 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pump, for the first 32 minutes, we have, actually for the whole episode, we have special guest Dr. Reinforcements. This was really awkward for Justin. He had a really, I didn't know where to go with this. We have Dr. Molly Maloof with us doing our Qua episode. Now, for the first 32 minutes, we do our normal introductory conversation. First, we talk about the Take Your Pills documentary. Apparently, this is a new documentary on Netflix. We all need to watch. All about Adderall. Dr. Molly talks about Getting Off Adderall. That's a fun one. We talk about insulin resistance, fasting and bodybuilding. Adam adds some insight there. Glucose monitors and how they reveal true hunger. That was a great tip that you gave us there, Dr. Molly. Genetic variances in diet, and we talked about cholesterol and hormones. And then we get into the questions. The first question was, do we trust normative data on routine blood tests? I guess the question basically is, do we think the ranges that were given by labs should be trusted? Dr. Molly told us that those organizations are huge bureaucracies and they're not very consistent. Mind blown. Damn the man. The next question, what kind of diet will we recommend for a woman who is suffering from polycystic ovarian syndrome in order to rebalance her hormones and promote fat loss? Et cetera. Great conversation in that topic. The next question was, what about makeup and skincare and its relation to health? Dr. Molly talks about endocrine disruptors, excuse me, that are quite common in these types of products and what they can do to your body. That's right. Damn those Kardashians. Find out what mascara Justin's using now. And the final question. It's a nice blue. What strategies do we have for a middle-aged female athlete on how to manage and balance her hormones, adrenal function, thyroid, et cetera, with her high levels of physical activity? We actually had a slight, I don't want to say disagreement, but it was a great discussion on that part of the episode. Get on the juice. Also, this month, Juice up. We are giving away the No BS six pack formula for free. What's up? How much, Adam? Free. Free 99. It was free. You actually can get the No BS six pack formula for free with any maps bundled. Now bundles are where we take multiple maps programs. We combine them together for particular goals. For example, the maps super bundle as a year of exercise programming. Enroll in any of those bundles, get the No BS six pack formula for free. If you have any questions on maps programs, here's some quick answers. If you're interested in maximum muscle gain and strength, that's maps anabolic. If you want to sculpt your body like a bodybuilder, physique competitor, or bikini competitor, well then you enroll in maps aesthetic. If your goal is functional athletic performance, that's maps performance. And if you're a personal trainer interested in training their clients better, or if you're interested in somebody who wants correctional exercise, that's maps prime and prime pro. So find all those programs, including the bundles with the free No BS six pack formula at mindpumpmedia.com. I'm excited to have you on as a guest of a quah episode, a Q and A. We do not do this with our guests. Yeah, have we ever done a quah with a guest? We've done it with once. One other time we did it with Mike Matthews, who's probably the only other guy that we would trust to do that. That's right. He could pull it off. The best we have in you right there. Oh cool. We'll see, we'll see how this goes. Yeah, I got faith, I got faith in you. So anyway, what's, how you been doing? We haven't seen you for like a couple months. I got a text from you the other day about. Wait, wait, wait, were we recording earlier? We are now. Well, don't worry, we'll first shave all of that. We'll put it on the floor. Nobody will hear. Let down do his magic. I really don't want my friend's name on the podcast. Nobody will hear what you said. We won't incriminate you. Before. Okay, okay, okay. We just started the podcast. Because people know him. Yeah. Yeah. He's an animal. He is an animal. That's for the pay-for site, you know. For you to listen to all the behind the scenes. No, how you been, what you been up to? You were telling me you got your resting metabolic rate tested and all that? Oh God, all right, so. How did you get that tested? What did they do? There's a company called Dexifit, and I had done my VO2 max at a fitness conference last year, and I had a really good VO2 max because I had two people cheering me on. And then this time, the guy's like, yeah, I'm just gonna like tell you what to do, and then you're gonna just run as hard as you can. And I'm like, wait, you're not gonna like cheer me on, you're not gonna like push me? And he goes, no. I'm like, well, can you please do that? Cause I'm not gonna run as hard unless you have, unless you tell me that I can do more. And frankly, he didn't push me hard enough, and I didn't do as good. And so I was really sad about that. Like I was in the excellent range, but I wasn't like on the border about standing like I was last year. And I think I could have gone harder. And then my, so last time I tried to do my RMR, they said it didn't work. So I don't know if it was cause it was too low, but this time it was really quite low. And I've always wondered about that. And I guess like- So you feel like you have a slow metabolism? Yeah, yeah. I think that's okay. Like we're gonna have real talk now, everyone. About two years ago, I went off of a very common stimulant medication for ADHD called Adderall. And you know what? Like I'm actually okay talking about this now because of that documentary that's out called Take Your Pills. I haven't seen it yet. And you guys have to watch this because like the reality is that a lot of doctors a lot of medical students take drugs and they take them because they diagnose each other. I mean college students, I didn't actually have a prescription in college but occasionally, you know, you would, my roommate had them. So, and they talk about all about this in this documentary but the point is, is that like a lot of people from the beginning of the use of stimulants and amphetamines as medicine in America, people took them, actually the story behind Adderall is really interesting is the doctor who developed the drug actually named it after his wife because he thought that it was a really nice experience gave him a sensation of higher metabolism, higher well-being, higher athletic performance. And he's like, and so he named it after his wife. Weren't amphetamines originally prescribed? I think if I'm not mistaken, I've seen old ads like from the 1960s or something like that or maybe I'm wrong, but where they would actually advertise methamphetamines to housewives. Yeah, that's the point. So they do more housework. She can do more housework, she can play better tennis, you know, like she'll be happier, she'll lose weight. Are you bored at home by yourself? Take meth, it'll help you out. Well, so now, you know, so it took me about a year to taper and then people always ask me that, she's like, how long is it gonna take me to get off this? And I'm like, honestly, it might take you a year because if you try to go cold turkey off of Adderall, you're gonna be going through a serious dopamine withdrawal. And that's like really not a fun experience. What's dopamine withdrawal like? We'll talk to anybody who's used a lot of cocaine, ask them how it feels, you know, like it's the sensation that something's missing in your life, the sensation that like, you don't have motivation to do the things that you want to do. For me, I felt very exposed and vulnerable. When you take stimulants, you feel very unstoppable. And the funny thing is that these, like a lot of the studies are showing that it doesn't necessarily improve performance in school, it just gives you the impression that you're smarter so that you actually try harder. So, I mean, some people it does help, but... Well, seeing that again, that's very interesting. That's fascinating. That's like marijuana when I think I'm creative. Yeah. Yeah. And then you look at... Although I do believe that marijuana makes people more creative because I think it, because the cannabinoid system is kind of like the brain circuit breaker. So if you're adjusting activity on a global scale in your brain, you might actually find more creative connections. That's my own personal experience with it. Well, they actually did test it with... I'm gonna go with that theory. They did test cannabis and there's a particular test where I can't remember what it's called. There's a name for it where if they give you a word, you have to name a bunch of words that are associated with it. And it's supposed to be a classic test of creativity and cannabis improves that. But back to Adderall, they've done cognitive like, okay, does this actually improve cognition and studies just say you don't, it doesn't. But it gives you the impression that you love your job. And if you hate your job and you hate what you're studying in school and a drug gives you the sensation that you actually enjoy it and you have a sense of urgency and agency to do the work, then you're gonna do it and then you're gonna fall in love with your job. So like, to me, it's, I think actually it is a synthetic stressor that gets your body to move towards something that you typically wouldn't wanna do. Wow. When did you go off that completely? It took you a year, you said it later. So I went off completely about two years ago at a meditation retreat and I definitely wouldn't recommend doing like the full end cold turkey with coffee at the same time, but they didn't have coffee at the retreat. Oh, sorry, didn't talk at all. No, it was definitely talking, but I cried a lot. I came back and I was like, okay, this is me, my new life now. And I was terrified that I wouldn't make as much money. I was afraid that I wouldn't have as many jobs and I was afraid that I wouldn't do well and everything and the total opposite happened. I actually made more money that year. I also, my relationships improved. I felt like I had more empathy, but I definitely put on some weight. Like I gained about eight pounds and I think that was actually partially responsible for the insulin resistance that I developed because, now get this, now this is something I did a bunch of research in. I literally had to like read all the papers on this to figure it out. But you know, we give anti-psychotic drugs to people who have too much dopamine and it lowers their dopamine and what happens to these people, they get really fat, right? So what happens if you're taking a drug that gives you a lot of dopamine and you go off of it? It's almost like you're getting the anti-psychotic experience now, right? Interesting. So I think it played a role in insulin resistance that I developed and I've read through forums on all sorts of websites that a lot of people have to turn to ketogenic diets to actually get their body back on track and through exercise because your metabolism is shot. Also because, if I didn't mean directly, affects the hypothalamus. So it directly affects your metabolism. Yeah, that's the part of the brain that controls your