. So again, red, near infrared light, and I would do that for somebody, again, who’s maybe showing on thermal imaging, a change that is concerning, great, but I equally would do that for somebody who, and I do,
for somebody who has a confirmed breast cancer or is post-treatment, and anywhere along in there, we would do these same things, which is let’s use red infrared light to optimize the body’s natural defenses against this. And then depending where we are in the process, we’ll use whatever allopathic tools are needed as well. And then microcurrent therapy.
So microcurrent, where light kind of has the same 12, 17 benefits, no matter where you put it, no matter what the source, if you’ve got a valid source of light therapy, that light is going to have the same effect. It’s just what light does. You get these benefits. There it is, nice and simple. With microcurrent.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (45:56.478)
it’s, especially if we’re doing frequency specific microcurrent, it’s driven by the protocol. So if we’re doing say an anti-inflammatory product protocol, then we’re specifically driving down inflammation through a number of different pathways. But we could be doing, you know, a detox protocol. We could be doing something that is more just kind of an immune support protocol. So, you know, kind of in the cancer world, there’s more.
happening kind of in the immunotherapy side of treatment. And so from a frequency-specific microcurrent, we can do a similar thing. What we’re going to try and do is augment the function of the immune system to help the body take care of this naturally. So then there’s an emerging model of cancer that’s saying that what cancer is when a cell or a group of cells become dys…
connected from the local information. So again, if you have breast tissue, the breast tissue is connected with a local intelligence that is informing those cells how to be breast tissue cells and what they’re supposed to do. When they get disconnected from that information source, they revert back to a single cell organ whose sense of its boundaries are self and everything else is not self.
And that’s kind of the definition of cancer. So this kind of emerging model is showing. And it’s not just a theory. I mean, they’re able to make a tumor come and go through this process of using bioelectric medicine to connect and disconnect a cell, individual cell, or a group of cells, so a tissue, from the local information network. When they disconnect it, it becomes a tumor. When they reconnect it, it becomes that.
comes back to being healthy, normal functioning tissue again. So in that same idea, we’re using microcurrent to try and accomplish that same process of bringing those cells back into the bioelectric gradient of the normal flow of information between in that tissue type. There’s a company out there called Novicur that is using a form of this. They call it, what is their name, tumor treating fields.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (48:25.418)
where they’re able to use, they would say not a microcurrent, I’ll say a microcurrent, to affect what’s happening at a cellular level to inhibit the process that is happening that produces a tumor, but not inhibit the process of normal cell function, physiology, metabolism, cell reproduction that happens in healthy tissue, but they can affect it as a…
happening in tumor genesis. And so there’s a lot of things that are emerging in the bioelectric space based on this kind of new idea of what cancer is. And so those are some of the approaches I would use. Light therapy, microcurrent therapy, working the healthy side of the system in a number of different ways to try and.
kind of reverse this process that is tumor generation, or, again, if we’re talking about the oral cavity, we’ve got an infection, how can we resolve that for a person and give them a management tool that doesn’t involve another root canal or having an implant put in or something of that nature? Like, this is a management strategy going forward.
Cheryl McColgan (49:50.214)
I think most people, before we go off the microcurrent, I think most people at this point are pretty familiar with red light therapy, photobiomodulation. There’s tons of research on it. It’s basically good for everything, as you pointed out. And I think most people can kind of associate that now with the big red panel or it’s a red dome device that you put on your, you know, something like that. I think everybody has a good idea about that. But microcurrent, when you say that, I mean, the only familiarity I have with it personally is, you know, being a woman in…
you know, how women have all their potions and lotions and things that they do their face. There’s like a device that’s got two electrodes that you actually use to work your face. Is it a similar thing if you’re treating other parts of the body or what does that process look like if you’re getting some kind of microcurrent therapy?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (50:31.182)
Sure. So there’s a whole range of microcurrent, and different approaches, different paradigms. So the frequency-specific is a particular paradigm in the midst of the world of microcurrent therapy. And I generally use frequency-specific microcurrent, although I have other types of devices that I’ll use as seems necessary. But my point is, I’m not going to use them.
primary go-to is frequency-specific. And I’d say the main difference between the frequency-specific paradigm and maybe just more of a standard paradigm of microcurrent is they’re using two frequencies at the same time with the understanding that it’s the resonance of the two frequencies that creates the effect. So their whole thing is the resonance effect. And so when I’m writing protocols,
for frequency specific, we’re doing frequency pairs. So let’s say there’s a frequency for, let’s say, collagen. And what I want to do is kind of increase the secretion in collagen fibers. So then I have my frequencies for collagen and increased secretion, and I put those together. Or increase circulation in a muscle fiber. So then I have a.
frequency for muscle fiber and frequency to increase circulation. I put those together or I want to reduce inflammation in a nerve. So then I’ve got a frequency for a nerve and a frequency for reducing inflammation. And I pair those. So when I, when I write a protocol, it’s, it’s a little bit like writing software for a computer you’re putting in, this is what I want to happen now. And then this, and then this, and then this, and then a protocol might have 10 or. You know, 200.
lines of code, frequencies, that are kind of giving information to the cell or tissue around here’s what I want to have happen. And so that’s how we’re changing the electrical gradient at the tissue level to move that gradient in the direction we want it to go and kind of move it away from the direction we don’t want it to go. So we’re…
Cheryl McColgan (52:52.158)
And it’s just a physical tool that goes on your skin that has, that produces the current. Just so people get, I mean, I’m a little worried they might get, like, I like this stuff. They might get a little bit too, like, but they’re like, but yeah, but how, what is it, what does it do? Does it feel like a zap? Do you put it on my skin? How does it work? You know?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (52:55.983)
Sure. So, yep. So the…
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (53:04.535)
Yep.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (53:10.926)
So the actual device is pretty small, about the size of a smartphone, but maybe twice as thick. So it’s a relatively small portable device, has a couple of wires coming off of it. They’re gonna go to four different leads. So that’s our two channels.
Cheryl McColgan (53:25.138)
Okay, so it’s leads, not necessarily like probes or something.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (53:28.91)
Correct, although it could be attached to probes. Most of the time for the home user, the probe isn’t the ideal form of application. Although,
Cheryl McColgan (53:39.55)
So is it maybe more like a 10s unit for people that are familiar with that? Like when you go to a physical therapist and they put these two leads on you and then it just kind of contracts some current basically. That’s my basic explanation.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (53:42.698)
it
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (53:49.902)
Correct, yep. So yeah, perfect, perfect. So the tens is a really good model. Most people have encountered tens. Tens is about a thousand times more current than microcurrent. So it elicits that oppositional response from the body, which is actually what you leverage to get the change you want. So make a muscle contract is a way to exercise a muscle. Microcurrent is really designed as a bioidentical current.
Cheryl McColgan (54:02.711)
Oh, okay, interesting.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (54:18.498)
So we shouldn’t feel microcurrent. Now, the skin is naturally electrically resistant. So you can feel the prickles, that’s impedance, and that’s your skin telling you it can’t move the current. And it’s not bad, but it’s not good. It’s a little bit like if you’re trying to fill a cup with water and the water’s overflowing. So that’s a sign that the cup is full. And that’s what impedance is. It’s a sign that your skin can’t move the current.
and you’re feeling the prickles, the impedance. So really, we don’t want to feel the prickles. It’s a bioidentical current, so it’s running at the same amperage as our normal physiology. So it really comes in under the radar, and we don’t notice the application of it. What we want to notice at some point is the effect of it. And that could be quick in the sense, so nerves respond really quickly to microcurrent because they’re electrical.
Cheryl McColgan (54:52.874)
Okay.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (55:15.334)
organs, so they change with electricity quickly. So somebody could have pain because of neural inflammation and we put on a nerve protocol and maybe within seconds or minutes they’re like, oh my goodness, that’s so much better. But if we’re trying to change tissue, tissue changes slowly, tissue changes in hours and days, and so you put it on, a person doesn’t necessarily feel anything.
This is nothing there to feel but what you hope is over Period of days or weeks you start to notice the effect of that tissue changing which would be like a restoration of function and so in Let’s say for well, let’s say so when I’m treating macular degeneration We’re putting currents into and around the eyes to affect a number of tissues and functions in the eye
But at the same time we’re doing that, we are putting current kind of through the skin around the eyes. So one of the most common things that happens for my clients who are treating for macular degeneration is they get a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months into treatment and their friends start to comment, like, what have you been doing? You look younger. Have you’re, you know, are you using a new product? Have you been going someplace for something? Because…
Even though the microcurrent isn’t specifically for a facial, and it doesn’t necessarily have the frequencies in it for changing collagen, which we have protocols for that, nevertheless, just putting microcurrent through the tissues does have an optimizing effect. And we get what’s called collagen conversion. And these things called wrinkles, which are when one type of collagen, normal, healthy,
collagen starts to fibroses and you get a line of fibrosed collagen in a sea of elastic collagen, it pulls in and you get this thing called a wrinkle. Well that, if we can reverse that process of fibrosing, the wrinkle goes away because there is nothing there pulling in on the skin, so it goes back to being as normal, healthy, relaxed, elastic tissue.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (57:38.858)
And that’s, sure enough, what we see when we do microcurrent facials, is we’re able to reverse the process of aging at the level of the collagen. So I use this example just to say, even when we’re not trying to do it, the microcurrent itself has that effect. So my clients who are treating for macular degeneration have this side effect of they also start to look younger.
Cheryl McColgan (58:04.862)
So not only are we learning that this is applicable in disease prevention or treatment, but that microcurrent actually does do something. So good to know.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (58:06.734)
Thank you.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (58:14.122)
Yes. So they would ask me about application and I wandered down that path. So what I do when I work with, with folks is really try and look at what’s the specific reason they’re doing it. And then what’s going to be most adaptive for that person’s lifestyle. So it could be, like you said, the 10 sticky pads that you put on. That’s that’s easy, simple, cheap. Great. That’s like, that’s the baseline.
But then we have a whole array of specialized electrodes. So let’s say, for example, somebody has neuropathy in their feet. So we have silver thread socks. So the whole sock is an electrode. You put the sock on and snap one end of the electrode to the sock. And then you might put on like a silver knee brace and put the other there. So you’ve got a positive and a negative, one on the foot, one on the knee.
And now the current is flowing back and forth through the lower leg, treating the neuropathy. And so in that case, we’re using these specialized socks. And then on and on. So again, for the eyes, I’ve got a special eye mask. For treating hands, we have gloves and we have little handheld electrodes. So I really try and match the mechanism of delivery to the person and how-
how they’re more likely to do this treatment on a daily basis. Because, optimally, people are doing their microcurrent an hour or two a day, depending on their condition. And then, again, we do a lot of at-home treatment. So people have the device at home. They’re treating on a daily basis. And then, again, depending on the condition, the treatment might be months, years, lifetime. It just depends on what we’re treating. Is it an acute issue?
somebody who’s had surgery and we want to try and minimize the chances of post-surgical adhesions. We want to optimize the scars so we don’t get overgrowth of scar tissue. We want to maximize the regrowth of blood vessels so that the scar stays supple and kind of a normal color to it. So again, we were talking about breast cancer. I do a lot of work with folks who are post breast
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:00:39.63)
and we’ll use microcurrent post-surgery for all of the reasons I just said, so that they really have an optimum outcome from the surgery and they have fewer complications a year or five years or 20 years later from that surgery.
Cheryl McColgan (01:00:57.886)
So thankfully microcurrent, good takeaway here is that it’s painless, that you can do it at home. Any final thoughts before we wrap up for today on the thermal imaging, just maybe like a quick summary or takeaways. Same thing with that, non-invasive, pain-free, possibility to detect early dysfunction. Any other things you wanna just add as the wrap up?
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:01:02.104)
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:01:22.922)
Yeah, so a couple of things, and I think you ran into this, and it was part of our conversation off the show, was, so the technology today is much more affordable. It’s high quality compared to what it was even a few years ago. So it’s not all that difficult of a business to get into. So you get a variety of people.
get into this. And because it’s not mainstream, it’s alternative, you’re going to get more of your alternative types in it. So you’re just going to potentially have that experience if you look around in your area to see if there’s thermal imaging. It’s probably not going to be in a doctor’s office. See, chiropractors do this in terms of if you’re looking for somebody with a medical degree.
more likely to find a chiropractor doing it than an MD. Maybe an osteopath might be into it again, a little bit on the, but you’re more likely to find somebody who isn’t, doesn’t have a medical degree that is offering this as a service. That’s perfectly fine. So again, what they’re doing is operating a camera and we don’t need an advanced degree to operate a camera.
Now there are some basic things you want to know about how to do it, how to do it reasonably well. But we just want to keep in mind, this is a fairly simple process. You’re gonna go into a temperature controlled room, you’re gonna disrobe, usually it’s done with the lights off or very, very low lighting. Somebody is gonna take pictures, depending on their system, they may not even be in the room with you, it may all be remote control, so you’re in the room on your own, it’s private.
you’re having the photos taken, those photos are then sent to a medical professional to be read. This person has to be certified in doing thermography. And so it isn’t your person taking the picture, the person that you’re probably going to who’s running the business, who’s doing the evaluation. They’re gonna be sending it out. Certainly that’s a question you wanna ask and make sure that that’s what they’re doing, is sending it out to a trained medical profession to give you the report.
Cheryl McColgan (01:03:44.147)
Yes.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:03:44.747)
And so assuming that those basics are there.
you’re going to be fine going someplace where you might be like, hmm, really? This is where I’m going. Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (01:03:57.83)
Well, just because you’re on that subject, I’ll just very briefly describe the situation. So the person that I went to, not a medical professional, did this as a business. She actually had her office in a co-working space where it had like a separate contained office. So it’s kind of like almost like being in an office building, right? Went to there. She had it set up so that there was a curtain in between us. And then she just, like you mentioned kind of remotely, but she was right there so she could talk to me.
and explain, like, you have to do some kind of weird poses. So she could explain to me if I wasn’t doing it properly, she would hold up her phone over and she said, see like this, or something like that, or she was showing me something else on her phone. But it was all very, I think, obviously, if you’re female and somebody’s taking photos of you, you might be more comfortable with a female and vice versa for a male, because it is still photos and you are still naked in the room. So yeah, so that’s kind of how it was. But I think.
You know, definitely check that out before you go because your level of comfort with the situation might be different based on how that particular office has it set up. So anyway, I just thought I’d share what my personal experience was with that.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:05:04.546)
Well, thank you for saying that because it is like this and it just is. So when I’m talking with clients about this, one, if they’re here in my area, I can make a direct recommendation and say, go see Sally. She’s great. She’s going to take good care of you. But if they’re not, then it’s a conversation about, well, how will they pick? And often it’s like there’s one place that does it. Well, you have one choice then. But.
Cheryl McColgan (01:05:28.414)
See ya.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:05:31.01)
to put it in this kind of normative context so that a person isn’t expecting like you’re going for an MRI. Like your thermal imaging is gonna be a very different experience than going for your MRI, but that’s appropriate. You know, just in terms of what it is and the cost of the equipment, the sophistication of the equipment, the danger related to the equipment. Here, you’re going to have a picture taken.
And there it is. That’s the level of concern you should have. Where are you going to get your passport picture taken? I don’t know, whoever’s opening it because I need it right now because I didn’t do my passport. Yeah, so that’s kind of the level that you’re working at. The reading of it will be done by a medical professional and that’s what matters to you. Yeah, so that’s really like what I wanted to add in is just the understanding of where this profession is in its evolution.
Cheryl McColgan (01:06:02.151)
Right.
Cheryl McColgan (01:06:05.65)
Right, whoever’s there.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:06:23.746)
just means it’s going to be located in these kind of non-traditional settings. And as a healthcare consumer, just be ready for that. And that doesn’t need to be a problem necessarily. Do a little bit of due diligence. And then if that all kind of checks out, go have the imaging done. With any luck, what you get back is a happy story. And then what you wanna do is a baseline.
So you go and you have it done. And if there’s just no anything to be concerned about, maybe you go once a year. You just do that. Not a big deal. Cost you 50 bucks to do a simple picture. $200, maybe a bit more, maybe $600, depending on your area. But you’re just gonna go as needed to have it done as a preventative. If it shows something, then you might wanna go more often to track its change. And again, that’s where this really starts to become helpful.
is both is this progressing? Ooh, I better take it more serious. Two, I’ve seen something, I’m concerned about it, I’m treating it, now I’m going to have the picture taken so that I can see if what I’m doing is working. And that’s an incredible like peace of mind to see that the efforts you’re making around diet and lifestyle and maybe you’re going for acupuncture, something to treat this.
And then to be able to see the objective data showing the positive change, it very much reinforces the behavior and gives you a sense of when you can say, yeah, I think I’m done. I don’t need to continue treating my sciatica with acupuncture. Not only are my symptoms not there, but now I see that the flow of neural information and blood has returned to normal. Great.
Cheryl McColgan (01:08:20.014)
Right. Or kick it down, like maybe spread them out more. Maybe instead of doing it every six months, once it’s back to normalize, then you’re going back to once a year, or once every 18 months, something like that. Yeah, I think it is a huge thing for peace of mind. So anyway, Guy, thank you so much for introducing me to this concept, introducing it to the audience. Can you please, before we totally wrap up, share with everybody your website and kind of what it is you do and how they can work with you just so that everybody knows where to find you.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:08:49.206)
Absolutely. So www.cerebralfit.com. So cerebral F I T dot com. And that’s best place to go to find me, but you’ll find my email address there. You’ll find a link to my schedule. If you want to schedule a free consult, you’ll find all kinds of information about our devices and what they do. I like to keep a lot of research on the website so people can just go in and kind of validate this.
on their own and find out that, yeah, there’s real solid science for all that we do. And then when they feel comfortable with that, and then if they want to do a consult, fantastic. So I really just try to put all the information out there. My main area of expertise is bioelectric medicine on the orthopedic side, so pain, body, and then specifically on the brain side, things like mental health, traumatic brain injury.
dementia Parkinson’s. So body and brain using bioelectric medicine.
Cheryl McColgan (01:09:57.054)
Perfect, that’s perfect. Thank you again so much for coming on the show today and I look forward to keeping you in touch.
Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:10:02.85)
Thanks for having me back.
Cheryl McColgan (01:10:04.73)
No problem.
Many people choose weight loss as a New Year’s resolution and often seek out keto as a way to achieve this goal. I started with keto myself in January 2017 and never looked back. In this episode, you’ll get a high-level overview of what keto is and isn’t, how I recommend you get started and what you need (and don’t need) to get started. Spoiler alert…most people way overcomplicate keto!
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In this episode, you’ll get ideas for how to improve your health in 2024. Some are simple and easy to implement, while others will take some time, focus and dedication. There are a lot of tools and products mentioned in this one, and you can find them all on the shop page.
Be sure to register for your FREE ticket to the Quit Sugar Summit starting January 8th, 2024. There are some amazing speakers this year and you get complimentary admission using my link.
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Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts!
