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When a young Eva Kollisch arrives as a refugee in New York in 1940, she finds a community among socialists who share her values and idealism. She soon discovers ‘the cause’ isn’t as idyllic as it seems. Little does she know this is the beginning of a lifelong commitment to activism and her determination to create radical change in ways that include belonging, love and one's full self. In addition to Eva Kollisch’s memoirs Girl in Movement (2000) and The Ground Under My Feet (2014), LBI’s collections include an oral history interview with Eva conducted in 2014 and the papers of Eva’s mother, poet Margarete Kolllisch, which document Eva’s childhood experience on the Kindertransport. Learn more at www.lbi.org/kollisch . Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute , New York | Berlin and Antica Productions . It’s narrated by Mandy Patinkin. Executive Producers include Katrina Onstad, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Senior Producer is Debbie Pacheco. Associate Producers are Hailey Choi and Emily Morantz. Research and translation by Isabella Kempf. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson, with help from Cameron McIver. Theme music by Oliver Wickham. Voice acting by Natalia Bushnik. Special thanks to the Kollisch family for the use of Eva’s two memoirs, “Girl in Movement” and “The Ground Under My Feet”, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and their “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project”, and Soundtrack New York.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

Ultimate Wellness, Healthy Lifestyle and Advanced Nutition

106 episodi

#Fitness #Alternative Health #Nutrition #Cheryl McColgan

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

updated 4 giorni fa

Pagina principale della serie•Feed

Ultimate Wellness, Healthy Lifestyle and Advanced Nutition

106 episodi

#Fitness #Alternative Health #Nutrition #Cheryl McColgan

Tutti gli episodi

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Benefits of Vagus Nerve Stimulation 39:58