weight. The ventromedial part of your hypothalamus. Yeah, I was about to say that. Just kidding. So, but the other thing too is it's also, to add on top of that, it's also an appetite suppressant. So you might find yourself wanting to eat more and then on top of it, if you have low dopamine, you might feel flat or down. And then you use food like coffee. I just got really, really obsessed with coffee after this because I was just like, I needed something. Wow, so you did that two years ago. So now you feel like your metabolism is slow as a result of that whole process? I do think it's slow. I mean, I feel like I have a sluggish thyroid too, which I've known for a while, but maybe that was related to being on speed for so many years. I mean, I was on it since medical school when a doctor diagnosed me on the rotation I was on with her. She was like, you know you have ADD, right? And I was like, well, yeah, duh. I mean, I was like, but, I mean, what do you think I should do for it? Go take stimulants. And she's like, well, I take them and I think they really help. And I was like, okay, well, I'll try. And secretly I was like, yes. Of course. So I went as an adult, I went to a doctor and she had this poster on the wall and it was like, do you feel this, this, that? You may have adult ADD. And I'm reading it and I'm like, okay, yeah. Yes, on all those things. And I know I probably have ADD, which by the way, people with ADD also have the ability to hyper-focus. So a lot of people don't know that. Yeah, no, I can totally hyper-focus, but I can't be around a bunch of people while I do it. Right, right. So I asked her, she had me take this quiz and then she wrote me a prescription for ADD medication. I didn't get the cool stuff though. They prescribed stratera, I think it was called, which made me feel weird and loopy. So I never took it again. And I'm happy they didn't give me Adderall. I tried Ritalin and it gave me headaches. And frankly, a lot of the reasons why I was happy to go off of it is because I just felt like, okay, here I am trying to be a person promoting optimizing health. How hypocritical am I that I'm on speed? Let's get real. Like this is bullshit. And so I had to come to juice this moment in my life where I was like, I gotta get off of this. And the whole metabolic effects of not being on speed do suck. Like I do feel like I have to work harder and I feel like I need to work out more to have the same experience. Like even just to maintain where I'm at right now, which is fine. I do feel like I need to work out more than most people do. Well, we've talked quite a bit off air and the goal is going to be, and we're going to help you. Oh, I know. I'm so excited about this. After we're done with the podcast, I'm going to take you through an assessment so I can give you better recommendations in terms of exercises and stuff. But in our experience, I mean, you want to speed up the metabolism, which in the context of modern lifestyle is what I think most people will probably benefit from because there's just so much food around us and we're just not active in our daily lives is focus on getting you stronger, which is number one. Like if we can give you some good strength and build, you don't have to build a ton of muscle either. Just getting stronger tends to get the metabolic rate to burn more calories, makes you utilize insulin better and all those other things. So that'll be the goal. What have your workouts been up until now? I definitely did a lot of bodybuilding last summer when I was dating a guy who was like super, super fit. Yeah, but you overdid it. Didn't you go crazy? I do feel like doing his regimen was probably not the right way to go into it. But yeah, because I felt more, I really did feel like I was high cortisol. Like I felt like it was giving me, it was kind of intuitive. Too much. I was like, you know, Travis, I don't really feel like I'm getting the results that I should be getting. And I feel like it's because my cortisol is so high. And I think this is kind of maladaptive. But I was also eating fairly low carb at the time. So I'm wondering also if I wasn't feeding myself enough. You know, it's really hard to say, but- Is insulin inversely related with cortisol? Like if insulin goes up, does cortisol go down or does that not matter? No, so typically what happens is cortisol makes you insulin resistant. So the insulin that you release, your body's cells are resistant to it. So you need more. So it's a vicious cycle of insulin resistance. Is this because cortisol makes your liver just release a lot of sugar? Is that part of it? And it makes your cells resistant to the sugar that it releases. Just directly. Oh wow, I did not know that. Very interesting. How common do you find that with your clients and patients? Oh my God. Oh my God, insulin resistance is everywhere. And the thing is, is that I think it's highly, highly underdiagnosed because we don't do oral glucose tolerance tests. And we don't do like, nobody goes to the doctor and does a two hour glucose challenge with insulin measured at one hour and two hours. Nobody does that anymore. And that's actually where we have a problem because there's 80 million people with pre-diabetes in this country. And most of them, like only 11% of them know they have it. And that's CDC statistics. So part of the reason is, you need the way you diagnose pre-diabetes is there's three ways. You can use hemoglobin A1C, which doesn't catch everyone. You can use fasting glucose, which doesn't catch everyone. Cause it only tells you about your fasting levels, which is really your hepatic insulin resistance. And then your muscle insulin resistance, you catch through the glucose challenge test. So one can be off and the other one not. So one of them measures your liver, how your liver responds. The other one is your muscle, how that responds. I did not know that. And there's isolated forms of both, right? And then you can find them together, but not everybody has them together. What do you find most common with the people that like let's say, for example, in liver, they struggle there. Is there a type of person? Vicerol fat, man. Alcohol, like people who have fatty liver and fatty, like my visceral fat levels are tiny. I think it's probably cause I'm fairly okay. My fitness is pretty much okay. But like my visceral fat is like 0.02 or something super low. So that's great. So that's not my issue. But this is where again, glucose monitoring comes in. Because if you're not looking at your response to meals, you don't know how your muscles are responding to the food. You don't know if they're easily taking them up. Like I exercised like a really hard workout yesterday morning, a bunch of high intensity stuff. And I had super low blood sugar all day long because of that effect on my muscle. That's part of the reason why it's so good to exercise. By the way, we're probably gonna recommend that you don't do super high intensity workouts. I'm guessing. Yeah, because what we wanna do is send a signal to your body to build muscle. We're not trying to get you to burn a shit ton of calories while you're working out because that actually can cause the body to start to adapt in a way where it becomes really efficient calories. So we see this a lot with like we'll get clients to do a lot of running or do all they do is hit style workouts and their metabolism's just adapt, adapt, adapt. And then we have these, I had a young lady, 120 pound X figure competitor or a bikini competitor who was doing an hour and a half of working out every day and anything over 1200 calories she would gain weight. That's how much her metabolism had adapted downward. So we had to reverse out of that, have her lift weights took us a year before I could get her to be able to consume closer to 2000 calories with that type of activity. See that to me is my dream, like to be able to easily consume 2000 calories. Which you should be able to. You should be able to. It's not like you're a four foot nine little 80 pound girl. I mean, you have enough size and muscle density that you should be able to burn that much. And I love eating. So let's get real. And I love eating vegetables. Like I eat most, I mean, I fucking love vegetables. I'm sorry for causing. I'm trying to work on that. But broccoli. No, but for real vegetables are like the key to optimal health along with exercise. Just cause they feed your microbiome. And if your microbiome is healthy, then you'll live a long, long time. But I guess kind of going back to the Adderall thing, like when you're not eating, your metabolism is like tanked, you know? Cause you're just not eating. You're eating like maybe one, maybe one in two meals a day. And that's another thing that we, you know, there's this big fasting obsession right now. And like, I think I'm going to get a lot of questions from this discussion, which is like, okay, so what about fasting, right? Like how do you fit into fasting? This is my question for you guys. Into like a bodybuilding measurement because we know that it's good for apoptosis. We know that it's good for your cellular health, longevity. So like, how does this work in your world? I would not recommend fasting to somebody who I'm trying to get their metabolism to amp up. So if I get a, if I get- I do recommend fasting to bodybuilders though. That was one of the things I used to do when I, I was one of the first coaches that I ever knew that used to in the middle of a prep would make all my athletes fast. So they're all overfed. What was your goal there, just to shed quickly? Well, you know, that's part of me just being a butt head too. Like, I just want to show them that like, listen, this is something that you can do. Cause the myth out there is that they're going to do that and muscle is going to fall off. You know, I mean, I remember what it felt like to be that kid too, who's trying to build muscle. And then also you see the scale go down and then right away you think, oh God, it was a pound of muscle that came off of me. But that's not what's happening. So I think I did it originally for just to show people like, listen, you can do this and you can be okay. Because I found that in the competitive world, a lot of these athletes had a really poor relationship with food. And so I was trying to break that. So for me, it was more about a relationship and the connection that you had with food. Interesting. Yeah, that you were so, cause I mean, we can talk all day about all the different health benefits to fasting. But in my personal experience, one of the most beneficial things that clients of mine have learned from fasting, it's just the relationship with food is realizing that holy shit, you could go two days and not eat food and your body is just fine. That's the reason why fasting is in like every major spiritual or religious practice because of that. And that's why I practice fasting every month. I do a 72 hour fast and I get the physical benefits from it. And I noticed those, but that's not why that's not what motivates me to do it. It's that whole psychological aspect. I feel like it's a reset. My palate gets reset. I break the chains of food. And what I mean by that is the emotional connections or when I get cravings, which are not real hunger and all those different things. Totally. But if I get a client who has a, what we would call a damaged metabolism. And I hate using that term because it's not that their metabolisms are damaged. