 A number of my patients with endometriosis, one of the tipping points for them was painful sex. Oh my gosh, yes. Yeah, and that, you know, somehow it became, they were advised that, well, you know, that's just a part of it and, you know, get over it or live through it and that's not what's supposed to happen. And it was actually that, that they kept saying, well, you know, I want to participate in this part of our relationship, but this is ridiculous, this is horrible. So that sex isn't supposed to hurt, right? Right, but you know what's interesting is not interesting, it's horrible. When I was, when I first started having sex in college, I went to a doctor and I told her that I had painful sex and this is before I was diagnosed with endo and she said I just needed to relax more in bed. So for a very long time until I was diagnosed, I thought it was a prude, I thought I just needed to relax more, there was something wrong with me. And I do think that's a great point, I think that when it comes with endo, we sometimes miss out on so much of our life, like having sex, going to birthday parties, going on vacation, that we get to a point where like, I'm not able to see my friends and family because of this, like this is, this is interrupting my career, my relationships, something has to be done. All right, what do you say to all the skeptics that say, oh, come on, you know, this is all in your head, it, it can't be that bad. You're just hysterical, and I'm sure you've been told this. Definitely. And I, and I always share the story, I interviewed a woman Lynette in my book that wasn't diagnosed until she was 53. And at that point, her organs had fused together and they had to take out part of her colon. So this isn't something that's in our heads. This is infiltrating our bodies, creating a lot of pain and discomfort. And like you said, I also like to reference that it can spread to your lungs and have your lungs collapse. I think if you were to tell a person, it doesn't have to be a man, this could make your lungs collapse. All of a sudden they're listening because it's not just about periods anymore. All right, let's talk about cooking. That's why everybody tuned in. All right, what's, what's the hardest part of being, being a chef of cooking? Well, it's cooking is not hard. It's the timing that's hard. You have to be able to just, you put it on the fire. And then you just got to take it off at the right time. So cooking isn't as hard as you think, but it comes down to timing. Now flavor is very crucial, you know, the use of spices and seasoning to enhance it, especially when you want to, you know, make cleaner food. And I think that, you know, kind of where a turning point for me was that kind of the color of flavor type thing. White sugar tastes white. White flour tastes white. Nobody runs into the pantry as a kid with a big spoon and takes a scoop of white flour. Maybe some sugar, but powdered flour. So as you start to eliminate lots of these starches and carbohydrates out of your food, it actually cleans up the flavor profile. So using, you know, ingredients, adding the ingredient in that benefits taste and benefits flavor and benefits the nutrition, then you start to line up really much more interesting dishes. What do most people not know about properly using ingredients and creating flavors? Where does everybody make a mistake? Well, I think that in using fresh herbs in that type of direction, they make the biggest mistake of just adding them all in at the end. That's not what any of the big classical cuisines have done over time, whether it's Chinese or even some of the great Italians and this type of thing. You start off with a little bit of great olive oil or avocado oil to get it started. If you add garlic or onion in at that point, the volatile oils that are the flavorings of the garlic and the onions and the spices are mixed in with the oils or oil base, not water base. So you get all those flavors into the oil first. And then when you cook in that medium, and the oil really transfers the heat from the pan or the air to the food, because if you don't have something to transfer the heat, all you're doing is drying it out in that type of method. So if you get the flavor into the oil that you want to keep in the dish and you get that to coat what you're cooking, you're about halfway home. The rest of it is timing and a little bit of patience, not trying to turn it up and get it done in two seconds. But the crucial part is you cook the little garlic and such, then you throw your red pepper flakes into it, then you would throw your basil into it to make a marinara sauce or that type of direction. Or you throw your dipper herbs into it to make a stir fry with ginger and garlic and chilies and cilantro, because the flavors go into the oil and then they stay in your dish. A famous Italian chef once said if he walks into a kitchen and smells basil, he knows they don't know how to cook, because the basil smell should be in the dish, not in the air. Oh, interesting. Okay. Okay. You talk a lot about coaching and mentors. How the heck? How does our listener find a mentor? I mean, do you walk up and say, hi there, I'd like you to be my mentor? That is ... Yeah. How do you do that? It's a little cringe. Yeah, most people ... So the mentor-mentee relationship is interesting, because you can't really just walk up to someone and say, I'd like you to be my mentor, because it doesn't mean anything and also it's a burden that you are placing on the shoulders of the person that you're approaching. If some stranger comes up to me and says, well, you