 So, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Today, we're going to tackle a topic that I'm sure a lot of you are dealing with. I get emails from you, Instagrams from you, all the time, Facebook, postings. You know, maybe you feel sick, but your doctors have told you everything's fine. And it's amazing, particularly you women viewers and listeners, this is a chronic problem that I've talked about over and over and over again. You absolutely know something's wrong, but every test that every medical senator, every doctor's office is normal, and you're kind of sick and tired, but you're sick and tired of people telling you you're fine. And you probably, many of you have noticed that you have this gut feeling that something is wrong, but you're not sure what it means. And you know, so many of you are sick and frustrated and scared. And as you know, you're not alone, and you're not crazy, you're not depressed. So, I've got a great guest on today, Alison Post, who's got a new book out, as you can see here, The Gut Wellness Guide. And she's been an integrative health medical coach for 30 years of experience in Northern California and Marin County. And The Gut Wellness Guide is brand new. And Alison, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. So we're going to back up a little bit. You had a very interesting path to your current mission, as many of us have. This started when you were a teenager. What happened? Well, when I was preparing to go to college, I got some birth control. I got an IUD, an intrauterine device, and unfortunately, the particular one that was being sold at the time ended up in two or three years later being taken off the market. It had been defective. It killed 18 women, and there were individual lawsuits that went into class action lawsuits of millions of women that really lost their health, their ability to bear children because there was proliferative scarring. There were deep problems with this device. So I was one of the people that had the device, and I had it for over a year. And when it started, when I had it at first, it seemed okay. But as I progressed with it, I started to feel uncomfortable. I noticed that I was getting infections. I would go down to the doctor, which in the 70s, your doctor was actually in your building, and almost a family member, he could come upstairs if you were really sick. But he would always kind of look at me and shrug his shoulders and say, you know, infections are normal for a teenage girl. He never mentioned, he knew I had the IUD, he never really mentioned it. I didn't really, you know, at that stage in the 70s, doctors were it. They were the authority. So I was like, okay, I'll give me a round of antibiotics, which growing up was also given out a little bit like candy, right? Yep, absolutely. I think the field was already set in my body not to accept this device, and maybe it was a little worse for me because there had been many antibiotic courses. And so I persevered and I got myself to college, and I was very excited. I was a theater music major, and by the first semester, my celebration of getting through my first semester with flying colors was, I went down with a group of friends and we went to Florida. We drove down and we were on the beach, and I became exquisitely ill and in pain, probably my third or fourth day there. And I just went to the emergency room. They kept me overnight. They had no idea what was wrong with me. They gave me a painkiller and basically said you should go home, which I did. I went back up to New York. I went to my doctor. But during this time, being in that emergency room, I just kind of settled in to my being and it struck me that I needed to get this thing out of my body. Nobody had mentioned it. And you know, I was in college. I was reading Free and Female and Simone de Beauvoir, and I was starting to understand how we weren't being seen and especially being called hysterical and overly sensitive and at my era. And so I went back up to home and I just went to the doctor and I said, you know, this needs to be out. This is not the right thing. So he said, fine. He took it out. He gave me another course of antibiotics. And I went back to college and I went back to my world. And two weeks later, I crawled into my roommate's room and said, I am so sick. I think I'm going to die. I need to, can you take me to the infirmary? I can't even describe the kind of pain that I was in, but it was body-wide at this point. But it was centered in my belly and in my pelvis. And I was taken to the emergency on campus. They held me there for three days, didn't know what to do with me. But my temperature continued to rise. And when it reached about 104, and I was delirious, I didn't even, I don't remember a lot of it, but they took me to the hospital. And there, a doctor said, oh, I've seen this before. He had seen women who had had this particular IUD. He had seen PID. This was beginning to make tracks. And he said, let's, let's see what we can see. He hooked me up to IV antibiotics, which ended up being almost five weeks long of a course, but saved my life. This is what for, right? And he basically told me in really no uncertain terms that my organs were tanking, that I was on death's door. He didn't know what was going to happen, but they were going to see what they could do for me. And so that's what happened, you know. And I stayed the course of the hospital. The infection cleared up. But I got out of the