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. It's a great target to do. But these are people who, okay, I'm not eating a lot of calories. I'm doing a lot of activity. Why am I, why is my body fat still high? Why am I not able to shed body weight? And so those are the people, I don't have them fast. We don't fast at all. Now, if they do fast, we'll do it for health and it's very infrequent. So the way I would incorporate it, if you're looking for the health benefits of fasting, is not to do the intermittent daily fasting, but rather to do maybe a 24 hour or 48 hour fast once, maybe a month or once every other month for all those other benefits. See, that's actually one of my goals anyway, is just to do like two days a month. That's it. So that's it. That would be the way to do it. With bodybuilders, I always did it or competitors, I always did it with the transition from in a surplus of going to deficit. So let's say I just, you know, I'm coaching you and you're getting ready for a show and I just gave you a surplus of, you know, three days in a row of 2,000 calories, which is a lot for you, you know, for those three days. Then on the fourth day, we're fasting, you know, no food for the entire day, you know, and I'd bring down the intensity in their training. And for me, it was about breaking again that relationship. Obviously, it's not advantageous for a competitor or bodybuilder to be intermittent fasting almost every day or fasting every single week. I just did it when I'd be transitioning and more so to teach the lesson. Well, there's also evidence to suggest that when you have regular and consistent feedings of protein, you actually become, you know, desensitized to it in the sense that your body uses it a little less efficiently. More of it is turned into energy. And so for bodybuilders who are consuming all this protein, all this food, a fast and then they go back to eating the protein, it's like, boom, they get this boost from it. And I noticed that every time. So every time I fast, I notice when I, it's like three days into my refeed or whatever where I noticed like this, almost like this anabolic effect. Well, I love what you guys are saying because really it kind of goes back to this idea of what really health is all about, which is adapting and self managing in the face of whatever life like hands us. And, you know, I think for a lot of people in America, if we had a mass famine for, you know, like people would just lose it. Like this country would not survive. Like we're asked a lot of countries, people survive and they live through like serious famines. And like, yes, kids, like, yes, there are children who die. But I do feel like we are a very fragile country when it comes to food because we're so overfed. Oh, my God. You know what? I make this point all the time and people will debate me and then I win this debate every single time. Most people in Western civilized societies have never felt real hunger. True. They've never gone longer than, you know, 12 hours without food ever in their entire lives. So everything that they think hunger is, is actually not hunger, but rather cravings or emotional connection or set and setting. So when they say things like, yeah, like, no, I'm starving. I get starving by lunchtime. You're actually not hungry. You know it's time to eat. You may be craving something. I mean, real hunger is this. If you're truly hungry, you'll eat anything. When you're craving something, it's one of these where you'll tell your friend, like, I'm starving. They'll be like, oh, cool, let's go get Mexican. Be like, I'm not in the mood for Mexican. I had that yesterday. Well, let's get pizza. I'm not in the mood for pizza. You're not actually hungry. Yeah. You just have craving. And this is actually where, again, I love wearing a glucose monitor because I can see if I'm actually low blood sugar. I can see if I'm like in the range where I should legitimately feel hunger. And there's two studies that I've been using to guide the programming of this app around biofeedback assistance, like basically assisting people who have never felt hunger using a blood sugar monitor to show them that your blood sugar isn't low enough to feel hunger. Oh, that's brilliant. No, I need to eat my blood sugar low. So they have metrics. Most people are eating, and there are blood sugars like a hundred. And I'm like, sorry, you're good to go. You could actually last a lot longer than that. I didn't even think about being able to use the tool like that. You imagine that? What a great way to take it. I can't wait till everybody can have that. I know, me too. How long do you think that's gonna be till we can all... Probably, I mean, the goal is like, the goal is the first quarter of next year. Okay. That's the goal. And you're consulting with these companies? Yeah, I'm there two days a week. Wow. So we get one too, right? Yeah. When that comes up. You can have us... Come on. Let's see who has the best insulin levels. Okay, so I just got a case of these glucose tolerance test sugar solutions. And I am so afraid to consume one of these because like... Wait, what is this? It's the test that you get at the doctor if you're gonna see if you actually have diabetes or not. And I know my fasting glucose is good. And I know that my blood sugar looks good because I know what I feed myself. But I've never done an actual glucose challenge. And so I'm like afraid to see what will happen to me. Is it pure dextrose or... How does it work? Explain how it works. So you start the timer and you drink this stuff. And actually you drink this thing and then you go for like five minutes. And it's just pure sugar or what? Pure sugar water. Okay. 75 gram hit of sugar. Oh, wow. There's a lot. Yeah. And like what you typically do is you wait two hours. But you can measure it one hours and two hours or you can measure every 30 minutes if you wanna get an even more effective assessment of like your peak. But like we have a glucose monitor. So we can just find out when the peak is. And this is something that's like missing from a typical glucose tolerance test is if you're at a lab and they give you this sugar water and they only test you at one hour and two hours, what if you peaked in between that, right? So if you missed the peak, you don't even actually know if you actually had abnormal blood sugar. So I'm basically gonna try to get everybody in the office to do this. I don't know if anyone's gonna do it. But like, but importantly, you have to be eating carbs before you take this test for it to be fully accurate. Wait, why if I go and say I go into a keto? Is it just because I become hypersensitive to it? You become physiologically insulin resistant. It's like it'll naturally happen if you eat just full ketogenic. This is like all over, I mean, this is like pretty well established stuff. But so like- Wait, what do you mean by that? Explain that, because that sounds fascinating. So your body becomes, your brain is like doing everything you can to get glucose into it, right? So your peripheral tissues are saying we're not gonna let glucose in because we want to shunt it to our brain, right? So the test will show that you have insulin resistance when you go? Yeah, so like I did the biome test and it said that I had insulin resistance and I was like, because they have a glucose challenge. And I was like, but I was eating less than 50 grams of carbs. Like shouldn't you guys tell me to eat 150 grams of carbs every three days for like three days before I do this? Because that's generally what they say you should do to get back to, because frankly, since being out of keto, I am super insulin sensitive. Like my blood sugars are crazy low right now. So like there is a benefit to ketogenesis by like really resensitizing yourself in the long term. But during that period of time, your body is responding like you don't have sugar and you need to make sure your brain is fed. Wow, that's so fascinating. Now, because of that, now do you encourage people to go weave in and out of like a ketogenic diet? I mean like I, so I have a slightly higher cholesterol if I do keto. And I have, I just checked my cholesterol. It's above 200 right now. Yeah, but who cares though, right? If it's dietary, because you're obviously eating higher. Everybody says that like you shouldn't care, but like I just feel like I've spent enough time with both the high carb and the low carb worlds to know that both sides have truth to them. And I'm just not, I'm just not convinced that like saturated fat is good for everybody. I'm glad you said that because it makes me feel better about the experience I had when I went keto was, and it was just me looking at, and I didn't even test my cholesterol. I just thought, this can't be ideal for me if I wasn't eating anywhere near like this. All of a sudden I'm consuming all this fats. When over 50% of my diet ends up being butters and oils. Yeah, I just felt really not great by the end of the month. Like second week I felt pretty great. But then by the end of the month, I was just like, this is so not sustainable for me. I do not feel well. Did you also, well that's an important one. But let's get real, let's get real. I have PPAR Gamma Genetic Defect. I have an FTO defect and I have APO E4. Oh my God. You need a SRP21. I basically, guys. I have a C3PO. I basically, I can't have a lot of saturated fat. Like my genetics are telling me you cannot live on saturated fat. Those are polymorphisms that were some people just, and this is again, this goes back to each, when you look at individual people, they're very, very different. Generally we can make general, we could say generally lower carbs may be better, ketogenic may be better, but when you look at the individual, I'm sorry, but some people, there are some people that are healthiest vegan. There are people who do it. Just straight up, just straight up. So it's very, very individual and you're talking about specific genes that we've now or variances that we've now identified that make it a higher likelihood that you're not gonna do well with a lot of saturated fat, but there's so much we don't know yet. And so I think you get at the end of the day, if you feel like shit, probably, because I had people message me because we all went keto a while ago as an experiment. And it's how I typically eat, not all the time, but most of the time, because I feel best on it. And I'd get messages from people and they'd be like, oh, you know, I've been keto now for three months and I still feel terrible and my digestion's bad and how long does it take? Okay, so that's another thing, right? Yeah. Like what about the gut health, right? Like you cannot eat the level. I mean, right now I checked my carbohydrate and take the last few days and I'm eating at least twice as many vegetables now that I'm off keto, but I'm still around like 50 grams of carbs, you know, net carbs. So like, am I in ketosis? I don't feel like I'm in ketosis, but I'm eating low carb, but like I need a lot of vegetables to keep my gut healthy. That's how I eat. So I'll eat very, very low starchy carbohydrates or low sugars and