4 giorni fa39:58

39:58

In this episode, Cheryl McColgan interviews Vitalijus, co-founder of Pulsetto, discussing the importance of sleep, stress resilience, and the role of the vagus nerve in health optimization. Vitalijus shares his personal journey into biohacking, including a 200-night sleep experiment that revealed key insights into improving sleep quality. The conversation delves into the science behind stress resilience, the vagus nerve’s function, and how devices like Pulsetto can aid in relaxation and recovery. Vitalijus emphasizes the significance of personal experimentation in health and the growing importance of mental health in today’s world. Read more about Pulsetto and purchase with our 15% off discount here or use code HEALNOURISHGROW15. Takeaways Vitalijus conducted a 200-night sleep experiment to improve his sleep. Key factors for better sleep include darkness, temperature, and minimizing disturbances. Stress is a major factor affecting sleep quality and melatonin production. The vagus nerve plays a crucial role in connecting the brain to internal organs. HRV (Heart Rate Variability) is a key metric for measuring stress resilience. Biohacking allows for personal experimentation to find what works best for individual health. Mental health is increasingly important in managing stress and overall well-being. Using devices like Pulsetto can help activate the vagus nerve for relaxation. Athletes can benefit from vagus nerve stimulation for recovery and performance. Small changes in sleep habits can lead to significant improvements over time. Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here . CONNECT WITH CHERYL Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts ! 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight Dry Farm Wines, extra bottle for a penny Drinking Ketones Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life Clean Beauty 20% off first order DIY Lashes 10% off NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life Facebook YouTube Pinterest TikTok Amazon Store Getting Started with Keto Resources The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide Watch on YouTube Episode transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:01.07) Hi everyone. Welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I’m joined by Vitalius and I got the first name going pretty good. I’m not even going to attempt the last name, so I’ll let him share that. And of course you will have heard it in the bio here prior to the recording. But welcome to the show today. We’re going to talk about all things kind of Vegas nerve, what that even is, why it’s relevant to you as a person out there listening to this. And Vitalius has a big interest in sleep and kind of a past with some things where he was super into biohacking. this is really pretty interesting. So, Vitalius, all that being said, we start by you just sharing a little bit about yourself and your background in the biohacking? And I would love to really chat about that sleep experiment you did, because that was quite impressive what you did with that. Vitalijus (00:45.603) Yeah, so before I created Pulsetto, am one of the co-founders of this company. I was working in corporate world and basically in the sleep industry. I was working in different countries, in different locations and I was responsible for sleep products. So naturally, sleep topic was always somewhere near, you know, but you know, one day I decided to go deeper to this topic. I had some issues with sleep also. So it was like, I was working in sleep industry, but at the same time I was sleeping bad, you know, I was working like a crazy for 16 hours and etc. And then when I was 29, I got panic attacks and Xanax and it was terrible experience. Cheryl McColgan (01:10.178) Yeah. Vitalijus (01:34.605) that I remember that I said, okay, I need to change something. And the starting point was sleep, yeah, because I was near this field and topic and etc. So what I did basically at that moment, I just took around 70 factors, which has some kind of scientific publications, know, and etc. 70 things. I will explain what those things mean. And I took those things I just listed. And then, you know, I started this kind of 100 night experiment, which means that I took one thing from those 70 lists. Yeah. And then three evenings in a row, I consume this thing. And I was imagining my aura at that moment, was like, what users It was not like a scientific study, but you know I saw some trends and how it’s affecting my trends and etc So the first thing what I tested it was kiwi as a fruit Don’t ask me why but there are some scientific studies which show that if you will eat kiwi before sleep You will sleep better Cheryl McColgan (02:22.83) It wasn’t bad. Vitalijus (02:39.855) Yeah, so I ate kiwi for three evenings in a row and I just wanted to understand is it really somehow improving my like sleep, friends and etc. So this was like a starting point. So this kind of things like a 70 things I tested during 200 nights basically. It was a lot of bullshit, sort of to say a lot of To some point my wife in the beginning looked at me very crazy, for example because I turned the bulbs to the red light bulbs in the bedroom. Then I was surrounded by some specific flowers because there are some studies about some specific flowers that are cleaning the air etc. I was consuming caffeine, three evenings in row, huge amount of caffeine. I just wanted to see how badly it’s affecting my sleep. I was consuming alcohol for three nights in a row. I was doing a lot of supplements, a lot of food things, a lot of bedroom changes, a lot of body changes, know, and et cetera. So from those 70 things, some of them was really nonsense, but some of them was really big game changers, you know, and… And after this experiment, I realized that, you know, how better I can sleep. You know, because before I thought that, you know, okay, my sleep is like normal, something like that, you know, I have some issues. In general, I am sleeping better. But only when I started to test, you know, myself and I saw what kind of changes can make a big difference, you know, then I realized that it’s a big gap between normal and good. From good to great, you know. And after those 200 nights, I really understand that you can improve your sleep very much and then it’s completely affecting your productivity. It’s completely affecting your energy levels, your sharper mind, etc. So this is how I went to biohacking. After sleep, was more topics. It was stress topics, was food topics, was physical activities. But sleep was the starting point of my journey to the biohacking. Cheryl McColgan (04:45.166) I absolutely love that you did. That sounds like something I would do. I haven’t done it yet, but that’s very interesting. When you were doing the 200 nights of the different things and doing three nights in a row, was there any specific thing that you tried that you could see like on your aura ring that it had a really big impact on either your HRV or your REM or your deep sleep? What was the thing that you found that was like, of like, whoa, this might be the thing? Vitalijus (05:08.059) So it was something like five big conclusions from my side. The first, I mean, let’s start from that there are game changes and there are nice to have things. A very good example of this is that, for example, you can read on Google somewhere that, for example, you need to eat pistachios, yeah, as a nut, because in pistachios you can find melatonin and melatonin is good for the sleep and et cetera. But I calculated. You need to eat 400 grams of Piscata, 400 grams, which is already seems impossible in order that you will accumulate around 25 % of melatonin. What you can do naturally. So for example, two hours before sleep to reduce the light. Cheryl McColgan (05:38.766) Cheers. Vitalijus (05:54.477) makes the bigger difference on melatonin than 400 grams of pistachios. So this was one of the first conclusions that there are game changers like those two hours before sleep to maintain the darkness and etc. And there are nice things like I don’t know, flowers, kiwi and etc. but they are not changing your sleep area. And basically I’m always saying to my friends or those people who are asking about sleep, so there are five things. First of all, the bedroom must be… Good. So it means the darkness and the cooling effect is very important. Temperature around 18, 19 degrees and I saw a lot on my data. So whenever I dropped the temperature or whenever I was sleeping in the cooler room, know, automatically let’s say the level of deep sleep was increasing, you know. The darkness of the bedroom is also very, very important. So if you have some kind of light coming from the outside, you need to, I mean… to cover completely the first is bedroom the second is the disturbances you need to minimize the bad things or maybe you don’t need to create new things but you just need to minimize bad things so one bad thing is the light very big game changer huge game changer even now for example in winter time with my wife we have tradition one day per week we are completely dark mode completely dark mode I mean We have candles and then some kind of this real light, I mean, no lads, no nothing. Once per week, it’s a perfect, perfect, let’s say, day for the relaxation, for the switching off your mind completely and et cetera. So this is the one disturbance, caffeine and alcohol are two other disturbance. So you can reach a lot of improvement of sleep just… Cheryl McColgan (07:27.342) that. Vitalijus (07:46.587) Yes, cutting those disturbance just if you will do just this, know, it will be huge. The third point is is stress. Because it’s a huge antagonist of melatonin, which means that if you have higher level of stress, the evening you will not produce enough melatonin and then you know, you will have issues with stress. So stress is huge topic. There are a bunch of ways to reduce the stress. Cheryl McColgan (08:04.878) I don’t want to stress. Cheryl McColgan (08:12.354) without what makes a power. Vitalijus (08:15.291) Baby-stir stimulation is one of the ways, you but it’s not only one way, know, you have you can meditation, can breathe, can do cold showers, you can go to sauna, there are routines, know, what you can do. The fourth, you need to have routine. You’re like a three, two, four things what you’re doing before sleep. I have my own routine, it’s like a 10, three, two, one. It means that 10 hours before sleep, three hours, two hours, and one hour before sleep. Cheryl McColgan (08:18.702) Bye. Cheryl McColgan (08:22.796) Get out! Cheryl McColgan (08:37.442) Thank you. Vitalijus (08:43.099) So for example, 10 hours before sleep, I’m not consuming alcohol, caffeine. Three hours before sleep, I’m doing some physical activity, like just no need to run a marathon, but just walking and something. Two hours before sleep, I’m trying to be in the dark mode and then cooling the temperature of the room. In my case, I have climat, so I’m just decreasing the temperature of the room to 18, 19 degrees. And then one hour before sleep, some sleep. Cheryl McColgan (08:57.152) Cheryl McColgan (09:06.721) Vitalijus (09:08.411) doesn’t matter, or you will be able sit for five minutes or you will meditate for 20 minutes. mean, something that is related to the stress reduction. So this is the fourth, you need to have a routine and the fifth, the morning, basically routine, but basically it means that you need to get the sun light. I mean, this is one of the most important things in order to, to let’s say, maintain a good balance of the circadian rhythm, etc. So those five. Cheryl McColgan (09:22.018) you Vitalijus (09:35.387) are like game changes I saw in a lot of my data because after those during those two hundred nights I started to make stacks you know I just started to combine things and I saw huge improvements in sleep quality and sleep quantity you know for example if you’re combining let’s say the dark mode with let’s say some stress management you know exercises so but at least something from this five list if you will do Cheryl McColgan (09:42.254) you Vitalijus (10:05.083) you really can improve little bit, little bit, know, and etc. Because with sleep the most important thing that you don’t need to think that you need to improve drastically. For example, if you add 15 minutes every day to your duration of sleep, just 15 minutes longer you will sleep or 15 minutes earlier you will go to sleep. In one week, it’s more than two hours. So, I mean, this is the point that you don’t need to… Cheryl McColgan (10:10.798) . Vitalijus (10:31.811) make a revolution in your life and start to do those all five things. Just one thing from this five list, what I mentioned previously, can make this kind of small change and then this small change can accumulate to the big differences. Cheryl McColgan (10:37.774) you Cheryl McColgan (10:44.814) Yeah, those are some really amazing suggestions for sleep. I think that, you know, the fact that when people do it is interesting, like having the aura or a tool like that, where you can kind of see what changes you make really affect things. agree with you. One of the biggest things for me was, and I’m at the age where I was starting to, you know, get a lot of hot flashes and be sleeping really hot. And I got the cooling mattress, like the Oolar. There’s a couple of them. There’s like eight sleep. I have an affiliation with one of them, but man, getting that coolness. in the room, like on the bed, that improved mine amazingly. So that one I think is one of the most important. Vitalijus (11:18.511) But this is the big happiness of being this biohacker, which means that you will test on yourself. Now, for example, in the last year, I test a lot with CGM, with the continuous glucose monitor. mean, also, you cannot imagine how many things you can test on yourself because this is very personal. I will eat banana and you will eat banana. Our glucose spice will be totally different because it depends on our genetic, on our gut brain, know, gut microflora, you know, and etc. So, Cheryl McColgan (11:31.118) Mm-hmm. Vitalijus (11:49.091) I mean, you can test a lot of things, you know, for example, I was consuming different carbohydrates on my empty stomach. I just wanted to see how, let’s say, how it’s affecting me in the long term of the glucose. I was eating like, I don’t know, this bread. For me personally, example, is spiking glucose to such a huge amount of level and even after two hours the spice still exists at a very high level. So for me the rice is not good and this I know only from this biohacking. testing and experimenting with myself, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not good for you. Yeah, because maybe it’s you are totally different, you know, and etc. So this is the greatness of the biohacking that you can use the tool like a CGM or like, I don’t know, or whatever, and to see the changes in the data, you know, on your personal data. So I think this is the most, you know, amazing thing. Cheryl McColgan (12:45.804) Yeah, totally agree. you so you mentioned that you were working at a very stressful corporate job and you mentioned stress is one of the things for sleep. And I think before we before I hit record, we were talking about something recently that you got into more release related to stress and also, you know, with using the pulsed set of how that can affect it. So I’d love it you could share a little bit more about what you’ve been learning about the stress part. And you have a specific name for it, I think. Vitalijus (13:11.387) Yeah, I mean the last three and a half years I’m quite deep in this topic is a stress resilience basically. For me the stress was always like this kind of mysterious thing, you know, because everybody blames stress. Yeah, everybody. I mean you’re bad at work, it’s stress. You have illness, it’s stress, you know. Everybody blames stress, yeah, but not so many can track it, can measure it, you know, can… Cheryl McColgan (13:18.062) Stress resilience. Vitalijus (13:39.803) somehow feel it, know, and etc. And for me, I am always this kind of person, you know, that what you cannot measure, cannot improve, you know, and you cannot control, you know, so I want to somehow to, so this is my big passion, you know, I want to somehow structure this distress and etc. And it’s quite a deep topic, it’s quite a young topic, you know, if you’re going Because for example in case of sleep you have a lot of data a lot of studies right now and etc in case of stress resilience Basically, it’s a quite a new science for us. Basically what it means that you have like us like a muscle you can build it, you know Because you can’t avoid stressful situations. It’s impossible. Yeah, it will be more and more stressful situations But if you will have stronger the stress resilience, you will recover faster. Yeah Because as a human being we are switching on between parasympathetic nervous system, means rest and digest, and this sympathetic nervous system, means flight and flight, and we are always switching, you know. Now the problem is that we are too many times per day. If previously, let’s say, we were in majority of time in those parasympathetic rest and digest, now we know 50 times we are going from those parasympathetic to sympathetic. I know every bad message, every bad WhatsApp message, every Instagram story, every bad driver creates some kind of let’s say urgency, some kind of bad feelings for us and etc. And then it’s a big probability that we will be in this loop and then it will become the chronic stress. And the chronic stress is very bad for us because it’s creating like inflammation. Cheryl McColgan (15:04.663) I love it. Cheryl McColgan (15:20.48) Thanks for watching! Vitalijus (15:22.221) oxidative damage for our body and etc. So, if you have this strong stress muscle, then you will recover, then you will switch faster to the parasympathetic nervous system. So this is very important and you can measure the stress muscle. One of the metrics of the stress muscle is HRV. So the higher the HRV, basically the stronger muscle you have. So for example, if now, let’s say very roughly, Cheryl McColgan (15:40.504) Thank you. Vitalijus (15:51.611) If you have 50 HRV as a metric, you have like an average HRV. If you have like from 50 to 70, it’s already you have like a stronger muscle than every person. If you have above 70, you’re already, let’s say on the very good level, more than 90 elite. So it means, and also very important thing that you can train. So it means that you can improve by doing some specific exercises, some specific routines, techniques. Cheryl McColgan (16:19.406) you Vitalijus (16:21.177) you can improve the HRV, you know, and by improving HRV you will build the muscle. So it means that if you will have more stress, will respond faster, you will respond, you know, and you will recover faster. So this is the science in, I don’t know, in five minutes, but it’s much deeper, you know, of course, let me just try to simplify it. Cheryl McColgan (16:27.798) Awesome, Cheryl McColgan (16:43.246) Yeah, and in relation to stress, I think one of the nice things about tools like the Pulsado, for example, and for those of you that are just listening and we’re not watching on YouTube, if you can go to the video, you could actually see what it looks like. It’s kind of just a device with some electrodes on it it’s got a button where you turn it on. So it’s very simple, but it just goes around your neck and rests on the vagus nerve. And I guess what I love about tools like this is it can be very challenging to get somebody to meditate, for example, you know, to take the time to do that. But what you do with this device, you just turn on the app, you put it on and it kind of does it for you. So to me, it’s kind of like a no brainer for people to try this and see if it has a good effect. And so I’ll just share with you that I only recently got it. And I did notice on my aura ring that the day that I did it, I can’t remember if it was the first or the second time, but I had some really amazing sleep stats that night, like much more REM and deep sleep than normal. And also just more solid sleep. I can’t say for 100 % certainty that it was the full set because you never know, there’s always so many factors. I really think that something like this, if you have stats from yourself previously, and then if you got really consistent with it, did it for say like 30 days, something like that, you might be able to more accurately see if this is something that’s helping you. all that being said, I would love it if you would share a little bit about what the Vegas Nervous Vitalijus (17:47.034) Yeah, yeah. Cheryl McColgan (18:08.64) nerve is and why it’s related to stress and then how does a device like this, you know, help people affect the, you know, different outcomes. Vitalijus (18:19.343) Yeah, I will answer this question and then I will add that for example right now we have like a new feature on our app that you can connect your Aura or Apple Watch or whatever with our device and you can get the data. of your heart rate, your heart rate variability, of your sleep, of your stress. And then you will see in the, this is our future. You will see that, for example, after the stimulation, how the heart rate is changing, you know, et cetera. And we will play with this data to create like a very personalized protocols that, for example, if you want to improve HRV, you need to do this specific protocol of Pulse Oto Plus, some behavior changes in case of, I don’t know, sleep or other behavioral things. And now, for example, we are working with Aura because we see from our current customers who are connected to Aura with Rosetto that sleep latency is improving. It means that how fast you’re going to sleep. And this is one the problems of the people who have like issues with sleep because they are so stressful, know, can’t, they’re racing mind, not allowing them to go fast to sleep and then they’re like a Cheryl McColgan (19:17.23) Mm. Vitalijus (19:31.343) you know, challenges or they are waking up in the middle of the night and they cannot go to sleep anymore. So, but back to the vagus nerve topic. So the vagus nerve is like one of the longest, one of the unique nerves in our body. It connects basically the brain with internal organs. The uniqueness of this nerve that it has branches in every organ. Yeah. So every organ has some kind of branch of the vagus nerve. Basically it’s not like one cable. It’s not Cheryl McColgan (19:59.98) Okay. Vitalijus (20:00.699) You need to imagine the nerve is like a cable, yeah? It’s like a network with more than 200,000 fibers that has connections to the different organs and all that. And the brain communicates with the gut, with the organs, the vagus nerve. So for example, for the brain to understand our liver is producing good, you know, and performing good, let’s say. Cheryl McColgan (20:16.02) you Vitalijus (20:29.967) the liver sends a signal via vagus nerve that let’s say all those arcs of liver is okay and then the brain sends the signal that okay if it’s okay then for example you can reduce the heart rate you know please be blood pressure please be reducing etc so it’s always communicating if you have issues with the vagus nerve or it’s not so strong let’s say or the tone is very low then you have this kind of Cheryl McColgan (20:32.302) you Vitalijus (20:58.619) brain, then you have brain fog, then you have tiredness, you have miscommunication between those brain and organs, and then you have these kinds of blood issues, IBS, and etc. So this is basically damage or dysfunctional vagus nerve. One more time, HRV is one of the metrics which represents the strength of the vagus nerve, how fast you basically can switch the parasympathetic nervous system. So vagus nerve, when you’re activating it, basically It’s switching on this parasympathetic nervous system, is for relaxation, for digestion, for cooling down yourself and etc. We’re targeting neck because on the neck side, on both sides of the neck, you have approximately 60 % of total fibers. You remember I said that vagus nerve is around 200,000 fibers of network, yeah, of those branches and etc. 60 % of them are on the neck area. That’s why we created this kind of… Cheryl McColgan (21:29.87) you Cheryl McColgan (21:35.488) you Cheryl McColgan (21:55.086) I don’t know if you can hear me, but that’s why I’m in the video. Bye. Vitalijus (21:57.381) device, which you need to put on the neck, you need to switch on the button, it’s connected to the app, and then we creating quite deep electric signal, which goes under the muscle to the nerve level. And basically in five to seven minutes, we are activating this nerve. And when this nerve is activated, you’re switching on this parasympathetic nervous system and then all the parameters are going down. So let’s say blood pressure is decreasing a little bit, heart rate is decreasing a little bit. Cheryl McColgan (22:04.846) you Cheryl McColgan (22:15.864) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (22:21.038) you Cheryl McColgan (22:26.498) Thank you. Vitalijus (22:27.675) HRV is increasing because it’s also one of the metrics of the relaxation of those stress resilience and etc. It seems simple, yeah, electricity goes under the muscle to the nerve. Where is the biggest, let’s say, now our work and laboratory work that if you are activating different, different vagus nerve fibers are responsible for different things. Cheryl McColgan (22:35.596) you Cheryl McColgan (22:44.622) Oh, I was walking. Walking? Yeah. you Vitalijus (22:56.175) from those 200,000, you know, some of the fibers are responsible for parasympathetic nervous system. Yeah, this heart rate drop and et cetera. Some of the fibers when you are switching on, they’re increasing the level of acetylcholine, very important neurotransmitter who is participating in inflammation management, you know, and migraine, for example, acetylcholine improves the level of nitric oxide, which is like a, you know, very important factor for the migraine. And that’s why Cheryl McColgan (22:57.71) you Cheryl McColgan (23:15.916) Thank you. you Vitalijus (23:25.093) There are lot of studies about vagus nerve stimulation on migraines, vagus nerve stimulation and inflammation. Some of the fibers that are responsible for gut brain access and those kinds of things like IBS and etc. So different fibers have different role on your body. Now, scientifically, this is the point that with specific electric signal like a voltage, amplitude, pulse wave and pulse width, we are trying to activate different levels of the vagus nerve fiber. So this… Cheryl McColgan (23:32.071) Bye. Vitalijus (23:52.827) seems simple product, but in reality, I mean, where we want to go, we want to have like 20 different programs on the product. And whenever you have issues with IBS, you’re just switching one product. If you have issues with migraine, you’re switching other product. I mean, you don’t need to wear like 20 devices. It will be one device, but with the different signals, who will tackle different fibers for the different benefits of health. Cheryl McColgan (24:17.838) you Vitalijus (24:21.243) So this is where we are going, know, and this is our like the biggest challenges and biggest issues right now and like experiments, tests, scientific studies, you know, and et cetera. Cheryl McColgan (24:24.738) Thank you. Cheryl McColgan (24:31.886) Yeah, when I was first exploring the device, I actually went on PubMed and was looking at vagus nerve stimulation and kind of what things that they were addressing with it. I definitely saw migraine come up in some of the gut things that you mentioned. But when you were doing the research for this device and now you’ve been so immersed in it now for years, what are some other than what you’ve already mentioned, what are some other conditions besides stress, migraine, and IBS that there’s good data for or that you even have anecdotal evidence for helping a different situation. Vitalijus (25:04.315) Cognitive performance, a lot of data about cognitive performance, memory especially. a lot of studies with army, military guys in this topic. For example, if you have sleepless night, so no sleep and it’s like very typical situation in combat situation in army, then you have a lot of mistakes because of those cognitive issues. But then if you are doing after sleepless nights, vagus nerve stimulation, you’re reducing mystic level very much. So this is a lot of studies in this case, blood pressure, but not in all cases, but it’s also part of the parasympathetic nervous system, because when you are in this parasympathetic, everything goes down, blood pressure goes down, the muscles are relaxing, the heart rate goes down, etc. quite a lot of studies of blood pressure that you can really regulate the blood pressure. Now there is one device, vagus nerve stimulator, which basically can treat arthritis, inflammation-related disease. Still it’s implantable device, it’s not like we have like a not implantable device, but they already have FDA approval for arthritis, which is, I mean, Cheryl McColgan (26:12.185) Bye. Thanks. Vitalijus (26:31.141) huge problem and etc. Migraine and cluster head pains, cluster head pains like a 10x migraine is even stronger, know, and etc. My wife, she has cluster head pains and this was the reason why I dig deeper in this topic five, six years ago, you know. So this is the topic. Now, for example, Lithuania, we are running a huge clinical study about Cheryl McColgan (26:48.238) you Vitalijus (26:59.003) the thoracic nervous system activation, we are even measuring the cortisol level of the hair, because it’s one of the best metrics to know, because there is a cortisol in the hair and you can measure before and after the hair levels of cortisol and etc. But here, still on the main topic of the thoracic nervous system. But for example, PTSD, also a lot of studies also with military, especially ex-veterans. Cheryl McColgan (27:02.178) you Cheryl McColgan (27:07.862) and then we support. Cheryl McColgan (27:18.21) Facebook. Vitalijus (27:28.667) and the people who have PTSD in general. It’s related for a sympathetic nervous system, but it’s a little bit different topic. So PTSD and vagus nerve also quite a big amount right now coming on public field. Cheryl McColgan (27:32.782) you Cheryl McColgan (27:39.598) you Cheryl McColgan (27:46.862) Well, that’s pretty exciting. I think, you know, on the underlying part of all of that is if you get better sleep, pretty much any condition that you have will be improved. So I think just that in and of itself is pretty amazing. When you are sharing this device with family, friends, and I know that there’s like a specific protocol and on the app, you can choose stress or pain relief or whatever. And you said there’s some other features coming, but what are your recommendations for people to use this? Like, is there, Is there anything like, don’t use it more than three times a day, or using it once a day is optimal, or does it depend on the condition? How would you suggest that people most effectively use the device? Vitalijus (28:24.027) At least once per day, perfectly would be twice per day, five to seven minutes per stimulation. There are different timing things for the stimulation, but like I said, five to seven minutes is enough to activate the vagus nerve based on our studies. So you can do it, for example, before sleep, just one hour, 30 minutes before sleep, just to put like a first five, seven, and then… or in the morning or even you have this kind of stressful before the stressful event. Yeah, we have, I don’t know, stressful meeting or you’re going on stage or you’re going to the dentistry, you know, to, to, I mean, I’m just saying my customer cases, yeah, where they are. Cheryl McColgan (29:06.381) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (29:11.523) Yeah, right. Vitalijus (29:12.475) the pool set and there are a lot of cases that for example one professional poker player is using before the game because he is full of stress so I mean in the morning and in the evening five to seven minutes the good part that it’s hands-free so you can multitask I mean Cheryl McColgan (29:19.65) Nice. Vitalijus (29:32.963) You can do whatever you want, can watch TV, can scroll the telephone, you can… I mean, at this moment I’m personally working with lot of sport players, so usually they are doing also before sleep, because they have big issues with sleep after especially games and etc. So they are using when they are in the… know, doing some procedures like… stretching or putting the legs in the cold, they’re just using it as a tool and then scrolling and just relaxing and etc. So the same with you, before sleep, whenever you watch TV, just can five minutes to put the device and just try to wind down and relax. Cheryl McColgan (30:18.476) I’m glad you mentioned the sports performance because I actually was on the website prior to meeting me. did this just before our meeting, not because I thought this was going to be a stressful meeting, because I saw you say that you should be using it one to two hours after training, which I did today. And so can you share a little bit about why for athletes this is useful? So for example, you do a weight training session and then I came home and I ate my protein, ate my lunch, whatever. And then I used this, I pressed the pain. setting on the thing because that’s what you recommended. And can you explain like why that’s useful after training, how it helps recovery? Vitalijus (30:53.733) So basically what now we are looking at, there are three situations when the sport people are using the Pulsator. Basically two and the third is 50-50. So before sleep, especially after the games, they have big issues. Typical sleep time is 3 a.m. After the games, it’s like a typical professional sport. Cheryl McColgan (31:09.326) Mmm. Vitalijus (31:12.891) a player due to many reasons they are going to sleep 3 a.m. So for them it’s a big factor, especially if the next day is the training already and they have just five hours of sleep or four hours of sleep. Then before the competition, but not always because they are very superstitious and they have their own routines. But especially those who have very stressful things, but it’s 50-50. Some trainers don’t want that they will Cheryl McColgan (31:33.112) Yeah. Vitalijus (31:42.827) relax so much because there’s some trainers want that they will go to the fight and flight you know Cheryl McColgan (31:46.894) Mm-hmm. Vitalijus (31:48.175) They need accelerator, they don’t need to So some trainers don’t want that they will use it for before the game or competition because they want this kind of adrenaline mode, etc. So it’s like I said, 50-50. And then the next is in the morning after very hard training because usually what we see from the sport people that HRV, one of the metrics of this recovery and etc. drops around 40%. percent after very hard like if you have benchmark I don’t know you’re Average base RV is like a 100. Let’s imagine that after a very hard training or competition, it drops minimum to 60, like a 40, percentage, which is huge, which means that you are not fully recovered, which means that you are not super stress resilient. It means that you are very sensitive, you know, which means that you can be affected with a lot of those mini stressors and etc. So with varying pull set up, they’re trying to decrease the level of drop. It’s not like a, it’s not a magic stick, you know, you cannot expect that after hard training you will remain on 100 HRV. But from our data you can decrease the droplets from 40 to 20, something like that, which is still quite significant. So basically the main idea is to control the HRV because it’s really decreasing after hard physical activity. Cheryl McColgan (33:18.988) Yeah, that’s amazing. I love so many good use cases for this. And I love that you were able to like really share with people kind of your personal experience, because I think often when people create a device like this, it’s often out of some kind of personal thing that happened to them, right? Like you said, your wife has migraines, so that was very helpful. And you’d been under a lot of stress of not sleeping well. So I love that you were able to find something and then bring it to market that can really help everyone. So all that being said, would love it if there are any final thoughts that you have or anything that you’d like to share that we haven’t already addressed, either in relation to biohacking or the device. Vitalijus (33:56.685) I’m always saying, probably I want to say two things. First of all, really experiment with yourself. I think this is the uniqueness of biohacking that you can do on yourself. You’re very personal, very unique human being. You have your own, I don’t know, glucose spike, your own sleep metrics and et cetera. So I think this is the important that you experiment. which means that you will take care of yourself. And this is the second point that you really need to take care of yourself, especially of your mental health. For example, me personally, it was a period of time last month, my typical average week, like a working hour a week was 70 hours per week. It’s huge. So, I mean, with this kind of huge… know, workload, it’s very, it’s very, it’s it’s very possible that you will burn out. Yeah. So I understand this, and I’m taking care of myself a lot about the stress resilience, mental health, and et cetera. Pulsetto is the part of their routine, but it’s not like a, like I said, it’s not a magic still. I’m really spending a lot of time on my mental health, you know, just to recover, to have good sleep. good nutrition, know, I’m taking care a lot about high intensive interval training. I am doing like a, like a self awareness, know, with thoughts, you know, kind of activity is decreasing my energy levels, what kind of activity is increasing my level, energy levels. I’m doing some parasympathetic nervous system. It means I’m taking care of myself, you know? So I think this is the very, very important, doesn’t matter if you are like a mom, you know. Cheryl McColgan (35:37.225) Bye. Vitalijus (35:46.519) or you are just a random person, need to take care of your mental health because nowadays, you know, it will be more and more stressors, more epidemic, wars, other, other health situations. So mental health is becoming, you know, more and more important. So take care of your mental Cheryl McColgan (36:06.05) Yes, amazing advice. Thank you so much again for joining us today and sharing all your knowledge and your passion for biohacking and for creating this device. hopefully we will see more from the future about this, the studies that you’re doing. for the final thing, if anybody wants to check this out, I created a link and it’s heelnorshgrow.com forage slash pulseto. So super easy to find and said, you go to the website. There’s a special section for athletes where Vitalius speaks about some of the benefits. Then you can also just find out all the information there. Thanks again. I really appreciate it. Vitalijus (36:42.757) Thanks, thank you very much.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Hypnotherapy for Behavior Change 44:37