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines, extra bottle for a penny
Drinking Ketones
Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life
Clean Beauty 20% off first order
DIY Lashes 10% off
NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow
Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life
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Getting Started with Keto ResourcesThe Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
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David Bean has a passion for health and wellness as well as technology. His personal regimen for wellness includes a low-sugar diet, CrossFit as well as intermittent and extended fasting. As a laser expert, he became passionate about bringing professional quality results to the home market, without all the pain and redness of in-office procedures. This was a great conversation about wellness as well as technology! Get an extra fabulous 20 percent discount with NIRA right now at this link and code HEALNOURISHGROW at checkout. This episode of the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast is sponsored by NIRA.Be sure to check out my results with NIRA in these posts:NIRA Review for Hooded EyesNIRA Precision Laser 90 Day ResultsNIRA Precision vs NIRA ProMaximize Skin Tightening Results with NIRA at Home LasersWatch the episode on YouTube:
Shawn Wells has done an amazing amount of work to improve his health. With numerous types of professional training, he's learned that ultimate wellness is something that requires a variety of tools. In this episode, he shares his best tips for improving health including inner work, meditation, nutrition, supplements and more.Watch the episode on YouTube
In this episode, I share four components of health that are critical to focus on if you want to enjoy optimal health and longevity. I also share my best tips for getting started with these things, most just require more mindfulness, easy tools and a few minutes a day to get started!Mentioned in the episode, please let me know if I missed one! Mindful Drinking app, free to try!Blue Blocking Glasses, HNG15 for 15% offThe best Magnesium supplement, all seven forms included.Watch the episode on YouTube here:
In this episode, I chat with Guy Odishaw about using neurofeedback. He has such an amazing amount of knowledge! It was fun to learn more about how these tools can help not only improve a normal aging brain but also help neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic brain injury.Visit Guy at CerebralFit.Watch the interview on YouTubeEpisode TranscriptCheryl McColgan (00:01.034)Hey everyone, it's Cheryl McColgan, founder of HealNourishGrowth, and we're back with another episode of the podcast. Today I am joined by Guy Odisha, and I am really excited to chat with him, particularly because you know about my love of all things, brain health, my background in psychology, and neuropsychology, and Guy actually is a neurofeedback practitioner.and he has a lot of really great expertise he's gonna share with us today. So welcome, Guy. And if you could just start by sharing a bit of how you got into this work and what is actually neurofeedback for those who might not know what that is.Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (00:38.417)Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here and chat with you. It was a delight so far. It's been great. The little pre-show check-in was wonderful. So my background, so I've been practicing for a little over 30 years, mostly in the area of what's called integrative manual therapies. So that's my kind of my main orthopedic side, a lot of chronic pain and trauma. And…Cheryl McColgan (00:45.855)Yes.Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:01.605)Then slowly that moved into doing what's generally bioelectric medicine. So things like microcurrent light therapy.Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (01:13.425)pulse magnetic therapy, things of that nature. So we've moved into the spectrum of bioelectric medicine. So that's been for about 12 years. And then I would say the last six years been more focused on the brain with neuroimaging, neurofeedback, neuroSTIM. And we'd use quite a bit of bioelectric medicine in our brain health clinics, but they just changed the name.when you do it on the body versus you do it in the head, they give it a new name. So nothing really changes in terms of the technology, but the name changes. And so, yeah, that's, you know, I kind of consider myself a psychophysiologist kind of working on the brain side of the brain mind continuum. And then, go ahead.Cheryl McColgan (02:01.758)I was just going to say what type of things do people usually come to you for? You mentioned chronic pain, but now you're moving more into the brain stuff. Are you more dealing with traumatic brain injury or just kind of natural aging processes or what is it that people are most seeking out help for?Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (02:19.485)Sure. So I have three main clinics. I have five clinics, but three clinics that are brain specific. So in my one clinic, Bakhti Brain Health Clinic, we're a little more omnivorous. So we're seeing a full range of mental health. So anxiety, depression, OCD, you name it, you know, in the across. So mental health. Then I would say probably our next biggestChildren, learning disability, we kind of put ADHD in with learning disabilities just because it doesn't have a great place to go otherwise. So it might be dyslexia, dyscalculia, just slow reading, and anything that comes up in the school side, academic side. And then again, we put ADHD in there. And then traumatic brain injury, we do a fair amount of traumatic brain injury.And that can be anywhere from kind of serious that gets the TBI down to say, post-concussion syndrome, which is a less significant injury, but not necessarily less impactful on the person who has it. Just the nature is quite a bit different than that spectrum. Um, and then peak performance. So we do a lot of peak performance. So people who don't have a problem, they just want to be better at whatever they're doing. So maybe that's executives. Um,We have some students, I have a doctor who is kind of a peak performance in his professional...
Join me for a solo episode where I share about Wild Health genetic testing and health coaching. I recorded this immediately after I received my genetic testing results from Dr. Carl Seger. I'm sharing some of my initial thoughts about the results as well as my first impressions of the Wild Health service. Receive 20 percent off of a Wild Health package with code HEALNOURISHGROW.Watch on YouTube
Stephanie Hilfer is the founder of Viim, a branding agency. Success in her health journey affected her business and ability to be an effective entrepreneur. Join us to learn about the practices Stephanie put in place that allowed her to find more balance between her personal and work life. You can find the 10-year values and goals worksheet mentioned in the podcast here. Our free Ultimate Wellness Workbook is another great tool to create more balance and happiness in your life.
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Automatically generated transcript, please forgive errors.
Cheryl McColgan:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I’m Cheryl McColgan, the founder of Heal Nourish Grow. And today I am here with my lovely friend, Stephanie, who I met through her podcast. And she does such amazing work in the world of branding, which is a little bit unusual for this podcast. And we are going to talk about that at the end. But what is not unusual is the fact that Stephanie has really had quite a bit of a health journey that she’s going to share with us today. And I think it’s really relevant to this audience because many of us are entrepreneurs or just work in a very busy job, very busy lifestyle. And I think Stephanie is going to have some great information and takeaways for us about how to better balance your life if that’s possible. But anyway, Steph, could you introduce yourself and share a little bit how you got to this place where you started to really focus on your health again.
Steph:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the great introduction. I’m Steph Hilfer. I do go by Steph. It’s not offensive to call me Stephanie. My mom birthed me Stephanie, but I love the informality of being Steph. I love that we’re just already friends when you call me Steph. So I am the owner, founder and creative director at Vim, as you said, a branding agency. And that, and I will say Vim has been a catalyst for me to continue. to focus on my own, not just health journey, but on myself. So as far as like what we talked about at one point was, in 2018, no, excuse me, 2017, prior to starting my own business, I was at this point where I was in full-blown tears, pretty much daily, around eating, around using the restroom, just constant feeling gross and icky. And I know we’re diving deep into some like super TMI, probably stuff, but I know that your audience is probably going to resonate with some of this. Um, and I was just to this point of there’s nowhere else to go. I have to do something. And luckily I had, um, my best friend since first grade and my sister-in-law who had worked with a holistic nutritionalist coach to kind of work through all of that. Wasn’t necessarily for weight loss, but obviously I think there’s always when you start to look internally at your health, I think that I definitely saw a benefit in that area as well. But I worked with this particular coach to really diagnose what was going on in my gut. We did a kind of handful of blood tests, stool tests, and we determined that there was some foods that were really not serving me well. And so I spent the better part of 2017, so 250 days of 2017, I essentially went whole food. Like just truly if the ingredient listing says banana, then you can eat it. But if it says flour and rich such and such oils, right? Not a single ingredient food. And my nutritionalist, her, or nutritionist, her program for me was not to just go 250 days eating this clean, but I’m not a good rule follower apparently. And I started feeling so good. Essentially I cut out caffeine, I cut out sugar, I cut out dairy and I cut out gluten. And then on top of those cutouts, I just ate whole foods. And I spent that whole year feeling the most, the word I would use for it was optimized. I felt so optimized and healthy and I know that if I hadn’t been in that really healthy, beautiful place that Vim would have never came to be. Now Vim actually happened in 2018 after I had slowly started introducing more foods back into my world and eventually as probably a lot of us, I went back to like full blown eating whatever I want to eat. And it was probably, I mean, I’m sure I had some not comfortable days in 2018, but it was definitely the early part of 2019 where I was like, I am back to that really unhealthy, you know, eating things that I know doesn’t serve my body well, drinking like a coffee every morning, which was the trifecta or the quad-fecta bad for me. Caffeine is bad for me, my body particularly. Dairy is bad for my body particularly. Sugar is bad for my body particularly. And coffee bean in particular, the actual bean itself was an inflammatory food for me. So I was drinking this like quadfecta every single morning drink that was just setting the tone for my day to be not optimal. And so through feeling just like that, I finally started realizing what I didn’t like about that journey was that I did lose so much weight. I lost so much weight that I lost any of the like curvature or shape that I happen to enjoy about myself. And so I set out to start working out with the intention of getting back to that diet. So that’s a really long answer, but that’s like in a snapshot where I’m and where I’m out today is I’m still… focusing really hard on that physical part. And I’ve layered in a really beautiful mental part. And so that’s where I’m at today, but we can dive deeper into whatever you think would serve your audience best.
Cheryl McColgan:
Yeah, no, you highlighted so many things there that I think are so important because part of the power in sharing, I think, is that you realize that you’re not alone. And I think for so many people, it’s for so many of us, it’s like this lifelong journey of health, right? That includes some times where we’re quote unquote, super good. Like
Steph:
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan:
I’m putting that in air quotes if you’re not watching on YouTube, because you’re being on point with your diet and whatever. you know, things happen and I’m going to guess you didn’t share this and that this is just again pure guess. But then, you know, when you started your business, starting a business is very stressful and very demanding. And so I’m sure for a time, your focus shifted much more to your business and kind of away from your health journey. But the point of that all is to say is that it is a journey and then we just keep coming back to it. Like I shared recently, I think I’m going to be on my maybe seventh weightlifting session of since I started up again. And it’s something
Steph:
Nice.
Cheryl McColgan:
that I’ve probably started 5,762 times in
Steph:
I’m
Cheryl McColgan:
my life
Steph:
sorry.
Cheryl McColgan:
for whatever, for whatever reason, weightlifting and strength training has just never been something I’ve been able to get to stick because I love being outside and I’d rather just like, I love going, I’d rather go on a 10 mile hike than be in the gym for half an hour. It’s just the way I am, but I realized the importance of it. So it’s just kind of keep coming back to that. But anyway, I think one of the things that you highlighted there as well, and maybe you could share a little bit more about this is that. Wheat in particular can be so inflammatory for people and damage the gut lining. And so once you started to make some of these changes, you figured out what you had sensitivities to. Can you share kind of the effects physically and mentally when you shifted away from those? Like, were you really able to tell a huge difference in your body?
Steph:
Yeah. So the first week I was prepared by my nutritionist, she was, you know, she really explained to me this first week is going to be a bit of a detox. So I was prepared to be frustrated and maybe discouraged. And it was a challenging first week, but I will say within the first 24 hours, I immediately started seeing changes in my gut. And then within the first three days, I started feeling better, just, just kind of lighter. And then within a week, my mood started shifting. I felt clearer. I felt, once again, optimal. And I also got to this point where, I mean, I did get to this point to be transparent that I wasn’t eating enough. And so we did work through, you know, how to do something that’s that strict, but still get enough calories in. And I did lose 30 pounds. So everyone I talked to was like, well, clearly you were in a calorie deficit. But I was eating So much food. My plates were so filled that my husband was like, are you gonna eat all of that? And I was like, yes, I am. I know I’m gonna eat it. I have pictures of these full plates, like lobster tails, steak, basically a whole head of broccoli, a sweet potato. And I would eat every ounce of it. And I felt full and I felt fulfilled. And I know… that I was eating enough calories, but my body was just using every single thing that was in me. So when I said earlier that I know that Vim wouldn’t have became, you know, it wouldn’t have happened was because when it started, it wasn’t me alone. I had a friend who approached me about starting a business. And like I said, I was about maybe six months off of, kind of reintroducing foods. And I still felt so optimal. I still felt energetic. I had clarity, my mental space was just in such a good spot that I would have never said yes to that if she had asked me today. Well, maybe today, but like that prior, right? When I said I was in full-blown tears, it was April 17th, 2017. I will never forget that day. I finally made that. That was the day I made the commitment. If you had asked me a day prior to that about starting a business, I would have said absolutely no. I’m in no place. energy, I don’t have my spark, my creativity. So I feel like it’s kind of a roundabout way of answering your question, but the answer is like I absolutely within 24, 3, and 7 days or 24 hours, 3 days and 7 days felt big shifts and those were big enough to push me into sticking with it.
Cheryl McColgan:
And then, you know, life intervenes, like we talked about, it’s a journey. So what really brought you back to, okay, I need to do this again? Was there a particular event or was there a certain way you were feeling or something that happened in your business where you just had this shift again, like, hey, I need to get this focus back on my health again?
Steph:
Yeah. I mean, I will say I have like clearly some body dysmorphia because I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life and I feel wonderful about that. Do I want to lose weight and do I want to be a little healthier in that department? Yeah. But when I look at myself, I still feel really proud of me. But at the same time, I wasn’t feeling… good. It’s so hard. I know you get it and I’m sure your audience gets it. But this like just not feeling good in your own skin and knowing what you’re putting in your body is not serving you. It was just this constant like reminder. And before my body image pushed me so much to make some of these decisions in life. And maybe it was my age. You know, I’m sure there’s lots of reasons why we use looking a certain way to fuel us to make healthy decisions. But I was at this point where I just knew that I wasn’t showing up for myself in the best way. And I do want to, and I still do, it’s still part of my journey, which I love that we’re talking about this being a life long journey. I do still want to go back and prioritize my food intake and what I’m eating in conjunction with lifting weights. But it was… I’ll be honest, it was seeing a couple particular people on my feeds showing up and women in particular working with my trainer now, showing up every day, recording themselves, putting it out there and being really transparent about, I don’t know what I’m doing or I’m just learning what an RDL is or I, you know, this was a heavy weight for me so I’m not going to do that next time. Whatever. Just really transparent. And I reached out to her and I said, who are you working with? Can I get their information? I’m really inspired. And I’m very low, I’m like you, super low impact, right?
Cheryl McColgan:
Thanks for watching!
Steph:
I wanna hike, I wanna do yoga. If I can stroll with my dog, swim, paddleboard, like you name a low impact exercise or sport, that’s my jam. And I never, and I look at weight training and I always thought that’s too tough for me. That’s high impact, that’s heavy. I never considered how much of a low impact, and I could be wrong, right? Somebody in the fitness world could tell me that’s not true, but for me, it fits within what I think is low impact. You know, like circuit training or some of these boutiques that have you hooked up to a heart monitor and they’re like, go, go. That. To me, even if you’re doing weights and that, to me, I consider that high impact. I’ve tried some of those, I’ve tried cycling, too high, I love mountain biking, by the way, but cycling and those kind of boutique circuit, like heavy, like go, go fast paced environments, not for me. My heart races and my heart rate gets so elevated when I lift, I don’t need a coach screaming at me.
Cheryl McColgan:
Right.
Steph:
telling me to go, go. Now I’m not knocking that because I know that there are a lot of men and women who thrive off of that. And that for them, for their mental space, for their body, for what they’re looking to achieve, it’s a beautiful fit. But for me, this scary, not for me thing of weightlifting, seeing somebody else, and that’s why I love your show, right? I love that you’re giving people an opportunity to just be real and tell their story. Seeing somebody else doing something that to me felt so, I’m gonna say not feminine. We don’t see a lot of females out there lifting weights. It seemed hard and heavy. Seeing her talking about, yeah, that was hard. So I’m gonna do this next time. Or that was, I didn’t ever think I could do that. But look at me now, comparisons from her first January hip thrust to her. July hip thrust and seeing her progression, it really was inspiring. And I just, I’ve learned, so when somebody very early on, when I started Vim, somebody asked why, like, why are you starting your own company? And I know this is like the most backwards answer. People might think this, but I said, and I stick to it is, it’s not my ultimate why, but reason for me starting it was I want to We have such a negative connotation around the idea of being selfish. And for me, starting my own business was me allowing myself to be the priority. Myself to be the priority to do the business how I want, to prioritize what I need as a human, to show up for my people and run my business the way I want. I wanted to, you know… just be selfish in my own mental health and my physical health and put me first. And I think as a woman, right, we don’t do that a lot. And then I think in society around careers and business, you don’t hear a lot of people saying that, oh, I wanna serve others and I wanna help others succeed. And yes, I absolutely do. But I was at that point where I wasn’t put the mask on myself first,
Cheryl McColgan:
Right.
Steph:
you know? And I knew I needed to do that. So yeah. Once again, kind of a tangent roundabout way of all that.
Cheryl McColgan:
No, but I love that. And I wish that there was a better word, like not a better, but a different word than selfish because it’s not, I mean, I think you put the nail in the head and I’ve quite often said this in the past, you really can’t serve others when you’re not taking care of yourself. So if you’re not putting on, you know, the perfect analogy, like you said, is putting on your oxygen mask before
Steph:
Yup.
Cheryl McColgan:
you put the mask on your kids and whoever else. you’re not going to be effective. So I just wish there was a different word. Maybe we can come up with a word for that together. I mean, between your branding
Steph:
I love that.
Cheryl McColgan:
brain and my marketing brain, you would think we could figure
Steph:
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan:
out a better word than selfish. Yeah, so to go back to one thing that you said, and I just want to, for one, you’ve inspired, this is one of the reasons I wanted to get you back on or to talk to you again is because you’ve inspired me. When you post your workouts and I see that you’re lifting again, I am like, oh, I need to do, you know what it does? It’s sharing is so powerful. And so I just want to thank you for putting that out there because that woman that inspired you, you’re passing that along
Steph:
I don’t
Cheryl McColgan:
now
Steph:
know.
Cheryl McColgan:
that you’re sharing your stuff. So I really appreciate that.
Steph:
Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan:
So let’s talk a little bit about, you hit on a lot of things there with prioritizing yourself. Now, not everybody has their own business and maybe has the power to change that in this moment, but were there… Any things that you learned along the way that could translate, say somebody in a corporate job or that does have a boss that don’t run their own business, were there things that you found that you could maybe incorporate that can still help people find more of that balance in their work versus their personal life?