stuff like that, but I do eat a lot of vegetables. So I'll eat very large servings of everything, broccoli, leafy greens. I like to cook them because I can eat more when I cook them. So I eat very, very similar. But yeah, I mean, those differences are, I mean, here's the thing I wanna ask you about cholesterol, did you test to see, because I know you can have high cholesterol, but then you- NMR, lipid profiles. Yeah, check your- When I did, well, so I need to check it again because I had mine checked in when I was eating higher carb in December and my lip, my lipoproteins improved. But when I did check them after keto last summer, they had gone way up. So the bad, even the bad forms of the bad. The bad ones went up last summer. So that's what got me thinking, maybe it's not, and not everybody happens to, it just happened to me. So that's when I started really looking back into my genetics and just like piling through all the studies that I've done. And I'm like, oh yeah. It basically says this is what's gonna happen if I do this, so. And it's not that you can't do it. People can do keto with higher mono and saturated fats in Omega-3s, but it's just a lot harder and you're eating a lot of oil. And so I don't know about you, but it's pretty gross. Like I felt grossed out when I was just like, I can't eat this much oil. Follow me alive. Dr. Dom Diagostino, same thing as you. So he dramatically reduced the saturated fat and then he increased the amount of other types of fat. I've seen what he eats. Olive oil, sardines, you know, that kind of stuff. I mean, like he does it. He makes it work. But it's just like the thing is, is you end up just eating like protein and green vegetables and like nuts. And that's just a boring life. Hell yeah, it's boring. I'm with you because at the end, look, we all, the three of us were personal trainers for a long time. And so our experience tells us that we, because a lot of times we'll have scientists or doctors on the show and they'll tell us like, this is what's best. This is what the study show. And we'll be thinking, because of our experience, we'll be like, well, that's nice, but no one's going to do it. It's not sustainable. Yeah, no one's going to do it. So it actually doesn't matter. So what you're saying doesn't matter because no one's going to follow. I like the idea of doing it for like a month here and there. Like Mark Sisson, is that how you say his name? Sisson, yeah. He says, you know, his whole story is now, just do it twice a year or something like that. And I think for a lot of people who are insulin resistant, which is like a third of the country, more than that maybe. Yeah, I think it's a really good reset. I think for a lot of people, we're so stuck on the insulin cycle and the sugar and the carb cycle that like, we just don't even know what it's like to not live like that. That's why I think it looks so positive. It looks so positive because we've went so far off the deep end with it. It's like, well, no shit, everyone's seeing all these great things from it. And then you realize you're not going to die if you eat all that much fat. You know, you're like, oh, I'm not going to die. Well, it completely changed my relationship with fats and carbohydrates. I fell into that category of people that just I had trained myself not to eat high fat. It was like I was on the low fat. I had non-fat milk in my refrigerator for God knows how long, stayed away from butter, stayed away from oil, stayed away from all that stuff to keep it down. Then when I went keto, and I was eating around that time because I was competing right before we switched over that, I was getting close to four to 600 grams of carbs every day. And so when we went keto with the complete opposite and I saw all the positive effects from it, the takeaway for me was, holy shit, like I don't need to eat that many carbohydrates. And now my carbohydrates fall around somewhere about 150 grams of carbs. It's not that much. And I feel great. And I don't have to be ketogenic all the time. It allows me to have a little bit of flexibility. That's a smart takeaway. That's definitely a smart takeaway. Here's another question on cholesterol. I've read studies that show that people with higher cholesterol tend to have longer lives in the sense that they have lower rates of all cause mortality. Well, so here's the thing. I had a client who had had like a triple bypass and he was just holding on to his statins and his registrace, like it was a security blanket. Like he was pushing his lipids so low. And I just kept on telling him, I'm like, well, first of all, I wrote him like a 20 page report on his health. And I said, look, like you cannot live with this low of cholesterol. Like you're not producing enough hormones. All of his hormones were low. I mean, like it's just not healthy to live. The all cause mortality happens when it's really low. I don't necessarily know if higher, I don't know the evidence on higher, but the real evidence that I found was that people who have the lowest cholesterol tend to have the highest all cause mortality. And so, and then the other thing that people don't talk about is how like- Depressions high too with really low cholesterol. Exactly, but really about hormone production. Like you can't make enough hormones. And there was a question from somebody on one of the Instagram posts about hormones in middle age. And if you're not eating any cholesterol and if you don't have enough in your body from its own production, you're not gonna make enough testosterone. You're not gonna make enough of all of your sex hormones. And you're gonna feel like garbage. Well, something that I experiment with. By the way, the way I do mine now is I go, I fast once a month and then I do, I go keto. Last week of the month, I eat carbs and then I recycle. And I'm just messing with this right now going in and out and it seems to work really well for me. Well, you're kind of developing a lot of flexibility, right? That's the goal. Isn't that what we all should be able to do? That's the goal. Shift to whatever fuel we want to burn. And also encourage diversity in microbiome and all that stuff. And I seem to feel the best doing it this way. So very interesting. I don't know. Let's get into some questions, man. I know we got a bunch of questions we got sent to us. This clause brought to you by OrganiFi. For those days you fall short on getting your organic veggies or whole food nutrition. OrganiFi fills the gap with laboratory tested certified organic superfoods to help give your health the performance the added edge. Try OrganiFi totally risk free for 60 days by going to OrganiFi.com. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com. And use a coupon code MINEPOMP for 20% off at checkout. First question is from Rachel Ersof. The question is, do you trust normative data on routine blood tests? Now I think she probably means like, do you trust the ranges that they give you on blood tests? Because when you take a blood test, it's always like, if you're within this range, that means you're okay. Right. What do you think about that? Well, I used to believe that if you're in the normal range, everything is fine. And then it occurred to me when I started working with this company and this Dr. Lee, Dr. Richard Lee in Foster City that there's a whole range of normal. And when we were developing this expert system for optimizing health using labs, I was like, well, where do you base your ranges off of? And he goes, this is off of 10,000 athletes and high performers and where their hormones were at. And we're not putting people out of range. We're boosting their hormones to get to the optimal range. And I was like, okay, so like you have a totally different range than most doctors do, right? And he's like, yeah, absolutely. He's like the range that most doctors are using is A, designed for that region. So whatever your lab region is in, like Northern California will have a North, LabCorp will have a range for that area. Oh, I don't know that. That is super interesting. I did not know how this gets down. Yeah, cause like if believe it or not, not every lab communicates in this country. And believe it or not, LabCorp is one of the largest bureaucracies in the country. And if you think that like LabCorp Florida communicates the LabCorp Northern California, you'd be sort of mistaken. Oh, wow. Yeah, so there's different regions. And then there's different like normative ranges. Now there's, you can go to labtest.com or lab tests online, and they're gonna have a range. And if you actually start looking, comparing all these different companies, you're gonna find that they're all slightly different. So the range gets bigger and bigger than it says overall, right? And so the reality is that these ranges are designed for diagnosing disease and identifying when someone is truly sick. And so, So in other words, if you're outside of the range, you might have the likelihood that you have a disease as high. That's like the insurance companies will pay for the doctor to act. So that's the point, right? Like people never think about the healthcare system like this. They think that system. So having a high like that's good. Is some... People think that the system is somehow designed to serve you. And it's actually not. It's designed to serve the insurance companies so that they can decide what you will get. And they don't want to, they just, yeah, it's just the truth, okay? And like anybody who works in healthcare knows this. So when you look at a range, you want to always ask your doctor, like how do they decide how to interpret that number? And I personally think that the numbers for men's testosterone are like really, really low. Like you have to be so, so, so, so low testosterone to get a diagnosis of hypogodinism that like you're basically, I don't want to use these words, but like you're basically like... A preview best in girl. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're really soft. And at this, so when we were using different hormones to boost, to optimize health, we were doing it with the knowledge that like we don't want to push you out of that range, which is something that happens when people are taking hormones from God knows where they got them, right? Or maybe they don't have a doctor supervision. You can end up, it's kind of like the 80s bodybuilders who were all taking hormones because they were kind of like dosing themselves. I mean, this is the same problem you see in the LSD micro dosing world. It's like when you don't have someone who has experience watching and making sure that you're not hurting yourself, you can really hurt yourself. So the key is, is that you want to stay within the range and you want to stay in the optimal range. And like there's different standard deviations of normal for every lab. Yeah, I think this highlights how important it is to hear how the patient feels. Yes. I was gonna ask you, can you give an example of like where someone might be off the normal range, but that's because they're doing something that you know about and it's like, you're not bad. I mean, I guess the thing I want to emphasize is like thyroid hormone. Most doctors are just looking at TSH and free T4. And they're not looking at free T3, which is the active thyroid hormone, right? And they're not looking at total T4 and total T3 and they're not seeing what's being converted. So... Or what about antibodies, too? Or reverse T3, or antibodies, right? So if you're not looking at a full thyroid panel and you're just saying, oh, your TSH is normal, what if you like ridiculously have thyroid symptoms and you just, there's no way of knowing because all they do is say your TSH is normal. And that is like how medicine is practiced in most of the country. I had a client like that where she had all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, but they would test her TSH and T4 and they're like, no, you're normal, you're normal. So she had to go find specialists and then they tested her antibodies and whatever. And they're like, oh, you have autoimmune issues and your body's producing this thyroid, but you're not utilizing it. So it's like you have no thyroid. Yeah, wow. And so she had to get, but this took her, by the way, like a year and a half. Okay, so I had a patient just like this who did not want to take thyroid hormone. And I said, look, we can do our best to optimize your autoimmunity. And we did, but at the end of the day, like he didn't want to take the drugs. And so he suffered for two years. And you know what happened? He went to another doctor. Doctor says, you know, you have Hashimoto's, right? And he's like, yeah, well, and the other doctor basically convinced him. He's like, you should just take this. And the other doctor's older, whiter, more, you know, like more experienced. And so he just started taking the thyroid hormone. And he's like, oh my God, I feel so good. You're like, you fucker. Well, you know, you could have done this like, I gave, you threw away the bottle I prescribed you like two years ago. You need to have white hair. That's what it is. And give you some white hair. Some speck of the wig. But you know, it's just, it's a delicate thing though because like, now you get, now once you're on it, you're like, okay, your month to month things can change and like your dose can change and your needs can change. And so you gotta go by, I think at this point. A lot of it's feeling when it comes to hormones. That's it. It's very subjective. Cause again, same exact person I was talking about earlier, she'll tell me like, oh, you know, too much thyroid. I need to start lowering a little bit. Cause I'm getting this. I think we should be prescribing kits of like microdose to thyroid hormone so you can do like, so you can like, literally dose up to what feels right for you. So you, so you can go by the smallest increment of up or down, you know? That would be brilliant. I know. I think that's a business idea. There's so many ideas. We might want to start with the mind pump. Yeah. And you know, the same thing with what we talked about testosterone, like you could be a man and you could have lower testosterone in the range, but you could have incredible androgen receptor density where you've got all these receptors. So less testosterone for you, you may feel great. Or the flip, you may have all this testosterone. You taught, look, you know, because I've been in the industry for a long, and because I've been in the industry as long as I have, I've talked to many men who've been on anabolic steroids. So they're taking a lot of testosterone and they'll have symptoms of low testosterone because the receptors start to shut off. So now these guys are taking- Yeah, it's down in regulation, right? Totally. So they're taking testosterone and they've got the testosterone of like 50 gorillas and they can't even get a boner because all the receptors are going down. Or they have really high sex hormone binding labulin. Yes. Or that, or right, which actually makes it kind of I have a client who has like way too high of such sex hormone binding labulin and we're trying to figure out why. Because we think it could be related to too much thyroid hormone he got prescribed. Maybe his dose is too high and that could be pushing up the, but like I'm just like racking my brain. Like you've got a 1500 natural testosterone level, but your free testosterone looks like you're deficient. And so- How do you lower that? We're trying a bunch of supplements right now, but like I think he needs to go down on his thyroid dose. Very interesting. Trying to figure it out. Cool. All right, next question is from, what does that say? Mist Patronus 1996. What kind of diet would you recommend for a woman suffering from polycystic ovary syndrome to rebalance hormones, promote fat loss, et cetera? Did you know that it stood for that PCOS? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. So polycystic ovarian. Ovarian, yeah. So what, first of all, explain what that is. So people know. PCOS is a pretty, pretty common hormonal disorder in a lot of women living in Western countries where you end up with insulin resistance in your ovaries and insulin resistance throughout your body and you end up with high androgens. So you get things like hercetism and you get things like acne. Which is more hairiness. More hair, acne, and- And these are what most women are not looking for, right? No, not fun. And is this because of the name of it, is it, does it mean you're literally getting cysts on your ovaries? Yeah, you see, if you do an ultrasound, you find cysts on the ovaries. And you also, a lot of these women have infertility issues and abnormal menstrual periods. How different is that from like something like endometriosis? Well, endometriosis is when the lining of your uterus sort of escapes your uterus and starts growing into your pelvic region. It's a very different, very different problem. Okay, okay. But the problem with PCOS is that we have a lot of people who are just living off of refined carbs and sugar, right? Like talk to any young woman. What are they eating in college? Like they're eating carbs and they're doing cardio. Hot pockets. Yeah. And so this is one population where I would recommend someone go on a month-long ketogenic diet just to snap back your body into like not being insulin, not having to be experiencing such an incredible insulin resistance from this condition and being able to resensitize your body towards, you know, like using a different energy source because a lot of these women just cannot lose weight because their bodies cannot metabolize carbohydrates relatively. Another thing I would recommend, if that's the case is resistance training. Resistance training for sure. Yeah, because nothing, I mean resistance training by far of all the forms of exercise that'll help your body deal with insulin long-term is resistance training because you're building muscle, you're conditioning it and muscle is a great tissue to help balance out, you know, how your body uses sugar and how your body deals with insulin. There's actually a really cool Instagrammer called Lee from America and she's this young lady in her 20s who's like totally dealt with PCOS and her website is filled with experiences and descriptions of what she's gone through. So follow her if you wanna learn even more because she's just a wealth of knowledge for a young 25-year-old, she knows so much about it. What was her Instagram handle again? Lee from America. So what are the symptoms of this? Is there a lot of pain during their periods? So oftentimes they have missed periods. So they're not even having periods sometimes. It's a lot of irregularity. How do they find, how do they- So not ovulating. How do they diagnose PCOS, is it through? It's through symptoms and through ultrasound but you don't have to have the ultrasound for the diagnosis anymore, I believe. It's a constellation of symptoms and lab tests. But for a lot, so I met another doctor whose wife was really suffering from PCOS and he put her on the ketogenic diet and she got pregnant. So I was pretty impressed. I was pretty impressed. Wow, that's super rad. And you said that they're not ovulating? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that that happens with PCOS. Yeah. How common would you say it is? Oh, I think it's really common. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, shit. Does birth control affect something like this? They put you on birth control. To help? To help with all the symptoms. Wow. To quote unquote regulate your periods but the thing is you're definitely not gonna be ovulating. What it does is just gives you more consistent periods. It doesn't fix the problem. It lowers your... So what happens when you go on birth control is it actually will raise your sex hormone by negobulin, which will bind up more hormone. So it does make you feel better because you're not dealing with this crazy hormonal crate nonsense. But it doesn't fix the problem, it just covers it up. Wow, so it's just covering up the symptom. On that note with birth control, what are you feeling? I'm glad you went there. I wanted to do it. Oh, guys. I mean, like, look, I was on birth off and on for a lot of my 20s and then decided to go off of it in my 30s because I was like, you know, I'm gonna want to eventually have kids and I just have a bad feeling about being on something that I know is shutting down my... Right, for that long. And, you know, so I think for a lot of women, it's a cover up for our problems. It's like, how do we deal with all of our hormonal problems? We just cover it up with birth control. And I was able to fix a lot of my hormonal acne issues with diet, but also my liver was not in the best condition after going off of birth control. And I realized that I had some detoxification issues that I needed to remedy. And so like, another reason why it's fun to start biohacking your genetics is because you can start learning all about your detoxification of different hormones. And I have some, there's a really good great company called Precision Hormones that does this dry urine test. And most people aren't looking at the whole metabolism of hormones or just looking at the blood hormones and just doing like a quick check like once a year maybe. And that doesn't give you enough data to know how your hormones are being metabolized. So if you have any issues with catecholamethyl transferase or with CYP1B1 or CYP2DA, like these are things that you can test for and learn about. And so I take a bunch of supplements now that can help me balance my hormones. What kind of, if someone goes to the doctor and wants to have a hormone panel. You really wanna go to a functional doctor. Okay, I was just gonna say. You really wanna go to somebody who's got their chops. Do insurance, does insurance cover functional? Some of it's starting to cover it. There's a company that my friend James Maskal has just started that's trying to create a more affordable version of functional medicine for the masses. I think he might actually pull it off, but he told me that they're working with insurance companies and that they're paying doctors. And I'm like, if that's really happening, that's amazing. I think it'll save them money eventually because they're doing so much of such a good job. I totally agree, I totally agree. Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah, it's an interesting point you made about birth control earlier. There's gotta be a large chunk of, and I'm sure it's not the majority, but a sizable minority of women who are prescribed birth control, not because they're trying not to get pregnant. No, to remedy something else. Just to control. Oh my God, birth control is literally prescribed for everything under the sun in obstatrics to treat every hormonal problem. Because what does it do really well? It turns off your hormones, right? It's like, what it does is it's a feedback loop switch, right? So it's like, you guys know this, you take testosterone enough, you can shut down your gonadal access and you won't make as much sperm. That's right. Same thing happens with women's ovaries, right? You give them enough estrogen, it'll have negative feedback loop on the brain and it'll start shutting down ovulation. And we wonder why so many women are struggling with infertility. And here's the fascinating, here's what really fascinates me, you can find these studies now. They're starting to find that women's preferences in the opposite sex changes when they're on birth control versus. 100% agree. Yeah, and did you experience that? That's part of the reason why I went off of it. Did you start noticing that you were dating different guys after the fact or what? You wanted more manly man probably afterwards or something like that, so it's supposed to be. I don't know if it was more manly man, but I did feel like I was worried that I would meet the man of my dreams, go off birth control and then not want him anymore. That's a statistic, by the way. I've heard that that can happen. Yes, that's a real statistic. Divorcerates go up, like it's a significant, it's not a huge number, but yeah. But like, I also know that like, I feel like pheromones are important, like chemical messengers and a lot of what's happening in our interactions with people is actually unspoken. And I feel like when it comes to sexual attraction, I want the most authentic attraction to come from my body, right? Like I want my body to be telling me what it should be. Like I wanna be like, yeah, this is real. Not like, am I into him or am I not into him? You know like. Just want security right now. Confused. I read this whole article on it where they showed all these tests and they showed, they took pictures of men and then they digitally feminized the faces or digitally masculinized the faces. And it was subtle, it was subtle. So you could see it was the same person, but you could tell one is a little more feminine, one's a little more masculine. When women are ovulating, they mostly want the masculine version. When they're not, they want the more feminine version. When they're on birth control, the feminine version. And so it definitely changes your preferences. And then they interviewed this one woman in this article I read where she said that she loved the way her husband smelled and she loved every, you know, just being around and putting her nose up to him and smelling him. Then she went off birth control and she could not stand his smell. Oh my God. Anymore. Oh my God. That's terrifying. See, wouldn't that suck to have to deal with that? Oh my God, that would be terrible. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a gigantic experiment we've been doing. And we don't really totally know if we've, I mean, I'm just looking at signals from society and, you know, there is part of it is women are waiting to longer to have kids. I'm one of them. But the other question is, is like, do we have to start asking ourselves, like, are we contributing to the infertility epidemic with this many hormones? We don't know. I think so. I think it's an experiment with us. We don't know. With our biology. I also think socially it's been a big experiment because for the first time in history, look forever, forever, up until, you know, recently in human history, sex was connected with pleasure, connection, and babies. And now what we've done is we've eliminated babies out of that. And that is a big social experiment. And so there's a lot of, you know, sociologists that comment on that and stuff. I think it's very fascinating, but excellent. All right, so the next question is from, what does that say there? J. Felene. No, J. Lennon. There you go. Thanks, Doug. J. Lennon, something like that. Makeup and skin care in relation to health. Oh my gosh. Please. Yeah, let's talk about that. What about makeup and skin care stuff? Do we need to worry about what's in that? Yeah, so I can't just say that if I die from anything that I've done to myself, it's probably the amount of chemicals I've been putting on my body since I was in maybe sixth grade. Because there are endocrine disruptors everywhere, especially women's beauty products. And like, I'm actually in the process of trying to, like, as a side project, not that I really need to do this, but because it's fun. I'm developing a bunch of products in my kitchen right now because like, I'm looking at all these things that I'm putting in my body regularly and I'm like, really? Am I doing this? Like, are we doing harm to our ability to actually reproduce by putting things on our body and making ourselves look a certain way in order to reproduce? Right? The irony in that. The irony in that. The irony in that. It's crazy when you think about that. That's such a great point. Oh, I finally met someone because I'm hot and now we can have kids. Oops, can't have kids. Right? So I'm wondering if like, that's part of like, why a lot of women have hormonal dysfunction is maybe it's because we're painting our bodies with all sorts of chemicals every day and like, every single woman in Hollywood and music today has got a makeup line now. And I'm sorry, but the Kardashians and what they have done to people's faces. Like, have you guys seen on Instagram like what people are doing now with contouring? It's just gross. We touched on this a while ago and it got really sensitive. Remember, I think we had some pushback on some people that were all mad at us. Because it's, it's, it's. It's like you're painting a new face on your face. Yeah, it is. It's a new person. It's a completely new person. You're masking your beauty. And so like, I, what I want is like, and I found through a bunch of really cool products, like you can get really good skin with great skin products, but like, I have celiac. A lot of women in media have autoimmune diseases. A lot of my friends have autoimmune diseases. And like, I keep on asking myself, okay, is autoimmunity definitely part of the fact that like we have such disordered gut microbiomes, but also is it because so many women and which by the way, autoimmunity definitely affects women more than men. Oh yeah. You guys are more sensitive to it. Like maybe, maybe it has to do with what we're putting on our bodies. I just say more sensitive or more that you've been disrupting it for so long. Maybe we've been disrupting our bodies for so long. Yeah. Maybe. In doctrine, for people that don't know what that means, these are, these are chemicals that have a weak affinity for hormone receptors or they affect the hormonal system. So, okay. And on top of that, like how many women are just like so mean to themselves, psychological, there's always a psychological component of every disease. Right. And like I keep on asking myself, how can a country like America really heal if so many of us are told to hate our bodies and hate our minds and hate our faces and hate the way we were naturally born and have to be someone else. You know, like I actually got funny guys. I got a private message from a young lady from the MindPop podcast who had breast implants. And I guess this is kind of like a side discussion, but I guess we're on the topic of cosmetics and cosmetic changes for beauty and for, you know. Overall health. Overall health and confidence. And I'm convinced that like she's, she has like, you know, breast implant related autoimmunity, you know, because she basically got implants and right after that developed autoimmune disease. Is that common? Is that happening that often? It's considered to be a condition. Like doctors are like, there are women who like- It's controversial only because there's so much pushback from the cosmetic surgery community. They don't want people to know that there's these negative- But like let's get real. Like your body is rejecting something. Yeah. And like what my theory is, is what's happening is like when, when you put something foreign in your body and it starts, your body starts attacking the foreign object, your body starts making scar tissue around that object. Encapsulation. And then your, your tissue is like still trying to attack things. And you can get cross reactivity with your own body. Right? I agree. I agree 100%. And also- What a bummer. And also just from a esoteric standpoint. Such a fake boob guy. Yeah. He is. I'm a famished man. Reclaimed. You know what dude? It's- Well the technology does seem to be getting better and better for these implants, but- Here's the thing. And I look, I get it. You know, it's your body. Do as you wish. And I understand for some people, I get actually it doesn't matter. It's your body. Do as you wish. On an esoteric level, if you think about it. You hate yourself so much. You hate your body so much. And we know that our thoughts and how we think about things affects us biologically. We know this for a fact. For a fact. I can literally measure chemicals in your body and hormones. Have you think about happy thoughts? Have you think about sad thoughts? Have you get stressed out? And we can see things changing. 100%. And those are the things that we know to measure and we know the relation. There's a lot of things we still don't even understand. So if you hate on your body enough, can that manifest into your body then attacking itself? Theoretically, I could see that being a possibility. Absolutely. You know, interestingly, there's plenty of research on stress and blood sugar. And I don't know if I mentioned this last time I was here, but people who are exposed to racism have higher blood sugars. Have higher risk of blood sugar problems later in life. I mean like kids with adverse childhood experiences have much higher rates of chronic diseases later in life and depression. So. Absolutely. This is why I mean like a spiritual or meditative practice, I firmly believe, and this is something that I've only recently added into my lifestyle because it was always, it was the last brick because up until relatively recently it was like, okay, exercise, yes. And then eating right. And then that changed a lot and learning about nutrition. And then it became okay about sleep and okay, have good relationships. And it was like the last thing was like the spiritual practice. And when I really examined things that I looked at, I said, well, you know, spiritual practices in some way, shape or form have been a part of human history. And we're wired to have these experiences. It's probably an important thing that we should, like you exercise your muscles, why not exercise that part of you? Because that can turn into other health things, so. So obviously less is more as far as the makeup is concerned, but is there good products out there? There's like the environmental working group has a website that you can start running all of your cosmetics through. Oh, that's cool. I actually, one of my projects that I haven't