9 giorni fa44:37

44:37

In this episode, Dr. Lloyd Glauberman shares his journey into psychology and hypnotherapy, discussing the importance of sleep, the obesity epidemic, and introduces the concept of lifestyle intelligence. He emphasizes the need for tailored approaches to behavior change and the innovative tools available for personal development, including his app that combines storytelling and hypnosis. Connect with Dr. Glauberman through his website and you can download his app on the Apple store with a free 30 day trial. Watch on YouTube Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here . CONNECT WITH CHERYL Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts ! 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight Dry Farm Wines, extra bottle for a penny Drinking Ketones Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life Clean Beauty 20% off first order DIY Lashes 10% off NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life Facebook YouTube Pinterest TikTok Amazon Store Getting Started with Keto Resources The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide Takeaways Hypnosis is a common state we experience daily, often without realizing it. Sleep is crucial for cognitive function and emotional regulation. The obesity epidemic is influenced by lifestyle choices and sleep deprivation. Lifestyle intelligence is about understanding and improving our health behaviors. Self-esteem has shifted from real-life interactions to social media validation. Hypnosis can be effective when tailored to individual needs. The brain cleans itself during sleep, highlighting its importance for health. Healthy behavior skills should be integrated into early education. Show Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:01.038) Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Lloyd Globberman, but he has generously said that I should call him Lloyd during the show. but just so you know, he is a doctor. Of course you heard that in his official bio, but Lloyd, I’d really love if you could share with the audience now, just in your own words, what got you into this line of work and what got you interested in helping people with their health and wellness? Lloyd Glauberman (00:25.712) I stumbled into the profession of psychology after I graduated from college. And at the time, in addition to being in college, I played drums in a rock and roll band. And like everybody else, I wanted to be a rock star. However, as the fact that we’re talking right now just lets everybody know that never happened. So I had to figure out something else. And it was during that time when Vietnam War was still in. Cheryl McColgan (00:39.82) Of course! Cheryl McColgan (00:46.606) you Lloyd Glauberman (00:55.322) in play and the only way to avoid being involved with that in an appropriate fashion was to work for the government in the health professions in some kind of way. And I stumbled across a job at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which was a psychiatric facility for residents of Harvard. So it was an up-tempo, really smart bunch of folks kind of thing. And so I walked in, off the street, went upstairs to the person who was in charge of personnel and I said, you by chance don’t have any jobs available, do you? For people who might want to begin a career. And they said, did you graduate college? And I said, yeah, seven days ago. They said, fine. When can you start? What? do mean, when can I start? I’m not even sitting down in your office. I said, are you actually hiring me right now? She said, Yeah, you look like you can do the job. Monday. Okay. That started my career, that bizarre set of circumstances. So I get there and I am now a psychiatric aid helping deal with and support people who have severe emotional problems, obviously, because they’ve been hospitalized. And I was getting very nice feedback from the staff, from the nurses who had been there for decades, from the psychiatric residents. said, you know, you should go into the business. Hence. I did. I started applying to graduate school. I got married early. My wife and I moved to California and I bumbled and stumbled through the whole process and finally got my doctorate from Syracuse in 1976. Came to New York, took the licensing exam and here we are decades later and I’m still involved in the business and it’s still enjoyable even though I’m a new Cheryl McColgan (02:48.13) That’s an amazing story. it’s funny actually how much we have in common because people that have listened to the podcast before might know that my background is in psychology. And I did go to graduate school for psychology as well, but I did not finish, unlike you. And also wanted to be a rock star, played the saxophone for many years. Lloyd Glauberman (03:06.132) Well, we have a lot in common. Welcome to those who didn’t make it. Cheryl McColgan (03:14.478) What a wild and wonderful world of health and wellness. But I think obviously the fact that you’re still excited about it and still coming out with new things even further along in your career is really amazing. And one of the things that caught my eye when your team reached out was that you also work with hypnotherapy. And that’s something, a topic that I’ve never covered on the show before. It’s not something that I’ve ever really looked deeply into. Lloyd Glauberman (03:35.529) Yes. Cheryl McColgan (03:42.07) other than the old movies where the guys wavin’ the clock in front of the face or something. That is about the extent of my knowledge. So I’d love it if you would just share with me and the audience what exactly is hypnotherapy and then how have you been using it to help people change their behaviors? Lloyd Glauberman (03:58.226) In a variety of different ways, I’ll go through my own understanding of it. mean, hypnosis is one of those magical terms, right? I mean, when you say somebody is in hypnotherapy as opposed to psychotherapy, like I’m doing CBT, you know, I’m doing hypnosis, ooh, you get that kind of thing. People don’t realize that trance is something that we are in and out of all day long. But because it’s so commonplace and we’re so used to it, we don’t call it hypnosis. We just call it, for instance, daydreaming. Have you ever been in a really deep daydream when somebody’s calling your name one, two, three times and you finally hear it and go, realize they had called you by your name three times and you didn’t hear it? That’s a hypnotic trance state, but it’s not called that. Cheryl McColgan (04:50.348) Absolutely. Lloyd Glauberman (04:56.018) Then, because nobody’s talking to you to go deeper and deeper, you’re just doing it on your own, right? People don’t realize how much life is in and out of trance. Another commonplace experience, you’re listening to music and suddenly a tune pops up from your high school years, one of your favorite years, right? And suddenly your mind kind of goes back in time and is beginning to relive that moment. In hypnosis, That’s called age regression. But when you’re listening to it by yourself, you don’t call it anything, you’re just in the past and enjoying that moment of thinking about something that occurred back. All of those experiences that occur in hypnosis are wired into us and occur all the time. We’re little bits and pieces of audio voices in our head floating in and out of consciousness. And sometimes we don’t realize that it’s happening. The next thing… We’re feeling kind of strange because we didn’t notice that we started talking to ourselves and denigrating ourselves because other things are going on. You didn’t pay much attention. All of that is a self hypnotic thing. So, so much of hypnosis is experiences that we’re having, but because it doesn’t have the aura of somebody on stage telling somebody to bark like a dog, you know what I mean? And then doing it, right? Cause we think about it, mind control, power and that kind of thing. It’s not like hypnosis. can’t be useful, of course it can be, but it has to be understood in the context of everything else that goes on in our minds. These are skills that we all have, but we don’t know that. So the whole idea is to generate ways to introduce information to people so they will somehow store it and use it. One of the more interesting ways of doing hypnosis is called conversational hypnosis. Cheryl McColgan (06:37.23) Yeah. Lloyd Glauberman (06:53.936) It’s you’re talking to somebody and you’ll be talking at a certain pace like I’m talking right now. And then you’ll pause and speak a little bit slower and say a few words about how wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to solve that problem that you’re having. And maybe some point you got that change in pace and noticing how words get marked out. Anybody who does hypnosis really well knows how to mark out words to the listener. in a way that tends not to bring attention to them. Because the whole idea is get around the conscious mind so you can hear things without knowing it, so you can respond in a positive way at the right times, in the right places, and with the right people. So some people who are hearing people. Yeah, yeah, we know more than we realize. Cheryl McColgan (07:40.248) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s a description that’s not as woo woo as I would have expected. And one question to clarify something that you said earlier before we kind of move on with, you know, how you use that to help people. Cause I do have a couple of questions around that, but the thing that came to mind when you were describing how we all may have experienced this before or have this skill. it, so I think a lot of people that listen to this might be familiar with kind of flow state, like artists and Lloyd Glauberman (07:47.058) It’s alright. Cheryl McColgan (08:09.898) sports people and golfers and that kind of thing. When you were describing that, I immediately thought of flow state because you’re kind of in a subconscious state for lack of a better term. Maybe you can describe it better. Would you say that that’s similar to hypnosis or is that sort of a different phenomenon? Lloyd Glauberman (08:28.34) That’s a very productive trance state. You’re not in everyday consciousness. Your focus is completely different and it’s focused on one particular set of skills or data, visual data that you’re dealing with, or auditory data, right? And yeah, that’s a very productive self, not a hypnotic trance state, but in a trance state that’s productive and focused. yeah. Athletes talk about that all the time. Musicians talk about, you disengage from the rest of the world. It’s you and what’s happening. Yeah, altered states of consciousness. That’s one type. Cheryl McColgan (09:06.526) Okay, so people are familiar with that as well. So I just think it helps color how they can better understand it. So, excuse me, when you use it with people, one of the things that came to mind when you were describing it, I’m sure ideally it’s probably better if you know the specific situation that the person is dealing with and maybe know some of their past, because I think you could tie in things in that kind of conversational thing. But is it also possible that say somebody’s interested in losing weight, could they use Lloyd Glauberman (09:11.006) Okay. Lloyd Glauberman (09:27.753) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (09:36.246) something that’s just geared towards that topic and have it still work for them? Or is it really just better if it’s very specific to the individual? Lloyd Glauberman (09:43.636) If you’re trying to help somebody lose weight, you have to kind of figure out what the structure of their experience is and what the problems are, because not everybody has the same set of issues, right? So if you can understand based on what they’re telling you, what it is, as you listen to them describe their relationship to food, when, how much, who’s around them, what might happen that’s negative if they lose weight, because a lot of times people Don’t want people consciously want to lose weight, but they’re worried about the kinds of things that would be expected of them if they did. I mean, this may be an overgeneralization, but I’ve worked with women who the issue of what will happen if I lose all this weight and have to deal with all that attention I am now going to get. Do I have the skills to be able to essentially say no when I need to? if somebody’s hitting on me, or am I going to allow myself to be taken advantage of because I don’t have that internal resource to be able to control my environment? So I’ll play it safe and I’ll keep the extra weight on. That’s one particular problem. Not everybody’s going to have that problem, but I’ve seen it enough to know that that can be profound. And most people aren’t aware of that. Cheryl McColgan (11:03.384) Yes. No, that makes a lot of sense. kind of was in my mind, I thought it should be more tailored to the person in this situation for that reason. But then yet you do see occasionally, you know, just random things on the internet, like, you know, hypnotize yourself and lose weight in 30 days. In fact, I’ve seen this, you know, at type of ad on Instagram. And so that’s one reason why, you know, when I had the opportunity to talk to you, I really wanted to, you know, bring that out so that people don’t get to try to use tools that might not work very well for them when they could. maybe go to a professional or have something that’s more tailored to their situation, if that makes sense. Lloyd Glauberman (11:41.28) Hypnosis can be very useful when the problem is kind of circumscribed in the sense it’s sitting nearby itself and you have a competent hypnotist therapist who knows how to use this and can establish rapport prior to the actual hypnotic induction taking place. Cheryl McColgan (12:01.932) Yeah, that makes sense. And you, so we mentioned, you know, weight loss, cause that’s a popular topic on this show. I know that you have some thoughts around the obesity epidemic and maybe kind of what’s driving it and what tools that you have that might help people with that. Can you add a little more color around, you know, just your overall thoughts on what’s going on in the world with that right now? Cause there’s a lot of new interesting things like the GLP ones on top of it and everything. Lloyd Glauberman (12:28.062) Well, it’s interesting, obviously. These drugs can be useful. The problem is, what’s the message being sent? The message is, your behavior is now an illness. So how is this going to spread out even farther in terms of other kinds of things, right? Right now, lifestyle is destroying the culture. Correct? People are spending a lot of time not moving, looking at screens. They’re looking, excuse me, they’re looking at screens for longer periods of time impacting their sleep. So less sleep, less movement. Gary, that’s a petri dish for obesity because… The one thing that’s never spoken about as much as other aspects of sleep deprivation is it amps up appetite. Why? Because the brain is tired and the brain needs food. So the brain says, hello, we’re hungry. Not really, but I have to make you believe you’re hungry because I need energy because it’s two o’clock in the morning and we’re still doing Instagram. So what are we going to do? We need something to eat. So much of that is the reason why the obesity epidemic is as it is, coupled with inactivity. So you’ve got kids growing up now, but I mean, 12.2 million high school kids have to get to school by eight o’clock. Think about that. What time do you think the average high school kid goes to bed? Midnight? Midnight in the early years? Cheryl McColgan (14:15.304) I’ve always thought that was crazy. Cheryl McColgan (14:21.154) I know based on ours, midnight or 1. Lloyd Glauberman (14:24.306) Right. So the probability is they need a lot of sleep because that’s the time when they’re in a growth spurt. They need like nine hours sleep. How much did they get? Probably five hours sleep. So day in, day out, in, week out, they are chronically sleep deprived and they’re not moving very much. That’s why the obesity numbers are creeping towards 50 % by the end of the decade. Now that’s going to be impacted by these drugs because But half the country is going to be on these drugs at that point because people are going to just assume, I don’t have to worry. I will just do this instead of taking good care of myself. all those taking good care of yourself things is just more than weight. It’s brain development. It’s all the other health related issues. So we are right now in the midst of a disaster and nobody’s doing enough to deal with those aspects of it. Cheryl McColgan (15:20.856) Yeah, not even, not even just that. think on top of that, guess my, cause I think for a lot of people, it can be absolutely life-changing. I’ve heard a lot of stories where people are using it in conjunction with strength training and getting their habits right. And they finally get that, you know, I guess for a lot of people, and I feel pretty fortunate. I don’t think I’ve ever had to experience this that much, but just the constant food thoughts and, and over, over exaggerated hunger from I could sleep and all the things that you’re saying that the drug actually quiets that and then they can kind of work on some of these things a little better than they could before. Lloyd Glauberman (15:57.076) If that’s the case and they end up doing that, then they will need the drug less than before, because they’ll get their body into that place and they’ll say, okay, why not test the waters and see whether I can do this? Cheryl McColgan (16:10.126) Yeah, it’s my hope that there are doctors using it in that way and helping patients towards that kind of thing. But I know it’s a lot of it’s like you’re saying, it’s kind of just going to be this bandaid where people take it, they don’t work on changing the behaviors. And then, you know, they’re stuck with this lifelong thing that they have to use that may or may not have long-term effects for just, you know, it has been used for a while, but I think it’s still too short to really know. if it has an impact on longevity or other things. Lloyd Glauberman (16:42.356) I know this from my own experience, because I’ve been on both ends of the continuum. And I had one of those shock, embarrassing moments when somebody said to me, when they hadn’t seen me in a while, this goes back, early 1970s. So I’m a couple years out of college and… They came over for dinner in Los Angeles, where we had just moved. Hey, Lloyd, let’s have dinner. I haven’t seen you in seven years. Fine. First thing out of his mouth was, man, did you gain weight? And I’m still thinking to myself, it occurred so slowly that it was invisible. And I think a lot of people have that experience. After a while, you just look at yourself and you look at yourself and incremental changes. After a while, you don’t notice anything has happened. Cheryl McColgan (17:14.082) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (17:18.285) you Lloyd Glauberman (17:35.058) Well, that moment changed my life forever because I never wanted to hear that. So I went through a whole metamorphosis and slowly began to do all the other things that occurred in the seventies as people realized how important exercise was and diet and all those things. So I got addicted to the good things. So, but, I know what it is to be a whole lot bigger than I was supposed to be. So I understand. And then my belief is, okay, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Well, that’s the difference. And you really want people to take more responsibility than they typically want to take. The drugs are great, but not as many people should be taking them as publicly are taking them. And you’ve got to build in healthy behavior skills into the school system. That has to be critical. Part of the way to do that is in early childhood education, elementary school education, get an educational publisher to publish a bunch of books on all the typical stuff that kids have to learn, but use lifestyle themes as well in there. So when there’s a story about a little kid who’s walking around town, you find that, yes, and he walked three miles that day and he felt really good about doing that and use math to talk about calories. Calories are what we burn. Okay, let’s do some math problems with calories. So while you’re in your early childhood