Steph:
Yeah, I know this is going to sound maybe like I’m trying to push an agenda here, but it’s so powerful for me and I’m biased because my world is branding. But whether or not you are a corporate brand, a personal brand, or just a human, the work that we do to help personal brands, corporate brands understand their depth was one of the most fulfilling and powerful exercise that I did for myself that has continued to be my lens that I look through and my litmus test that I run through every single day to make better decisions. And so let me explain what I mean by that. So one of the simple exercises that we do with our clients is we help them establish values. So if you’re watching on YouTube, this is like the most un. creative or well-designed thing ever, but this is a sticky note with my handwriting of my values. Enthusiasm, positive, intention, visual, excellence, and peace. And so for me, this exercise of working through and establishing this for me was incredibly freeing. I’m a lot. Maybe today, since we’re talking about some things that aren’t my normal jam that I geek out about, even though they’re totally me and I’m living them and I’m learning to love them. When you get to know me, I’m pretty enthusiastic. I’m a lot. I talk a lot. I’m a nerd. I talk about weird things that I think… I geek out about the color of a straw at Jimmy John’s. I’m just a lot. I used to get… worried that enthusiasm and this, I sometimes, and I used to with like a negative connotation, I used to call myself like a positive Polly, you know, like, oh, you’re just so positive, everything you talk about, just you turn it into a positive somehow. And I think I found that people, I worried people found those things negative of me or judged them to be fake. And those are just having them written down and being like, this is your permission slip. that this is you, this is not only your brand, you fuel these words from a piece of you that is important to live authentically. So enthusiasm and positivity are two things that every time I’m making a decision, should I come on a podcast, should I take on that client, do I wanna go for a hike or do I wanna go do the circuit training my friend asked me to go to? I look at them and I look through, I literally like. Once again, if you’re watching YouTube, I think like my words are on these glasses here. And now that I put them on, I look through them like they’re their own individual layered lens. And I think if I’m not feeling enthusiastic or positive or all the rest of my words about this particular decision I have to make, then I need to stop and think about does that truly serve me? and what I set out for. When I said I wanna be selfish, these words are selfish to me. These are important enough to me that I’m gonna reserve saying no or reconsidering a situation if it doesn’t align with these. I also have really high, A typical, A type, high, what’s the word I want? Like very high, high vibe. How come I can’t think of the word I want? really strong, pressured words of intention and excellence. And those are words that are very true for me. They’re not, I’m not saying that as a value system for me personally, excellence means I’m perfect all the time. In my actual write-up with what these words mean to me, I have a cautionary about excellence being
Cheryl McColgan:
Yeah
Steph:
something that can actually get you out of alignment and can force you to think perfection over progress instead of progress over perfection. But then all of these really high energy, atypical, atype vibe personality words, I’ve balanced with peace. Peace is that incredibly important value. It’s not last. because it’s the least important. It’s the one that after you read those, it’s the reminder that, listen, you still need to be in peace with all of this. You need to feel good about being able to be, I felt like sometimes with enthusiasm and positive, if I came on and I was a little more subdued and a little bit more calm with even how I speak, I felt like it wasn’t authentic. All of a sudden, I’m not being me. But I do have this side where I can just kind of chill and be quiet and be a little calmer. And I used to think someone’s gonna think I’m not being myself or I’m not being me. And by creating that balance word into my own value systems, I can honor those times that I am peaceful, that I need to seek peace. And I also think of peace as this like, do I feel really good? about the relationships, the things I’m doing? Am I at peace with them? So it was kind of a long answer, but if you’re listening and you’re not feeling good about your health, your fitness, your mental space, this introspective work that I do for brands, you can do for yourself. And it’s incredibly freeing when you take the time to do it. Now I know it’s easy for me to say that because I do it professionally. But it’s really just sitting down, and maybe even if you’re a journaler, just writing a bunch of words that matter to you, and then maybe free write for five minutes. That’s probably a long time to free write, but just free write, just words over words that pop into your mind, and then take a second to see where the commonalities are. Like if you say the word joy. and over and over again and you didn’t even realize you wrote it seven times. Look into that deeper and see if that matters to you. I don’t know. Does that kind of hit the nail on the head on what you were
Cheryl McColgan:
Wow,
Steph:
looking for or does that help?
Cheryl McColgan:
no, it’s such a powerful practice. And I’m so glad that you brought it up because it’s something that I actually, on my website, Heal Nourish Growth, you look up, if you just go to the website and type in what is ultimate wellness or type in ultimate wellness, it’s kind of what it is what it’s, it means something different to everyone.
Steph:
Mm-hmm.
Cheryl McColgan:
But the way that I have people identify and get in touch with that is pretty much that exercise that you just mentioned. And it’s kind of called like a 10 year. values and goals worksheet or whatever, but it starts with identifying those words that kind of identify your core values. And so if you’re not, without giving away your secret sauce, because obviously this is what you do with them and for branding, but if somebody wanted to approach that, so you said kind of just sit down and pick words that resonate with them, because I just love to hear how your process is maybe a little bit different than what I do with people.
Steph:
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan:
So you write down those words, you identify what’s important to you. And then you wrote them on your Post-it note. Can you say a little bit more about, because I think this is where it’s a really powerful practice, how keeping in alignment with those words guides your daily decisions, because it’s getting you to your ultimate goal in the future, whatever those ultimate 10-year goals you identified, it makes day-to-day decisions easier. So I’d love for
Steph:
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan:
you to just maybe say a little bit more about that.
Steph:
Yeah, the way we do it here for our clients is a little different than what I had shared that a listener could do. What we do is so much more in depth. So we actually spend a full day, eight hours working through several different exercises. Not because it takes, well, it does take that long. It’s because I help poke and prod and pull out of my clients deeper. things than they usually share. I think society has made, I don’t know who to blame. I don’t know, let’s just not blame anyone. I think we just have a tendency to shortchange some of the amazing thoughts and feelings we have. I say that, I tell my clients, the goal of that day is to get the things out of your head, out of your heart, and out of your gut, and out on a super messy platter. Just get it all out. We walk around with these beautiful thoughts and goals and dreams and ideas about how we approach the world, how we run our business. And I keep saying business, because guys, I understand, that’s my world. But every single one of you, no matter what you do, you have a brand. Now does brand, do we associate that with dollars? Yes, but that’s not always the case. Personal brands is like the new buzz world. buzzword for your resume. It is the reputation that you have, whether you control the narrative of that or not. What branding does on a monetary place is help use that to convert people who get into our world into a client. But as a personal brand or as a human, just wanting to benefit from what you’re hearing today, it’s really about introspection. and leaning in and making sure that you feel like you have the permission slip to be who you are. But how do we know what that is if we don’t spend time diving deeper into it? So we spend a full eight hour day. It’s not a secret sauce. We work through several different exercises that I offer on my website. I don’t hold it as a secret because I know that people don’t spend the time to do this. I’ve had clients come to me and money was no issue, but the moment I told them they have to sit down with me for eight hours, then became an issue. You know, the moment I told them, I’m gonna ask you what your why is. We’re gonna talk about in depth, like things you’ve never probably shared with others. Then all of a sudden, they start to pull back. So yeah, it’s really not, there’s no wrong way to go about it, but the way we do it is we start with Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. So if you’ve ever read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, or if you’ve seen his TED Talk, Start With Why, we start there. We’re not recreating the wheel. There’s such a powerful exercise to dive deep into what it is we do, why we do it, or how we do it and why we do it. So that’s the very first exercise. And in our eight hour day with our clients, we tend to take about half that day. on exercise one.
Cheryl McColgan:
Wow.
Steph:
That’s how much depth we go through. And if you are a mom listening to this, if you are a business owner listening to this, if you’re anyone listening to this, taking that time, even if you’re not a business owner, it’s truly the words I’ve had for clients, I always ask after that discovery. I always ask for feedback then because I want to know how was that for you? We have a lot more to go for. go through, but how is just that for you? And the words I’ve heard were transformative, cathartic, right? And completely life-changing. And so I hold that really dear, right? I started earlier saying I wanna be selfish. And by being selfish, I’ve been able to help others put themselves first and give them the permission slip that it’s okay. So… I was once again, I feel like all my answers are long. Ha ha ha.
Cheryl McColgan:
Hey, that’s the format of a podcast, right? They’re meant to be long. Otherwise,
Steph:
Okay, good.
Cheryl McColgan:
we wouldn’t have a show.
Steph:
Yeah, we’re not on TikTok.
Cheryl McColgan:
Right. So, oh gosh. Yeah. I’m starting to, I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to appreciate this long-form content a little bit more here lately. I’ve had this kind of interesting struggle with Instagram and the content there, and personal growth and appreciation for these conversations that I get to have with people like you and talk about their business and their health and just the things that have transformed their lives. And then producing longer content for myself, like doing more stuff on YouTube, which is a very, very scary place. I’ve talked about that before. But it’s putting yourself out there. And I think to your point, when you do this inner work and you have these kind of goals for ways to take care of yourself and then in turn, being able to help others through doing that, that you become slightly more insulated from the opinions or
Steph:
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan:
thoughts of others. And it allows you to just, you know, do your good work in the world and be less affected by the outside noise or by what other people think you should be doing or
Steph:
Yeah.
Cheryl McColgan:
their commentary or their criticism usually, let’s be real online.
Steph:
Yes. Yeah, everyone
Cheryl McColgan:
Um
Steph:
has an opinion, for sure.
Cheryl McColgan:
Yes. So Steph, before we wrap it up for today, can you please share with people where they can find you online, the name of your business and the website, of course, and then if they want to connect with you just more personally after hearing your health story or follow along with you as you work out.
Steph:
Yes, yes. Well, thank you for telling me that those videos inspire you. I actually, in the beginning of this year, decided I would switch that content to my personal page because I felt I, even with my own, right, as a branding person, I guess all of a sudden questioned, you know, is this actually valuable for people? Do they want to see this? And so that’s really validating to have that reminder that it’s good. And I have shifted back. I have shifted back to posting that there. But yes, so there is at get Vim. So if you wanna get a hold of Vim, you can find me on all the socials, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook at get Vim. Now Vim stands for visual, intentional, integrated marketing. So Vim is spelled with two I’s. It’s very similar to the English word Vim, which means enthusiastic, high spirited, energetic, but it is spelled with two I’s. So make sure you. Check that out. We’re also at Get Vim, or excuse me, we’re also online, www.getvim.com. And yeah, I am still very immersed in my brand. So when you see things, that’s me. So interact, DM, show me an email, all the things you will actually get me. I had one person show up for a consult and they were taken aback that it was me on the other line.
Cheryl McColgan:
Hehehe
Steph:
And I was like, and I realized right then, I need to show my face way more because we are a beautiful team over here. We have several people who help make things run around here, but you’re gonna see me, you’re gonna show up and I’m gonna be on the other end. So I’m excited to get to chat to your listeners.
Cheryl McColgan:
Yeah, and if people didn’t quite catch just how good of a branding person that Stephanie is, like her whole thing about the name of the company and the matching, like if you didn’t get all that, pay attention because she’s very, very good.
Steph:
Thank
Cheryl McColgan:
And
Steph:
you.
Cheryl McColgan:
also you do share a lot of really fun behind the scenes content, sometimes with your clients and stuff. I’ll catch that you’re doing a photo shoot for the day with their brand and working on colors and stuff, and it’s just all very interesting. So, highly encourage you to go follow Steph over at GetThemEverywhere. And thank you again so much for coming on today and sharing more about your story.
Steph:
Yes, thank you for having me.
In this week's episode, I speak with Mahryah Shain, CEO of More Hari Naturally. He shares about what can cause hair loss and why DHT plays an important role. Visit More Hair Naturally to learn more about Mahryah and the company. They also offer free hair loss consultations.
Watch the interview on YouTube
Automated transcript, please forgive errors.
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.93)Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. I am the founder of Heal and Nourish Grow, Cheryl McColgan. And today I am joined by Mariah Shane, who, as you heard in his bio, is the CEO of a hair health company, but he has kind of made this his passion in life. And he's going to share with us today some insights and things that we can possibly do to help hopefully make our hair a little bit healthier going forward. So
Mahryah Shain (00:09.265)who, as you heard in his bio, is the CEO of a hair health company, but he has kind of made this his passion in life, and he's going to share with us today some insights and things that we can possibly do to help hopefully make our hair a little bit healthier going forward. So, welcome, Ryan. Could you just share with everybody kind of your background a little bit and how you got into this field?
Cheryl McColgan (00:25.438)Welcome, Raya. Could you just share with everybody kind of your background a little bit and how you got into this field around hair health?
Mahryah Shain (00:32.581)Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me here today. I'm very happy to be here. So basically, here's how this, it happened organically, I should say. So just growing up, I'm from California, I'm still in California. And growing up in California, I've always been raised with the philosophy that everything our body needs to survive exists in nature.
that we have survived millions of years of evolution synergistically evolving with nature as we go. So when our bodies and our bodies are designed to survive, we are designed to live and to thrive. So I've always had the approach that when something's non-optimum with my body, my goal is to make my body strong enough to handle that situation.
you know, and that exists in nature. That's always where I go first, is that area. How can I strengthen that area of my body so my body can fix what's going on? Now, hair loss is in my family. Every man in my family is totally bald. I am thrilled to have what I have because I should be like cue ball bald today. So when my father started losing his hair, we were like, oh, he was like, I wanna fix this. What's happening?
And so we started looking around for remedies. And this was probably the 90s, I'd say, mid 90s in there. So we started looking around for solutions and remedies. Cause we're like, okay, so he's losing his hair and he's trying to fix it. And like everyone else does, he was kind of panicking and stuff cause it's a big deal for people. And there was nothing there. There was nothing in the natural realm that really was game changing. Like there were…
there were lots of stuff like rubbing onion on your head and you know little cures like that but nothing really substantial that was like this is going to change my hair this is going to help it so he went down the drug route the popular route the same drugs that were made in the 70s the same drugs everyone's using today he went down that route and he started getting sick he started like you know his body he started getting very tired he his immune system dropped he actually started developing breasts because it started altering his hormones
Mahryah Shain (02:57.669)And so he was like, this is not cool. This is not, this isn't, this isn't what I want. And we were all the same, like, no, you gotta, you gotta stop this. And my mother's from Italy. And so we have cousins in the Lake Como region and she was just talking to them casually about, you know, life and catching up. And she mentioned what's going on with my father.
In this week's episode, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal shares how she went from being stressed out and overweight to getting her health back. She shares some actionable tips anyone can use to learn to trust themselves again and why this is so important in your health journey.
For the resources from Dr. Venugopal mentioned in the episode, please visit her website.
Watch the episode on YouTube
Automated Transcript, please forgive errors.
Cheryl McColgan:Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Priyanka. We had this little discussion before we started today. I could pronounce her last name, but I didn't want to risk messing it up. And she is a board-certified OB-GYN turned health wellness coach. I'm excited for her to share her background with you because a lot of people that listen to this podcast are interested in. Obviously health and wellness, but sometimes specifically weight loss. And she definitely has a great short story to share with us about that. So Dr. Priyanka welcome. And I'm excited for people to hear about your background.
Priyanka Venugopal:I'm so excited to be here, Cheryl. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, you can call me Priyanka. Priyanka just on its own is just fine. Dr. Priyanka or Dr. Priyanka Venugopal. Either way, I will respond to all of those names.
Cheryl McColgan:Great. So, if you could just tell people about how you had some struggles, I think even going back to when you were a child with your weight, and I'm guessing that, you know, maybe family background had some things to do with this. So if you could just share with people all about that and then kind of how you, how that followed you into adulthood.
Priyanka Venugopal:Yeah, absolutely. So my story, I kind of want to almost start backwards. Right now I am a mind and body health coach for high achieving professional working moms who want to hit their dream body goals while living their real life in a way that feels simple and sustainable. And the reason I'm so incredibly passionate about that for high achieving women is because of my own story. I have been that high achiever again as a physician and as a working mom, really that human that wanted just to do more, be more, like create like. basically want more achievements in my life. And I would say that probably from a really, really young age, that was a lot of my story. I was just the high achiever, the girl in the front of the classroom, like raised her hand and won every single eight plus in gold star. And it really served me well for many years of my life. Obviously it got me into medical school and through residency. But also what happened along the way is a lot of my own. self-concept, the way that I thought about myself, my worth and value was really attached to accomplishment. And, you know, where this over many, many years led to was having a very good on paper life as a physician. I had a very supportive partner and two like very cute and loving kids who drive me crazy half the time. And I also weighed a little over 200 pounds. And this was as this was back in 2018, 2019. And, you know, between you and me, if you have tried to lose weight, you have probably a long history of trying to lose weight, and that was me as well. I have been on that roller coaster for many, many years where I tried every single thing. If you name it, I have probably tried it in some capacity, and it would work until it stopped working. Calorie counting and points and macros and exercising at the gym, I did it all. I would lose a lot of weight, and then I would always somehow gain it back, and then some. And that was kind of where I was a few years ago, where I was feeling like I had this good on paper life, but I just felt really heavy in my body. And ultimately I felt really frustrated because I was like, I'm a smart person. And yet this is one area of my life that I just can't seem to figure out.
In this episode, Narado Zeco Powell and I talk about metabolic flexibility. You can find Zeco online on his Instagram and at the Matter Over Mind podcast. If you're curious about the tool he mentioned, Lumen, you can find it at this link. Use HEALNOURISHGROW at checkout to receive $50 off.
Watch this episode on YouTube
Automatically generated transcript, please forgive errors.
Cheryl McColgan:
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I am the founder, Cheryl McColgan, and today I am joined by one of my old friends, Zeco Powell, and he has a podcast that I was on quite a while back, and we have known each other on social media now for a couple years. He does some awesome work, and so I can't wait to share his story with you today. Zeco, welcome. And if you could just start by telling people. how you got into what you're doing today, because you have a very interesting past about how you grew up and how you became sort of interested in all of this health and wellness stuff. So I'll just let you kind of tell a little bit about your story, how you got into this.
Zeco:
old friend. That's an excellent introduction by the way, because I'm like old as dirt. So thank you so much for letting the audience know when you're talking to your butt. But yeah, so I grew up in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and my history is a little different than most people. Like I wasn't overweight, but I was underweight. So growing up, I think I was 17 years old, five foot 11, and I weighed about 113 pounds, right? So imagine what underweight
Cheryl McColgan:
Wow.
Zeco:
I was at that time. So when I moved to the US, and this is when I moved to the US, is first I actually weighed myself, right? And when I was here, I started to get interesting in weightlifting, because I was a skinny kid walking around. So I started weightlifting, eating more, and then I eventually would gain weight. You know, I would gain weight, lose weight. I mean, I've been over 200 pounds before, did not drop back to 150. And I got to the point where it was becoming dangerous, because it wasn't just about... you know, health anymore is just how much weight I could gain, then I feel like, like body dysmorphia, right? Like I gained this weight, but I'm like, I'm not happy with myself. I ain't start losing this weight again. Right away. But it really, when you look at it, I've been like healthy, or semi, I've been fit all my life, not healthy. I was fit, but wasn't healthy. I saw that asthma, I had eczema issues. I mean, you look at me, I look good, you know, and, but you would never tell that I have all these problems. And this is something I tell people that We see people in the gym and we say, oh, this person looks so good, but that doesn't mean they're healthy. That's why you shouldn't actually strive to be like somebody else because you don't know what they're struggling with. So anyway, fast forward to about, let's say, five years ago, my asthma was really, really bad. And it was bad to the point to where days I couldn't work. I have to go home, lay on the couch. I mean, I'm completely dizzy. I feel awful. And the last time I, one of the times I went to the doctor, he said to me, I said, hey, Doc, look. because they put me on more medication. They kept increasing my medication. I said, there's something I can do outside of this medication, right? I'm gonna take your medications, but now you have me on pills and Advair, plus my butyrol I've already been taking, and I'm not getting any better. I'm only in my 30s at this point. And he said, no, well, you know, you could try to eat better, and that's about it, you know? And I was like, okay, no, this can't be it. There's no way this can be it. I'm too young to be on these medicated pills, and I know what's gonna happen down the line, right? So I started reading books from like Dr. Stephen Gunter, Dr. Mark Hymer, listened to podcasts like Ben Greenfield and the Model Health Show. I mean,
This episode is all about hair loss and some recent trauma that made it even worse. I've started to try to figure out the cause and have been implementing some new practices to try to make it better.