hospital and went back to school and nothing was really ever the same. I felt, my brain changed. I'm an avid reader and very educated. I found it hard to read. That was my first sign, like, wow, what is that? I have to read this paragraph three times. I found it hard to digest. I was bloated. My eyes were swollen. I felt swollen. I lost a lot of my hair. I could just feel, and you know, I didn't have a lot. I had taken biology, but I wasn't, and I was a musician. So I was like, God, this is systemic. It's like my whole body is involved in this. And there are all these symptoms and signs. So I would go and I would talk to a doctor, to a social worker, because, you know, that's what happens, right? Oh, well, you look fine. Your blood tests are good. You come from a very stable family of health. And I'd be like, you don't understand, there is really something wrong with me. And I just persevered. And lo and behold, I was 19. Yoga was kind of a new deal in the world. They offered a class at my college. I left tennis, and I went to yoga. Yeah, I saw a picture of tennis in the book. I'm a real tennis lover. But I went into yoga, and I learned that I could breathe, and I could move with my breath and feel my whole body and start to work out whatever had gotten trapped in my connective tissue. I didn't really understand that at the time, but I started to, that was the first inkling like, wow, you need to really go on this path, and you need to find out, because nobody else is going to help you. You need to find the support where the support is being offered. So I studied yoga, I studied breathing, I got curious, anatomy and physiology. I looked into Ayurveda, and as I progressed, I met all these women that were in the same boat and also met men that weren't quite feeling well either. And people talk to me a lot, they always have since I was young, so I heard a lot of stories. And by the time I was 28 or 29, I'd shifted. I thought theater was great, I loved it, but I feel this is way more important. This is calling me, because I understand that I went from 19 years old to 29 years old, it was like a different world. Part of what happened, though, is they told me when I left the hospital that I would really suffer the consequences of this illness, that I would have many surgeries, that they didn't know how much scarring I had, and that I wouldn't get pregnant, that I was probably fertile. Well, lo and behold, at 23, I got pregnant when I got married and had metopic pregnancy. So actually, fortuitous, because when they did the surgery, they said, oh my God, the doctor had never seen scarring like this. My bowels, everything was just filled with scar tissue, so you could really see the depth of the damage that this device had caused. And that's what I heard, and then I thought, okay, I haven't let it work to do. I didn't sink. I got a little depressed, of course, and went to see if the other tube was viable, and it was. And I was like, okay, my children are going to be people that need my support. And I just went on the path of finding out as much as I could about health, about my body, and about being in a body so I would have the empowerment to help other people and continually help myself. So if somebody comes to you, how do you as a health practitioner translate what you've learned into helping someone who comes to see you? Well, the first thing I start with and that I'm pretty well known for is my listening skills, because that was the real missing ingredient for me. Somebody could really hear me. It's as if they had the thoughts before my mouth even opened, oh, I've seen what she's coming for. I have a pill for that, right? That's not how I work. I've been a massage therapist, a body worker, a craniosacral therapist for 23 years. So I educate people semantically, and the health coaching is kind of the icing because there's so many more things in your container. But basically when somebody comes in to see me, I listen to their story. They bring me a problem. Often people bring me blood tests. They bring me stool tests or not. They bring me the pain, what's happened to them and what's current. And I kind of roll back gently and slowly and say, well, let's try to find the root of this. Because I know it's happening now and we're really going to attend to that. But they've filled out a four or five page history for me. And we start to kind of roll it back. When did this begin? And what was life like for you when you were a child? What was your development like? Did you have surgeries, injuries, traumas? What was your birth experience like? Do you know about it? Do you know what your mom's world was like in utero and what her diet was like? And I look at everything. I look at their fitness. I look at what's happening with their diet, what their culture is bringing to that because it's really, I don't jump on them. I just find out. I let them roll the story out. And then we can gently and slowly unwind what's happening there that's keeping things not working and start to roll out what the plan could be, but a collaborative plan. I got to stop you for a second. I was at a Bill Maher concert last weekend at this time. And Bill Maher said, my mother smoked and drank all through her pregnancy with me. And look, I turned out just great. I'd like to get him on my table, I wonder. Yeah, I don't think either of us would recommend that our mothers or if you're pregnant, smoke and drink. But I thought, listening to you, I couldn't