education, Cheryl McColgan (18:49.294) you Lloyd Glauberman (18:59.496) You learn about all those lifestyle areas that are important and therefore have it be woven into the fabric of the way you think and hopefully the way you behave because you learn what you’re supposed to be doing. So we need. Cheryl McColgan (19:13.164) Love that. You need to send Kennedy a tweet about that or something. Lloyd Glauberman (19:16.66) We need an educational publisher to do that, and that can be done relatively easily. Storylines with health behavior woven into the fabric so kids read about it all the time and they get used to it. All the language. Once you get the language in there, then you’re home free. Then they’ll understand. Cheryl McColgan (19:38.092) Yeah, that’s an amazing idea. Love that. Hopefully somebody that matters will hear that. So now that we don’t have that, unfortunately right now, so there are so many adults that have not been exposed to that. They get different messages through the media, whether it’s these GOP ones or if they just don’t feel like they have the time or the energy to focus on their habits. But I know one of the things that you help people with a lot is behavior change. Lloyd Glauberman (19:42.238) from. Cheryl McColgan (20:02.418) And so I’d love to hear how you work with adults on these things when they’re working on implementing new healthy behaviors. What are some of your best tips and ways that you get people to make these changes and make them sustainable and actually make them stick? Because that’s definitely a big area of interest of mine. So I’m always interested in hearing other ideas about that. Lloyd Glauberman (20:22.824) Well, lots of times people don’t have all the information that they need. So I always begin with, what’s the most important thing that you do? And people will pause and they’ll say something, right? And I’ll say, nope. The most important thing you do is sleep. And there’s a quizzical look on most people’s faces when you say that because it’s Sleep is this magical thing, except you don’t remember any of it, except bits and pieces of a dream. But when you start talking to people and letting them know what actually happens while they sleep, they begin to understand how important it is. And I remember 2017, there was a piece of research that came out that I thought after I read what it was about, that it would go viral through the culture. I was wrong. It didn’t happen at all. So I’m taking it upon myself to tell everybody if they missed it. And that is while you sleep, your brain cleans itself. Now think about that. I mean, the image of a dirty brain had never occurred to me before I read that research article. So what happens? You sleep. At a moment in time, the spaces between the cells open up and cerebrospinal fluid pours into your brain and you get a dishwasher effect occur. Now, when you realize that if you don’t get enough sleep over time, it’s like a car, you don’t change the oil, gunk builds up. So when you start thinking about things like Alzheimer’s disease is a potential outcome of something like that, you get people’s attention. When you present the idea that, if you don’t sleep well, your cognitive functioning is a little bit fuzzy, right? So your IQ isn’t going to be functioning as well. You get a little bit grouchy when you’re sleep deprived, right? And all your emotional intelligence skills, they don’t show up either, right? So you get all of these dysfunctional things happening as a consequence of this one behavior. Lloyd Glauberman (22:50.164) that is that essential. Then you can expand outward and talk about other things, but you need to get people’s attention as to what’s most important. You don’t get enough sleep, you’re not gonna exercise as much. You have to do these things. The core things will create the foundation for you being as bright as you can be and you being as emotionally in control as you want to be. Cheryl McColgan (23:03.278) Thank Lloyd Glauberman (23:16.712) And I’m sure everybody listening right now is thinking about a time when, whoops, I got a little bit too angry as a consequence of sleep deprivation for a while. Because we all know those things. So my job is to remind them of the basics and then reinforce all the changes that they make, albeit limited at times. Anything you do to make a change, especially when it comes to increasing your sleep. And if you can get an extra cycle every night, you have no idea how beneficial that can be. Sleep cycle symptoms in about 45 minutes in a way. Cheryl McColgan (23:44.919) Yeah. I’m so glad you brought that one up because I think it’s easy in this space to just assume that everybody knows about the glimtatic system at this point and that they need to sleep well for brain health, but not everybody knows that, just people in this space do. So I hope that people that are out there that are listening to this might be either reminded of this if you have heard it before, or I hammer on sleep all the time because also related, you said your emotional intelligence, all of those things, hunger. signals are higher when you don’t sleep and so it affects your weight. It affects pretty much every area of your life. So that’s an amazing first practical tip is work on your sleep. Any things that you’ve learned over the years for people that struggle to get good sleep, do you think it’s mostly that they’re on their devices or doing things during the day that don’t allow them to relax at night or are there other factors? Lloyd Glauberman (24:41.86) I think most people who have trouble sleeping, well, having trouble sleeping and not getting enough sleep are not synonymous. Because you have some people who just get addicted to Instagram and all the other kinds of stuff that’s available to them. We used to have something called self-esteem, right? Where how you felt about yourself was basically, dictated by the kinds of interactions that you had with other people, face to face, in one-on-ones with people, in groups, how you interacted and became an individual in the context of socially related events. Well, over time, things have changed. And this is my riff on words a little bit, so afford me a little bit of levity for the moment. Self-esteem has now morphed into self-esteem. The experience of oneself is now the artificial creation that exists on the internet. Right? Now, I have very low self-esteem because I don’t appear on the internet at all. So I realized, Lord, you have now have low self-esteem. You can’t interact with anybody anymore because you’re not up there. Okay, what can I tell you? But that’s what’s happened. Cheryl McColgan (26:00.163) Yeah. Lloyd Glauberman (26:09.724) Self-esteem has been replaced by our experience of ourselves artificially created, the image that we have. And that has, that’s completely and totally detrimental to one’s life, but it’s addictive. People love to see things that they write out there. They love images of themselves. They love having a whole bunch of followers. That’s can be, that’s a drug. And that’s one of the reasons people are doing that kind of thing, which is not. particularly useful to themselves in their own personal development. But once they get hooked into it, don’t, especially if they grow up with it, that’s the reality that they have. So you got high school kids right now, the image that they’ve created outside in the world is that who they think they are. Strange places. Cheryl McColgan (26:59.148) It really, it really is. I have this conversation quite often because we have kids that are, you know, 20 and 17 and, know, I think a lot of their beliefs about the world and to your point themselves are highly related to social media and what they see, what they think everyone else is doing all the time when they’re actually not, you know, or how much money anybody has when it’s actually not, you know, it’s just a very interesting concept. Well, all that being said, think that you so obviously people have a variety of issues to work on these days, social media just being one. What are some of the tools that you’ve created? I think you have a really interesting thing that you just brought to light. Was it maybe psychology today? Speaking of writing, I think you’re one of those publications you’re writing for, but you introduced this idea of lifestyle intelligence. I’d love to hear more about that concept and how you use it to help people. Lloyd Glauberman (27:58.558) Well, we’ve been talking about that. And it’s my belief that our foundational intelligence is what we were born with. An infant never overeats or decides not to move, right, or sleep, right? Infants know exactly what they want. If you try to continue feeding an infant, they’ll push the breast away. They understand what their needs are. Those needs are slowly undermined over time by the combination of the culture at large and homes, right? What we eat in our home. We are taught. Families are kind of like groups under a hypnotic trance. where what you see and what you hear and all the experiences, after a while, it’s a blur and you don’t have a sense of exactly what’s going on, but something is happening and you’re being impacted by it. Like I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I had no idea what appetite actually was. But my mom loved to see me eat. Loved it. It made her feel good. I’d come home from school. She said, Would you like a snack? I don’t know. What do you got? There’s some salami in the refrigerator. You might need to make yourself a sandwich. All right. That’s 3.30. When did I eat dinner? 6.30. Was I hungry? Of course not. Did I eat? Sure. It was dinner time. That whole thing is a trance state. So you’ve got the family trance. You have the cultural trance. By the time somebody graduates high school, they’re hypnotized by the lifestyle that they’ve had and the multiple levels of. Right? You don’t know what’s happening. All you know is that you’re going along for the ride. Right? That’s what we have most of the time. Until you stop, pause and reflect and realize this is not a good thing for me. I got to make some changes. By the way, one of the things that I found out along the way as I was learning how to do things is that the most Cheryl McColgan (30:03.566) you Cheryl McColgan (30:18.87) you Lloyd Glauberman (30:20.5) powerful, interesting state of consciousness we have is that little glimmer of opening up to learning in between waking and sleep. Now, we’ve all experienced moments of being in between where get a dreamlike thing has gone on and you say, wow, this is really strange. And the next thing you know, it’s morning because you Right? Because it doesn’t last very long, maybe a couple of minutes. That in-between state called the hypnagogic state is an incredibly powerful learning state. The problem is you’re not there for very long. So how can something be structured to do that, to help you learn? Well, I came across an interesting hypnotic induction called Cheryl McColgan (31:09.39) you Lloyd Glauberman (31:20.082) the dual induction. It’s rarely used because you need two people, two hypnotists working simultaneously with one subject, where both of them speak simultaneously. You have this look on your face that goes, this is weird. Cheryl McColgan (31:40.666) Well, I’m just trying to imagine that. At first, my first thought was thinking about the poor therapist trying to talk at the same time as the other one was talking. I don’t know if I could do that. Lloyd Glauberman (31:49.586) Well, they scripted it. Okay. And I’m looking at this, watching this going, what in the world is going on here? But then I noticed that while I’m listening, I’m going into this strange hypnotic state. And I said to myself, this is an interesting technique to get people into that state. Is there another way to do it without needing two people? And I said to myself, figure out. how to do this. This goes backwards, quite a ways into the eighties, where audio tape was the way people were listening to music. So I said to myself, I gotta figure out a way to put this on audio tape. So I figured the best way to do it was to use storytelling. So I figured out a way to be able to present hypnotic suggestions using my voice twice, one in each ear. So you hear stories. Cheryl McColgan (32:44.238) Mm. Lloyd Glauberman (32:47.054) And they’re interesting fairy tales too, but you don’t hear most of them because you’re floating away. But that hypnagogic state, you can keep people there. There for like 15 minutes. And while they’re there, they pick up suggestions for changing thinking, feeling, sensing and behaving. Do you like that little riff I did there? You like that? Cheryl McColgan (33:12.014) Yeah, like it a lot. Lloyd Glauberman (33:13.766) You had that look on your face and said, hey, this sounds pretty cool. OK, I can go with this. Cheryl McColgan (33:17.846) Yeah. So I’m imagining, so you were able to do this on audio right left, and I’m sure there’s something interesting with the brain sides and how this works too. Lloyd Glauberman (33:25.62) Mm-hmm. Lloyd Glauberman (33:29.82) No. Well, think Chris, the stories of Chris cross halfway through. So at one point and I, I was lucky enough to be able to rent a. A microphone that was three dimensional. Okay. So that it sounded as if people were surrounding you, not coming out of the headphones. So you had that. creating the experience of the presence of others while you’re listening. So it kind of made everything very dramatic, very impactful, as well as entertaining. So stories, I mean, we are stories. I mean, we all know that. That’s the most important thing people need to realize about their lives. First and foremost, we are the storytelling creatures because we are stories. Cheryl McColgan (34:17.016) Yeah. Lloyd Glauberman (34:27.144) From the time we were about four years old on, when our brain developed enough, we would come home and tell what we did in kindergarten, right? Or in school. That telling of a story, that’s the foundational fabric of our life. We’re storytellers. That’s who we are. Cheryl McColgan (34:37.772) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (34:48.908) That’s so cool. gotta I’m gonna try to go searching for this taper. You can send me a link or something, so I would love to experience this. before we. Awesome. Lloyd Glauberman (34:57.042) I’ll send you a bunch of stuff because I have whole bunch of these stuff for various kinds of problems in addition to the issues that we’ve been talking about. Cheryl McColgan (35:08.8) And so are any of these things that you just described, so we haven’t mentioned yet that you have this really cool app that’s out now. Are any of those types of things in the app or can you just describe what the app is and how people use it? Is it audio? Is it visuals? Is it habits? What’s the whole deal? Lloyd Glauberman (35:24.67) First, all of these, of what I just described, the audio material, is on the app. That’s the secondary part of the app because that’s what you, you basically use it as a stress management behavioral change initiator. All right, that does the heavy lifting. The rest of the app is me talking directly to you every day for three minutes, outlining. a specific piece of taking good care of yourself, why it’s important, how to go about doing it. So we combine all the different levels of consciousness in the app. So everything is stimulated, allowing you to utilize all your capacities in ways that can help you make the changes you want to make. It’s a creative process. Have a good one. Cheryl McColgan (36:13.102) So it sounds like really anyone can use that with whether, cause I mean, who doesn’t need stress relief pretty much. Lloyd Glauberman (36:20.468) And you can test drive it for a couple of weeks and that costs you anything. So if you like it, that’s fine. If you don’t like it, okay, that’s fine too. But it’s interesting stuff. And it’s called lifestyle intelligence, LQ, because that’s what it’s all about. Cheryl McColgan (36:25.654) Amazing. Cheryl McColgan (36:30.094) And can you? Cheryl McColgan (36:37.262) Right. And when you were piloting this or testing it on people, can you share maybe some of the types of things that people were using it for and what kind of things they experienced after having used the app for a while? Because I think, you know, there’s so many apps nowadays for so many different things. And I think even getting people sometimes to try something, even when it’s free for a couple of weeks can be a little daunting. Oh, it’s just another like I’ve downloaded a million of these apps that are like kind of. to not to do lists, but something like that, you know, and I get in it and I’m like, that’s not what I wanted at all, or it’s not what I expected. So I think it’d be great if you could just share kind of what they could use it for and what they might experience if they start using it. Lloyd Glauberman (37:19.166) Well, the audio material is, there’s a variety of areas of it. There is a weight loss program which utilizes that. There is a self-esteem program. There’s a time management program, procrastination program, breaking through creative blocks, procrastination, time management. It covers virtually all the kinds of issues that people are. dealing with and want to improve on. Okay, and all within the structure of that, what’s called the dual induction storytelling format. By the way, there are actually three stories on every one of those tracks. The lead story about a person with a problem who meets a magical character or an interesting situation. And then from there, there’s a pause and then the two stories start up. They play for 15 minutes. Then it comes back to the lead story where you hear that The main character has learned new thoughts, new feelings, et cetera. But it covers, there’s so many different topics that are there and available, all within this framework. And every one of these programs will relax you. So there’s the stress management automatically built into this thing. I want each of the brainwave states to be stimulated. Beta, which is the state that we’re in right now, cognitively focused learning. Alpha, the relaxed state, the most meditative state that people go after. Theta, what we were just talking about before, the in-between magical learning state. And then delta, sleep, to maximize that. So we want all the brainwave states to be involved here. And I think people will find it interesting and took up most of my life doing this stuff, figuring out, figuring this stuff out because I didn’t begin with Cheryl McColgan (39:13.24) I’m sure. Lloyd Glauberman (39:16.84) I’ve this clue that it’s about anything that I’m talking to you about now. I mean, that just evolved over time and it was nice. I learned something. Okay, time to share. Cheryl McColgan (39:26.894) That’s awesome. Well, this has been so wonderful and I did learn a ton today. Can you, for kind of last words, can you share with people where they can best find you? You said you’re not too involved with all the social stuff, but where they can best find you on the internet and if they want to download the app. And of course I’ll link this in the show notes. Lloyd Glauberman (39:49.191) There’s lifestyleintelligencelq.com. That would be the app. I’m talking to you. I will tell you all about it. It’ll be a variation of what you and I talked about. And that’s pretty much it. And you can always communicate with me through the app if there’s any questions or stuff like that. Cheryl McColgan (40:06.542) Awesome. And I think you also mentioned before we started recording that you have a virtual practice as well as a practice in Manhattan. Maybe just a quick word on that. Lloyd Glauberman (40:15.012) I’m in my office three days a week and I do virtual the other three days. So my practice is full and I’m, yeah, I like working with people. I like talking. Actually, as you can see, I can’t shut up, Sal away. Cheryl McColgan (40:28.398) Amazing. Well, thank you so much. Again, I’ll link to all this in the show notes. If you have further questions or want to get in touch with Dr. Glauberman, all the information will be there. So again, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time. Lloyd Glauberman (40:41.724) My pleasure, I enjoyed being here. Thank you.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Hume Body Pod, Is it Worth It? Hume Health Review 27:24