Future episodes on this topic will include hair loss experts, things I've tried, what's working and what's not.
Things I'm trying so far:
iRestore (has a 12-month money back guarantee)
K18 Repair Mask and Hair Oil
Collagen
MSM
Watch this episode on YouTube
In this episode, Sheri Geffreys and Gina Gallagher share their healthy journey stories. They have an interesting past together! They were close friends in high school, went their separate ways and eventually found each other again on Facebook and rekindled their friendship. It turned out they'd each had a unique health journey that led them to seek out alternative healing methods.
Learn how each of these women found relief and healing and eventually founded a company to help other women find better health products. Visit them at Yonder Food.
Watch on YouTube:
Automated Transcript, please forgive errors.
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.897)Hello everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. And if you have been listening for a while, you might have noticed that I have been a little bit absent and some of you know that I moved out to Utah. So the podcast has been on a little bit of a hold, but we are back and I am excited to kick off being back on the air officially with two lovely women that I have with here with me today. And that is Gina and Sherry, and they will get the privilege of me being.
maybe slightly rusty, but I think it should all be fine. So welcome to both of you. Before we get started, I'm just going to share with the audience, I think, I don't think I've ever had actually two guests at the same time on the show before. So that'll be really fun. And these two ladies have been like best friends since high school. So we're going to hear all this really interesting backstory between the two of them. I'm gonna let Sherry start. So Sherry, if you're watching on video, hopefully their names show up, but Gina has the lovely dark brown luscious.
Sheri Geffreys (00:30.303)Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (00:58.505)hair and Sherry has the lovely blonde luscious hair, which we'll get to later in the podcast, probably why that is and why I'm mentioning that. But Sherry, why don't you get started and just tell everybody a little bit about your health journey and how you got interested in being in this space and sharing your story.
Sheri Geffreys (01:17.582)sure, yeah. I mean, I mean, like you, you know, what happens in life is sometimes we have a very, you know, serious health scare. And that could also be the biggest blessing ever. Because for me, it was, you know, when I was 30 years old, and I was on maternity leave from a corporate the corporate world. And while I was pregnant, I felt a lump right here. And they just, oh, it's probably just your thyroid, no big deal. You know, we'll look at it when you
you know, like maybe three months or so after you give birth. Well, right after my son was born, I just, you know, you just kind of feel in your gut, like something's not right. Like it's way big. I went in there like immediately after he was born. And two weeks after he was born, they diagnosed me with Hodgkin's lymphoma. And I had to go immediately into chemo and radiation. And I had to bound my breasts from stop from breastfeeding. And it just like hit me and I didn't know anything, you know, cause I wasn't really.
studying the natural health space or anything. So I just didn't know anything and I just went into it and it scared me because my brother had that same exact cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, and he got a secondary cancer from all the harsh treatment, the chemo and radiation. He got, by the time he was 25, he got like a, like from the radiation here, he got like a cancer in his glands. And then he ended up passing away. So he had, that already happened. So I just went into chemo radiation. I was freaked out.
And as soon as that was done, I just did a deep dive into natural health. I said, I have to change my genetic expression. I gotta figure out how to get this stuff out of my body. I need to change my life because I'm a mom now and moms are warriors, you know? And so I needed to be here for the long haul. And so that's when it started. And that was like,
In this episode, I talk about my unintended hiatus from the podcast, what I've been doing the last six months and what to expect from the podcast going forward. My intention is to be back to weekly episodes with great health and wellness information and I hope you'll continue to be along for the ride.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW0_VsL-g8U
Automated transcript, may contain errors
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.038)Hello everyone, it's Cheryl McColgan, the founder of Heal Nourish Grow and I am welcoming you back today to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I have been on a bit of an unintended hiatus and before we just jump back into kind of business as usual here on the podcast, I thought I would just do a quick episode just to kind of reintroduce you to the concept. Tell you.
where I've been, what I've been doing, why I didn't announce a break because number one, I didn't know I was going to take one. But just to sort of tell you how things will be going from here on out and let you know what has changed in the Heal Nourish Grow world. So anyway, I actually recorded an episode about maybe five or six weeks ago. I'd have to look back.
And is this kind of intended to jump back in, but then I really wanted to get, you know, kind of everything lined up again, get some more guests lined up for you, which I have a couple coming up that I think you'll really enjoy. But on to what happened. So basically I, last summer we made a very sudden decision to sell our house in Cincinnati. It sold very, very quickly.
And then we went on what I like to call the Vega Bond Tour. And if you'd like to learn more about that or read more about that, there's several pieces of our adventure over on the website at healnourishgrow.com under the travel section. But basically, since both of our kids are away at school, we decided, okay, let's take advantage of this housing market, sell this big house that we don't need anymore, and we can both work remotely. So we basically just went on the road for a few months and spent…
month at a time in a few different places. We started out by getting our kids back to school and then we drove across country and our first stop was staying in Big Sky Montana for a month in a little fishing cabin on the Gallatin River and then we were in Sedona for a month in October and really we intended to do this through about March or April of this year, 2023.
and then be back in Cincinnati. Or we thought, well, maybe along the way, we'll look at some real estate and see if there's somewhere else we wanna be, but we pretty much fully intended to be back in Cincinnati. Well, there were other plans in mind for us, apparently, because we ended up really falling in love with a house that we found in the Salt Lake, Utah area. We love to snowboard, and that's one of the things that we were enjoying about the idea of being able to travel.
Um, you know, for a month at a time is to stay in some different places that were snowboarding locations. Cause normally we only get to snowboard once or twice a winter, maybe three times. But we have to travel to do that because as you know, Cincinnati is not exactly the hotbed of ski and snowboards area. So, um, so that's something that we enjoy and we figure while we can still do it. Uh, why not be actually close to it and be able to do it anytime. And we just happened to do it in the season where.
In Utah, this was the most snow they've ever had like ever in history in this, in the mountains now down in the city, there was a lot of snow too, but mostly it's in the mountains and so, uh, you know, not everybody had to deal with that amount of snow all the time, but it's like 900 inches in the mountains for the year. So it was a pretty epic snowboard year. So if we ever were going to move, this was a good time to make that decision. And so what happened with the podcast was I was, I had done really well of.
pre-booking a whole bunch of episodes and I was actually took al...
Dr. Laura Brown is a naturopathic doctor who uses a holistic medicine approach. She has a variety of skills but pays special attention to the inner workings of the gut microbiome, one of the most important parts of our bodies.
This discussion was interesting because Dr. Brown talks about the connection between mind, body and spirit and how all of these work together for a person to be healthy and whole. When a part of the body is out of order or functioning incorrectly, it can throw off everything. Treating people holistically instead of traditionally means choosing to go deeper into the why and how of the body.
This is an important topic because many people put their bodies through stress, unhealthy diet or workout habits, and generally not taking care of themselves. Using this knowledge to change habits and find ways of healing, like eating whole foods, exercising and getting enough rest are key to creating ultimate wellness.
Our free Ultimate Wellness and Happiness workbook can help with these things!
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on YouTube:
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH DR. LAURA
Website: https://southendguelph.ca
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/DrLauraMBrownND
Book: https://amzn.to/3EAjk1q
Dr. Alyssa Dweck is an OBGYN with a special interest in female menopausal and sexual health. She has co-authored several books and been on two morning shows. Dr. Dweck also regularly contributes to several magazines and professional publications.
Today’s discussion walks through age-related fertility and female health issues. Understanding that fertility takes time is important. Dr. Dweck recommends figuring it out by your early thirties and creating a plan with your gynecologist. She also references using cryogenics to freeze eggs, to save them from aging until you’re ready to begin the process.
Toward the end of the conversation, we shifted to perimenopausal and menopausal health. Even though it may sound scary and overwhelming, it’s something that should be explored and discussed with your doctor to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH DR. ALYSSA
Website: hellobonafide
Deb Erickson is a master neuro trainer, the founder of the ICAN Institute and the creator of the ICAN Neuro System application. She has devoted years of her life to the retraining of the brain and has researched numerous neurological methods.
Today’s episode involves a discussion of Deb’s foundational years that led her to found the ICAN Institute and the neuro training tools in use today. We also cover how neurological devices can affect weight gain and loss and how to do so in a healthy manner.
Deb is an inspiration and someone who shares methods of opening up and learning why you have mental and emotional limiters. She describes how to be at peace with these so you can grow and move forward.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on YouTube:
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH DEB
Professional Website: ICAN Institute
Personal Website: deberickson.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/icaninstitute
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Deb-Erickson/100008786070440/
This episode is the follow-up to my first New Year’s goals podcast episode earlier in December. After learning how to space out your goals and tackle them one at a time, I’ve got another method to tackle your goals in the new year.
Today we discuss what I call “The Five C’s.”
These are consistency, commitment, choose, community, and connect. My bonus “C” is clarity. All of these are keys to create habit change through mindset and daily choices.
Everyone needs these things in order to be successful in implementing goals and habits. These keys can make the difference between a short-term changes and habits that actually stick in the long term.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Dr. Paul Goodman is an experienced clinician, surgeon and teacher who studies how food can be used to treat various conditions and diseases. He focuses on whole-body health and using food as medicine. His background in ophthalmology is what led to nutritional research and its benefits when it comes to treating eye conditions. He currently works as the Chief Medical Officer at Fresh and Lean.
Today’s discussion explores eye health as well as overall health. Proper nutrition is easily overlooked but can be exactly what’s needed to make a difference in your health and well-being.
In addition to our body’s relationship with food, Dr. Goodman explains the correlation between diabetes and blood sugar and how various nutrition and exercise habits can make an impact in the disease process. This was an extremely productive conversation that offers encouragement in how to start transitioning to a healthier diet without the pressure to make an instant change.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on Youtube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH DR. GOODMAN
Website: https://www.freshnlean.com/blog/author/paul-g/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-goodman-
Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/pgoodmancmo
When it comes to New Year’s goals, people can easily get discouraged. Everyone starts out with the best intentions and new goals. However, many quickly lose steam and may ditch New Year’s resolutions altogether. In most cases, this is because people are overly aggressive with their goals.
In this video, I explain the purpose of my digital ultimate wellness and happiness workbook and how it can contribute to your success in creating new habits. Trying to achieve smaller goals over a long period of time rather than massive goals over a short time, makes new habits easier, more sustainable and will help you achieve your longer term goals.
If you need more than a workbook and an accountability group or coaching speaks to you, reach out!
Ultimate Wellness and Happiness WorkbookYou can find the 12 weeks to ultimate wellness and happiness workbook for free on the website under books! If one of your goals in the new year is weight loss, you may also want to check out 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose weight.
Whether your goal is to lose weight, grow stronger, or replace bad habits with good ones, breaking down your year into manageable chunks is a great strategy for helping your New Year’s goals stick around.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Lynne Bowman is a 76 year old grandmother now living her healthiest life. She’s managing diabetes with a mostly plant-based diet and healthy habits like consistent movement. She emphasizes the phrase “real food” throughout our discussion because that’s what she believes is the healthiest diet, and on that point, we totally agree!
As you all know, I emphasize the importance of eating the proper amount of protein for optimal health. While not impossible, it is very difficult to get enough high-quality, complete protein from plant sources. We actually need even more protein as we age to build and maintain muscle.
That said, Lynne is the perfect example of how there is no one size fits all approach to finding optimal health. Each person needs to experiment with what works best for their own body while monitoring markers like fasting insulin, glucose, HbA1c, blood pressure and body composition.
A fantastic way to tell what your diet is really doing to your blood sugar is to wear a continuous glucose monitor. For a more in-depth discussion of that as well as a discount at Nutrisense, please check out my show with Molly Downy. If you want to test your own insulin levels, here’s a website to help you get started.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the show on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Connect with Lynne
Website: https://lynnebowman.com
Instagram: lynneparmiterbowman
Facebook: Lynne Bowman
The China Study Book
Dr. Nathan Goodyear works at Brio Medical and has made it his goal to treat cancer using a holistic approach involving many alternative therapies. His position as medical director allows him the freedom to explore a wellness lifestyle for his patients through a solution-based, integrative approach based in science.
Today’s discussion hits close to home, as cancer is something quite prevalent in my family history. Hearing about Dr. Goodyear’s patients and success with holistic medicine is such amazing news and something I hope becomes more widespread. If you’re looking for creative treatments and solutions for cancer, you can make an appointment on the Brio Medical website.
Dr. Goodyear’s method and research gives great information and hope to those wanting education and understanding of the reasons behind cancer growth and progression.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH DR. GOODYEAR
Website: brio.com
Twitter: Dr. Goodyear
Facebook: Dr. Goodyear
Alan Aragon is a nutrition researcher with 30 years worth of experience in the field. He relies on evidence-based information to publish a monthly research review as well as articles for magazines and scientific journals. He helps recreational and professional athletes with performance and nutrition.
Today’s discussion focuses on his recent paper about age-related anabolic resistance and how much protein we should consume daily. Spoiler alert, the current RDA guidelines are inadequate for optimal performance and muscle maintenance. Alan also discusses how protein intake can vary from person to person based on a multitude of factors.
This subject is near and dear to my heart because protein is something I have been very focused on in my work over the last two years!
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH ALAN
Website: https://alanaragon.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thealanaragon
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.aragon.796
Dr. Fiona Tassoni resides in Australia and practices traditional Chinese medicine as well as acupuncture. She planned on an entirely different career but began studying acupuncture and Chinese medicine after experiencing healing from it herself.
We discuss the benefits of holistic medicine and healing methods, as well as an in-depth conversation on fertility. Dr. Tassoni has a particular focus on the importance of harmony in a relationship when trying to conceive. She also offers several practical tips you can begin practicing today to improve your fertility whether you’re male or female.
Dr. Tassoni offers traditional and holistic approaches to fertility and pregnancy care, both in-person and online. Her training and knowledge are invaluable, and I’m so excited to share this conversation with you!
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Book: 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight
Dry Farm Wines
Drinking the Best Exogenous Ketones
Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts
Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG for discount
Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep
Instagram Day to day keto food and inspiration in my stories
Facebook
YouTube
Pinterest
TikTok
Amazon Store
My favorite electrolytes
Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF
Six Tips for Better Sleep
OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)
Manta Blackout Sleep Mask and new audio sleep mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto
Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode
Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Connect with Dr. Fiona
Instagram: dr.fionatassoni
Facebook Group: Pregnancy Accelerator Program Community
Website: pregnancyaccelerator.com
Today's episode covers ideas for making it through the holidays without gaining weight. I'm passionate about living a keto lifestyle, but that doesn't mean sacrificing holiday cheer! I offer several useful tips for those that want to maintain routine and health while attending various holiday gatherings throughout the months of November and December.One of the best ways to keep from binge eating at holiday parties is to eat a filling protein snack a few hours beforehand. This could be a few eggs, a chicken breast, or some Carnivore Crisps (save with HNG10) eaten in advance to keep cravings at bay. Although this episode is mostly about avoiding weight gain and stress throughout the holidays, I also give some updates on my personal life. This includes us VRBO-hopping between several states after selling our house in August and going back home to Cincinnati for Christmas! If you want to see where we've been staying recently, you can follow along on our Vagabond Tour and the latest episode in Sedona.Watch the episode on YouTube
Matt Zemon has a master's degree in neuroscience and psychology. He has dedicated his life to introducing and explaining the benefits of psychedelics like ketamine to treat mental health conditions.
Today's discussion, although centered around psychedelics, also covers the positives and negatives regarding antidepressants and several real life examples. De-stigmatizing the mental health conversation is a battle that takes time and energy. Matt's goal is to show the benefits of legal psychedelics like ketamine without the pressure to utilize them.
Matt Zemon is the founder of HAPPŸŸ, a mental wellness company that specializes in the explanation and use of oral ketamine. This psychedelic drug can help open the mind and promote healing from past traumas. He also co-founded the company Psychable, which helps locate ketamine clinics for the safe and learned use of the drug.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH MATTPsychable: https://psychable.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattzemon/His Book: Psychedelics for Everyone: A Beginner's Guide to these Powerful Medicines for Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, PTSD and Expanding Consciousness
Dr. Eugene Choi is a certified transformational mindset coach, with a background in clinical pharmacy and business. His goal is to delve deep into the emotional and mental health of individuals and uncover the reasons behind their constant state of stress.
Today’s discussion centers around the body’s executive and survival instincts and fight, flight, or freeze responses. This can mean a person is living within one of those responses and is no longer thinking rationally.
Choosing to undergo transformational mindset training means learning how to override survival instincts to revert back to executive function, known as the rational brain. We also explore some of the reasons behind why certain brain responses are more natural.
Dr. Choi offers real world examples as well as his own personal experiences and research to back up his methods. He developed a course explaining the steps individuals can go through to self-identify and start to heal. Although these methods may seem new and different to some, they have some strong evidence to back them up.
Watch the episode on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/zz7nboSJNuc
CONNECT WITH DR. CHOIWebsite: https://destinyhacks.co/private-workshopThe Neurohacking Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-neurohacking-podcast/id1545882602
Greg "The Hydrogen Man" used to suffer from various chronic pains and injuries, and finally found relief in molecular hydrogen. He invested in various tools to learn about this healing method, and eventually began running his own tests to see what molecular hydrogen could affect or change about the human body.
Now, he’s a hydrogen therapy evangelist, promoting the safe and educated use of molecular hydrogen to those with chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, and other illnesses.
Today’s topic of discussion centers around molecular hydrogen, but also the importance of knowing your own body and what it needs to heal. Along with his methods, Greg explains the importance of diet, rest, and exercise and how those can all be contributing factors that molecular hydrogen can boost.
Greg the Hydrogen Man has now dedicated over ten years of his life to the study of molecular hydrogen and its benefits, and recommends learning the science behind it.
Get $100 off a hydrogen machine with HNG100.
Watch the full episode on YouTube:
CONNECT WITH GREG Email: uprising144k@gmail.comYouTube: UPRISING 144K
Bronson Dant has been a coach and trainer for over ten years. His goal is to improve people's lives through the use of keto nutrition in conjunction with fitness training and consistent movement. He started his CrossFit gym in 2014.
Topics for this week's episode include developing a keto lifestyle, the benefits of strength training, alternatives to going to the gym and how to combine ketogenic nutrition and movement to achieve optimal results. We also discuss how Coach Bronson uses keto nutrition and consistent movement in his own life, as well as the lives of the people he trains.
This was a fun conversation since you know my personal focus is not only on overall health and wellness, but also on using a ketogenic diet as a means to ultimate wellness. Learn more about optimizing health in my book, 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight.
View the interview on YouTube:
CONNECT WITH COACH BRONSON:
Website:ultimateketogenicfitness.com YouTube:https://youtube.com/c/ultimateketogenicfitness Facebook:fitketofam.com Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/coach_bronson_keto/
Rick Olderman is a physical therapist, pilates instructor, author, speaker, and more. He has spent the last 20 years studying the effects of chronic pain and injuries and experimenting with various methods to fully resolve them. Despite the lack of understanding around chronic pain, Rick has pushed through to learn more every day.