resist. He's the exact same age I am. And that is our era. Our mothers, I say in my book, I think my mother's favorite food group was sugar. And baked goods. I mean, that's what we were growing up on, and that's what was happening there. So we need to kind of unwind to see what's happening from the beginning. And then we can move forward. Yeah. You know, there's a quote in your book that really struck out with me. You're right. One reason we do not trust what our body is telling us is we don't like what it has to say. So how do you, how can a person learn to listen to their body? Number one. And second, how can people push past those worries of what their body is telling them? How do you do that? Sently and slowly. Part of the work, besides getting people the support they need to understand diet, to understand what they really need in their sleep. They need to understand that we have a very ramped up culture and nobody can slow down. So what's happening? Everybody's walking around, always with the device, always online. Not in their body. They're eating in the car. They're rushing from appointment to appointment. Even with their children, they're taking their, I work with kids. So these children, they don't even have half an hour for lunch anymore. So everybody has a lion on their tail. And the first, and this is cortisol raising and leaky guts, this is what happens. That's the territory. So it's kind of like, how do we introduce the slowing down? That's why that's a big part of the book. Unwinding. It's the unwinding. It's like, how do we unwind the nervous system? How do we unwind the breath? How do we learn that we literally can embrace slowing down? It could be really scary at first, because so many people that are sent to me are sent from psychiatrists, psychologists. I work with trauma with people who have been at Three Mile Island. So many people that have had severe trauma. So it's scary for their bodies to let down. It's like, no, I can't. I have to stay alert, otherwise this is going to happen. So it's a slow unwinding process of learning how to be in your breath, how to have a support so that you can co-regulate with somebody and learn how to self-regulate. Just how to be in your body, be in your breath one step at a time. Because then you don't have to push past anything. You can learn how to unfold something gently and slowly. You can learn, we don't do it all at once. Just like we don't introduce everything in the diet all at once. We get educated. We start trying things out because you can't overwhelm people, but you can get them there because that's what I've seen for over 30 years. People really listen. They learn how to listen to themselves. And then they're excited. They're like, oh, that's not so painful. I understand what that is now. It's empowering for them because they've been told your health, you can make the choice, but once we relax, which is the starting point, that's when we finally move forward. So once you start doing that, you mention, well, then we need to kind of talk about what to eat. And you write in your book about the connection between the gut and our emotional well-being, which I've written extensively about and there's more to come. So do you have an interesting story to share about this connection that you can give us an example of? Dr. Gunjee, I could tell you thousands of stories because emotions are such a big percentage of why it goes awry in the gut because there is a system, the vagal system, that there's a connection. The neurotransmitters are in the gut. And if the gut is seriously impaired, it's going to affect the way people feel they're going to get depressed. They get anxious and vice versa. If they've grown up in a family dynamic or in an area that has had a lot of trauma, even if they've had the most pristine diet, they're going to really be affected. So I have a lot of stories in my book. The first thing that comes to mind to me is a woman who had fibroid tumors and really harsh digestion. She just couldn't digest anything. She'd had her children. She was in pain. She was bloated. Everything was happening, the brain fog. And she was referred to me and she told me her story. And I just held her to teach her how to touch her own belly, how to gently breathe, how to open up into her rib cage, which is where her organs are, and how to try to help herself so gently reduce the stress that was in her center. And within about 15 minutes, which happens very often when people are with me, she started to cry. And I'm pools of tears. And I stopped and held her and said, I'm here to listen. If you want to speak, if not, I'm just here to be with you. But this is good for you unless you're uncomfortable. I always check in with people, like, what is their comfort zone? And she basically went, I have no idea. All I know is that it feels amazing for me to let go of whatever this is. And we got to the end of the session. She felt better and she just kind of looked at me and she said, wow, I must have had that inside of me for a really long time. I said, well, call me, make sure you stay in touch. You're welcome to come in again. But here's a practice for you. Here's something that you can do every day to keep connected. And she continued it. And two or three weeks later, she contacted me and said, wow, I'm not having a hysterectomy. I've already gone in and my fibroids are shrinking. I'm digesting better. And she just gave me the rostrum of what had happened in