23 giorni fa27:24

27:24

I’ve been planning to do this Hume Health review for a while, but I wanted to wait until I’d used it for six months. During this time, I got three DEXA scans to compare the results to the Hume Health Body Pod scale. According to the manufacturer, the Body Pod correlates within three percent of a DEXA scan. For this Hume Health vs DEXA review, I thought it would be easier to present my thoughts in a video/audio form so I can share it with my podcast audience as well. If you prefer to read it the transcript is below and I’ll be updating this page shortly with a written review. If you decide to try the Hume Body Pod , use code HEALNOURISHGROW at checkout to receive an extra discount that stacks on top of their sales! In this episode I discusses the importance of daily weigh-ins and how they can be a valuable tool for tracking body composition over time. However, just knowing your weigh isn’t enough, especially when you’re actively working to build muscle and lose fat. I share my thoughts on various body fat scales I’ve used in the past as well as most recent experience with the Hume Health Scale. Using the three DEXA scans I got during the same time, I compare the accuracy and utility of using a home body composition scale. I also share tips and tricks on how to get the most accurate readings from your Hume Body Pod. I also provide practical tips for maintaining muscle mass while managing weight, highlighting the significance of protein intake and consistent tracking. Takeaways Daily weigh-ins can help maintain consistency in weight management. Daily weight fluctuations are often due to hydration and diet, not fat gain. Tracking weight over time reveals trends rather than daily changes. Body fat scales can provide insights into muscle and fat composition. The Hume Health Scale offers improved accuracy over traditional scales. DEXA scans and body fat scales have their own variances in accuracy. Consistency in measurement conditions is crucial for reliable data. Prioritizing protein intake is essential for muscle preservation during weight loss. Regular strength training helps protect muscle mass during calorie deficits. The Hume Health Scale is a valuable tool for at-home body composition tracking. Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here . Link to Document Podcast Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:01.262) Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am going to discuss a product that I’ve been using for a while and this will be a little bit different of a podcast episode, although it will weave in some of the tools that I’ve used over the years to be consistent. And one of those things is the simple body scale. So I’m one of those weirdos that I weigh every single day. I just look at it as data. And I really feel like over the years, this is what’s helped me be really consistent and not gain or lose too much weight in any one given time. I know a lot of people are not very excited about using a scale or having daily weigh-ins, but I really do think it’s a valuable tool if you’re a person that can just treat it as data and not allow whatever the number on the scale says to wreck your day, basically. Because body weight is so dependent really on just day-to-day hydration, whether or not you had a salty meal the night before, that sort of thing. And so what I’ve noticed over the years is that literally my weight can fluctuate within a week of anywhere from a pound or almost the same every day all the way up to a five pound difference, just depending again, mainly on hydration. if you can look at it that you know, People will often say this and it drives me nuts. I gained three pounds this week or I gained three pounds yesterday and it’s like you really didn’t. You didn’t gain three pounds of fat overnight. You probably just ate something really salty the day before. So what’s really important is more the idea of tracking your weight over time and looking for trends and having the ability to have a weekly average or something like that with your weight. So you really just want to look at it as data and not let whatever that number is on any given day rule your world. The other reason that we need to be concerned about body weight and why just a regular scale is not all that useful is because there’s never been a really great way to track your body composition using a regular scale. So your regular scale just tells you your weight. It doesn’t tell you anything about how much percent fat you have or how much muscle you have. Cheryl McColgan (02:22.606) or anything like that. as I’ve been going through my little weightlifting consistency thing over the last 18 months, you know, it’s been a big goal of mine to put on more muscle. so oftentimes what has happened on the scale, and I can track this because I’ve gotten several decks of scans over time when I was making this a new goal of mine, is that, for example, in a six month period, even though I’d been working out really consistently and doing a lot of things that should have affected my weight. If I was looking at my weight as just the number on the scale, after six months, my weight was exactly the same. It was crazy. And if you didn’t have some kind of tool like a dexter or whatever, you might’ve thought, I didn’t make any progress at all. And it would really be easy to get discouraged. But what actually happened in that amount of time is that I had put on three pounds of muscle and lost three pounds of fat at the same time. which is really amazing. Yet with a traditional scale, all you’d get on the scale is that you were exactly the same. And so that can be really defeating. And so one of the tools, and I’ve talked about this over before, that I’ve used over the years is a body fat scale. And they use bioelectrical impedance to send electrical current through your body. And basically the way that it works is that your muscle holds a lot more water than fat. it, the electrical signal passes through it. I always get this little confused, but it’s either it passes through it more quickly or less quickly than that. And that’s how they tell the difference. And so then using some kind of calculation and algorithm, they’re able to predict your body fat and your muscle mass based on that electrical signal. Now, when these first came out, they were not very consistent at all, but I’ve always been an early adopter and I’ve always been involved in the health and wellness space for a really long time. So I had one of the first ones that came out, a bioelectrical impedance scale. based on, know, I think I had my first, like I had a hydrostatic, which is where you actually immerse yourself in water. And this used to be the gold standard of body composition, you get immersed in water to do your body fat. And I had had the scale at the same time. So I knew. Cheryl McColgan (04:43.286) that the scale was really off. But what has always been good for is trends because what it will do relatively well is track over time, are you losing fat, gaining fat, losing muscle, gaining muscle. So in that way, it was kind of useful. then it still is just acts like a regular scale and tells you you’re right every day. So the first one I had probably 15 years ago or whenever those first came out, not that great, but had it for years. And then probably about five years ago, I’d say I invested in a new one. was a withings and it was definitely better and had some other little features that I really liked. Like it had a cardiovascular health number that was based on, there’s this other thing that it can measure with the electrical current and kind of tell you the ideas if your vessels are flowing more openly or more closed and kind of just give you some indicator of cardiovascular health. So I really liked the withings scale for that. had that for several years. Also knew that based on DEXA that it wasn’t really very accurate in comparison what the body fat actually was. And so then I had the opportunity to try the Hume Health Field. I’m just going to show it to you. Here it is. And if you’ll notice my background in the room right now, I’m in a different spot because I’m actually out in Utah snowboarding for two months. And so I actually brought this with me. So that should tell you something. Number one, I did want to finally do this review. But number two, like I said, it’s really important for me to stand track. have some other body composition goals this year that I’m working on and I didn’t want to go for like nine weeks without this tool. So the fact that I carried it with me in my luggage should tell you that I at least think it is pretty good. that is the, you know, this is the upshot of the review is that I do like it a lot, but I’m going to tell you kind of some of the downsides to it, the upsides to it, what I found it to be. in relation to dexics, and had two dexes, well three dexes actually, since I’ve had this, and since I’ve been using it, but what I really wanted to do, so I could do this review for you guys, is to take my measurement with this Hume scale at home, and then immediately not changing my hydration or anything like that, going directly to my dexa and getting those numbers so that I could compare them. Cheryl McColgan (07:03.904) And so that’s what I’ve done. so again, here’s the scale. And so what’s different about this when it has this thing that pulls out, this is that you put your hands on it while you’re standing on this scale so that it has more points of contact with your skin to do the bioelectrical impedance. And if you go to a gym that has an in-body, that’s the same technology. And a lot of people think that in-body is pretty good. So you’re getting a technology now years later that is vastly better. It’s still not perfect, but then Dexa is not really perfect either. When you get a Dexa scan, every different machine has a little bit different measurements. And you can tell this because when you see the document that I have where I have the Dexa scans that I was getting in Utah on the scanner there, and then the different Dexas that I was getting when I got back to Ohio, a different scanner gives you different numbers. And it’s not that your body composition. magically change overnight, it’s that each individual machine, number one, they have two different algorithms that they use on the DEXA to calculate body fat. so it really depends on which one they use. And I learned about this because when I went to the new DEXA in Ohio, I had told him I had been getting them before and he said, Oh, do you know what formula they used? And I said, no. And he said, well, there’s two different ones and it can give you a different results. So the main thing is once you start using a DEXA is just try to go to the same facility in the same machine every time that’ll give you the most consistency. And then know that if you go to a different one, I actually had one too at a conference a few years ago and that the machine gave me kind of some different numbers at the time too. So there’s nothing that’s going to be perfect. And so even a DEXA scanner has a margin of error every time that you’re on it. And so based on hydration, based on the margin of error, you’re getting something like a variance of five to 10 % in any given set of readings. And so it’s just important to keep that in mind. So again, with any of these tools, what you’re looking for is change over time and you’re trying to be as consistent as possible with when you weigh. So typically what I do with either the DEXA or just when I get on the scale in the morning, I get up, first of all, I at night, you know, I have a kind of a routine of Cheryl McColgan (09:23.66) when I’m drinking before bed and things like that, it’s not perfect. They don’t always cut it off at the same time every night. So that can cause some variance. But basically, you know, after I go to bed, I don’t drink anything in the middle of the night ever really, unless I am just like desperately needing some for some reason. But so I’ll wake up, I’ll go to the bathroom, get on the scale. Ideally, you want to be naked because you want the variance of the clothes being involved every time. And, you know, put my hands on the electrodes and stand on the scale, get the reading, and then I go on with my day, have my coffee, drink my morning glass of water, all that kind of good stuff. So, and it’s consistent as you be with the same time every morning. If you were really good about your hydration and you kind of really drink almost the same thing every single day, like keep track of your ounces of water, like we all should be doing better about, I’m actually working on that myself right now. but then in cutting it off at the same time every night and then getting up at the same time every morning and getting that review on the scale, that is going to give you the most consistent results. When I can tell big variance on the scale is when I’m dehydrated or conversely, if I had a really salty meal or something like that the night before or went out the night before. So for example, dehydration, if you drink alcohol, you might notice that it dehydrates you. And so anytime we had a night where we’d go out and say, have some wine with dinner, something like that. or we had wine with dinner at home. Actually, that’s a better example because the level of salt in the food is totally normal and everything like that. So what I would find on a night after having wine, I’d wake up and the scale would be down sometimes as much as two to three pounds just because of the dehydration caused by alcohol. Conversely, if I go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant or really any restaurant, but they use a lot more salt, there’s often ingredients that my body’s not necessarily used to. And then what will usually happen on a night like that, I might wake up and get on the scale and my weight is off another two or three pounds in the up direction. So number one, again, no reason to panic. You didn’t magically gain three pounds of fat overnight, but what you will notice is that your scale, if you’re using one of these bio, any bioelectric impedance scale, because of the hydration levels is how it reads your body fat and your muscle mass. Cheryl McColgan (11:40.462) you will notice that those wildly fluctuate too. So for example, you might be going along during a week, you ate at home every night, you’re doing well, blah, blah. Everything’s the same and all the readings will be very, very similar throughout that whole week until you have one of those days where something was different and boom, you might see your muscle mass suddenly drop way down. And it’s nice because the app, and I’ll just show you this right now, pull it up so that you can see what I’m talking about, but it does a graph and you can do it by day, or month. And so, For example, if I put it on week, you’ll see that, you know, obviously there’s some fluctuations day to day in that. And let me scan back and see if I can find any other big, well, that’s for the week ones, but the daily ones, like I said, is where you’ll see quite often some big variants. So this is why you track over a week, because you can see sometimes it’s really consistent when I’m, you know, eating at home and having level of hydration and then boom, it might pop up because I went out or something. or levels of hydration change. So that looks like that on every single one of these. That was weight, and I’ll pop over to here to lean mass. You can see here was a big spike in lean mass. I didn’t magically gain more lean mass overnight. But you can see if you’re tracking over time, and let me pop over to the month view. So then you can see that that’s where it’s important. You want to get those trends. So you can see that my weight has been trending down over the last several months. working on that purposely. And that gives you a glimpse of the app too. It’s really nice because it breaks it down into weight, body fat percentage, muscle mass, fat mass. It does it by each arm and each leg, just like Dexa will tell you how much you’ve gained or lost mass in each body part. so I think I’m to the point now where you can see it’s not perfect. And again, I described the Dexa, it’s not perfect either. But according to Hume, their results show that they correlate with the amount 2 % of DEXA in general. And they did some studies on that. And then I also pulled up a more recent study on bioelectrical impedance. And it just talked about the variance even in the clinical level setting of these tools. So no tools would be perfect, but I do and have found it to be very useful and useful for tracking. So what I did for this video, and if you’re listening to this on the podcast, you might want to pop over to the show notes and just take a look. I put this all. Cheryl McColgan (14:06.102) in a spreadsheet. You know, kind of geeky like that if you know me. Anyway, I want to just compare the readings that I got the day that I got the DEXA in the morning that I stepped on the Hume scale and compare them for you. So I’m going to attempt I’ve never done this before, but I should be able to share a window in my computer. And so if you’re watching on YouTube, you’ll be able to see that. So I’m going to share the spreadsheet. that I created and this will be in the show notes a link to this document. So hopefully this is showing up correctly right now and that you can see it. But you’ll notice I highlighted some of things in yellow there. And what I observed is that the thing that the scale is most accurate on compared to Dexa is the lean mass. And this is actually pretty cool because that’s really what I’ve been working towards the last. You know, going on two years now and just trying like prioritizing protein. I’ve been doing that for a couple of years before I started lifting. And then now since I have been consistently lifting for the past 18 months, this has been something I have really wanted to work on is, you know, increasing that lean mass. And it’s for all the reasons that I’ve talked about in many podcasts before just aging well, keeping up your strength, being able to do the things that you want to do daily in life. is. absolutely improved my snowboarding ability. I noticed a pretty big difference on the mountain in my leg strength and how my legs feel after a day in the deep house. So it’s been pretty cool to experience that. But you’ll see if you look at some of these numbers that if you look at the DEXA number that I got, like for example, the right arm lean on this September DEXA was 5.6 and then the Hume said it was 6.2 and then This was actually one of the biggest differences here. But then you’ll see the right leg, 17.5, Hume said 19. I find that the Hume in general overestimates a little bit on the lean mass and underestimates a little bit on the fat. That might be a marketing ploy, maybe just to make you feel a little better about yourself. But you know, when I calculated the percent change and I’m… Cheryl McColgan (16:19.182) Fairly sure that I did this right. We’re looking at anywhere between 2 % to 10 % variance. There’s one thing I noticed on the trunk fat and trunk lean on the app. For some reason, it’s not reporting the right numbers anymore. The trunk lean should be in the 50s, and one of them, it’s coming out on the Hume is like 19 in the app. So I think that’s just an app glitch. I actually did submit a ticket to the developers so that they know about that. If you want to look at this further, have three tabs that has three different DEXAs and the results of the Hume. So you can look at that a little closer if you’re interested in this kind of thing. So I’m just going to go ahead and stop that for now. But what I observed, the trends over time are accurate. So if it was saying that I was losing body fat on the DEXA, which I did, it was also showing that I lost body fat on the Hume. And like I said, the body parts specific ones are fairly close to what the Dexa was reading. And again, there’s always these variances, so not too worried about it. I’m more just interested in tracking these things over time. And you know, it’s the best tool that we have for an at home way to track these things right now. So even though it’s not perfect, I find it’s really useful. I’ve been enjoying it. It’s kept me more consistent. It’s definitely interesting to look at all that data each morning when I get up and particularly now that I’ve used it for several months. Like I said, the day-to-day things, can’t really put any stock in that. The weekly trends, yes, you can see that because you’ll see, I lost a little weight or might have lost a little fat this week. But then the monthly ones are really where you’re going to see it. And that’s why I wanted to wait until, like I said, now it’s been six months that I’ve been using it because if I just use it for the first month or something, I’m not really going to be able to know if it is accurately tracking the trends because that’s just not enough data yet. And so I think it’ll be interesting to just keep using this over time because then I can see, okay, if I get ready to do the thing that I’ve been thinking about as a goal this year, and I’m not quite ready to announce it yet, but there should be a pretty big difference in some of those numbers. And so I’ll be able to more closely track that. And if I go through with this, I will definitely do another report a few months down the road so you can see those new numbers and how. Cheryl McColgan (18:41.9) they changed on the Hume compared to the Dexa, because they’ll get another Dexa at the beginning and end of this process, so I can see how things went. anyway, the other thing about it is because I have ended up liking it and using it and wanted to be involved with this and use it and test it out, I did get a code with them. And so if you go to healnourishgrow.com slash humehealth, you get an additional percentage off. And whenever it’s on sale, like right now it’s on sale. If you happen to be watching this when it first comes out, is on sale 35 % off for Valentine’s Day. Well, my code stacks on top of that. So that’s pretty awesome. And it always stacks on top of it as far as, you know, unless they change that at some point in the future. But right now, if you use my code, healnourishgrow, or just go to that link that I said, it’ll automatically put the code in. And so whatever the sale price is, you get more off on top of that. So if you have any specific questions about it, please make sure you reach out to me or leave it in the comments below. If you came to my channel, by the way, on YouTube, because you were looking for a view for Hume Health, I hope you’ll subscribe and stay with me. I talk about all things health and wellness here. I have great guests on the podcast. We talk about all kinds of random health and wellness kind of things. And if you subscribe and support the channel, that’s really the best thing you can do to support it is subscribe. the more popular it is, the more people find it, the more I can get good guests and share more of this kind of information with you. So I would really appreciate that. Hit the like button, all that good stuff, leave a review on iTunes. And yeah, so I hope this was helpful. I will also have in the show notes, I’m going to actually write out some of these points in an article to support this video. And there might be more details there. might link, well, for example, I’ll link, there’s a study, a screenshot. linked in the spreadsheet that I was just showing you that is from a recent 2025 study by a Dutch group talking about dexas and their accuracy, or sorry, bioelectrical impedance scales and their accuracy. And then I’ll also probably add in there one about the dexa accuracy and some of the limitations of that. if you listen to people in this space that are really focused on muscle health, for example, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Cheryl McColgan (21:01.55) You know, none of the tools that we have right now to measure body composition are all that great. And she’s been saying that for quite a while now. So, but this is the best we have. And so if you’re a person, if you are working on body composition things, trying to lose weight, one thing I would caution if you’re trying to lose weight, you know, you want to lose fat, you don’t want to lose muscle mass. So that’s one important thing to track on this. That’s one thing that people have been struggling with when they decide to use GLP-1s is a lot of people lose muscle mass on that. if you’re just losing weight in general, even if you’re not losing weight loss, that’s a really common thing because you have to. And this is the other thing we always talk about here, right? Prioritize protein, especially when you’re doing a fat loss day. So you want to shoot for one gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So for example, if you are, say you’re a woman who’s about average height, five foot five, something like that, and you weigh 160, but your ideal weight is 100. 30, then you’d for at least 130 grams of protein a day and you go a little above that. If also, if you are strength training on a regular basis, doing that quite a lot, you might want to go even for a little more than that or at least the high end of that range. So anytime you’re in a fat loss phase, weight loss phase, eat more protein, it helps protect your muscle mass and also lift some weights while you’re trying to lose weight. will protect your muscle mass. I suspect there’s some studies, even if you’re not lifting quote unquote, super heavy, you’re trying to stimulate your muscles to know that you need them and you need them to stick around. So when you’re in a calorie deficit, you don’t want your body deciding to break down the muscles because you’re not being used. So anything you can do to stimulate muscle growth, muscle protein synthesis, the other thing is eating at least 30 grams of protein every single meal that you eat so that you stimulate muscle protein synthesis. anyway, again, this, video was meant to be mainly a review, but also throwing those things in, obviously, that we always talk about here so that if you are working on fat loss, that you will not make some of the mistakes that really hurt people in their endeavors to do that. So again, hope you enjoyed this. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions about the human health scale. I’ll still be over here using it every day either way. And I would love to hear your experiences too. Have you tried it? Are you looking at getting it? Cheryl McColgan (23:27.086) What are your thoughts? you already have one of these kind of scales? Because like I said, this is definitely the best one I’ve ever owned up to this point. It’s a lot more consistent. It’s a lot more close in the numbers to the actual body fat and the lean mass percentages, all that kind of stuff. Again, it’s not perfect, but pretty much the best we have for at home right now. So anyway, take care and I will talk to you again soon.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Motivation is Overrated: How to Crush Your Goals Without It 53:24