Today’s episode includes discussion surrounding the causes and effects of chronic pain and injuries, the effects of physical therapy and the small adjustments people can make to improve their quality of life. We also get to hear several methods for examining yourself to learn why you might have mysterious pain.
He also emphasizes the value every individual’s body holds and how they can test and develop healthy methods of coping with or absolutely resolving chronic pain. Be sure to check out the link below for his next book and the discount code mentioned!
View the interview on YouTube:
CONNECT WITH RICK
Website: rickolderman.com Use code FIXINGYOU for 20% off his next book Podcast:https://rickn6.podbean.com. YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXNyv2iwhBZkXFzZXpjXBAA
Stephanie Leaf is a gardening, food preservation, and scratch cooking expert. Her goal is to help modern mothers be more confident and self-reliant, while improving their ability to provide for their families. Maintaining traditions and healthy life choices are a balancing act with which we could all use some help!
Today's episode consists of tips on starting a garden, maintaining a stock of preserved foods using both a garden harvest and buying in bulk. Stephanie also has a podcast called "Simple Living Made Simple" and and a blog called "Wingin' It on the Homestead"where you can learn more about these methods.
Her expertise comes from years of research and experience in relation to gardening, canning, and food storage. I'm excited to share with you how to simplify a healthier life while respecting some of these time honored traditions. Even though they may seem complicated, Stephanie explains the simplest ways to get started.
View the episode on YouTube:
Click here for apps to track what's in your pantry, fridge, or freezer.
CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE:
Website:https://wingingitonthehomestead.com Podcast:https://wingingitonthehomestead.com/simple-living-made-simple-podcast Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/simpleliving_madesimple
Today I’m sharing about the recent twists and turns in my life. As we continue on the road with the Vagabond Tour, I discuss some of my tips for staying on track with diet and exercise while traveling and experiencing some stress.
We put our Cincinnati house on the market a few months ago, and it sold within a few days. Right now we’re renting a Montana fishing cabin waiting for the market to chill before we go purchase again.
In other news, the Heal Nourish Grow website has just been refreshed and I'm so excited to share the new design with you. It’s a lot more user friendly and you should be able to quickly locate any of my previous posts and podcasts that interest you.
I also discuss the stress of the last several months and my favorite ways of staying healthy and happy while on the road.
I have some great guests coming up and I’m excited to share their expertise. As always, please let me know what kind of content you’d like to see and hear…I always do my best to deliver the topics that are most relevant to you! Let me know if this resonates with you and your life!
Watch the episode on YouTube:
In this week’s episode, Chris Burres shares his knowledge and experience with health related technology and how he got into the supplement business. He was a scientist in manufacturing, selling “the most beautiful molecule” along with his business partner. This molecule has the ability to trap other elements and deliver them wherever necessary.
Over time, Burres researched various properties of this molecule including its oxidation level, power levels, and atomic properties. He had learned that if there is no readily available antioxidant within the body, there might be reactive oxygen species (ROS) traveling around the body causing cellular damage (oxidative stress). This molecule has the ability to hold onto ROS until the body is able to replenish antioxidants, preventing oxidative stress.
After discussing the potential of this molecule to improve health by preventing oxidative stress, Burres explains the effects and potential of this molecule if taken internally. He also shares personal anecdotes , how using the supplement has helped people in various ways including improved focus and better sleep.
View the interview on YouTube:
CONNECT WITH CHRISLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisburresTwitter: https://twitter.com/chrisburreseweb
Dr. Leybelis Padilla is a practicing gastroenterologist and health coach. She’s always been passionate about health and wellness and now combines her medical training and focus on gut health to help others.
Topics for this week's episode included going gluten free, colon cleanses, the importance of getting a colonoscopy and why the age to have your first colonoscopy (45) has changed.
She also believes in the importance of a healthy mindset, the mind body connection and how yoga and meditation can help with overall health.
Watch the interview on YouTube
CONNECT WITH DR. LEYBELLIS PADILLA
Website: https://leybelismd.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/leybelismdFree E-book! How Your Gut Can Impact Your Skin https://leybelismd.com/freebie-gut-and-skin
In this week's episode I spoke with Dr. Yug Varna, co-founder and CEO of Phyla. Together with his co-founder, they created the world’s most advanced probiotic acne system. The other co-founder, Maria Cho, struggled to find an effective solution to treat her acne. Yug and Maria worked together to create a product that addressed her skin condition in a way other skincare doesn't. Using what they knew about the skin's microbiome, Dr. Varma and Dr. Cho developed Phylabioitics.
Skin's Microbiome
To prove the efficacy of the new product, they ran clinical trials on phages and how they affect microbiome diversity. Phages are part of the skin microbiome and are helpful in combating acne since they kill harmful bacteria.
Dr. Varna has a Ph.D. in microbiology from Johns Hopkins University and conducted over 10 years of microbiome research at UCSF. His passion was looking for the technology to support his products.
He discusses the differences between the microbiome in our gut vs the skin's microbiome. The skin microbiome refers to the ecosystem of microbes on your skin, comparing it a rainforest. It helps protect you from pathogens that could affect your system and overall health.
Watch the episode on YouTube
In this week's episode, Dr. Jane Levesque shares her insight on the relationship between diet, fertility, and lifestyle. Her own journey led her to focus on her health and provoked curiosity about the effects of diets and lifestyle on fertility. This eventually led her to study naturopathy. She now teaches others about how to manipulate lifestyle factor to help with fertility and easier pregnancies.
She learned that birth is just the beginning; women tend to treat pregnancy as the marathon, but the marathon officially begins after child birth.
After learning more about individualized healthcare, she realized that every woman needs a different routine, pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy, and post-partum. Dr.Levesque uses her passion and personal experiences to help other women and men through fertility, childbirth and parenthood. She shares how important diet is to maintain a balanced nervous system, personalized diet plans vs. generalized diet plans, her individualized program, and much more!
Watch the interview on YouTube
In this week's episode, Dr. Glenn Livingston shines a light on the industry of dietary habits, eating disorders, and more. His work relates people’s emotional states to the types of food they crave or struggle with and noticed the same in his own life. He's passionate about teaching this correlation to others and how knowing about this can overcome poor eating habits.
Throughout Dr. Livingston’s research, he learned about how impulses work in the human brain and how certain situations may affect those impulses. There are a lot of powerful impulses that we are expected to deal with as human beings. Learning techniques to short circuit these impulses is key for habit change, especially with eating.
He shares his insight on how much of an impact an unhealthy diet/lifestyle could have in other areas of life. His programs and book offer steps and habits to incorporate into daily life, allowing greater control over eating behaviors as well as other areas.
Watch the interview on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator Six Tips for Better Sleep: https://healnourishgrow.com/better-sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount): https://chilisleep.com Manta Blackout Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/3GIZ1wL Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto: https://healnourishgrow.com/complete-guide-ketogenic-diet Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode: https://healnourishgrow.com/getting-started-with-keto-podcast Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/c39a5091aa
CONNECT WITH DR. GLENN LIVINGSTON
Website: https://NeverBingeAgain.comFREE Book: Never Binge Again https://amzn.to/3AFjmmsTwitter: https://twitter.com/NeverBingeAgain LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drglennlivingston Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livingstonglennFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/glenn.livingston.10/
Joe Cohen, is the Founder and CEO of SelfHacked, SelfDecode and LabTest Analyzer. SelfHacked is a resource to search for any supplement or health topic. SelfDecode and LabTestAnalyzer are personalized health report services to discover personalized diets, supplements and lifestyle plans using their advanced health DNA testing and analysis. You can use your existing Ancestry, 23andme or any other DNA file to access their core insights for FREE or order a new DNA test through them.
Joe has a long history of health interests and gives consultations to people who sought his advice. He’s written articles, books and is a frequent speaker at health conferences. Growing up he suffered from several health issues including inflammation, brain fog, fatigue, digestive problems, anxiety, depression, and other issues which led him to found SelfDecode.
He found that DNA lab tests gave him great insights but were hard to understand. As part of his journey, he made it his mission to help others by making it easier to understand the health insights that can be gained from DNA testing. Their service helps you understand, track and monitor your health journey as well as discover lifestyle risks with insights, recommended reading and suggested supplements.
In this episode, Joe is sharing his screen and walking through some of the types of things you can learn with SelfDecode, so you may prefer to watch this one on YouTube.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator Six Tips for Better Sleep: https://healnourishgrow.com/better-sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount): https://chilisleep.com Manta Blackout Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/3GIZ1wL Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto: https://healnourishgrow.com/complete-guide-ketogenic-diet Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode: https://healnourishgrow.com/getting-started-with-keto-podcast Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/c39a5091aa
CONNECT WITH JOE
Website: https://selfdecode.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/mrbiohacker
Catharine Arnston is the founder and CEO of EnergyBits, the first premium algae company in the world. They value quality and focus on educating others on algae as a vital superfood and why you should be using algae for health benefits.
When her sister was diagnosed with cancer, Catharine started doing some serious research. The oncologist recommended she change her diet to an alkaline diet to prepare for chemo. Unfortunately, neither sister had any knowledge of this so Catharine did extensive research on alkaline foods. She learned a lot about plant-based nutrition and health benefits. After leaning more, she wanted to make the world a better place by sharing the benefits of algae and an alkaline diet. This desire drove her to change her career route and go back to school for nutrition. Algae for Health Benefits She learned algae is the most alkaline, plant-based nutrient-dense food. In Asia, it's been used for fifty years as a health and longevity supplement. Spirulina and Chlorella have a long list of benefits in addition to being keto friendly. They contain approximately 64 percent protein, 40 vitamins/minerals and zero carbohydrates. They put it into a tablet form at her company to make this superfood more accessible. The tablet makes it shelf stable, effortless, vegan and safe for anyone.
Listen in to learn more about how Spirulina and Chlorella affect the mitochondria (the energy powerhouse of our cells) by protecting them for greater health and energy. The compressed pill form makes taking algae for health benefits easy.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator Six Tips for Better Sleep: https://healnourishgrow.com/better-sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount): https://chilisleep.com Manta Blackout Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/3GIZ1wL
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto: https://healnourishgrow.com/complete-guide-ketogenic-diet Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode: https://healnourishgrow.com/getting-started-with-keto-podcast Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/c39a5091aa
CONNECT WITH CATHARINE
Website: https://www.energybits.com/ code HNG for 20% off your purchase Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/energybits/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ENERGYbits/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/energybits
In this week's episode, Madison Madden shares her insights on ayurvedic medicine, yoga and what she has learned about her own health. She spent most of her childhood ill due to poor immune function. Exploring ways to better her health created a passion for nutrition and practices to support mental and physical well-being.
As part of her healing, she found a spiritual teacher and learned more about the energetic lifestyle properties of yoga and Ayurveda. When combined with yoga, Madison found that Ayurveda significantly impacted her health.
Her love of these ancient practices led her to become an Ayurvedic Doctor so she could help others heal. Due to her training, Madden treats physical health issues within a system that treats the person as a whole energetic being; mind, body and spirit.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator Six Tips for Better Sleep: https://healnourishgrow.com/better-sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount): https://chilisleep.com Manta Blackout Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/3GIZ1wL
Getting Started with Keto Resources:
The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto: https://healnourishgrow.com/complete-guide-ketogenic-diet Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode: https://healnourishgrow.com/getting-started-with-keto-podcast Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/c39a5091aa
CONNECT WITH MADISON MADDEN
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/madison.madden.353 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livewise_madisonmadden/?hl=en Mind Body Food book: https://amzn.to/3babDmv
Kelly Ann Gorman was misdiagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and Neuromyelitis Optica. She started to heal her body by creating her own recipes and caring more about her health and wellness. Kelly took a stance to learn about medical malpractice law since no firm would represent her since she is still living. She took it upon herself to become her own attorney for not only one but six medical malpractice legal cases.
Now as a patient advocate, she shares her story on social media and on her podcast to help others become more aware of the importance of being an advocate for your own health and medical care.
Not only a patient advocate. Kelly is also the author of Everything is Messy. She shares her knowledge and organization tips, strategies as well as budget-friendly vegan recipes. The new book she is working on emphasizes gut health as a means to heal various health problems.
Kelly offers coaching and consulting for podcast production and a creative coaching program to help you level up on LinkedIn. Be sure to check out the Kelly Ann Cares Podcast where you can hear more about health, healing, and wellness.
Watch the Episode on Youtube
CONNECT WITH KELLYWEBSITE: https://kellyanngorman.comhttps://everythingismessy.comKELLY ANN CARES PODCAST: https://kellyanngorman.comON DEMAND-A 2022 BUSINESS EXPERIENCE: https://everything-is-messy-collection.myshopify.com/products/on-demand-a-2022-business-experienceTIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@kellyanngormanofficialLINKEDIN NEWSLETTER: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6866512629620453376WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: https://kellyanngorman.com/business-mindset-organizational-toolsLINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/kellyanngormanINSTAGRAM: @kellyanngormanofficialYOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/kellyanngormanPINTEREST: https://www.pinterest.com/kellyanngorman
In this week's episode, Avigail Gimpel shares her insights on bonding, and forming relationships with children with ADHD. She began her journey by teaching at a school for international students where she found her passion and purpose for delving deeper into and working with those with ADHD. You'll learn more about how ADHD is diagnosed, ADHD causes, ADHD types, what ADHD means (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and about ADHD and caffeine.
As a teacher, she developed a program for kids with ADHD which helped her gain a strong background in the subject as well. Throughout her personal experience, she found that daily medication might not be the optimal solution for dealing with ADHD and discovered the importance of physical health, diet, health, and interactions in terms of how one can work along with ADHD.
In her book, she identifies and breaks down the most common causes of ADHD including the instant gratification personality. While diagnosing kids with ADHD, as parents or caregivers, it is important to take note of behaviors that might be of importance or might want to take a look at. Being honest as parents/caregivers is of utmost importance as they should create plans and programs that they can handle.
After learning more about and understanding the depth of ADHD in children and its various effects, Gimpel finds ADHD to be an opportunity for parents to step in and use their creativity to create games and other plans to help their children. She talks about the resilience and perseverance of kids which gives them the ability to be strong while coupled with the leadership of parents.
If you're struggling to relate or find strategies that work for your child with ADHD, you'll definitely want to listen to this episode and get in touch with Avigail!
Watch the episode on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator Six Tips for Better Sleep: https://healnourishgrow.com/better-sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount): https://bit.ly/hngchilisleep Manta Blackout Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/3GIZ1wL
CONNECT WITH AVIGAIL GIMPEL LinkedIn: https://il.linkedin.com/in/avigail-gimpel-4a2a4bb9 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hyperhealing.adhd Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/avigail.gimpel.7 Twitter: https://twitter.com/avigailgimpel HyperHealing Website: https://www.hyperhealing.org HyperHealing book: https://amzn.to/3IzFBMY
Automated transcript, please forgive errors.
Cheryl McColgan: Everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I am joined today by my guest, Abigail, and hopefully this works a little better because we've bee...
Today I'm sharing news about my new cookbook, KetoCon and some online free events where you can register for entrepreneurial and health advice. On July 11, right after this episode came out, the publisher made a data driven decision to pull the cookbook, They feel like they missed the market opportunity. They may revisit it in the future but for now it's a dead deal. I can't believe this is happening so late in the process, but it is what it is I guess. I'm obviously upset, but moving on although I REALLY wish they would have made this decision a few weeks ago before I started bugging all of you about this and promoting it everywhere, including at KetoCon this past weekend. They may revisit its release if grain free gets hot again, but for now it's cancelled. Obviously, I am heartbroken and in shock. :( I've got a lot more exciting projects up my sleeve though, so stay tuned. I'm not about to let this get me down! Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Watch the Episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL My Mandoline: Mueller Multi Blade Adjustable Mandoline Book Event: Joseph Beth Cincinnati Creative Side Businesses for Women: Free Online Summit July 11-15 Summer Health Bundle Starts July 11, 2022: Over $1100 of Health Related Products and Education for FREE 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJWebsite: https://healnourishgrow.comDry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrowDrinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.comButcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrowGet Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrowFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrowYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrowPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrowTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrowAmazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrowLinks to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shopNutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.ioMy favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplexUpdated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculatorSix Tips for Better SleepOOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount)Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
In this week's episode, Dr. Kerry Gelb shares his journey of working on his documentary, Open Your Eyes, which shines a spotlight on the relationship between diabetes and eyesight. After conducting pilot studies, he discovered there was a link between and insulin resistance. Unfortunately, there are many eye problems with diabetes. Vascular as well as other diseases could be diagnosed sooner using the eye as a source of information. The eye can now be seen as the window to your health.
As Dr. Gelb traveled to film his documentary, he was able to learn more about the relationship between diet and eye diseases. Those who ate more unprocessed food and spent more time in the sun were seen to develop macular diseases of the eye at a lower rate. He spoke with experts regarding different relationships between insulin resistance and eye health.
After diving deeper into learning about the eyes from a different perspective, Dr. Gelb filmed this documentary to share his insights and knowledge with the general public as well as shine a spotlight on the importance of eye health.
He also shared the 20-20-20 rule for eye health, use of blue-light filtering glasses, importance of sun exposure and much more.
Watch the Episode on YouTube
https://youtu.be/EfkCehHoBes
Automated transcript, please forgive errors.
Cheryl McColgan: Hey everyone, welcome back to the heel nurse grow podcast. I am really excited to share my guess I say that every time, but I am always really tied to share my guest with you because I think we're gonna have a really awesome conversation today with Dr. Bell about eye health. And he has been working for the last several years on the documentary that we're going to discuss in detail, and then also of special interest to my audience specifically, is he does some work with eye health and diabetes, and so… You know, I don't like to get too doom and gloom with these things, but my gosh, if saving your site isn't a good enough reason to work on your metabolic health, I don't know what is… So anyway, all that said, Welcome, you can share a little bit about yourself beyond what I just said Beyond with in your bio, how you got into being passionate about eye health and what led you to spend two years of your life traveling around the world to make this documentary.
Open Your Eyes Documentary
Dr. Kerry Gelb: We thank you for having me. I'm so excited that our documentary is called Open your eyes is now on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, iTunes, Google Play YouTube, movies and documentaries. And I think people realize that the eyes are important, but they don't realize the connection between the I and systemic disease. So the purpose of making the movie is to have the population, the public at large, realized that through the eye, we could diagnose disease much sooner than a lot of times they could be diagnosed from going to internists, all your family practice, especially when we're dealing with vascular disease, because when we look into the eye, we could see 10 Mike grounds or less, so we can see the capillaries, the really small capillaries, so as you know, capillaries go from your toe up into your brain, and we could tell a lot by looking at the capillaries in the eye, in fact, you mentioned diabetes a number of years ago, when I got this special camera to image the blood muscles in the back of the Ithaca Aries, I would see these little power chains. And at the beginning, we didn't know what it was.
Eye Problems with Diabetes
Dr. Kerry Gelb: And then, but because I'm very interested in functional medicine, and I've been until a lot of the FM conferences and I spent a lot of time taking lectures from Mark Houston, who you might have heard of, was an integrative cardiologist and vascular disease, I put two into it together, and I realized it was probably those were micro aneurysms and they were cared for insulin resistance, so we did a pilot study to see of these micro-aneurysms were related t...