her life that she had to hold back. And she didn't feel comfortable about her belly. She was embarrassed with it. She was married. She didn't even like her husband to see her belly. It had been a difficult emotional journey for her. So you see that when people start to contact their bodies, their breath, and feel held and supported in it, that there's time. We have the time to do this. Then the connection is made, and suddenly the light comes on. And the digestion does change. So I mean, I can go on from children, from infants to people that are 90 that this happens over and over again. So you mentioned that you had her focus on her belly. And you talk a lot about belly breathing in the book. And I know that's a core principle of yoga. What are some of the tips you can share with people to guide them in good belly breathing? Let's one takeaway that people can get from you. I think the most important takeaway is that we want to use the least amount of effort because so many practices are breathed deeply, and it becomes a musculature. It becomes an effort. We can't get out of hypervigilance if we're going to try really hard and we're going to judge ourselves and we're going to think, this is the perfect way to do it. It's a soft, gentle, slow thing. So if you start just with belly breathing and you breathe in through your nose, down your throat, and gently just feel the expansion, you let your belly know that you're giving it this life-giving oxygen. But listen to what your belly has to tell you. Where's the restrictions? Does it hurt somewhere? We don't want to push into it or push past it. We want to honor it, feel it, and then have a practice. Every day we're going to return and we're going to effortlessly breathe, soften, be in our belly, and in a week's time we're ready to move on to another technique to kind of reduce the stress in the belly. But we just start simply, simple, gentle, gentle. So humor me, my lungs are in my chest, so how can I breathe through my belly? Well, you don't really breathe from your belly, Mr. Doctor, which I think you know well. But when you send the air in the right direction, your diaphragm is your breathing muscle. And it's actually moving down and expanding your ribcage laterally so that there's a pressure system that starts to move into your belly that fills your lungs up. There's, you know, I could draw it for you. It's gorgeous. And you did, actually, in your book. Right? Yes. And it's like, yes, we fill lower lobes of the lungs. We get more oxygen in our lungs because we're actually utilizing the mechanism. But most people, as I think you know, are breathing up into their chest. They're panting fast through life. They're hardest, you know, they're in that hypervisual state. So we just have, again, we're back to the unwinding. How do we unwind the tissues, soften the body, slow everything down? So we can return to our birthright, which is inherent health, and which is the proper way to breathe. Even if it happened to you when you were a little baby, your body knows somewhere how to do this. And we can hold a space for that. You know, clearly, as you know, and I know, a lot of conventional medicine has failed us in these areas. And certainly a lot of the wisdom of the East is incredibly useful in this area. But what do you say to your naysayers and critics that all of this is very unscientific that you're laughing? So I know you've been told this. So what do you say about that? You know, it used to happen a lot more because there's a tremendous amount of science now. And we have doctors like you, frankly, who are bringing it forth and sharing it with a wider audience. And people want it. So they're going to their doctors now and saying, but I heard Dr. Steve Gundry or I know Chris Kresser, you know, whatever is happening, they're like, I go to this woman who taught me this, I feel a hundred times better. You know, I think we're being supported more. But I listened to the naysayers. Not many of them connect with me because they're primed for me. They've read my book. I have a book from 15 years ago. You know, they and they've been told, oh, this woman, you know, I mean, it's we're lucky when people know about us a little bit. But I do I do feel that when that happens, I'm willing to listen. What is, you know, I'm curious, what is it that you that you think is unscientific? Let's have a conversation about it. And that way, maybe I can allay your your fears. Maybe I can show you some literature or turn you on to an M.D. that will make you feel safer. You know, people just need to feel safe. But the science is so there now. It's incredible. Yeah, it's my next book is the longevity paradox, which will be out at the end of March. And there's a lot of fascinating information about the effect of meditation actually on changing the gut microbiome. And yeah, and so and there's some really cool studies of people who are on a waiting list for a meditation center in Northern California versus people who actually went to that center and following their health and following their gut microbiome over a period of time. And so all of these people actually well intentioned. They all wanted to do this. But one group got taught meditation and the other didn't. And so it's fascinating. Wonderful. All right. Let me take you back to almost the beginning with with you. Do you do you feel that learning the technique of belly breathing was one of the real big impacts on turning your health