6 weeks fa53:24

53:24

In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Cheryl McColgan discusses how to stay on track with your 2025 goals, emphasizing the importance of consistency over motivation. She shares strategies for creating manageable goals, habit stacking, and balancing commitments to ensure success. Cheryl also highlights the significance of time management, mental tricks for habit formation and the value of rewarding progress. Personal reflections and life updates provide a relatable context for her insights. I She also shares her experiences and insights from a recent vacation, focusing on travel challenges, dietary choices, and fitness management. She discusses the importance of maintaining an active lifestyle while traveling, the balance between indulgence and health and the significance of consistency in fitness routines. Takeaways Motivation can fluctuate; focus on building habits instead. Consistency and commitment are key to achieving goals. Start with small, manageable goals to avoid overwhelm. Habit stacking can help integrate new habits into your routine. Evaluate your goals to ensure they are realistic and achievable. Balance your commitments to avoid setting yourself up for failure. Investing in time-saving solutions can enhance your wellness journey. Sleep is crucial for recovery and overall health. Use mental tricks to overcome resistance to starting workouts. Reward yourself for progress to maintain motivation. Baggage capacity issues can disrupt travel plans. Consistency in diet and exercise is key to health. Listening to your body is crucial for injury management. Aging affects fitness goals and recovery time. Balance indulgence with healthy choices while traveling. Episode Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:01.134) Hello everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. And also happy 2025. I don’t think I’ve gotten to officially say that even though there has been an episode out this year. Anyway, today I just wanted to chat with you about how to stay on track with your 2025 goals. A lot of people set New Year’s resolutions or even if you don’t set a strict resolution, there might be some things that you are trying to work on in the new year and this is one of my favorite topics because I feel like everybody thinks they want to wait until they get motivated to do something. motivation waxes and wanes. And I speak to this 100 % from experience because over the years, my motivation in area of health and wellness has been lacking. But that doesn’t prevent me from doing the things I know I need to do and that I should do. And that’s because I think motivation is really overrated. It’s more about creating your habits and then having just consistency and commitment over motivation. And that’s really what will help get you to your goals. And one of the things that I find and I haven’t been doing much coaching lately. I’m actually thinking about opening that up again. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, please get in touch and let me know. You can just email me at info at heelnourishrow.com. But one of the things that I’ve noticed in the past, and I’ve heard many, many other coaches and people in the wellness space say this, that the thing that people kind of get hung up on the most, particularly with New Year’s resolutions, is that they try to bite off way more than they can chew. And so what happens is for maybe the first couple weeks of the year, you stick with whatever your new routine is. I’m going to eat right, I’m going to exercise four times a week, I’m going to drink more water, all this. And so you might stay with it for a couple of weeks, but it all becomes very overwhelming. And so instead of moving forward, you just feel overwhelmed and you kind of quit altogether and not taking any of those habits where if you do some things like habit stacking, and I’ll talk more about what that is shortly, habit stacking, starting really small, making small manageable goals, taking one goal at a time. instead of Cheryl McColgan (02:23.318) exercise, eat different, drink water, maybe it’s just pick one of those to start with, not all at the same time, because time, time goes on. You have weeks, you know, if we’re all lucky, we have weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years of time to create these new habits. And what happens is getting the first one solidified or getting one in your routine where you’re committed and you’re, you know, doing that one again, and it becomes just a routine to you. don’t even think about it like brushing your teeth. those are the best habits because then that goes on autopilot and then that’s the perfect time to then start another small habit that you can do over time. if your commitment and your goals have already waned, I’d like to invite you right now, know, the New Year’s a great time, of course, because it’s just kind of what’s traditional and what people are used to. But really any day, not a Monday, can be a Tuesday, can be a Wednesday, it can be a Thursday, any day, any week, any month. is a time to start something new. And so if you’re already starting to wane on some of your New Year’s resolutions and you hadn’t given them this much thought before, maybe evaluate, did you take on too much at once? Maybe that’s really what’s preventing you from being consistent in these new habits. Or did you set a goal that’s just very unrealistic? That’s a thing too. I mean, starting to go from a diet where, say you’re eating the standard American diet, you’re eating out a lot, you’re eating a lot of fast food. And then your goal for the new year was, well, I’m just gonna eat all whole foods. Well, that’s a very daunting task. They’re very different from one another. So it might be best to just start with, okay, most days I’m going to make better choices. And you do want it to be measurable. So for example, maybe it’s if you’re eating a lot of fast food, you might set your goal to, I’m only gonna eat fast food four days a week, if you’re at five days a week now. So starting small like that. And then do that for a week or two. and then take it down even more and make this transition more gradual over time. Because especially with food too, if food or a different way of eating is one of your goals, if you’ve eaten a lot of highly palatable processed food, the food scientists are smart. They design the food, they engineer the food to make you want more and crave more of it. And there’s this perfect combination of salt and sugar. Cheryl McColgan (04:42.624) and fat and things that make it just so stimulating to your brain. It’s a big dopamine hit. And so if you go from having that every single day of the week, going to what’s going to seem in your mind, maybe bland food if you’re eating whole foods and you maybe you’re not the best or maybe you’re not used to making things at home. And so the taste difference is going to be so significantly different that not only are you going to, you’re going to lose out on some of those hits. So that’s going to make you feel not as good in making these good choices. And it’s also just going to be such difference in taste that initially that it might be just a challenge. If you slowly over time, you’ll have a lot more success hitting that goal. And then also keep in mind kind of the 80-20 rule. So in many things, maybe it’s your diet, maybe 80 % of the time as whole foods, maybe 20%, you get some treats or have some things that are more processed 80-20 in that way. Also 80-20 in your consistency. None of this can be perfect. 100 % of the time every day of the week. And so give yourself some grace. If you make a little mistake or something didn’t go as you planned on one day, or even in one hour, the next hour, the next day, the next week is a chance to do it. The only thing I would say about that is don’t wait. Just recognize that, okay, that wasn’t the best choice I made for lunch there. I had fast food. I said I wasn’t going to do that. But now for dinner, I’m going to make a better choice. I’m going to eat more healthy food for tonight. And then tomorrow I’ll honor my commitment to whatever that goal was for that day. So don’t let it get away from you just because one meal, one time, one week, one day, one hour you messed up, that doesn’t give you license to just ditch it all, right? So it’s okay. Just give yourself grace and then reset your intention to make it better in the next choice, in the next choice. And so in that way, if you can make those good choices about 80 % of the time, or better, you’re going to be so much better off than where you are now. So let go of perfection, let good enough be good enough, and just move forward with your goals that way. So think that’s one way to really start thinking that will allow you some breathing room so that you can create one new habit at a time. You you can work on more than one thing at once. You’ve just, you’ve got to know yourself and you’ve got to know your level of overwhelm. Cheryl McColgan (07:03.822) And you’ve got to know how difficult the thing is that you are changing. So for example, if you’re rehauling your diet overall, that’s a pretty big goal that might take a lot of your decision making capacity and willpower and things like that. So that might mean that other goals need to be put on hold. As an alternative, if one of your main goals is you’re already working out three days a week and you’ve committed to do four days a week now, that’s not as big of a jump. that’s probably going to be a relatively easy goal in terms of, you know, keeping your commitment and actually being successful with that. So taking on another goal on top of that one might not be as taxing. So not only do you want to create balance within each individual goal, you want to try to create balance within your overall goals and your life goals and also matching it to, you know, what’s realistic in your life. Maybe the reason you’ve been successful and consistent. with working out three days a week is because that’s really what your schedule allows and what your time allows based on your other commitments. Going to that fourth day a week, it could be a case where your lifestyle or your time commitments just literally don’t allow for that. So in that case, you might be setting yourself up for failure. So it’s also interesting to note those things too. Like, yes, maybe we’d all like to work out four or five days a week in a perfect world where we have… help with the kids and our house is clean and we don’t have to cook and our job is not stressful and we don’t have to be there very much. So that would be the perfect scenario where yes, you probably could take on that goal to exercise more days a week. But if you are like most people and you have a full-time job and you have kids at home and you manage your own house and you have to clean your house and cook and shovel the driveway, like if you can see the… Reason the lighting in here is kind of funny today if you are watching this on video is I’m in the Midwest in Ohio, if you don’t know that already. And we had a huge amount of snow. It’s been about a week and a half ago now. And it’s been the most snow that we’ve had like since the 70s. It was kind of crazy. there’s still and it’s been so cold. So there’s still tons of snow outside. So while it is very dreary today and cloudy, whatever light there is out there is kind of bouncing around and it’s making. Cheryl McColgan (09:19.662) the contrast here in the recording area not look like it normally does. So anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, but to get back to the goal setting and the things that you’re doing with your diet and with your exercise, if your life is already full of a lot of commitments and a lot of time commitments, then adding more time commitment on top of that is probably not gonna be as successful. So maybe in that sense, you look at that goal and maybe you turn it into being more effective with the time that you do have to work out. So maybe you plan better so that you can take less time in between tasks in the gym, or you can do what I recently did and we invested in a home gym in part because I was going to the gym consistently and I didn’t mind that much, but the commute is no joke. It definitely takes more time. So it was taking me probably a total of, and I did up my days to four days a week. So every time I would go to the gym, it was taking me 20 to 25 minutes to drive there in each direction. And then just time getting over, you’re probably talking an hour out of your day that’s just wasted. Now, I tend not to waste my time in the car, I always listen to podcasts. So that’s another good tip is to kind of. You know, there’s certain things you can multitask and that is my time whenever I am in the car to keep up to speed with the thought leaders in the health and wellness space and to listen to podcasts. And then, you know, my time when I’m working on my recovery and I’m in the sauna, I have the model. And if you haven’t checked this out before, if that’s something you’ve ever thought of doing, I mean, it is literally one of the best in the world we’ve made in our health and I you know, one of the reasons that we wanted to do that was if you are a regular listener of the podcast, you might remember an update from December of what is this? So this is twenty five. Let me think about this December twenty three. Yeah. December twenty three where my husband had open heart surgery and three blockages replaced. And so part of the thing with sauna is it is very good for Cheryl McColgan (11:34.954) Heart conditions heart patients it kind of mimics exercise and not to say he is also obviously exercising too But it was just like one of those things that we could like hey if we can do this It would be great to have in the house because not always a sister with recovery But it is really good for health purposes for him and he has a very high stress job So anything that we can do to get him to relax is well worth it But anyway, if you haven’t checked that out the one that I ended up with it’s non-toxic. We have another podcast episode about it here. I’ll put that in the show notes where we interviewed the founder of Sunlighten. And so the link is heel nourish grow slash Sunlighten. And if you go to that, you can read more about their saunas and why they are better than others on the market. And you know, more about benefits about Cheryl McColgan (12:34.562) more about the benefits of that and why you may want to consider it. But anyway, so doing those things that can add time and sometimes there’s an exchange of time for money, right? So like I was starting to say before, we did invest in the because it’s becoming very apparent with my husband’s work schedule that it was just going to be. very, very difficult for him to create a schedule where he could be consistent and get in the exercise they needed to build some muscle back up after the surgery and that kind of thing. And our both our kids play high school and college sports at a very high level. And so whenever they are back home during the summer, they’re always training and they had actually wanted this, you know, something like this before. So it really made sense for our whole family. And again, you’re trading time for money, right? If you can afford to do that. So we put in a home gym in the basement and I’ve been absolutely loving it. It has given me, like I said, four hours back to my week where I can do other things and focus on other work. So that’s been wonderful. And Peter’s been going down there. He has started using it. So that’s all incredible, incredible, and just really fortunate that we were able to do that. So if that’s a possibility in your life, trying to save that time wherever you can so that you can put in more effort to your wellness goals, whether it’s exercise, whether it’s cooking, whether it’s meditation and relax time and recovery time, because that is so underrated and so important. know, if it’s just getting, and I say just, but even as just getting back your sleep, you know, getting up that extra hour early in the morning to drive to the gym or something like that, you might be losing out on sleep that you really, need. not only for recovery, just for your overall health and wellbeing. Like sleep, you’ve heard me say it before, is literally one of the most important pillars of health. And so, you know, doing anything that you can to protect those things, protect your time wherever you can, it’s gonna help you reach your goals more easily too. Another thing with exercise and being more effective is to, again, multitask. So you could do things like listen to… Cheryl McColgan (14:50.604) Maybe take a call for work while you’re on a walking pad or having the standup desk like I used to have and I could write and slowly walk at the same time. So pairing those things up as much as you can. And then within the gym, know, number one, finding a gym if it’s possible, it’s not super busy because when machines are taken up, that definitely slows you down. Also doing things like super sets. So for example, working to opposing muscle groups, whether it’s working an upper body and a lower body muscle, or maybe it’s opposing like your biceps. and triceps are opposing so you could work your biceps and then go right into triceps and you’re working a different muscle so you’re not wasting time resting in between. say wasting time, it’s not wasted but if you’re looking for the most time effective kind of workout, supersetting is a great way to do that. And there’s been some research recently that’s really showing that supersets don’t impact muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy gains. So you can do separate super sets as long as you’re not getting too winded or anything like that and you’ll still get the same benefits. So that’s just some thoughts. I I’ve done one of these episodes or written in articles about this over the years about creating new habits anytime. It’s not just about, it’s about anytime you create a habit. Think about it, kind of tricks to get you into things. Another trick if you’re, So, again, it’s not about, for me, it’s not about motivation, because I’m quite often not motivated to, especially lifting weights. You know, I’ve talked about this. It’s like, I know I need to do it. I know it’s very important, but I’ve just never loved it. I’m enjoying it more, to be honest now, but it’s just never been a thing where I’m going to be highly motivated to go lift weights. Now it’s just become something that I do because it’s a habit. It’s kind of a non-negotiable, so I don’t even think about it as much anymore. Even when I don’t want to, I just go. And my biggest trick around that, whether it’s any kind of workout, and this over the years, this goes back to the many, many years when I was a runner, did that for 17 years, like 25 to 30 miles a week, which is why my knees are awful now and I can’t run anymore. Man, if I could get those years back, I would just lift instead. I’ve talked about that before too, but anyway, my trick for that is, is always just put on your workout clothes, or if you were going to a gym, Cheryl McColgan (17:11.47) say you’re so exhausted, whatever, you’re like, I only have to go there, I only have to go for five minutes, and if I’m still super tired, I can just leave. It’s like you gotta trick yourself, and as dumb as that is, it works every time. Or I’m just gonna put on my running clothes, and I’ll go outside, and I’ll walk for five minutes, and if I still feel terrible, I’m just gonna come in. I literally, in 17 years of tricking myself like that, never came in. As long as I could get out the door, then it was on, it was fine. So just using those little mental tricks. Another thing that people like to use and that is effective for some people is to give yourself intermittent rewards for your goals and for habit changes. So for example, say you, you know, your new thing is you’re going to work out three times a week and for three weeks in a row, you hit those three days a week. Well, then maybe it’s time for a treat and that could be, you know, it’s different things for different people. And also again, based on money, your treat could be just a long bath. Your treat could make your partner watch the children or something like that. they do it. Or maybe it’s a Starbucks drink that you don’t normally get that’s really fancy and just makes you feel indulgent. So just giving yourself some kind of intermittent reward and say your goal is something like, I’m gonna lose a hundred pounds. Well, that’s a big daunting goal, right? So, Cheryl McColgan (19:06.926) So what you may want to do with that is to make intermittent smaller goals to reward yourself. So say you hit the first 10 pounds, maybe it’s a new workout outfit or a new pair of pants, or after you hit 15 pounds, it’s a nice dinner out or something that just, you know, whatever it is that’s meaningful to you and that’s a reward for you. It can be monetary, can be non-monetary, it can be food related, it can be non-food related, it could be a vacation. It could be something simple like just giving yourself an hour to read in peace. So it doesn’t have to be this grand or expensive thing, but it’s just setting yourself in the mindset that you’re going to get this reward and it’s something that you crave and look forward to. And then useful also in just giving yourself that little dopamine hit, that little reward for actually sticking to your commitments and for, you know, doing this good for yourself for creating a new habit. So that’s kind of all of the, mean, there’s a million other things that we could talk about in relationship to this. And, you know, if you have specific questions around anything I said or want some elaboration or some other examples, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you on that or address it in a future episode. But there’s just so many things that you can do to set yourself up for success. And that’s what’s really important in the beginning, because the creating a habit is the most challenging part. Once you’ve created it, like brushing your teeth every morning and every night, it’s like you do it without thinking. And that’s the beauty of habits. It doesn’t require motivation. It doesn’t require thought. It doesn’t require anything basically, but it just being in your routine. So for a lot of people, another little hint is for these things, whether it’s drinking water or working out, those kinds of things, put it on your calendar. Make yourself a reminder that pops up on your phone or whatever on your computer screen. If you have meetings, or making an example like every 30 is my time to work out whatever it is just make it kind of the easiest you can so that it just is it’s almost harder to skip than it is to just do the thing and get it off your mind and get it off your to-do list right so that’s kind of all the things about on your goals again if there’s more clarification or other topics that you’d like to hear about in this let me know because Cheryl McColgan (21:32.77) You know, one of the things with podcasts, at least I used to be every single week and it’s just become over time. To be quite honest, it’s kind of just, it’s just depressing when you’re putting things out there and you don’t, know, if you don’t hear from people, of course everybody’s busy and not everybody has time to comment or things like that. But you know, honestly, the biggest thing that you can do to support this content, this podcast, if you’ve been enjoying the content, if you enjoy what I do, The easiest way to support it is so simple. And it’s really to just share this, like send a link to your friend that you think that might enjoy this or send an email or a text or whatever it is, just be like, hey, I was thinking you might like this, the show or this content. And whether they do or not, whether they ever listen, it’s like that really is just helping get that energy out in the world. And then also leaving a review. If you can go to iTunes and leave a review. It just helps more people find it. The more podcasts have reviews, the more the people are talking about it or sharing it or listening to it, it helps the algorithm ranks. Everything’s about the algorithm now. It doesn’t matter how good of content you have. If it’s not getting seen, then it becomes just, it’s out there in the ether and nobody knows about it and nobody’s benefiting from it. So it makes it more challenging. It makes it more challenging to get really good guests as well. if you’re not a super popular… podcast, you might not get the guests that you’re interested in interviewing and then passing on that knowledge to you. So that’s really the way that you can help me and I would so much appreciate it if you would do any of those little items. And yeah, so then I’ll just give you a quick life update. For some reason, those episodes seem to do really well when they’re totally focused on that. And it’s been a while since I’ve done this. So and it does relate to habits and goals. and staying consistent because I’ve talked about this with how to stay on track when you go on vacation, for example. So I just got back from a week, well, about nine days in Europe, snowboarding. And it’s really exciting because it was the first snowboarding of the year for me, since we don’t live. Cheryl McColgan (23:42.734) Utah anymore, I can’t just walk out my back door and go snowboarding. So we went for this one and this was a vacation. It’ll be a little different upcoming here because I am going to go spend some time