In this week’s episode, Eileen Durfee shares her journey of growing up with various physical ailments. After focusing on her health, she discovered the symptoms she was experiencing were due to her body not eliminating the toxins to which she was regularly exposed. Environmental toxins can negatively affect our health. While some sources of toxins are more obvious, they can also be in the air we breathe, what we drink and things we put on our skin.
To help her recovery, Eileen tried different medications, diets, therapies and more. However, once she finally started eliminating environmental toxins and supplementing with the right minerals, she started feeling better.
After discovering this key to health, Eileen became passionate about helping others feel better too. She started a company to create natural healing products. One such product is an innovative toxin-free, portable sauna that facilitates many benefits like detoxification. Eileen talks about her experience and research in creating a radiant isolated tent for the sauna from organic webbing. You can see all of her innovative products at the links below.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
CONNECT WITH EILEEN
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creatrixsolutions Website: https://www.creatrixsolutions.com Exhibiting Healing Products at Fight Week: https://ufcinternationalfightweek2022.com
In this episode, Samantha Louise tells us about her personal journey self-discovery and how that inspired her to create Brave Girl International. Our society promotes competition between women, whether it is having the best outfit, looks, grades, etc. There is a lot of societal pressure on women to "be perfect." This ideal is often portrayed in media as the standard to which women must adhere. This pressure often causes stress, depression and hopelessness in young women.
Samantha Louise is helping girls and women to rewrite the rules and narrative that surrounds how women should be in the world. She guides them through a new path to well-being less focused on perfection and competition between women.
Brave Girl International will act as a leadership cultivator and supportive community for young women. Rewriting the societal narrative gives women and girls a new way of thinking and being in the world. She hopes to connect girls and women across the globe to build a healthy sisterhood where they will be guided through the development of healthy well being. Samantha Louise also gave insight into how parents can approach these topics in a non-threatening way with their children.
Watch the episode on YouTube:
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/ Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA Website: https://www.samanthalouise.co/ Sign up for Brave Girl Circle and reach out! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samanthalouise.co Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipcultivator Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoYaE-UUIvcXCpl9En_M8eQ
Karolina Rzadkowolska took a break from alcohol for Dry January about four years ago and quickly decided never to go back. How do you know if you're an alcoholic though? With people drinking alcohol more than ever since the pandemic started there are a lot more people asking this question. There is more of a need than ever for people to look at their alcohol consumption. Karolina shares the benefits of quitting alcohol as well as tips for understanding more about your alcohol consumption habits.
She points out the game of whether drinking is a problem compared to who vs binge drinking vs "being the bum under the bridge" is a slippery slope. Actually most people who consume alcohol over drink. Some questions to ask include whether it makes you feel good, whether the habit is serving you and your current goals. It also has many negative physical effects that may be at odds with optimal health.
Making conscious decisions about alcohol is what is important and recognizing what ways you may be using it as a crutch that keeps you from addressing your true needs.
Watch the episode on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF:Â https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/ Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH KAROLINA
Book: Euphoric, Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, Healthier, More Confident You Website: https://euphoricaf.com Instagram.com: https://www.instagram.com/euphoric.af How Do You Know if You're An Alcoholic? This question is being asked a lot more since the pandemic. Classic signs include:
Hiding alcohol Not being honest about how much you're drinking Wishing you could drink less alcohol Feeling sick or groggy after a night of drinking Noticing your alcohol tolerance going up Drinking to feel normal Drinking despite not really wanting to Feeling agitated or sad when you don't get to drink
Automated transcript, please forgive any errors.
Cheryl McColgan: Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to The Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today, I am joined by Karolina, and I am not going to attempt her last pale and hers, but she is a health and wellness coach, and as you heard in the bio, she works with people on some alcohol-related stuff, but we're just gonna have a chat today, and talk about her own personal health journey and sort of how she got into this work, so... Welcome. Carla, can you just give everyone a little background about yourself in your own words, just kind of what your health journey was like and why you started getting into this work?
Karolina Rzadkowolska: Absolutely, Cheryl,
In this episode I talk with Robin Switzer, CEO of KetoCon. Robin found keto after years a of a dysfunctional relationship with food and dieting. Keto helped her overcome food addiction, get rid of the extra weight she was carrying and led her to a new life's purpose.
We also discuss the excitement of KetoCon being back this year after the pandemic hiatus. Learn more about the speakers, panels, sessions and why you want to be in attendance. My partners Vitamix and Kalorik are generously donating kitchen tools to be used at the event as well as items that we're giving away. Be sure to attend my cooking demonstration on Saturday at 3:30 to have a chance to win a Kalorik Maxx Air Fryer Grill or a Vitamix blender!
Listen to the interview to learn more about Robin's story as well as learning more about what you can learn at KetoCon. Use code healnourishgrow at checkout to get a great discount on your KetoCon ticket.
Watch the episode with Robin on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount:https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF:Â https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/ Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH ROBIN
Website: KetoCon Instagram: https://intstagram.com/ketocon KetoCon Discount: Use healnourishgrow as your promo code at checkout
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Automated transcript, please forgive the errors.
Cheryl McColgan: Hello everyone, welcome back to the heel nourish grow podcast. Today, I am joined by Robin Switzer, who owns and manages her own production company, and also happens to the CEO of KetoCon. I read the introduction, but first, before we really talk about any of that stuff, the whole reason that Robin got involved in this space is because of some previous health issues and things of her own. Robin, I'm going let you take it away and so you can kinda share some of your background and how you got into eating low carb and how keto and eventually running KetoCon evolved for you.
Robin Switzer: Sure. Well, first, thank you. Thank you for having me, thank you for the opportunity to share the story. To talk a little bit about KetoCon. I found the keto diet left as a result of many, many years of struggling with what I understand now to be metal dysfunction, but it was all really a result of just not being able to properly manage the...
In this episode I talk with Dr. David Shirazi who has training in both functional orthodontics and chinese medicine/acupuncture. This conversion was great and featured unconventional ties between tooth and mouth health to sleep apnea, ADHD, facial chronic pain, bruxism and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders. He also reveals how mouth breathing is related to many dysfunctional outcomes.
If you're struggling to find a practitioner to help with these health conditions, Dr. Shirazi gave some great resources as well as having the ability to see patients in his offices in the Los Angeles, California or online.
Watch the episode with Dr. Shirazi on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/ Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
To find functional orthodontic practitioners around the world: TMJTherapyCentre.com
CONNECT WITH DR. SHIRAZI
Website: https://tmjla.com Brentwood and Thousand Oaks, Los Angeles area office Nasal Spray: https://truebiologicfunction.com Podcast: Bite, Breathe and Balance Podcast launching 2022
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Learn more about the benefits of fasting, keto, PSMF and the 21 day fat loss kickstart. Break stalls, make keto easy and take diet breaks! Both paperback and kindle versions of the book are out today.
Watch the episode on YouTube
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21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/ Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask Protein Sparing Modified Fast: George Blackburn Dr. Jason Fung
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Dr. Brian Lenzkes was an overweight, stressed out physician who was frustrated with his inability to truly help his patients. After years of traditional practice within the US healthcare system, he was overworked and frustrated. He eventually stumbled across low carb eating and Dr. Jason Fung who is a world expert on helping people with diabetes reverse their disease through fasting.
Once he transformed his own health through these practices, he knew he had to share these treatments with his patients. He proceeded to completely transform is practice and now helps his patients through a direct care model in which he is taking people off of medication daily because they are improving their metabolic health.
I am so excited to share his work with you! He is truly impacting health and wellness on a daily basis in both his life and the lives of his patients.
Watch the episode with Dr. Lenzkes on YouTube
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21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight: https://amzn.to/3EWXyDJ Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/ Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH DR. LENZKES
Podcast: Low Carb MD Podcast: Life's Best Medicine Website: Low Carb San Diego Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blenzkes/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianLenzkes
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Jeremy has been working on his health and wellness for years and has lots of practical tips on how to integrate wellness practices into your life. He avoided knee surgery by losing 70 pounds and now works on staying in the moment, meditation and staying consistent with the gym. He is one of the cohosts of the Fit Mess Podcast where he and Zach talk about all things health and wellness with a great male perspective.
We talk about mindfulness, meditation, vegetarian keto, getting consistent in the gym and mental health.
Watch the interview withe Jeremy on YouTube below.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/ Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask Sacha Inchi Powder
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide Vegetarian Keto: Ketotarian by Dr. Will Cole
CONNECT WITH JEREMY
Website: The Fit Mess Podcast: The Fit Mess Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fitmessguys and https://www.instagram.com/graterj Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fitmessguys Emotional Freedom Technique
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Learn why breathwork, sleep, meditation, heat therapy and short intense workouts are the key to overall health. We also talk about how it's why eat less, move more isn't the whole story, something I also talk about in my new book, the 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight.
Ryan also talks about why delicious sauces make eating healthier a lot easier, LOL. Be sure to listen to to hear more about all of these things!
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/
Sauce Ryan Mentioned in the Interview
Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH RYAN
Website: Ryan Kennedy Health Podcast: The Ryan Kennedy Show Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanckennedy
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Anji Kat has been working with employees for years on improving their health and wellness. She's changing traditional work wellness programs through her coaching. She helps people engineer their lives to create space for change and is a huge proponent of decluttering as a means for creating change.
Watch the interview on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/
Six Tips for Better Sleep OOler Bed Topper for Hot or Cold Sleepers (healnourishgrow at checkout for an amazing discount) Manta Blackout Sleep Mask
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH ANJI
Website: https://www.soulfullivingwithanji.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soufullivingwithanji
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
In this episode, I chat with Dr. Clayton Bostock, who focuses on functional medicine in Vancouver, Canada. His goal is empowering patients in their own healing process. Most of his patients are dealing with some combination of the following: fatigue, anxiety, digestive concerns like bloating or constipation; hormone-related issues like painful periods, endometriosis or PCOS. Depression and chronic pain are also very common.
His goal is to work with his patients to find the root cause, often going back to the basics like stress, sleep, proper light, etc. to find health again.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
CONNECT WITH CLAYTON
Website: https://drclaytonbostock.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drclaytonbostocknd
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
This episode starts with sharing about my 21 day fat loss kickstart book coming out in April. I wanted to write this book was because of the continual questions I get about how to get started with keto, how to make it easier and how to break stalls and plateaus that seem to always happen when you're trying to lose weight. It's sort of a 21 day keto diet but you'll want to read the book description for full details.
Then I shift into addressing some specific questions from a reader about weight loss, starting keto and what macros to use while getting started.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find us.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io My favorite electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com/product/mitoplex Updated Keto Calculator with Higher Protein and PSMF: https://healnourishgrow.com/keto-calculator/
Getting Started with Keto Resources: The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
This transcript is automated and may have mistakes.
Hey everyone, welcome back to The Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I haven't done one of these kinds of episodes in a little while, where it is me chatting with you about some things today I have something really different to share, and it's something that I've wanted to do on the podcast, but I kinda had to wait until it got going a little bit to be able to do it, and that is sort of answering more of listener questions or answering questions from people that interact with me on social media on a daily basis, or after they've seen a presentation of mine. I often get some follow-up questions, so that's what the most of this episode is going to be about today is the specific case of this person to protect her anonymity, I'll just call her Jane, that is obviously her real name, but Jane had a bunch of follow-up questions after the presentation that I did at the Keto diet Summit, so instead of just telling that on a one-to-one basis, especially when it's a very long complicated question and it's got some nuance to it, it's very difficult to write all of that out as a response.
So quite often, it's a much easier for me to just record a video, and so I thought I would do that and share it with you as well, so that hopefully some of the things that we might talk about here today might help you also, but before I get into that, I just want to share about... First of all, as you guys know with the whole pandemic thing, it's been a very interesting time for a lot of us, and change in our routine, change in our jobs, possibly change in our day-to-day experience, and part of the things that were happening initially in the pandemic, if I did decide that I wanted to do a podcast again, and I don't think I've ever shared on this show,
Learn about practices that helped Sara through injury, addiction and divorce. She now helps others create a healthy lifestyle through mindset coaching and is amazingly inspirational.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io
CONNECT WITH SARA Website: https://saragogginyoung.com
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Kellie's before and after weight loss with keto.
The internet can be a beautiful thing. Thanks to meeting each other on Instagram and bonding over food and keto, I've now had the privilege of knowing Kellie Smith for several years now. She is a 46 year old wife and mother determined to achieve ultimate wellness and healing from autoimmune disease. She started with keto in 2018, but now tend to lean more towards carnivoreish as a means to better manage symptoms from scleroderma, sjogren's syndrome, lupus, raynaud's phenomenon and interstitial lung disease for a total diagnosis of mixed connective tissue disease.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kellie, she is a truly lovely person and an inspiration to me every day.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
Watch the interview on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYLWebsite: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io About the FODMAP protocol: https://healnourishgrow.com/five-low-fodmap-diet-tips-to-manage-ibs
CONNECT WITH KELLIE Instagram: https://instagram.com/caffeinie.and.optimism
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Ever wonder about continuous glucose monitors or don't even know what the heck that is? Listen to my conversation with Molly Downey to learn why using this simple device can give you so much insight into your health. Continuous glucose monitoring devices are being used more often now by health seekers outside of the diabetes community. Learn more about why you may want to use this device to learn more about how what eat affects your body. Discount code for nutrisense.io with this link or HNG20 for $25 off your first month.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show. Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor I used a Nutritsense continuous glucose monitor for several months and really enjoyed my experience. The insights it gave into what foods affected my blood sugar and the role stress and exercise play in glucose levels were very interesting as well. I definitely recommend you try one if you're interested in learning more about how specific foods affect your blood sugar. Nutrisense Cost How much Nutrisense costs partially depends on how long you choose to use it. Generally committing to more time in the program will give you greater savings. The easiest way to see how much Nutrisense will cost is to fill out their online survey with your goals. You can choose as little as two weeks, but to really get good health insights, I recommend at least a month. One of the best parts about it is that memberships come with access to dieticians that can help you interpret your results. Because I love their product so much, I partnered with Nutrisense to get you discount, just use HNG20 t0 save money. What is a Blood Sugar Monitor? True to its name, a blood sugar monitor measures your blood sugar. With a traditional blood sugar monitor, you have to prick your finger and place your blood on a special strip multiple times a day to know where your blood sugar is. Even when you do this a lot, it's easy to miss certain insights. A continuous glucose monitor is on the back of your arm for two weeks and measures blood sugar constantly. A tiny filament you can't feel goes into the interstitial space and gives an excellent proxy for blood sugar. It gives you readings 24/7 by just scanning the monitor with your phone. By using a continuous glucose monitor, you have a complete picture of how certain activities and food really affect your blood sugar.
Watch the interview with Molly on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL
Nutrisense, code HNG20 for discount: https://www.nutrisense.io Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH MOLLY Website: https://www.nutrisense.io Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nutrisenseio Instagram: https://instagram.com/nutrisenseio
In this episode I talk to Terry Tucker about his various careers that ultimately prepared him for the biggest battle of his life, cancer. While dealing with his diagnosis and life after amputation, he came to a realization that there were several lessons he wanted to share about finding your life's purpose. He believes everyone is born to lead an uncommon and extraordinary life and that has nothing to do with where you work, how much money you make, or where you live. Living with purpose can take some investigation, but it's definitely worth it.
One of the great lessons is finding a way to live your life's purpose even if it has nothing to do with your day job. This concept is something often forgotten, but no doubt one of the things you can implement to make your life more purpose driven and joyful. I loved this talk with Terry and I hope you to to!
Please leave your review on Apple Podcasts and let me know what your biggest takeaway from this episode was.
Watch the interview on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH TERRY Website: https://www.motivationalcheck.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/motivationalcheck Twitter: https://twitter.com/terrytucker2012 Sustainable Excellence Book
Below is an automated transcript, mistakes are likely.
Cheryl McColgan: Everyone, welcome back to Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today, I have a guest that I'm really excited to share with you, we've actually been planning this for a couple of months, and we're finally recording today and is Terry Tucker. So welcome, Terry. And if you could just tell the folks a little bit about your backgrounds though, before we go into what we're actually gonna talk about, they have some idea of where you're coming from, basically.
Terry Tucker: Sure, thanks for having me on, Cheryl. I'm really looking forward to talking with you. I'll try to give you the Reader's Digest version of my background, you can't tell this for my voice or from looking at me, but I'm 6 foot 8 inches tall and played college basketball at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. After growing up in Chicago, I'm actually the oldest of three boys, I have a brother who's 67, who was a picture for the University of Notre name baseball team, I have another brother who's six, put six... It was drugs about the Cleveland Cavaliers in the national passport on, and then my dad was... I put five, so I kind of joke that if you stat behind our family growing up in church, there wasn't a prayer chance you were gonna see anything that was going on whatsoever, but our 58-inch mother was really the boss, it didn't matter how big, tall strong we were whatever. Mom says That's the way I went. After I graduated from college and moved home to find a job, I'm really gonna date myself now, but this was long before the Internet was available, and I was all set to make my mark on the world with my newly at Business Administration degree.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Terry Tucker: And I look back now and realize what a knucklehead was if they can't do anything...
In this episode, I talk to Dr. Jim Collins about the benefits of CBD oil and why you may want to add it to your wellness plan. We talk about the benefits of CBD oil for menopausal symptoms, energy, mood, addictions, pets and sleep among other things. We also discussed why full spectrum CBD is important and why you want to look for high quality, third party testing, which is so important for any supplements, powders or vitamins you use. If you want more detail about why using CBD oil is helpful, especially for aging and longevity, check out Dr. Collins' book, Living Longer and Stronger with CBD.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
Watch the interview on YouTube
CONNECT WITH CHERYL Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Butcher Box, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH DR. JIM COLLINS Professional Website: https://drjimcollins.com Sapphire Essentials CBD Oil and Products: https://www.sapphire-essentials.com use code HNG20 at checkout for 20% off Healthcare Continuing Education: https://collinslearning.com Online Continuing Education: https://ceu.academy Living Longer and Stronger with CBD Book
Heal Nourish Grow Podcast Episode 17 Transcript
Cheryl McColgan: Alright, welcome everybody. Today, I am joined by Dr. Jim Collins, and he just wrote this excellent new book, All about the benefits of CBD oil, and I am really excited to chat with him today, so, Dr. Collins, I'll just let you kind of introduce yourself and give some background on how you got into Gerontology, and then we'll go from there.
Dr. Jim Collins: Yeah, fantastic. Cheryl, thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it. I kinda knew what I wanted to be early in life. My father was an electrical engineer and my mother was a nursing assistant in the same nursing home for 30 years.
Cheryl McColgan: Oh wow.
Dr. Jim Collins: Yeah, a long long time. So it's a bit... It's kind of a funny story, and it's related to the movie Driving Miss Daisy.
[laughter]
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Dr. Jim Collins: So... But I was driving Ms. Mary. So my father worked in the afternoons, and my mom worked at 7:30, eight o'clock in the morning until three or whatever. So my father made me a deal and he said, "Son, I'll buy you a car the minute you turn 16, but you'll have to drive your mom to work and you'll have to pick her up after work," and I said, "Oh," because mom didn't like to drive. But my high school was over here, the nursing home was approximately six minutes away, so it was no big deal whatsoever. So I got out of school, high school, about 30-45 minutes before my mother got off her shift.