around way back when it was the starting point for me to be able to to have my nervous system come into balance actually because I was all scared of pain. I was scared of everything and my system was so ramped up. So the belly breathing that I learned and then I took on myself was a very slowed down. It helped my nervous system slow down. And then I had teachers who taught me how to use the entire mechanism. My cortisol levels came down and I could start to feel honestly what the choices I needed to make for my exercise for my diet in my relationships. I mean everything came from that. It's not you know it's not a cure. It's on the road to understanding what we can do to help ourselves. But it was I mean the the sun came out for me when I could finally go. Oh I'm not anxious. I mean I was so anxious. There were so many things happening in my nervous system. And I became neutral. I could feel my health again. And then I knew how to further unwind what I needed for myself. So this is like this is an introduction especially for people that have no idea to get out of a loop of hyperactivity and trauma so that they can participate in your program even better. Things will settle or they can even know how to choose that you're there out there because they're not always listening right others. So okay so our listeners mom works dad works the kids have 27 after school activities like you mentioned when we started and they're rolling their eyes and going wait a minute I don't have a meditation room in my house. I don't have the time to go down to a meditation center. Can they when they wake up in the morning before all hell breaks loose. Can we belly breathe in the bedroom. Can we do it in bed. Help us out here. I'm helping you and you're wonderful because that's what I teach. It's like first of all breathing is something we do day and night. And if we can start to wake up in the morning and then before we go to sleep those two areas where we're in bed and hopefully we're going to stay there for at least an hour before the baby starts crying. So we get these moments it doesn't take long to slow down. Especially if you have a structure to do it with you've had somebody teach you something and you're like okay I'm going to be here with myself five minutes I start people sometimes with three minutes because that's the unwinding how do we get this into our life because honestly Dr. Gundry once people start on this they're amazed like everything's easier or oh they do have time or they can make space or children I've gone into classrooms with second graders and taught them how to breathe and they will I'll say to them at the beginning like it's kind of funny isn't it I'm teaching you how to breathe you know and they'll all be raising their hands like no I have asthma no like my mommy probably doesn't breathe I need to teach her and so it becomes a familial you know the family dynamics have to be included and everybody starts doing it together and then we have the field of your life your life can slow down because guess what as you know we can do a lot more when we're not hyped up we get so much more done you know because we make choices and we can actually focus and be in our body and be in our passion and not waste our time right and not get angry we can be angry and deal with that but we don't have to flare into something that takes an hour away from our life so it just it branches out into so much but we start it like I said so slow just honor people where that you do start where they are you know you can't pile stuff on you really they're not going to go for a 10-day vipassana retreat at the beginning but I have to say they do end up going but let's get them ready for that so that they don't trip out there right okay all right now I got I got one more thing to ask you and folks who are listening or watching we're going to go deep into the bowel to one of our favorite subjects and let's talk about poop so what what can people learn from their stools your should we be reading our stools well you should definitely be looking yeah I mean it's a great way to monitor what you're doing and what's working and what's not working I'm certainly you should be having the stool to look at every day at least once people can really learn what they're eating because there's a transit time there's a way that the body can tell you through your stool yeah I didn't really like that I'm not going or I'm going too much I'm dry I'm damp you know like what's happening you can find out so much through your poop yeah you're right when I was when I was writing the plant paradox I have a thing in there that when you look down in the toilet bowl you should see a giant coiled snake looking up at you and originally I wrote that you should you should see a giant coiled anaconda and and my editor wrote back Julie will and she said there's a movie called anaconda and I don't think we want that visual you know coming out coming out of the toilet and she said could we just say coiled snake and I said oh yeah okay sorry but you know Dr. Terry Walls who's become a good friend who cured herself of MS with food it makes a very good point that she thinks all of us should eat seven cups of vegetables every day and quite frankly if you eat seven cups of vegetables you will see a giant coiled snake at least once a day and perhaps more and as I talk about extensively you got to feed the bugs in your gut that are actually going to give you the hormones and the