mentor me, I don't really know what that means. Does that mean they want me to teach them a bunch of strategy for free, which is consulting that normally requires a lot of effort on my part? Does it mean they want introductions from me? Okay. Which ones? Why? What are you going to do with them? Are you going to execute on them? It puts the monkey on the back of the person that you're asking. You don't want to do that. In fact, it doesn't work. I can say every few months, somebody says, will you mentor me? I just say, what does that even mean? They never have a real answer. Usually what a lot of those people mean, not always, but what a lot of those people mean is show me the direct path that I can take to be successful, because I have no idea and I don't really want to figure it out for myself, which is a shame, because I do recommend that people figure these things out for themselves and I do think that you have to figure it out, frankly, for yourself. It seems a little, not always, but it's a little lazy and a little entitled to go and think that you're just going to get a mentor and that that mentor is going to guide you out of the goodness of their heart. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Of course, now you see a lot of very predatory internet marketers selling mentorship programs because people ask for it so much. They say, pay $10,000 and get in my inner circle and we will mentor you. What they mean is, you can show up to my live events and on my Zoom calls and I'll give you the equivalent of what you and I are talking about on this podcast right now, but it's not real mentorship. There's nobody really guiding you. They're just giving you information and there's a massive, massive difference. A mentor-mentee relationship is actually symbiotic in that maybe this is a sales guy that works for my organization and start selling, let's say, podcast ads and then says, hey, you know, I bet we could sell social media ads, but you have to get your social media presence up to snuff. I say, yeah, I don't really know how to do that and then he says, I'll handle it. I've got all these content creation ideas. Here's what my plan is, et cetera, et cetera. Then maybe they go off on their own after working with me for a few years and getting my program going and I go, wow, this person really killed it. Maybe they go off on their own and they say, hey, Jordan, I have a question for you. How do I hire? You hired me. You hired really good people. How do I hire? I say, oh, hey, good to hear from you. What I look for is this, this, this and this and then they say, hey, Jordan, a few months later, so I hired these people. One of them's not working out. How do I let them go and keep the relationship? I give them advice there. This person's already done a lot for me. Maybe they're even sending me clients. Maybe they're still selling ads for me on the side. Maybe they're still managing my social media, but they're also asking me questions and I'm giving them the value in return because we're in a close symbiotic relationship. They're not paying me, you know, I'm not quote unquote their mentor, but I'm giving them specific advice in a very specific area. I think a lot of people have this sort of fantasy that an actual mentor exists because it seems like an easy route to just do everything somebody else did and become that person's protege. But in any case, any mentor-mentee relationship, let's look at the OG mentor-mentee, right? Some like Kung Fu school. The younger person who is the mentee, they're teaching all the dang classes for like 10 years. And they work with the master and the master's there for some of that, but the mentee is the one who's saying, all right, everybody line up. I'm taking you through warmups, et cetera. We're working for the other person. Nowadays, people just want to cut a check and get mentorship, but what they're really getting is screwed out of their money. True. You know, for our viewers and listeners, what's one of the most important takeaways from your book that everybody can put into practice for their health today? Yeah. I'd say the big takeaway is diet and exercise are two different tools with two different jobs, right? The work we do with the Hatha says that maintaining your weight is mostly to do with your diet and what you're eating. A lot of other aspects of your health, heart health, brain health, that has to do with the exercise and how you're spending those calories. And so you can't sort of trade diet and exercise. You kind of have to do both. That's the tough news. The easy news is there's a lot of good ways to do that. You can find an approach that works for you. But I think we have to think about diet for weight, exercise for everything else. That's what I would say. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. There's exciting research about when we exercise, our muscles make hormones called myokines. And these things are incredible about for producing BDNF and stimulating neuron growth. I mean, who knew that moving would help your brain? I mean, really? Yeah. Absolutely. And especially as people age, we're finding, this is a work, another guy I work with it in when I work with the Hatha is a guy named David Reiklin at USC now. And he's done really interesting work looking at people as they age. Physical activity seems to stave off a lot of cognitive decline, seems to be protective against that for the reasons you're saying that it's not just your muscles, right? Exercise gets everywhere. And so really exciting stuff on that end of things too, for sure. Yeah. In the longevity paradox, I write about women who routinely exercise for most of their lives have an 80% reduction in Alzheimer's dementia compared to women who don't routinely exercise. And even women who carry the Alzheimer's gene and who eventually may develop Alzheimer's, it arrives 11 years later than if they didn't exercise routinely. And when you think about that, it's one thing to get Alzheimer's at 80 and quite another to get Alzheimer's at 91. I mean, 11 years of a good life at the end of your life is well worth the investment. But I think it's interesting that you mentioned in your book that a woman's menstrual period when understood properly is a superpower. And you also talk about that menopause can be turned into a superpower. So I think that's fascinating and give our listeners the pitch on why menstruation and menopause could be superpowers that you should embrace. Yeah. Thank you for bringing this point up. I think that I've been talking a little bit about with our conversation how I used to really hate my own cycle. I thought it was really punitive and I just thought it was this big rigmarole for nothing every month. And it was only after Italy and then coming back to Toronto, working with my patients where I actually started to really look forward to, it was almost like a report card. I was like, what is my hormonal report card going to be like this month? And I think that when you understand the ebbs and flows of your ever-changing hormonal milieu, because as women in our reproductive years, this includes my perimenopausal ladies, we have a different hormonal composition every single day of the month. So that is going to have profound effects on what we should be eating, how we should be moving, what our mood is going to look like, our energy levels are going to look like, our receptivity, our libido, so our receptivity to sex and whether we're not, we are interested in it at all. And all of these things are really important to consider for a woman's health. There's also, I go into a lot of detail in the book around estrogen receptor. There's basically estrogen receptors almost everywhere. There's areas in the brain that are very sensitive, particularly these areas around verbal acuity and being able to pull and be able to floss your vernacular, if you will. So there's certain times of the month where you are much more, you are much better suited to, you know, give a podcast, you know, be on a podcast like this or give a presentation or ask for a raise. You know, there's different times of the month where we are just, we have that slight edge because of that hormonal composition that we are currently experiencing. So I think once you get to understand your ebbs and flows, like when you are more introverted and it's time to sink into your body. When you're more extroverted and it's time to network and chat and ask for that raise, once you understand that, this is what I'm talking about in terms of a superpower. I try to schedule most of my talking when I need to be giving a presentation or speaking as I am with you now. I try to schedule it around week two of my cycle and into week three because I know that we have estrogen bathing my brain in these articulation centers. I know that I'm a little bit more extroverted. You know, I tend, I tend to kind of skew introverted normally, but week two, I'm like super happy. I love everybody. People are good, you know, so these little nuances in understanding where you are emotionally and physiologically, I think can have profound effects on your enjoyment in your life. And the same is true also in menopause. Menopausal women are often forgotten about, right? And even we see this in like Hollywood. We see, you know, there, we have, we're devoid of sexuality. As soon as we turn 50, it's like, there's just no zest for life. You know, and this, you know, you and I, it sounds like you have a love for European culture as I do. And there's a certain, you know, the Greeks say there's a certain like Zoe, like a certain like zest for life that I think is portrayed as lost once we move into menopause. And I completely reject that. I think that all of the energy that we put in every month as, as women in our menstrual years towards the development of this endometrial lining, you can now take that energy because it's no longer happening in your reproductive cycle. And you can use that to call into your life the things that are most important to you. And it's likely if you're a 55 or, you know, your menopausal woman, whatever age that happens for you that you've been spending likely decades taking care of other people, your children, your, you know, your career, your husband or your partner. And so this is a time of almost reclamation where you can say, okay, I'm going to do what's really good for my soul. I'm going to make sure that I do, I do what's good for me. And so you can take this, you know, that almost sometimes the roller coaster that can happen in, in the reproductive cycle and then move that into energy that you want to create. And even though you don't have, you know, ovaries, you know, you don't have a womb that can be reproductive, you can still be very productive. You can be, you can use that, you know, I call in the book, I talk about, you know, your womb space being this like all chemical, you know, like prowess, like you can use your womb space to create and call in the things that you love. So that's a little bit, that's a little woo woo. That's me kind of getting into my feminine a little bit, but I feel, I really feel strongly about that. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.