in Utah over the winter and we’re just living and working there for a couple months. And so that will be like life as usual, but this was definitely more of a vacation. And of course, you know, being in Europe was around all the good cheese and all the good wine. and all the good different foods that we don’t normally have. so we visited Italy, Switzerland and Austria, three of my favorite places over there to snowboard. And one unfortunate thing did happen though, and this is not related to health and wellness, other than the fact that it definitely affected my mental state was that we were in Cincinnati and we for the first time put air tags in our bags. so we could kind of know where our boards were and stuff and I’ve been reading a lot that there’s more theft of snowboards and stuff on the mountain now and skis which is really unfortunate because you just usually go into the lodge you know when you think about it you take off your board you leave it outside and it’s like you’re always there when you come back thankfully and you don’t have think about that but apparently just the times that we’re living in it’s becoming more common for these things to get stolen. So I decided to put air tags on the boards. And it’s also great for when we travel with them so that we can know where they are. And whether this is karma or whether this was just good that I did it this time so that we had this benefit, we’re in the plane on Cincinnati, our bags were loaded. It said it on the Delta app that the bags were on the plane. And then when we were getting on the plane, it was interesting because it was a small commuter plane to go to JFK. And they were saying, we don’t have any more room for bags. We’ve got to figure this out, blah, blah, blah. When we were walking onto the jetway and the person taking the gate tagged bags was talking about this. So they were definitely having baggage capacity issues. Now I used to travel a ton for work and we still travel a fair amount now. So I have good status with Delta and I have priority tag on my bag, which is just not, I don’t know if they actually pay attention to this. I’m gonna say no after this experience because. Cheryl McColgan (25:56.45) What they did was our bags, our snowboard bags were on the plane. And you think about this, you wait all year for this. You look forward to it, you save for vacation, you think about it, it’s very exciting. And you the snowboards for us is a big component of our vacation. So they were on the plane. And then they weren’t. Because of that scenario with the bag, for whatever reason, they decided to take those off the plane and then quote unquote, expedited them. So instead of going Cincinnati and JFK, JFK to… Zurich, sorry, I had to think about where we flew into. We just won layover and we always avoid Charles de Gaulle for that reason with snowboards because baggage goes missing there quite easily. I don’t know what it is. It’s like the black hole of the universe for baggage. But so then they took the bags off our plane and quote unquote expedited them going to Detroit and then to Amsterdam and then to Zurich. Well, lo and behold, they did not arrive in Zurich. with us. Theoretically, they would have arrived a half an hour after we got there on this other flight. Well, somehow the bags I think they what was it they got stuck in Detroit for a little while and they never got on the plane in Detroit and we had the bag tags so we could like watch this the whole time. It’s quite entertaining if you get over the fact of them not being there. And so yeah, so anyway, four days later, we finally get our snowboards and That was the trip. anyway, so that’s totally an aside from what I wanted to talk about with the food and the diet and those kind of things over there. And I did already. We just finally got back. So then on the way back, we had another problem where the flight, missed a connection. We had to spend overnight in JFK. So that was really fun, too. Got back a day later than we anticipated. But so I did already weigh myself since I got back. I’m not totally back to, you know, travel as a lot of things as like bloating. It’s probably extra salt from things you’re not used to. But I got on the scale the very first morning back and I was the same as when I left. And that has been a pretty consistent thing for me over the years on vacations and I think for a couple of reasons. First reason is probably because we take very active vacations. So we generally are hiking or snowboarding or walking around the city all day. never, I mean, this is for good or for bad. I’m not really sure which. Cheryl McColgan (28:20.174) But we never really take a relaxing vacation. Like we don’t have beach vacations where we just down and drink margaritas and go to the spa or anything like that. It’s always a very active vacation. So I think that helps. And then the second thing is I do indulge on vacation. So for example, we had plenty of wine. Of course you’re in Italy. That’s going to be a thing. And at least for I haven’t totally given up drinking yet. So that’s still on the menu for me. I, you know, I do go debate back and forth about that because, you know, it’s definitely not good for you. For the most part, it’s a neurotoxin. It’s carcinogenic. There’s a million negatives of alcohol for sure. But then there are the slight positives, the social aspect, the relaxation aspect, and they haven’t quite figured out, like for example, how in some countries they have this consumption of these things and they don’t seem to have the same incidence of issues with it that we do. So anyway, all that being said, we did have, so we had wine. I ate a lot. of cheese, Switzerland is amazing for cheese and so is Italy. We ate pizza in Italy one of the times which you if you know this over the years it’s definitely morphed and I’ve always been a whole foods diet based person but strictly in ketosis these days not every single day in ketosis. I’ve definitely added a few more carbs to experiment with that in relation to lifting and I haven’t noticed a huge difference to be honest like putting more carbs before the lifts and stuff. I haven’t been able to totally correlate that. And there’s plenty of lifters and people in the keto space that stay keto, don’t use extra carbs around their workouts and that’s totally fine. But it’s just something I’ve decided to experiment with just because my metabolic health is very good. I don’t have the same concerns as when I started keto back in the day, which is 2017. So quite a while back now. And also I just think Even people I’ve coached that they’re getting into keto or getting started with keto, you do, I think there’s a good amount of time to be strict in the beginning so that you can truly get into ketosis so that you can adjust your body to learn how to burn fat. Because most of us have not had that experience as a fat burner. We’re just constant carbs. And so your body just knows how to burn carbs and not fat. And then the opposite can happen too over time if you’ve been Cheryl McColgan (30:40.972) you know, if you’d been doing keto for a long time and in ketosis for a long time, your body can kind of lose the ability to efficiently burn carbs as well. So it’s kind of good to make in and out of that a little bit to some degree. But after you’ve had that first, you know, four months or so where you’re strict, you’re definitely in ketosis, your body is fat adapted, then after that, you should occasionally, if you want to, if you don’t have a gluten, a severe gluten intolerance or you’re not celiac disease, things like that. If you want to have a good bread on occasion, keto substitutes for bread. And I can tell you this because I’m a recipe developer too. I’ve made keto substitutes for a lot of things, but I can tell you the two things that there are no good substitute for and that is pasta and bread. The keto versions of those. you’re just it’s never going to taste the same. It’s not going to taste 90 % as good as how it tastes 80 % as good. And so again, back to this 80 20 thing in the moderation. I think if there’s a particular food that you’re craving and it’s just amazing, for example, pizza in Italy, pizza in Italy is like, I don’t eat pizza any other time, quite honestly, because here to me, it just like makes me feel horrible and tastes gross. And it’s just not very good. but man. having it in Italy and having a really well prepared pizza. my goodness. So all that’s to say, you know, I definitely had a lot of things that I typically wouldn’t eat. I definitely found days where I was not meeting my protein goals. It’s just you can you can do it there. But you know, part of it’s being on the mountain. Part of it is the planning part of it is the fact that we were moving around a lot and so we were eating out every single meal. We didn’t have a place to prepare meals. So that definitely makes getting the protein goals that we have for optimizing health a little more challenging. I did bring protein bars and some protein drinks with me. But then also that’s the other thing when you’re on the mountains, like, well, do I want to add, I don’t want to add these in and then feel bad or bloated or worse by adding these things in. Cheryl McColgan (32:54.434) So it’s just, a balancing act and eating out over there, part of the reason it’s more expensive, for example, in Switzerland is they actually pay their servers and wait staff salaries and healthcare and things like that. So it’s more expensive. And yeah, so to get like, say you wanted to get like a meat dish, it would definitely be more expensive because typically, especially on the mountain too, the cheap things are the pizza and the pasta. If you want to actually get one of the few meat dishes that they have, they’re probably twice as much in cost. So it was just, you know, it a balancing act of all of those things. But the thing is being consistent, that’s the whole point of this. So I don’t eat every meal like a complete crazy person when I go on vacation. I for the most part, I eat the way I normally eat here with the slight deviations of the things I mentioned more cheese than I would normally eat because the cheese is amazing and all the breakfast buffet for the in For the most part, when you have the hotel room there, the breakfast is included and it’s not a breakfast like when you go to the Fairfield Inn or something that’s got cereal and bagels and pancakes or something like that. They have generally a meat tray, a cheese tray. They’ll almost always have scrambled eggs. They do the cute thing where they have the eggs. They have the like eight little containers for whole eggs and you put it in and you set your timer and you get the little cute. thing that holds the egg and you tap the top and you open it up and you have your little, you know, your one little boiled egg or whatever. That’s very typical for that to be on that breakfast buffet as well. And then of course some croissants, they’re big into their sweets for breakfast, always like little cakes out there, croissants, that kind of thing. But so for the most part, I have breakfast, I’d have what I would normally have. I’d have some eggs, I’d have some of the meat, I’d have the good cheese, and I’m not counting anything or like, really worried about it, anything like that. just eating so that I’m satiated enough to make it to my nice meal on the mountain, because that’s the other thing that they have that’s amazing. There are all these restaurants on the mountain. It is nothing like the experience of skiing in the US and the things that we have on the mountain to eat. Typically here at the top of the mountain, the very top, there will be kind of a cafeteria style restaurant. And that’s generally what you’ll find. If there is a halfway one on the mountains, it’ll be something like that. Cheryl McColgan (35:16.646) But over there, there’s like legitimate fine dining restaurants on the mountain and they’re just unbelievably amazing. It’s hard to want to miss out on though. So eating a breakfast that would just, you know, last long enough, nothing super big and then you go have this amazing lunch on the mountain is kind of like, you know, the other thing that might add to that is that you’re eating your probably biggest meal in the middle of the day. and then having a lighter dinner, which is kind of something we always say to do here, but in the American culture, it’s not really what happens. Dinner is usually our biggest meal. So I think that’s kind of flip-flopping that around there too. I have something to do with it, but mainly just being consistent 80 % of the time, eating the same things I normally eat, the other 20 % eating maybe some things that are treats or that I wouldn’t normally have like we tiramisu, which is amazing. Yeah, so just like that. So just finding that balance. But anyway, the whole point of that is, again, like I said, I did get on the scale, I did not gain anything. And you know, I have the Hume Health Scale now, so it’s heelnurserow.com slash Hume. They still have it on sale. I did a before and after, like three months of testing the scale. It’s really the best at home body fat scale I’ve ever used. And I’ve been using them now for probably 20 years. Almost as long as that technology has existed, I’ve had a bathroom scale that does that. And for the most part, they’re just awful. They’re not very accurate at all. They don’t really track beyond broad trends. This one has been very spot on, very close to what I got the Dexa at the beginning and the end. was like literally tracked that pretty much perfectly. So I’ve been super happy with it. And it didn’t show any significant, you know, muscle loss or fat gain or anything like that. Just kind of the same weight, kind of the same stats as when I left. So To me, that just speaks to being consistent, staying active, and that’s about it. It sounds simple, but it depends on where you are and kind of what you’re used to doing on vacation. But for me, it’s very simple and it just balances out. Just don’t overeat. Don’t excess every single meal. Have one meal a day where you have some things you wouldn’t normally have or once a day when you wouldn’t normally do it, and it should all. Cheryl McColgan (37:33.934) theoretically balance out, at least it usually does for me. So I would say try that. If you haven’t tried that in the past, definitely be active while you’re on vacation. Give yourself the treats, but balance that out with being reasonable. Like I gave you the example breakfast, kind of just ate like I normally do and maybe slightly less just so I have room for that good lunch. And then that’s it. So that’s kind of a life update on top of that. Still strength training. I’ve been fighting a couple of injuries. Right before I left, I’ve been following Mike Isertel. I think I mentioned him on a previous video that I talked about lifting. And I was trying an exercise that was new to me. The week before we were leaving, stupidly, probably when you’re going to snowboard trips, not the time to try a new exercise. But I was really excited to try it because I thought, OK, I think I’m finally strong enough to do this because what it is, it’s a Smith bar, kind of like a Bulgarian split swap. you’re kind of. your, let me think about this front foot elevated front foot elevated. And then you’re really like just only using your front leg, like not even really using the back foot for stability. I was bringing my back leg up at the same time. So really just making that step with one leg and the weight are which my Smith machine is not counter weighted. So it’s like without any weights on it, it’s 35 or 40 pounds to do that. And this is on one leg and I’d gotten up to 50 pounds. on my Bulgarian split squats. And so I was thinking, okay, I think I’m strong enough to do this now, no problem. Because I watched them train some people, women with this exercise and none of them had any weights on the Smith bar. So, and these are all people that are pretty serious lifters. And so anyway, I was talking to my right leg was definitely easier. It’s a little stronger, although muscle wise, it appears they’re about the same now. Like the one I had the injury on the left one a couple years ago and it hit was behind. but I’ve caught up my strength and definitely my muscle mass is the same on my left leg, but I think the strength is still a little behind. And so when I went to my left side to do it, I can’t remember if I did a couple first, but about, you know, somewhere in between, I went to step up on the next one. I was like, so that hamstring attachment, you know, right at the top of your hamstring, right where your meets your glutes. And it was thankfully, it was just a little pull. And as soon as I felt it, it was like, Ooh, Cheryl McColgan (39:56.406) Yeah, it still hurts once I stopped doing the movement. So I knew to just like chill out with that. So that pretty much I did do my two lower body workouts the following the week before we were leaving. I did the two lower, but I had to modify a lot and didn’t do that one again for sure, but modified a lot. And so it still was painful for the whole. But it was it took a big hike one day because the board bags were gone. up a mountain, probably 45 minutes trail. And it was definitely sore more than usual the next day. But it wasn’t enough to stop me from doing anything, thankfully. So I caught it in time and lesson learned about that. Because the other thing that I learned was that I’ve been pressing since, well, at least since our last trip in September, from September to end of December. I hadn’t taken any rest weeks. hadn’t deloaded. And my body was definitely feeling like towards the end of December, beginning of January, I was like, I knew I needed a break, that my body needed a break. I was like, oh, I’m just going to press through the trip because then I’m going to have 10 whole days off and I’ll be, you know, off quote unquote, when I’m hiking. But like different, like not like not weight training. And so I was just like trying to make it through. And I think also contributed to this injury that I really needed to listen to my body. mean, gosh, 51. You would think that I would finally get that through my thick skull. I’m much better at it now, but I still have these little lapses. So lesson learned, when you’re feeling your body needs a deload, just do it. Take a little break. You need it. It’s going to only give you more strength going. It’s like a thing for me to push through that. Cheryl McColgan (41:51.252) that I’ve been fighting is I’ve had tendonitis in my right elbow now for started this summer it got a lot worse September October enough I went to the doctor I got PT I got dry needling I did soft on it it got a lot better but again I’m still doing my upper upper body stuff with modifications and trip because then I’ll have you know days off for it to heal So that, it’s a little sore today because I did do upper body yesterday. I did upper and lower yesterday. because this week was kind of funky in the trip. I’m going to do it again tomorrow. And then next week I should be back to my regular schedule. But it’s a little sore. But overall, I think it is getting better. It’s not preventing me too much from doing a lot of stuff, especially now that I’m using the VersaGrips. raising motion, you know, that you when you’re holding weights and pulling and pushing and all that stuff, it does kind of crank up that area of tendonitis of tennis elbow. so so having the VersaGrips so I can kind of like just barely like grips actually hold it on. I’ll have to squeeze the bars. And so that’s definitely been helping. In addition, I kind of ditched all focused bicep work for right now while that’s flared up because you’re still getting bicep work from a lot of other things. So, bring it I did have my right knee act up as well. this is and these are all the tendonitis has been a long time since so when I used to golf all the time I had that but that’s been probably 15 years since I’ve had a flare of my tennis elbow and then the knees are just on and off constantly. They’ve been I mean honestly they’ve been wonderful for probably 18 months now that I haven’t really had a problem with either one until Cheryl McColgan (43:55.406) just this time where I think I, like I said, I pressed it too much. And then I think probably the factor with the right one, the conditions were not great. There was not a lot of snow and I’m kind of fighting that injury in the front leg. so, and also my back leg is the one that I push with. My right leg is the one you skate with when your foot’s not in the binding. So there’s a number of factors there. I think I just tweaked it a little bit. It feels a lot better today. I again, did work lower body yesterday too, just modified that a bit, wore my knee sleeves and did everything that didn’t hurt. And actually I felt like it kind of almost loosened it up a little bit yesterday, but man, I was in bed last night, both things were hurting pretty bad, but got up this morning and that’s all feeling better and hoping good night’s sleep, rest day today. I’m hoping I wake up tomorrow and that both are significantly better. But yeah, so just managing that, you in the past what I probably would have done, especially if I hadn’t been already lifting now for, I don’t know what it’s been, it’s been at least a year and six months, something like that. It’s by far the longest, most consistent I’ve ever been with that. But in the past when I’d have these things crop up, I’d have an injury flare up or something, I would just stop completely. Like what, if it was a lower body injury, I wouldn’t do upper body. I wouldn’t do, I just wouldn’t do anything. I’d just stop, I’d go on my walk like that. But I would quit lifting. And so what’s been different for me in this whole process is just really being committed to doing it for a long-term thing. Cause now I think I finally got into the age where I can’t ignore it anymore. And if I want to be healthy and strong in later years, I know this is what I need to do. So that’s really driving me. And so now it’s, I think before I always just thought I had time, you know, I have time to get, get more muscle at some other point. But now I realized, okay, I’m kind of out of time for that process. And so I’m just modifying. and noticing things as they crop up. Again, taking more rest days if I need to, that’s totally fine. But also just balancing that with honoring this commitment. So when you have injuries and stuff, you do need to listen to your body. And again, I just messed that up pretty bad. Didn’t really. Cheryl McColgan (46:10.87) I just want to get to where I was, but keeping in mind that I’ve got the next two months that I want to snowboard. So if I do need to reduce my training to let this injury heal, I’m totally fine to do that. I’ve got it in my brain. Me right now, priority is to have strong days outside on the mountain and safe days because my injury is not acting up. And if, Lifting is exacerbating that and then I’m going to just chill out. So that’s the plan. And you know, if you find all that interesting or not, I do think it’s interesting to hear with how other people deal with that stuff, because I think in particular, especially at a very high level, they’ve accessed all this technology and these things that can really help them get better more quickly. Not all of us have access to that. And then in addition, that’s their life, right? So they’re dedicated, their recovery is dedicated, everything they do is dedicated to healing that thing. And that’s how so many of them get back to what they’re doing more quickly. Because they do have access to all this, they’re focused on their recovery, they don’t have anything else to focus on. Whereas if you’re kind of a quote unquote normal person who has an injury and you don’t have the time to do all those extra things or the money or the access to technologies like PRP or injections or like I said, I did do the dry needling that was very helpful in this scenario for this injury. it’s, you know, find ways to balance that we can’t compare ourselves to athletes where that is their sole job and they’re 30 years younger, 20 years younger than us, that kind of thing. You know, it just takes older bodies longer to repair. It takes older bodies longer to gain muscle. I that’s just where we are now, unfortunately. And even though I’m still like 20 in my head. And I think this is where this gets me in trouble sometimes as far as wanting to amp things up and just really going for things of physical goals or this like lifting stuff and getting more into it. So just have to really remind myself of where I actually am and how while my brain might still be 20, my brain is definitely not and I’ve got to be a little bit more careful with those things. So Cheryl McColgan (48:28.694) So as you’re going into your goals, this is another very good reason to take it slow and to just give yourself some time to adjust and to change. overboard with it. anyway, hope some of that was useful to you. there’s content that you want to hear more about or that you’d like to hear about, definitely shoot me an email. Put it in comments below or do put in comments. And live sharing goes a long way to help the podcast do better in the ratings. So until next time, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, rest of your day, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing and stay in touch.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
100 Pound Weight Loss and Depression Remission with Carnivore Diet 41:24