Dr. Jim Collins: So, I'm a very social person, so I didn't wait in the parking lot listening to music or anything like that. I parked the car and I went into the nursing home, five days a week, and I was just amazed at what I saw. Elderly people who were very wise, very cognitively alert,
In this episode we explore some new theories of obesity and the croissant diet with Brad Marshall. His background is in molecular biology, food history, a stint at the culinary institute and butchering which gives him a unique perspective and the ability to decipher complex scientific concepts about how our bodies process fats and store energy. Brad posits the reason we get fat is mitochondrial dysfunction from too much polyunsaturated fat in the diet. He has been testing this theory on himself and others in the biohacking community.
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CONNECT WITH CHERYL Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH BRAD Instagram: https://instagram.com/fireinabottle Web: https://fireinabottle.net Low PUFA Pork: https://firebrandmeats.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/fireinabottle
Cheryl McColgan: Thanks everyone for joining us today. I have Brad Marshall, who, as you heard in his bio, is a very much a Renaissance man. So welcome, Brad. How are you doing?
Brad Marshall: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Cheryl McColgan: Yeah. So you have been making the rounds lately because you have this diet. You sort of created the somewhat controversial, but I love the name of it, 'cause I've always been a big fan of French food, and that is The Croissant Diet. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to start experimenting with this stuff and how you got interested in The Croissant Diet part. The Croissant Diet and French Paradox Brad Marshall: Sure. And so my... Well, my background dietarily is I've been keto a lot of my life, but I also went to the French Culinary Institute back in the late '90s, I guess, in New York City. And so, as I've been a keto adult, and knowing that that works and seeing that it helps people, I've had to struggle knowing that at the same time, the traditional French diet where they're combining starch with butter, seems to be keeping people thin as well. And I'm a food historian, and I love looking at the dietary history of people in New York State who were mostly dairy farmers back in the day. And looking at people in New York City, even into the '50s and '60s, when you look at those old photos, you can see that everybody is... Almost everyone is universally slim. And not even that they're not fat, but they're really skinny. And you can look at menus of the day and food trends and USDA data, and everyone was combining starch and butter and meat and potatoes, and they stay lean. And then something changed and people started to get fat. And so my thought is that, what changed?
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Brad Marshall: And so I started reading the blog Hyperlipid. I gained weight, I was working, I wasn't... I was working a lot, running a farm and a butcher shop, and I wasn't paying very close attention to my diet 'cause I was overwhelmed and I was eating restaurant food and whatever,
In this episode, Katie and I chat about how she transitioned her entire family to a lower carb lifestyle. She shares about the difference in her own life as well as how cutting out sugar affected her son who has autism, keto and autism just go together.
Katie talks about how there is keto substitute for almost anything, whether cheat days are worth it and how she's made keto her lifestyle. We actually recorded this episode almost a year ago so some of the comments might be slightly dated but all of the content is still completely relevant.
We both agree sticking to keto for several months in the beginning is critical to success and allows you more freedom later. She also has some great thoughts on when/how/whether you should cheat or go off plan. Katie has some great tips as well about introducing kids to reading labels and how to get your kids on board with a different lifestyle. Our best tip is to lead by example and let kids see the choices you're making without being super dogmatic. Just plant the seed!
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
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CONNECT WITH CHERYL Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Drinking Ketones: https://hng.shopketo.com Get Notified About the Fat Loss Book: https://heal-nourish-grow-llc.ck.page/ad0a682866 Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH KATIE Instagram: https://instagram.com/ketolacylane
Some resources about keto and autism: Current nutritional approaches in managing autism spectrum disorder: A review Ketogenic diet versus gluten free casein free diet in autistic children: a case-control study A modified ketogenic gluten-free diet with MCT improves behavior in children with autism spectrum disorder Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
In this episode Dr. Meg Mill talks all about headaches and migraines and how to combat them. Like other functional medicine doctors, she is focused on finding the root cause of headaches to help get rid of them for good. She is offering a special eight week program in January to help you finally get the migraine relief you deserve and we also talk about migraines and nutrition.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
Watch the interview on You Tube
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH DR. MILL
Website: https://www.megmill.com January 2022 Program: http://happinessbeyondheadaches.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmegmill
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Cheryl McColgan: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to The Heal Nourish Grow Podcast. Today, I am joined by Dr. Meg Mill, and I'm really excited to share her knowledge with you because she focuses a lot on headaches, which is something I know a lot of people in this audience struggle with. So, welcome, Dr. Mill. Can you just give us some of your background, how you... Before you get to how you got into this work, you were originally, I believe, a pharmacist, so maybe you could kinda tell us about your progression of moving into functional medicine.
Dr. Meg Mill: Yes, absolutely, thank you so much for having me here. I spent almost 20 years actually practicing as a clinical pharmacist before I made my way into functional medicine, and I kind of have two tracks of how I ended up in this space, and one was a personal journey and the other one was just from experience with patients. So I just... Over the years of working with people, we're seeing people, I would say, survive rather than thrive, I would see people coming in with more and more medications and just really still not feeling their best. And although there's a really wonderful purpose for medications, it's not the answer for everything. And when you're not looking into some of the root causes, people were getting more and more sick while kind of piling up and getting side effects and other things from medications.
Dr. Meg Mill: And in the same vein, I actually had spent years with IBS and had been jumping around to different gastroenterologists and getting to them like, "Oh, you're fine, but... " And I did not feel fine by any means. And so I was looking for other answers and just found through that journey and my own personal experience, was able to find function medicine and heal myself and then go on to change career paths and go back and get certifications to practice. And I do see... It's amazing the difference you can see for people when you're looking into the root cause, so many things can be fixed and healed that way.
Cheryl McColgan: Yeah, that is a real frustration in western medicine, and it's certainly something that in the... I'm very involved in the keto low-carb space and biohacking stuff, and it's certainly a conversation that we have quite often in the community about, why don't we address the root cause more often? So as you moved away from pharmacy into functional...
Jack Bobo is a food futurist and the Author of Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices. In this episode we talk about the psychology of eating, some of the factors and habits that drive food choices and issues regarding our food system and sustainability.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH JACK
Website: https://futurityfood.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/futurityfood/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FuturityFood/
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Cheryl McColgan Hey everyone, welcome back to The Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today, I am joined by Jack Bobo, he is the author of "Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices." I'm really excited to have him here. As you heard on his bio, he has such an interesting background with food and policy and psychology. So you know I'm interested in that because that's my background as well. So anyway, welcome Jack, if can you tell us a little bit about your book and how you got into all this, that would be wonderful? Obesity Epidemic in America Jack Bobo Great, well, thank you, thank you for having me on this show. Really excited and delighted to be here. Well, the book really came out of this question that I kept asking myself, how can it be at a moment in time when we know more about health and nutrition than we ever have in the history of the planet, we've never been more obese? As I'm sure you talk about all the time, 42 percent of Americans are obese, 75 percent are overweight or obese, the number is going to 50 percent if we don't change that trajectory. And so, the book was sort of my effort to look into how have things changed over time, looking at the psychology of food choices, how our brains and environment are driving the choices we have, and really what would it take to reshape our and redesign our food environment to make healthy choices the easy choice? Because I certainly don't feel like we should be struggling as hard as we are to be healthy. I mean, our grandparents, they were cooking with lard for goodness sake, [chuckle] and yet none of them were obese, so, clearly lots of things have changed. And how do we get back to that point where we can enjoy the food we eat, not feel so stressed about it?
Cheryl McColgan And when you were doing your deep dive into that for the book, what was it that you kind of found, Was there a predominant answer, did you find it to be a number of co-factors, what has surprised you the most after looking into this a little bit more?
Jack Bobo Well, I think as all of these things, it's complicated, and it's not one thing, it's a thousand things. And often when we're looking at new diets and other things, we're looking for something to fix the problem. And it isn't one thing, you know, it's each decision we make, how things are packaged, the food and the environment we're living in, but let me just give you one example. If we went back to the 1960s, there's a guy named David Wallerstein, who's sort of the guy who invented super sized portions....
In this episode, I chat about how to get started with keto without overcomplicating it! For a more detailed version on how and why to get started with keto, be sure to check out our beginners guide. If you want to know more about how to get into ketosis quickly, what to eat to get into ketosis, how to get into ketosis quickly after cheating or how to get started on keto, you're in the right place!
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Cronometer Macro Tracking App: https://cronometer.com Keto Macro Calculator: https://healnourishgrow.com/ketocalculator Mitoplex Electrolytes: https://hng.shopketo.com Life Extension Blood Tests: https://lifeextension.com
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast. Today we're going to discuss how to get started on keto. We're getting close to the beginning of a new year and what happens every single year is people set New Year's resolutions. Quite often, that revolves around getting healthier in some way, or losing weight, or changing habits. So I wanted to give this to you as a resource so if you're not doing keto or low carb yet, you'll hae some more information on why it might be something to try, some of the benefits, some of the things that it can do for you.
If you already are low carb or keto, you might start getting questions at the beginning of the new year from your friend that might want to lose a couple of pounds or change some of their habits. They might ask you how they should get started and quite often, that is a difficult position to be in because you can tell them sort of how you do it or how you think that they should approach it, but sometimes it's just easier to hear these things from somebody else.
So I thought I would just give you this resource so that you have it and share it with anybody that's interested in starting to live a lower carb lifestyle. This will give them a good idea of how to get started on keto. How to Get into Ketosis Quickly
So I've talked about this subject multiple times in the past and getting started on keto really comes down to wo ways to approach it. There is the "Rip It Off Like a Band-Aid" and go all in approach. With this method you start really restricting your carbohydrates very strongly from the very beginning. This is how to get into ketosis quickly. Although I might argue there is no real reason to get into ketosis quickly, this is one way to do it.
Then there's a more gentle approach and that is really the approach that I recommend. Getting into ketosis with this approach means going lower carb in a slow manner. It gives your body more time to adjust. It gives you time to adjust your mindset and it gives you time to make some changes in your household. For example, planning what types of foods you'll have in the house.
Those are the two approaches to getting into ketosis. Either one you choose, you'll get into ketosis eventually and the difference is really only a couple of days to a week.
Rich Howard first started meal prepping in high school when he had special dietary needs as a wrestler. He continued his keto meal prep habit into college and has opted for keto meal prep or high protein versions at times depending on his goals. As a busy father and grad student, he continues to meal prep to save tie and money while eating healthy. His passion for meal prep led him to start the site mealprepify.com where he shares tips for meal prepping as well as recipes for meal prep.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Butcher Box: https://butchr.co/healnourishgrow Meal Prep Containers: https://amzn.to/3cKZ9PA
CONNECT WITH RICH
Website: https://mealprepify.com Email: rich at mealprepify dot com Keto Meal Prep Cheryl McColgan: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast. I'm really excited to share my guest with you, today. His name is Rich, and he runs a site all about meal prep, and it's really interesting how he got into that. I thought it would be great to chat with him going into the new year, because I know a lot of you are gonna be working on your diets and wondering what you can do to stay on track. So Rich is going to help us out with that today. So welcome, and tell everybody a little bit about sort of your background and how you got to be interested in meal prepping.
Rich Howard: Yeah, thank you, Cheryl, it's great to be here. Yeah, my name is Rich. I have been meal prepping for as long as I've been cooking. I grew up in Austin, Texas, and I wrestled in high school, that was my high school sport. One of the weird things about wrestling is that you have to have weight classes, and so as a high school kid, I was having to diet and eat my own food, and so really, it just started out of necessity. My mom didn't wanna cook separate food for me every night, and I don't blame her at all. And so, if the family is having spaghetti, then I would get on the grill and make chicken and rice. Meal Prep Saves Time and Money, Less Cooking Rich Howard: And after doing that several times, I realized quickly, I don't like cooking all that much at the time, and I don't have time, with studying and sports and practices and having to bring food to school that was on track with the diet, so I just started making all my own food. And I had some particular kind of food dietary needs at the time that I couldn't really even... I couldn't even buy food from restaurants really or from grocery stores. So for wrestling, I'd have my water weight down, and so I basically had a no-sodium diet. And if you've ever cooked or tracked sodium, anything you eat from anywhere is really high. And so out of necessity, I just started meal prepping.
Rich Howard: I would cook a bunch of food on Sunday nights for the school week as a Sophomore and Junior in high school, and that's really where I got started. And then, really, I just kind of continued since then. In college, I would... It is the same kind of deal, I wanted to save money and wanted to eat healthy. And so, I would cook a bunch of food on the weekend and eat it in between class and during the week and for dinner,
The benefits of fasting for health are numerous. In this episode, I give the the background for why I'm so committed to extended fasting for autophagy and health. Basically the short version is I have so much cancer in my family and my own previous history with multiple surgeries for tumors (you can read more about that here if you're interested). This is why I'm so committed to this health protocol in an effort to stay as disease free as possible. Extended fasting is a very powerful practice that has multiple benefits.
After I tell you more about my history and background with fasting, I read my in depth article about fasting. It goes into more detail about the benefits of fasting for health. It's a longer one so I figured it might be more convenient for you to be able to listen to it in audio form. The intro for this episode is below.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://healnourishgrow.com/dry-farm-wines-review-keto Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, $20 off with code HNG20 60 Hour Assisted Fast I Do Monthly: https://hng.rebootnow.com Butcher Box: https://bchrbox.co/HealNourishGrow Cookbook: https://cookbook.healnourishgrow.com
Well, hello everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I'm your host, Cheryl McColgan. And if you haven't been around my content before, this will be a new topic for you, but if you have been around for a while, this is something that you've heard me talk about many, many times in the past, and that is the topic of fasting. So before we get into the rest of the show today, I just wanna share with you some of my personal reasons why for fasting, so that you know where I'm coming from, and that you know why I'm so passionate about it, because it's a topic that I quite often speak about at keto summits and in other education. So I just wanna share with you my background. Why it's so important to me.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here. Benefits of Fasting for Health So about six, seven years ago or probably seven years ago now, my dad was diagnosed with blood cancer, and actually prior to that he had had thyroid cancer, and my whole family has a whole bunch of cancer. Both sides of the family. Breast cancer, colon cancer all kinds of things. Probably some of this is due to living in the South and maybe not having the best health habits, but it certainly, there is a genetic component to cancer, and so I started digging around and doing some research, and this is kind of a lot how I got to come to the whole keto and low carb space as well. But while I was digging around, I ended up finding some information, I was probably typing into Google cancer and cancer prevention, and I ended up finding an article about the 2016 Nobel Prize for autophagy, and I pulled this up so that I could say his name properly because I could never quite get it, but it's Yoshinori Ohsumi.
And so in 2016, he won the Nobel Prize for autophagy. Well, what autophagy is, what they discovered is it's your body's cellular clean up process, and basically you can think of autophagy on a contin...
In this episode Courtney and I discuss living with type one diabetes. She is extremely active and involved in bodybuilding, which has made managing her type one diabetes more difficult. However, through a keto diet she is more easily able to manage her type one diabetes and keep her A1C down. Keto and diabetes just go together! More and more evidence is coming out that using a low carb diet to manage diabetes works amazingly well and quickly.
She gives some of her best advice for starting keto whether you have diabetes or not.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! Sharing the show with friends or leaving a review helps to much by allowing people to find the show.
Watch the interview on YouTube.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH COURTNEY
Instagram: https://instagram.com/Cornut34
Cheryl McColgan So welcome everyone. I'm joined here today by Courtney. Courtney is a wonderful lady that I have been following for a while on Instagram, and she utilizes the keto lifestyle to help manage her type one diabetes. Welcome Courtney.
Courtney Lillich Hi. Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan Thanks for joining me. If you can maybe just start out by... obviously, if people are listening to this on the audio version, I read your bio, and so they already know a little bit about you. But can you say in your own words a little bit about your background and how you came to start eating in this way. Diabetes and Keto: Improving A1C in Type One Diabetic Courtney Lillich So, I'm type one diabetic and I've been insulin dependent since I was three, now I'm 38, so it's been quite a while. And because I'm very active, I do bodybuilding and boxing, all kinds of workouts and exercises, that sounds great like, "Oh, you're gonna be so healthy." But it's hard to manage the blood sugar levels, they go up and down, up and down, and so my doctor, my endocrinologist has always had a hard time with me in particular, my A1C levels haven't been great. And then I also have a coach for my body building competitions. And I did competitions probably for four or five years, and then my body just was like, "Okay, I'm done, I'm done with it for a while." So I still... I kept... I still have the coach, and my body just wasn't responding to the usual diet and workout regimen that typical bodybuilders use, like the carbs, and the diabetes I think it's part of that too. So he just said, probably in 2019, I hadn't even really heard of keto before. I've heard of it, but in my head it was like, "Oh, all you do is eat almonds and butter and fat, just bad stuff like that." And I was like, "I would never wanna do that ever."
Courtney Lillich But then he mentioned it and he said, "Hey, you've heard of keto, let's... We should just try it out." And I read more about it, and it's not a... Like I said, it's not a typical bodybuilders diet, so I said, "Why not, let's just try it, and then I realized it was good for blood sugars and I just... It was really hard to switch over, but I'm super focused and dedicated if I'm trying to do something. I was on it for a year and it helped my blood sugar levels, and I was able to lose some weight on it, and yeah, that's how I fell into it.
Cheryl McColgan That's awesome. Well, so just to give some people background. Maybe some people listening to this aren't as...
Danielle realized she had sugar addiction through an awakening she had several years ago when she went through a detox in the middle of the Columbian jungle. As she withdrew from sugar, she experienced a period of feeling very ill. She continued on without sugar and after a few weeks realized she no longer had cravings like she did before and sugar no longer had the same hold over her. Her path to breaking sugar addiction had begun.
Through this experience, she became passionate about nourishing her body properly as a means to avoid the chronic diseases so prevalent in her family. She spent the next two years figuring out her version of a sugar-free, whole foods diet. She now works as a nutrition coach to help others break their sugar addiction and find greater health.
Her personal motivation never included weight loss but rather finding health and preventing future disease through a better diet.
One of the great tools she discusses is asking yourself "why" at least three more times when you find your surface-level reason for wanting to lose weight or change your diet. This process allows people to get closer to the root of their food addiction. Breaking sugar addiction may require asking these why questions repeatedly over time.
You'll have to listen to the show to hear more about this process, but it's a simple and effective too to start identifying bad habits in relation to sugar and food so that you can create new, healthier habits.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today!
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
CONNECT WITH DANIELLE
Website: https://danielledaem.com Quit Sugar Summit: https://quitsugarsummit.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/danielledaemcoaching Instagram: https://instagram.com/danielledaem YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLCqU7XE_KU1xPmjkpZyGPA Emotional Eating Video Series: https://coach.danielledaem.com/stress-eating-series
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here. Breaking Sugar Addiction By Getting to the Root Cause Cheryl McColgan Hey everyone. So I am joined here today by Dani. And she is one of the producers of the keto... Well, the Quit Sugar Summit. We have so many great free education right now, it's pretty awesome, but maybe you can tell us Dani, how you got involved with the sugar-free life, and how you came to that, and then we'll go from there.
Danielle Daem Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is fantastic. I'm so excited to be a part of this in the beginning of this podcast.