done yet that's on my to-do list is to basically take my bathroom and run everything through it, find out what do I gotta throw away? What's the website called? Environmental working group. Excellent. .org or .com, do you know? .org, I believe. And there was a study that is worth mentioning called the Hermosa study. And it was, they took a bunch of Hispanic young women and had them measure their urine before and after, removing most of their cosmetics from their regimens. And they found that like the chemicals in their urine dramatically lowered. Like there was a dramatic difference in the amount of excretion of these chemicals that really shouldn't be in. A lot of these, the problem is that a lot of these, a lot of the worst cosmetics affect the most impoverished people because they're not taking out of the cheap products yet. So like you can still find Triklizan in Johnson and Johnson products. You can still find- Which is an antibiotic, right? Yeah, antimicrobial. You can still find phthalates in nail polishes. You can still find parabens. I find parabens in expensive products sometimes. But generally speaking, you find these in the cheaper products. And who buys cheaper products? Well, people who can't afford the more expensive ones. And so like, it's not fair that like, the people who are suffering the most are probably the people who don't have the education to know better to choose more healthier products. But frankly, like a lot, what a lot of women don't know is that you can make pretty amazing body oils from like coconut oil and essential oils. You know, like simple stuff like that. You can, you can make your own cosmetics. My girlfriend uses avocado oil. Oh, it's great. She'll use that on her legs. And I'm like, damn, what do you got in your legs? They taste good. But I- TMI, bro. My bad. All right, final question is from Elizabeth H. Harris. Strategies for the middle-aged female athlete. How to manage and balance hormones, adrenal function, thyroid, et cetera, with high levels of physical activity. Bottom line, the impact on the endocrine system as a whole. Okay, so this might be controversial because I have clients who are pro hormones and against hormones. Some of the ones that are against them tend to be the ones that are like, just fundamentally believe that all drugs are bad and they should be not using anything ever. But that being said, you know, I think that if you look at society, if you look at humanity, it's really amazing that we're living past 50, right? Because like our lifespans are just getting longer and longer. But so we didn't really have to worry about menopause like 200 years ago. People just died, right? So now people are living. And the question is, is do we wanna live with the, you know, like the fact is that you've got like 200 receptor sites in your body for estrogen. And your brain is just a fundamentally different brain when you don't have estrogen. So what typically happens to people in cultures where they don't have access to hormone replacement is men as they age start reducing their testosterone production. And women as they age start reducing their estrogen production. And if you look at old people, they start kinda looking like each other, right? They kinda lose their gender identity, which is fine. You know, it's totally fine if you want to age like old Chinese women in the middle of rural China, that's fine. But like if we live in a modern life where we have technology that can enable us to live differently. And my personal belief is that when I hit the age amount of pause, I'm definitely gonna be taking hormones and I'm definitely gonna be tweaking them based on my labs because I don't wanna suffer. And I wanna be able to do things with my body till, you know, later in life. So my personal preference would be that if I was a middle-aged woman, I would get tons of hormone testing. I would go to an expert doctor and I would get replacement based off of what I needed. Do you think being a competitive type of athlete at this age, it makes it easier or more challenging for this person? Well, the thing about being a competitive athlete is you know you're putting your body under an even more stress. Cause I'm guessing this person is probably a high-performer in other areas of her life. Which means like, you know, how many competitive athletes do you know that are in their middle age that are just doing that, right? So I'm guessing she's probably an executive or probably somebody who has like- How you do anything is how you do everything. Yeah, right, yeah. So when you're working a lot and you're exercising a lot, you have to ask yourself, how are you recovering from the stress? And so that's really a big important part. But then when you're doing like high levels of physical activity, the question is like, how is that affecting your body? Like I think we've talked about this before, but sometimes I see people who get into CrossFit and I see them get like this really strong limbs, but then they have like a gut. And it's because oftentimes I think that it's like, it looks like a high cortisol habitus. Looks like somebody who's got too much cortisol. Now if someone, a lot of women have thyroid dysfunction, it's just such a problem that like, I'm surprised people don't these days. But you know, the question she has to find out is like, where does she have a problem and where can she mitigate that problem? Where is the Delta that needs to be addressed? For somebody who's a super crazy athlete, adaptogens are key, but you wanna make sure you're taking the right ones for your body. I just found out that Ashwagandha is a night shade. So if somebody's got autoimmunity, that might not be the best one for them. Goji berries as well are night shades. Not great for people with autoimmunities. So I would get tested. I would get typical blood labs, including estrogen, progesterone, sex hormone binding, glabulin, testosterone. But for a woman, you wanna make sure you get the LCMS, not the other test, which is for men. And that's because like, certain testosterone tests will not pick up the testosterone in women with as much sensitivity. The ELISA test is one that you don't want if you're a woman. And see what the high sensitivity one. Then you wanna get CRP, you wanna get homocysteine to check your inflammation and your oxidative stress. And then you also wanna check your DHEAS, your morning cortisol. And then you wanna look at your cortisol rhythm and you wanna look at your hormone metabolism. And then you wanna get that full thyroid panel that I told you about before. And those are the same tests that we were doing at Genesol that I still do in my practice today. And I do them because I think that it gives you a nice picture of how your hormones are responding to your daily life. And then in these people, I would also look at heart rate variability. You make a good point because at the end of the day, it's about quality of life. And if a medication, and we always say this too on the show, because sometimes we come across as anti-all medicines. And I think we come across that way sometimes because we're so over-medicated, generally speaking. But at the end of the day, if it improves your quality of life, then go for it right now. The key is dosing. Like, I always start people on the lowest possible dose. I had a client with pretty much zero testosterone. She was like, I wonder why I have no libido. I'm like, well, why don't we just start you on a tiny bit of testosterone? And by tiny, I mean like, the pharmacist I was speaking to at the compounding pharmacy was like, you do realize this is like really, really, really small dose, right? And she's like, we never dose this low. I'm like, well, I wanna dose this low. Gave it to my client. She totally noticed a difference. And she's like, I don't, and I was like, you know you can go up if you want, but you don't have to. She was like, this is perfect. So like, turns out you can actually do really well with lower doses of things. You can. And the other thing too to consider here, we're talking about a female. Now, men and women are very different in many regards, but in this regard in particular. Men, if we're healthy, if we're fit, if we eat adequate fat intake, and we've got good strength and all that stuff, theoretically speaking, we produce sperm up until the day we die. We can actually, theoretically speaking, impregnate someone until the day we die. Even if we, even if we live, yeah. Even if we live until, you know, the age of 80. Great powers. Now women go through a change where they literally, their body's no longer fertile. Like you cannot have kids anymore. Well, you can, interestingly, you can not produce eggs, but women can have babies with the aid of hormones for a lot longer than we realized. Yeah. Like, definitely. What would you speculate, how long? Women have done it in their fifties. Yeah, in their fifties. But still, there's this change that happens, naturally, in a woman's body, where she stops having, evolutionary scientists think that this happened because the role of the grandmother was so important in the tribe, where she needed to stop having babies so that she could help her daughter, or her son, or whatever, take care of their babies. And so this became this evolutionary strategy, if you will. Interesting. But yeah, even, you know, here's the thing, like, if you tackle everything, including your sleep, your exercise, your diet, and you're doing all the things right, and you're resting, because you're a high-level athlete, you know, you might be overdoing everything, like. Well, that's, I feel like questions like this remind me of like the, we get a lot of these, they're just different, they're just phrased differently. It's like the eat your cake and have it too. It's, if you're asking a health question, how do I take care of my health or keep something healthy? Meanwhile, while I'm this competitive athlete in advanced age, like, you know, when, a lot of people, we think athletes are healthy, but doesn't, you can be athletic, but you doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy. Oh my God, totally. And so it's really like, where are your priorities? Like, is your priorities in the, you know, the endocrine system and being healthy, or is it in being a optimal athlete? And if it's being an optimal athlete, there's no doubt I'm gonna push you in the direction of, okay, well then, you know, taking hormones, getting this done, maybe we go that route, because you care more about that. But if you look at me as a client say, I like to run, I have these athletic things I like to do, but it's less of a priority than my health and the advice I give is gonna be different. Yeah, I have to try that. And same thing with being a man, like, you know, once I hit my mid-40s and 50s, if I think to myself like, God, I'm not like I used to be when I was in my 20s, I could take testosterone and start to feel like I used to, or not and understand that I'm aging or whatever, but as far as quality of life is concerned, I'm 100% on board with myself. I'm kind of against, though, is this obsession in San Francisco and Silicon Valley of people taking growth hormone, because- Is that a big thing? It's a really big thing, yeah, a lot. I mean, oh my God, I was at a party once, and I