precursors of good things going on in your brain so yeah so we got to breathe in our belly and we got to feed our belly and everything will be okay exactly I agree and I do eat at least seven cups of vegetables a day it's actually my favorite food so we're lucky in California to have such a bevy of vegetables but you know and even you know I came from the Midwest and the South originally and with the frozen products that are now available year-round organic there's there's less and less excuse to say well you know you people on the coast you're you're different yeah we do have access to great stuff year-round but it's now available you know I go back to the Midwest and South all the time in it and go through stores and go to restaurants and they're there we just have to educate everybody with you all right so as as you know I get a audience question every every week so we're gonna go right into that M. Monroe asks I'm a shift worker do you have any helpful suggestions on how to maintain a healthy diet ie fasting supplements when to eat etc so this this is a great question shift workers as you know as a shift worker are some of the most unhealthy people in the world I know this first-hand as a heart surgeon and cardiologist for a long time and also as a scrub nurse in college and medical school when I work the night shift I also work the night shift in emergency rooms so night shift work is some of the most dangerous work there is for your health everything gets screwed up your circadian rhythm gets screwed up your day night cycle gets screwed up and when we're tired the things we turn to to help us out are simple carbohydrates and it's like burning jet fuel and I can tell you that's one of the reasons I got 70 pounds overweight because I had to have jet fuel all the time to try and stay away but I think there are really good steps to do this one of the things when if you're a shift worker you have to have when you go home you have to have a completely darkened room to go home to and you have to arrange that bedroom that it is black and it's easy to do their blackout curtains there's blackout shades that's number one number two don't fall into the trap of needing lots of caffeine and lots of simple sugars I mean I went to so many ding-dong dispensing machines and hostess cupcake machines in the middle of the night and the in the hospital don't do that bring some nuts from home that works great there is lots of ways to get a little MCT oil in your purse in your pocket you can even get coconut packets of coconut oil in packets that you can take to work these will give you the energy you need without killing you so those are just a couple of really good tips as a former shift worker and I for 20 years I continued to work nights and maintain my lower weight so I can do it but you you got to do something because it's killing you as a shift worker depending on their circumstances to if you can introduce some structure like can you wake up two hours before that shift and get a rock and fueling nutritional breakfast can you come home and have a good small meal and then for me you know take at least 12 hours without eating so that your body can rest and repair right so we can get a structure happening and that way that's the unwinding that's a step right I agree so much with you about the blackout curtains like we can introduce I also was in the theater and I was a restaurant person doubled up so I worked sometimes till three o'clock in the morning as a bartender if you can believe that and so yeah you had to find a way not to have a cocktail to wind down like that's the last thing you want to do to yourself because you're not going to have good sleep the chemicals in your body just they it's all screwed up so there's so many things people can do but until we would know this shift worker personally I would be reluctant to talk about supplements except the set what you're talking about take the MCT oil with you introduce the vegetables you know because we don't really know what's going on for that person and I would wait for that part great all right so that's going to be it for today Allison where can readers find you and your work well they can find me online at Allison post calm I'm on Facebook Instagram LinkedIn I have an online program coming out next month that is actually a video audio worksheet that goes with the book so people actually learn these things because I do work with people all over the world online and I wanted to give them a way to do this in their own home at their own pace so that'll be coming out no fantastic up on my website get in touch with me I'm happy to answer questions because this is why we write this is what we do we really do want to help and the gut wellness guide is everywhere bookstore on every online purveyor okay very good well thanks a lot for joining me and good luck with the book and good luck with the online program that'll be great it's such a pleasure thanks for inviting me and thanks again for joining me on the Dr. Gundry podcast we'll see you next week tune in because as you know I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you exciting news my friends my new book the longevity paradox is out now like the plant paradox this will be a game changer in helping you live a long vital life so pick up your copy now at your local bookstore Barnes & Noble or Amazon or my audiobook which I actually recorded this time and make sure you tell your friends and family about it