Cheryl McColgan Yes. It's very fun.
Danielle Daem I feel so honored. And I'm grateful that we connected... Yeah, with my work with the Quit Sugar Summit. My journey with sugar... I'll call it my, journey and relationship with sugar, it's been underlying my whole life, for all of us. It starts at childhood, it wasn't for me until about five years ago when I was on trip in South America with my husband that I really realized the addiction that I had to sugar, that it was really... Had it's talons in me, and this control over me. And I really started just having some real eye-opening moments,
In this episode, we'll talk about the temptation to eat in a different way during the holidays. Whether you decide to eat foods you normally do or not during the holiday season, it's important to go into the holidays with a plan that matches your goals. We'll address holiday weight gain and some strategies to combat it. Of course, getting sugar and carb cravings under control by changing the way you eat will also make weight maintenance much easier!
Articles mentioned:
What is Ultimate Wellness, goal setting exercise Five C's to Create Better Habits Low Carb Pumpkin Pie Exercise and Oxidative Stress Introduction to Meditation Hyponatremia Accountabilibuddy Low Carb Bloody Mary Mix Dry Farm Wines Mindful Eating
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
Cheryl McColgan Hey, everyone. Hope you're having a wonderful day. I am Cheryl, as you know, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, and if you haven't, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast where we talk about all things health, wellness, low-carb nutrition and things to help you improve your life at least a little bit every single day. And what I wanted to chat with you about today is how not to gain weight during the holidays. [chuckle] So every year, around this time, we start to indulge a little bit more, myself included, and that can be a time with family and friends that's so wonderful. And so many of us, with what has been going on in the world in the last almost two years now, is a time to really celebrate and enjoy ourselves, and quite often in many cultures, at least in the American culture for sure, that revolves around food and around alcohol and around cookies and indulgences in all sorts of things that you might not eat on a regular basis, especially if you're trying to live a healthier lifestyle.
So Because as you know, my background and training is in psychology and addiction studies. I wanted to share with you some ideas and some strategies about how to... I'm gonna put this in air quotes, for those of you that aren't watching the video. So if you're listening on audio, this is air quotes, "stay on track during the holidays". I kind of don't like that phrase because it insinuates that you're not kind of mindfully making decisions all the time. And that is definitely part of what we're gonna talk about today. So I think you can approach the holidays in two ways. So number one, if you're in maintenance mode, you can stay the course and stay at maintenance calories, stay with your same activities during the holidays as much as possible, and maybe plan for over-indulgences, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a short amount of time here. And the other strategy is, if you are in weight loss mode for the holidays, that's fine too, but it's gonna require a little bit more dedication and planning than usual. Strategies to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain So there's a few ways that we can approach that as well. So first of all, you know how we say, "What's your goal?" So determine what your goal is during the holidays: Do you want to, number one, maintain your weight or avoid holiday weight gain, do you want, two, continue trying to lose weight, if that's your goal; or number three, do you not mind if you gain,
In this episode, I am talking with the Founder of Dry Farm Wines, Todd White. We discuss meditation, nutrition, fasting, biohacking and ketogenic diets, and of course natural wines. Learn more about a sustainable low carb lifestyle that includes mindful living while still enjoying sugar free wine.
Todd shares with us his journey from Atkins to the sustainable and moderate keto lifestyle he is currently living. He also shares his vast knowledge on the different versions of keto and his go to biohacking tools, such as cold plunges and saunas.
Mediation and fasting are two big players in his life and have been for over twenty years.
We also learn more about Dry Farm Wines. You can read our review of Dry Farm wines here along with videos showing you can drink their sugar free wine and stay in ketosis! They are the only natural wine company serving the European standards of purity within the states with tested alcohol percentages under 12.5 percent.
All this and more in this conversation with Todd, lots of great information you can use in this one!
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions here, you’ll have a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card that we’re giving away on November 17, 2021
Watch the interview with Todd White on YouTube.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor, $20 off with code HNG20
CONNECT WITH TODD
Website: https://dryfarmwines.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dryfarmwines
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here. Cheryl McColgan: Hi everyone. Today, I'm sitting here with Todd White, and I am so excited to speak to him because I have heard him interviewed multiple times in the past, and I have absolutely adored his product for years. You guys know, you've heard me talk about Dry Farm Wines 1000 times. I've done the experiment with drinking it and staying in ketosis, which is on my YouTube channel, so now I get to chat with the man that made this all happen. So welcome, Todd. Todd White: Thanks, it's great to be here. I'm looking forward to having a talk today about everything, low carb, keto, fasting, and sugar free wine. Cheryl McColgan: Yeah, I'm super excited. We were chatting a little bit before we actually started recording and I was excited to learn that you are as big a proponent of fasting as I am. But for now, why don't you maybe introduce yourself a little bit, tell people a little bit about your health background, how you came to this lifestyle and wanting to really lower your chemical load in your body, which is part of the way that Dry Farm Wines came to be. So if you can just talk a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are now.
Old School Biohacking Todd White: Yeah, so my journey started more than 20 years ago. Before biohacking was a term, I was a biohacker, as you were one who was experimenting with dieting. So biohacking is a confusing term, some people don't know what it means. I define it as the art and science of how we structure our behavior to have a positive impact or outcome on our neurological and biological outcome.
I am talking all things keto with Jen Fisch, creative director, blogger, mom, and author. You may know Jen from the online space as Keto in The City, where she shares easy and low carb recipes on Instagram, her blog, as well as in her books.
Tune in to hear about Jen’s health journey and how her keto lifestyle began. Jen was diagnosed with two different autoimmune diseases that were fighting her body from the inside out. She then began searching for an anti-inflammatory diet. What started off with Atkins and low sugar and ended up being keto. Once she started eating better quality foods, she realized her sleep improved. It’s really trial and error with keto, and not all "keto snacks" are good snacks which we talk a lot about today.
Finding what ingredients and whole foods work best for your own body is what's important. From sugars to bone broth and packaged keto foods, Jen shares her history with what worked for her body and what didn’t. Again, everyone is so different!
We also talk about transition foods, hidden ingredients, and preferred sweeteners, as well as plants. All of these topics and more in this episode.
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions here, you’ll have a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card that we’re giving away November 17, 2021.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
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Website: https://ketointhecity.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ketointhecity_
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Cheryl McColgan: Welcome, everyone. I'm here with Jen of Keto in The City. Thanks for joining us today, Jen.
Jen Fisch: Yeah, super excited, great to talk to you.
Cheryl McColgan: Me too. So part of the show, and since you're one of the very first interviews on the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, one of my goals is to really just share with people practical tips and knowledge, and you've been now living the keto lifestyle for quite a while and have experimented with many styles of eating over the years, similar to me. So if you could just maybe tell everybody first, how you got into keto, and a little bit about your history and background with that. Battling Autoimmune Diseases Jen Fisch: Yeah, sure. So yeah, it has been a long story of trying to figure out what works. But basically, over 20 years ago, I came down with two autoimmune disorders within six months of each other. So psoriasis first and then psoriatic arthritis six months later. And so I struggled with that for many years. Eventually, I went to a doctor who was an MD, but who was actually an acupuncture doctor, and he was the first one that recommended I cut sugar out of my diet. Before that, I had never even thought about the connection between the food that I was eating and how I was feeling, and none of my other doctors had ever mentioned it. So that is what turned the light on for me. That was about 15 years ago and I started on Atkins from there because that was popular at the time.
I remember going straight from that appointment to a bookstore, just sat on the ground of the bookstore,
In this episode, I am talking with Jimmy Moore, author, podcaster, and speaker. You may be familiar with Jimmy from The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show or one of his many books. Jimmy shares his personal weight loss and health journey with us, which is so inspiring! He lost almost 200 pounds by starting with Atkins, later going keto and to his latest way of eating which is more of a keto/carnivore approach.
You will learn a lot as we go over topics of fasting and how it is so important when trying to reduce inflammation in the body. We also talk about biohacking therapies like ice baths, red light therapy and the importance of looking inward to heal the body from past traumas. Rest is also so important. Jimmy took himself on a sabbatical and talks about why it happened and the benefits he received from it.
Mental health, physical health, cholesterol, and the keto culture are key topics also discussed today. Jimmy shared his whole wellness program, eating regimens and why we need to give ourselves grace.
So many important topics were discussed and I cannot wait for you to hear!
Did you enjoy today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions here, you’ll have a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card that we’re giving away November 17, 2021.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop
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Website: https://livinlavidalowcarb.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livinlowcarbman Books: Cholesterol Clarity, Keto Clarity Losing 180 Pounds, Finding Greater Health and Becoming a Force in the Keto Community Cheryl McColgan: I obviously introduced you to everybody prior to putting our interview on, but I'd like to hear from you in your own words, you have such a very interesting history about how you got into keto and some of your family health history. Could you share with people a little bit about that and kind of how you got to where you are now? Eating the Standard American and Low-Fat Diets Jimmy Moore: Oh yeah. I was eating a low-fat diet before finding low carbs. And I think that we all do that. We all kind of default, when you need to get healthy, when you need to lose weight, what you did, you cut back, right? We all heard that message our whole lives. And if that works for you, you're doing that and over and over and over again. I think what draws people back to it is the reinforcement, when you do that and then you do lose some weight. You feel somewhat better.
I would argue because you get rid of the junk in you feel a little better. For me, I had tried all those things and I had been successful up down, up, down, up, down, up down with low-fat diets. And in fact, in 1999, you mentioned family health problems. My brother had a series of heart attacks and one week, so four years older than me, my brother, Kevin. In 1999, he had a heart attack, he was in the hospital for some routine checkup and had a heart attack while it was in the hospital. Thank God, because it probably would have died had he not been there. Then later, he'd have another heart attack, on and on and on.
He died at the age of 41, but when he had the heart attacks and again, that was a wake-up call for me and I lost a bunch of weight. And at the end of about nine months,
In this episode, I am sharing the incredible conversation about clean keto that I had with The Salmon Queen, otherwise known as Gigi Ashworth.
Gigi does not hold back with us. From professional snowboarding to getting her master’s degree in nutrition to her abundant social media platforms and YouTube channel, Gigi’s message remains the same. Helping people while entertaining them at the same time is what she truly loves to do. From her early years of disordered eating, autoimmune diseases, surgeries and learning about the ketogenic diet we get a true behind-the-scenes look at who and what Gigi is all about.
Tune in today to learn about “The Gigi Approach” and how The Salmon Queen got her name and book. Learn more about stress, digestion, fitness, her go-to workouts, the difference between dirty keto, lazy keto and clean keto, and why we need to be eating more quality ingredients from the store. All this, and so much more on today’s show!
Did you love today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions here, you’ll have a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card that we’re giving away on November 17, 2021.
Watch the interview on YouTube
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Website: https://gigieatscelebrities.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gigieats YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GiGiEatsCelebrities1
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Cheryl McColgan: Welcome. So Gigi, I've read your bio obviously, but can you just share with people in your own words, how you came to this way of eating and some of a little bit of your past? I think you have some really interesting, things that you have done leading up to some health issues that you had, where you had to change the way that you ate.
Gigi Ashworth: Uh, do you have like 15 hours? I don't think people wanna listen that long, but anyway. So when I was around 14 years old, I actually was at a boarding school for snowboarding. I used to competitively snowboard back in the day. Whoa. And now I'm like, oh, don't get me here in the mountains beause it's too cold! Anyways, so when I was doing that, I was exerting a lot of energy, and I started to really focus on how I was feeling and I wasn't feeling good. It's really funny how when you start to do a lot of physical activity, you take note of how your body feels, even at the young age of 14. I thought, there's something off, there's something not right here. How Gigi Discovered the Keto Diet I did physical activity before I was on the track team and all that kind of stuff. But I guess I just didn't really care, pay attention or I was like to you into wanting be popular. So when I was in boarding school, I was complaining to my mom about it, who actually has been doing the keto diet for the last 30 years or so. Yeah. She's been doing it for a long time as a doctor and she always wanted to be a nutritionist, but her father was like, no, you're gonna be an OBGYN. So that's what she wound up doing. Anyways, I was complaining to my mom and she sent me book that didn't have a book jacket or anything on it. And she was like, hey, just read this book.
I am so excited to share this episode with you. Today I am chatting with Dr. Stephanie Estima. After meeting her at the Keto Diet Summit where we were both speakers, I knew I had to have her come on and talk to us. Dr. Stephanie Estima is a mother, best-selling author, podcast host and coach. Tune in as we go over several topics such as brain and cardiovascular health, fitness, hormones, life span versus your healthspan and keto and menopause We also get into keto cycling, therapeutic interventions, as well as mindset. Dr. Stephanie also shares her knowledge on pre-Mmenopausal needs, considerations for keto and menopause, the benefits of lifting weights, and how to find the right sustainability when it comes to your own diet. This is a jam-packed show, and we're excited to hear your thoughts. Did you love today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions here, you'll have a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card that we're giving away November 17, 2021. Watch the interview with Dr. Stephanie Estima on YouTube.
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Website: https://hellobetty.club The Betty Body Book: https://bettybodybook.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.stephanie.estima Better with Dr. Stephanie Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/better-with-dr-stephanie/id1479074542
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Cheryl McColgan: Hi Everyone, welcome. Today, I'm here with Dr. Stephanie Estima. First of all, she has a new book out, which is amazing. And second of all, she's really focused on making sure that your hormones stay in balance while you're on keto, which can be a particular problem for us, ladies. So welcome, Dr. Stephanie Estima. Could you just tell us some of your background, how you found the low carb diet, how you got into it and your interest in this subject? Keto for Brain Health Dr. Stephanie Estima: So I have been, you know, for most of my career, very interested in brain health and brain metabolism, and the ketogenic diet was something that I came across maybe for, well maybe five or six years ago now in terms of some of the benefits that it can have for cognition, for mood, for sleep. I started implementing it in my practice.
That was when I still when I had a brick-and-mortar practice and it had a profound result in my patients. So it's something that I've always been very, very cognizant towards is this idea of how can we change some of the things in our life, whether that's nutrition or movement or supplementation or stress reduction as a way to level our brain health in some way. The ketogenic diet, I'm sure we'll talk about it today and I'm sure you've talked about this on the podcast before.
It's one of those protocols that is very, very efficient for reducing inflammation in the brain, for helping with clarity of thought, helping with sleep and all the things that are important when we're thinking about long-term brain aging and brain health.
Cheryl McColgan: I'm so glad that you brought up that subject because it's also part of my background. I have graduate training and clinical neuropsychol...
Welcome to the very first episode of the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast. I am your host, Cheryl McColgan. I am the Founder of Heal Nourish Grow an ultimate wellness, advanced nutrition, and healthy lifestyle site. My intention is to share experiences and insight through unique content that will help you transform and live your best life.
I have been in the health and wellness space for over 25 years and I'm excited to bring my expertise and knowledge to this show. This has been a passion project of mine for quite some time and thrilled for it to finally be hitting the airwaves. Tune in every Wednesday to hear from me as well as my educated and extremely informative guests on topics such as keto and low carb nutrition, eating well, healing, fasting, the psychology behind it all, and most importantly our overall wellness.
While I personally have some strong opinions on what constitutes the best diet for overall health, I also want to this to be a resource as a flexible dieting lifestyle podcast offering new ways to approach how you eat while learning more about nutrition in general.
We are going to be unpacking a lot in these episodes! From finding your why to hearing from experts in the health space, to exploring your own goals, you're sure to find something that will improve your day-to-day experience. We also will be getting into several lifestyles such as keto, low carb, and finding which plan will work best for you and your body and why at the very least reducing sugar in your diet is so important to health.
I am thrilled to have you here and cannot wait to hear your thoughts on this kickoff episode.
Did you love today’s show? Let me know by leaving me a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening from today! If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions here, you'll have a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card that we're giving away November 17, 2021.
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Website: https://healnourishgrow.com Show Notes: https://healnourishgrow.com/podcastepisodes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healnourishgrow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healnourishgrow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/healnourishgrow Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/HealNourishGrow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healnourishgrow Dry Farm Wines: https://www.dryfarmwines.com/healnourishgrow Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/healnourishgrow Links to All of My Favorite Products With Discounts: https://healnourishgrow.com/shop Heal Nourish Grow Podcast Introduction Hey, everyone, I'm Cheryl McColgan founder of Heal Nourish Grow and I'm coming to you from my little studio under the stairs, which is kind of a funny story. We bought this house and this is actually a gun safe, which we have no use for. So over the pandemic, it became the perfect little podcast studio because my office is actually right next to my husband's upstairs and he's on the phone all day talking and I do a lot of writing. So I had to figure out different places in the house to go to do the things that I need to do.
But anyway, that is not why you came here today, right? You're thinking Heal Nourish Grow podcast, the description intrigued me, how can I learn? What can I do? What is this all about? So anyway, I'll just give you a little bit of background about me so you know why I'm doing this podcast. I hope you'll stick around to hear all of the wonderful guests that I have planned. I already have multiple episodes recorded.
I've been podcasting actually, over the years for a while and I'm an avid podcast listener myself. So I know how it is, when you find a new podcast, you like it, and you kind of want to binge it a little. And that's what we're all used to now, right? With Netflix and Amazon Prime and all those streaming services. We're used to being able to have a lot of episodes on demand. So I wanted to start with a few so that you get a sense of what...
Heal Nourish Grow is the health and wellness podcast that helps you create your version of ultimate wellness! Are you tired, stressed, gaining weight or feeling overwhelmed? Or are you feeling good but would like to feel amazing and optimize your health? Do you have health issues you’d like to change? Have you ever wondered if eating differently could make a difference in your mood or weight? This is not just a keto podcast! We're looking at all aspects of health to have you firing on all cylinders.
We are launching November 3, 2021 with five episodes and new ones to be released every Wednesday.
Join us on the Heal Nourish Grow podcast with host, wellness coach and Heal Nourish Grow LLC founder Cheryl McColgan to explore all the latest in low carb and keto nutrition, health and biohacking! We explore in-depth why what you eat matters and how your food choices can affect your body and mind. This is not just another keto podcast. We want to explore all facets of health and help you find the version of nutrition that not only works for you, but helps you thrive!
Our goal is to help each individual optimize overall wellness. We share practical knowledge to help develop new habits that optimize your experience and support real health. Tips, tricks and research that helps you accomplish your goals as well as interviews with thought leaders in the health space is what we're all about.
We also share the inspiring stories from everyday people that have changed their lives for the better combating autism, ADHD, obesity, depression, eating disorders and more. Low Carb Lifestyle I’m a science nerd at heart, so of course, this somewhat keto podcast will talk about low-carb research, but my goal is to make it accessible to everyone. To be clear, I want to take the research, help explain it and break it down into bite-sized chunks you can incorporate into a keto lifestyle that is practical and sustainable!
If you're not ready to go fully keto, you'll at least be getting other great health information and how reducing carbs is healthier and can help you reach your goals.
This show has several fun segments and will continue to evolve over time. My goal is to make it the best keto podcast out there, so I’d love your feedback.
Think you’d make a great guest for the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast? Please submit your information here to be considered.
Find us everywhere on social media @healnourishgrow sharing daily inspiration in Instagram stories and at healnourishgrow.com