literally saw these two guys that I know, like, one guy was handing the other guy like a kit for growth hormone. And I was like, is that what I think it is? And they were like, don't, you didn't see that. And I'm like, oh my God, that just happened. And I was like, it's cool, like I totally understand what you guys are doing, it's not a big deal, what I don't understand is why people, even, by the way, this is like, funnily enough, someone quoted in this article that was written about me that like, Peter Thiele uses growth hormone. And so I immediately texted my friend who's a doctor, and I was like, I didn't say that. I did not say that that was like, I didn't even mention his name, but it apparently was public knowledge at this point. So the journalist was writing about it. And I found out that that was true. And I was just like, do people wanna live forever? Why are they taking a substance that definitely leads to increased risk of cancer? Like, if you have a little bit of cancer and you pour growth hormone on it, it's gonna grow. In the context of inflammation and cancer, it's gonna, that's a bad idea. This is the thing, like when I start using replacement hormones later in life, you better bet your bridges, I'm gonna be getting MRIs on a yearly basis, checking for cancer. Like, these are growth hormones, right? Like hormones help us grow. And part of what sucks about aging is we don't grow as much, we start declining. And so you have to be vigilant about cancer if you're gonna be doing these things, because you are at risk, like. That's a good point, because if you had like an estrogen-sensitive cancer and you're taking estrogen. Exactly. You know, it could be a bad thing. But even more of a reason to make sure that your lifestyle's healthy, even more of a reason to make, like, you know, since our last podcast, I've actually like really reevaluated my lifestyle because I'm starting to ask myself like, as I start studying more Chinese medicine, there's this idea of when you fully exhaust yourself, you're actually draining your quote-unquote Jing, which is this source of energy and vitality and life force. And I'm kind of like, well, maybe the Chinese people actually had some knowledge on this that like me letting myself get so exhausted that like I basically sleep for like 14 hours on occasion. Maybe that's not good for me, you know, long term. So I've been asking myself like, where can I actually find places in my life where I can just say I'm gonna do less? That's so rad. You're studying Chinese medicine right now. I mean, I'm studying a lot of things, but one of the things that I'm personally interested in is Chinese herbs. There's apparently like 50 Chinese herbs that are like the compendium of like the, like I had some herbal tonics in LA at the super hippie amazing grocery store called Arawan, as you probably see in my Instagram stories is my favorite place in the whole world. And I drank these tonics and I was just like, this is insane, how good I feel. And I was just like, I've got to figure out what this is all about. So now I'm just like studying all the adaptogens and bought some deer antler velvet. What are some of the things you're finding? What are you finding interesting right now? Tell me about deer antler velvet. Apparently it's a tonic for libido and testosterone. Remember the kick on the deer antler spray for hot? And then it was like the big thing. Did you start taking it? I mean, I have some and I put it in my, I'm putting it in my like tonics that I'm creating. Is it working? I mean, I'm actually fairly celibate right now. So I feel like I have a good libido, but like it's being transformed into my work, not into my sex sex life. You're horny. Could be your hungry. Could be your hungry too. She's reading the fuck out of the books right now. I legitimately am hyper productive. I'm hyper productive. Like I am in love with my vegetables, but like not like that, that's gross. You guys are terrible. Cucumbers delicious. You guys are terrible. I'm just trying to tie it all in. This is ridiculous. No, but I legit, I'm interested in this concept of like the balance of Chinese herbs and achieving more of a sense of wellbeing. And because like you can have one, like this tonic was like $16. Let's get real. Like I was like, this is ridiculous. This cannot be this much money. And so I started looking at all the ingredients and then I went back down to LA and I went to the store and I go, hey, can you just like, kind of like screenshot that recipe because I want to make this. Found out what all, I found out that like I was using the wrong amounts of things, like too much Shilajit and you know, and so I've been modifying mine, but like I'm kind of like being guided by how I feel, but also now that I'm lurking into the actual science behind all this, I'm like, there man, thousands of years behind all this stuff. So if I had three of me and I didn't have like five jobs, I would probably be like going back to school, but I have a textbook and I have the ability to read. And one of the things that I really find the most valuable of my medical education was that I learned how to teach myself anything. I didn't go to all my classes. I spent a lot of time watching videos. I spent a lot of time in my room just feeling frankly like garbage, cause like I didn't take great care of myself for part of medical school. So I learned how to teach myself everything through just watching videos and reading textbooks. And that's how I learned now. That's so awesome. Yeah, the Western medicine is based off of the scientific method. Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine are not because they weren't using the scientific method. And what the scientific method does very, very well is it breaks things down into components, into pieces. And then it dives in super deep on those pieces and really gets a good understanding of those pieces. But through doing that, it loses sight of the entire thing, which is why Western medicine tends to treat the human organism as pieces. Like go to a hormone doctor, go to a gut health doctor, go to a doctor that works on the nervous system. Whereas with Chinese medicine, it's the human organism and it always has been. So when they look at like herbs and how your organs worth, you know, whatever, they're looking at you from a whole perspective. So for chronic issues, I have lots of experience with Chinese medicine. My uncle is a Chinese herbalist. And I mean, I've learned a lot from him and that's how he explains it. And he goes, you know, when it comes to chronic issues, like if you go to a Chinese medicine doctor and you tell them you have some chronic issue, they're gonna look at your diet. They're gonna look at how you sleep. They're gonna look at, you know, how you're moving. They're gonna look at the types of, you know, foods you're eating. And then they're gonna look at herbs and based on all those things and your whole life, then that determines what percentage of you should, and your emotions. That's another thing that they take into account that we don't even consider. Right, right, right. We just like, go to the mental health department. That's right, that's right. That's why I think it's so fascinating. And I'm really happy that someone like you is diving into that. Well, the thing is, is that a few years ago, there's a Chinese researcher who won the Nobel Prize for finding the cure for malaria. And it was an old Chinese formula that like, how is she getting a Nobel Prize for this? That's already been around for thousands of years. That's interesting. That's amazing. I won the prize for reading an old book. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it was more than that, but like still, it's just, I think it was Artemisthen or something like that. Awesome. Do you feel like we're going in the right direction with that or do you think we're getting worse? Do you think we're- I think China is totally, totally losing, losing their most, one of the most valuable things that they've ever contributed towards society by adopting the Western model of medicine. Wow. Yeah, they are buying up as many antibiotics as they can. They are building clinics just like we have. They are like, people are getting sicker and sicker and they've got far more pollution than we do. And they think that the Western model is somewhat more valuable. They really value our healthcare, like our healthcare model. Because it makes a lot of money. It makes a lot of money. That's why they value this shit out of it because it puts money in their pocket. Yeah. It turns out. So like I feel like it needs to be preserved. And I don't think that necessarily everything that they have that's applicable to their culture is necessarily like perfectly applicable to Western cultures. But that's because they have different genetics than we do. And I feel the same way about Ayurvedic, like Doshas. Like I don't actually think that Ayurvedic nutritional model is necessarily like purely translatable to someone with different genetics than that. But I think that there's something that we can learn from every cultural medicine. That like if you, I mean like acupuncture, come on, cupping. Yes, absolutely. I think there's lots of truth in all of those things. And if you look at all of them, you get a much clearer total picture. Well, I think we're gets all muddies because some of the things that we can't explain and when someone tries to, that's where you get the counter, right? It's the language that they use. It's just the same thing I used to feel about talking to somebody who was into massage therapy or hearing someone talk about cheese. We give names to these things that we're uncertain of that we've been using or being practicing for hundreds or thousands of years. And then you get the Western scientists that come in now, they're just like, oh, that's a made up word or we can't measure that or prove that. So we're just gonna disregard it completely. It's like acupuncture. I used to have an acupuncture at some of my gym and she would explain like chi and the meridians and how the acupuncture does this and that. And at first I was like, oh, this is such a bullshit. Like what are you talking about chi and like mystical energy? And then I thought to myself like, well, there's actually a lot of times where you go to the doctor and you have referred pain. So you have pain in one area and it means that this organ is hurting or something else. And we know these things for sure. Like maybe they're working with the nervous system with these needles and they're getting the nervous system to communicate. Like they're just using different language. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Totally. And I mean, there's always that quote. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Ooh, I like smooth. I'm gonna have to write that down. Excellent. Yeah. That's something I learned in medical, believe it or not. Oh, very cool. As always, it's been freaking awesome. Really excited to have you on our show. Have a fun time guys. Set my regularly. We can expect you back, right? In a little while. Yeah, if you keep on training me and getting to me in a shape, I'll keep coming back. Oh yeah. I like that deal. Love it. 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