8 weeks fa41:24

41:24

In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Cheryl interviews Kerry Mann, who shares his transformative journey of losing 100 pounds and overcoming severe health issues through dietary changes. Kerry discusses his struggles with depression, anxiety, and various health conditions, and how he discovered the ketogenic and later the carnivore diet, which significantly improved his mental and physical health. Kerry also shares his documentary that aims to highlight the healing power of a proper human diet and the stories of others who have experienced similar transformations. Find Kerry at https://healinghumanity.movie/ and @homesteadhow on social media and YouTube . Takeaways Kerry lost 100 pounds and overcame depression and anxiety. The ketogenic diet and later carnivore, was life-changing for Kerry. Kerry is passionate about sharing his story through a documentary. He emphasizes the importance of diet in mental health. Kerry’s documentary features real stories of transformation and benefits of the “proper human diet.” Watch on YouTube Episode Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:00.952) Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Carrie Mann and he has a really amazing story that includes a hundred pounds of weight loss and he is now working on a documentary and I just think he has a really interesting background so I was really excited to share his story with you. So welcome Carrie and if we could get started by you just sharing. First of all, don’t think I said in that like how you ended up. losing the weight and it’s kind of a thing that is very popular right now. I think that a lot of people have heard about. So when it gets to that point, I would love to have you share how you found that and why that ended up working for you. So welcome, Carrie. Kerry (00:42.586) Thank you so much Cheryl, I appreciate it. Yeah, I’m down 100 pounds since my heaviest, overcame all sorts of health issues. For me, I actually, found the ketogenic diet maybe 10 or 15 years ago and it was kind of life changing for me back then. It was the only thing that had really worked for me. I had depression, I had anxiety, I was diagnosed with IBS. I sleep apnea. I went in for a sleep study and I had to get a CPAP machine. My stomach was just always hurting. No matter what I would eat, I tried many different types of diets, low FODMAP, plant-based diet, and my stomach was always bothering me. I ended up having a couple of kidney stones a few years ago. had my gallbladder was kind of borderline and the doctor was like, you could take it out or you could leave it. And I said, I have so many stomach issues. Let’s take the gallbladder out. And then like two years after that, I lost my appendix. It burst on the operating room table. Could have killed me. Like, thankfully I went in for the hospital. I was actually thinking I was having another kidney stone, but I went in just before they were going to do surgery on the appendix, it burst. And just had a whole bunch of health issues. I had arthritis in my foot. They said it was gout and it hurt so bad I could barely walk on it. And then amongst all that my weight just kept going up the biggest issue for me was mental health depression and anxiety for 10 or 15 years. I tried every antidepressant anti-anxiety medicine and Just never got better for me the medication Sort of made me feel like a zombie I kind of felt numb to it But I I just didn’t feel like myself and the really deep dark depression kind of never went away But when I found keto, which was 10 or 15 years ago, I was watching a documentary on Netflix and I learned about keto for the first time and I tried it. It was the only thing that ever touched my depression. I noticed like, I feel a little better. I feel different. It was a whoa moment. I’m like, I feel different than I have with any of this other medication. And I started losing some weight and I probably lost more weight on a Kerry (02:54.106) decent ketogenic diet than I have doing any other sort of dieting my entire life and I’ve literally tried every diet. I just couldn’t maintain it with keto. I remember at one point I lost about 60 pounds and my wife did too and I started exercising and we’re feeling so good. We have a picture of my wife and myself and I remember saying, I will never gain this weight back. Like I’ve figured it out now. And I think it was like three or four months later I gained all the weight back and then some. I would do keto and then I would try to go back to eating in moderation which for me is like moderating an addiction to carbohydrates and I could never do it and I would end up gaining the weight back but long story short I found carnivore diet which is sounds crazy I know it sounded crazy to me it sounds crazy to a lot of people really what it is is just a very strict ketogenic diet I heard about it from a YouTube video from this guy he said I’m gonna do this carnivore diet for 90 days and my wife and I were watching him on YouTube and I’m like that’s crazy like you can’t eat only meat you’re gonna have a heart attack you’re gonna clog your arteries But on the flip side, the guy’s story, he was overweight. He had depression. He had IBS. He had all of the issues that I had. And I knew when he was talking about it, I knew the science of a ketogenic diet. I’m like, that will work. That’s just a strict ketogenic diet, but there’s no way you could just eat meat and sustain it. long story short, I noticed that the video was two years old on YouTube. And so I was watching with my wife. said kind of cynically, I’m like, there’s no way this guy is still eating meat. Like let’s fast forward. Let’s go watch his most most recent video and I did that you couldn’t even recognize him he lost all of his weight he had a big smile on his face he was talking like his IBS was gone his mood had improved his depression had gone away and that was really what opened my eyes I still in my brain I’m like this guy’s an outlier he’s crazy that’s not gonna work for everyone and then I did a ton of research I found Dr. Ken Berry on YouTube Kerry (04:56.928) Talking about carnivore diet. I probably watched a thousand of his videos and Then I found dr. Philip Ovedia who’s a heart surgeon that’s been eating carnivore for about ten years He’s performed like 4,000 heart surgeries. I’m like, wow a heart surgeons doing carnivore and then I found Dr. Anthony Chaffee who’s a neurosurgeon. He’s literally done brain surgery on people I heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan and he had done the lion diet, which is a stricter version of carnivore and he said he was off all of his antidepressant medication and he stopped snoring the first week and I was snoring and I was on antidepressant medications and I’m like all of these really smart people I’m like I shouldn’t do carnivore because these smart people are doing it but it is worth further investigation it would be foolish of me to just be like that’s just crazy I can’t do it when all these other people are doing it and one other thing I forgot to mention. The biggest issue besides my depression was about seven years ago. I was at home and I got really dizzy. I stood up and my face was numb. My fingers were tingling. I was confused. My wife was asking me what was going on. I couldn’t tell her what was happening. She called 911. and I spent the next five days in the stroke unit. had a TIA mini stroke in my late 30s and they did all these tests on me. Thankfully, I had a couple of symptoms that lasted a while like vertigo and numbness and I went to physical therapy for that, but it wasn’t like a full blown stroke. So I didn’t have anything like permanent paralysis, but they did all these tests. They’re like, you’re 37. Like, why do you have all of these health issues? What’s wrong with you? And they tested my heart and they said you have congestive heart failure. Your ejection fraction is 44. Your heart, what that means is for those that don’t know, your heart doesn’t keep up with the needs of your body. It’s not pumping enough blood. That’s why you’re getting fatigued and tired. They said it’s probably a downstream effect of my sleep apnea. That puts a lot of pressure on the heart. It probably didn’t help that I was a hundred pounds heavier than I should have been. That puts a lot of extra pressure on the heart too. So all of those things were what was happening. Kerry (07:07.576) So when I saw Dr. Ovedia, a heart surgeon, that was one of my biggest concerns. like, I can’t, I can’t eat meat. Even after seeing Dr. Barry and some of these other ones, that’s going to clog my arteries. That’s going to give me a heart attack. And then I heard Dr. Philip Ovedia talking about it. And I really started digging into some more research around. the heart and cholesterol and a lot of stuff that I have learned we have been misled on that even like major institutions have reversed but sort of the mainstream narrative is you eat meat you clog your arteries There’s a lot of misconceptions there. So long story short or maybe a little too long. Sorry. I tend to rant a little I Decided I what else do I have to lose? I’m I’m so sick. I have all of these issues I said I’m gonna just do an elimination diet. I didn’t tell myself I’m gonna eat meat only I said I’m gonna Cheryl McColgan (07:41.988) Bye. Kerry (07:54.722) I’m just gonna eat meat. Like that was all that was left. Some people would argue, what about vegetables? And I actually did that for about a year. I did a strict ketogenic plant-based diet. I had just a tiny bit of protein, but it was salad for lunch, salad for dinner, all low carb. It didn’t help me for a year. I still had IBS. I still had depression. And now everybody’s different, so I’m not saying this forever. But for me that did not help me So yeah, I decided I’m gonna do this elimination diet for 30 days. I’m gonna do carnivore diet I went out I went shopping I bought a bunch of meat and I started from there Cheryl McColgan (08:36.654) So you’d said you’d found keto a long time ago and that it helped with your depression, but then you’d kind of go off of it and then kind of go back to eating in moderation. What do you think it is about now having gone to the carnivore diet that you’re able to stay with that? Is it just the effects are so much greater that you feel so good that you don’t want to mess it up or is it like… keto is almost like the training wheels for a more restrictive diet? Or do you have any sense of why you’re able now to stay on this better than you were on keto? Because you could argue that, know, carnivore is even more strict than keto. So why is it that you’re able to stay with this one, do you think? Kerry (09:20.086) Yeah, that is a wonderful question. I’m really glad you asked that because it was an epiphany I had a while in. So when I started this carnivore friends, family, my wife, they’re like, here he goes again. This is the 47th diet, but this is the real one now, right? This bad crazy thing he’s going to do is working. Cheryl McColgan (09:32.676) You Kerry (09:39.268) The difference for me from keto to carnivore was I was always trying to moderate an addiction. When I started doing carnivore, I realized I am addicted to carbohydrates. I’m addicted to sugar. and I can’t moderate them at all. And I would do it many times, would do keto really, really strict, like 20 carbs or less a day. And then every now and then I’ll say, I’m just gonna have a couple raspberries. I count them all out and make sure like the carbohydrates were low and all that stuff every single time. It was just like, I’d get a little bit of that. I since learned like, you know, even if you eat things that don’t have sugar in them, if they have carbohydrates in them, they break down in the blood as glucose. And if something breaks down in my blood as glucose, half an hour later, I’m like, I need more of that. I need more of that. And I look at it as more of an addiction for me in particular. I’m just speaking for myself because everyone’s different, but it’s like, if I was addicted to cocaine or alcohol, I would never do that and then, it’s Saturday, I’m gonna have a little beer now. I’m gonna have a little cocaine because I did good all week. That was the biggest difference for me. And I guess the second part real quick was… all of the other diets I did and I did all of them. literally did all of them. Keto was the best by far the closest but counting calories, Weight Watchers, all of those things. They always felt forced. They always felt like I just got to get through this. I’m going to lose 30 pounds and then I can go back to moderation. I could go back to doing this. When I started doing carnivore, it felt forced for maybe two or three weeks until I adapted. And then it was like a switch went off and something changed for me where it’s like I’m no longer eating food for Kerry (11:17.038) I’m eating food for sustenance and I really, I really enjoy a fatty ribeye, like a big steak. I love it, but it’s it’s it’s different than before. It’s not an addiction like before. It’s more of an appreciation. So that was one of the, that was the biggest thing for me that was different. And still I’m, I’m on day 600 almost. I’m about a week away from 600 days now. I have no cravings and it’s the most natural thing in the world. Even at day 600, there are so many times where I have to remind myself to eat. And when I was doing keto, I would get that every now and then, but I’d add a little carbs and then I’d be hungry again and I’d be hungry again. The blood sugar on carnivore is just perfectly leveled. And I guess the last thing I’ll say real quick, you kind of mentioned this in your question, I had a very deep… Why for doing this? mean, I was begging, praying to God, like, give me something because my depression was just so hopeless. And he gave it to me like this changed my depression and my it’s I would have given anything in the whole world just to have a baseline. I used to get so jealous of people when I was in the deepest depression. like, man, I wish I could just be normal like that person. And this took me on the opposite end of whatever hopeless is in terms of depression. I’m not just at a baseline. Like I am just full of gratitude. I’m thankful, grateful, blessed. Like I want for nothing. It’s just It’s incredible the mind shift change on carnivore. So like for that reason alone, it has been such a game changer. And then I always show people this, but I guess for those watching, for those listening, I’m holding up a container of pills. This was about 15 to 20 medications I was on at one time and I’m on zero now. It took a while for me to do that on carnivore and I did it responsibly through my doctors and weaned off, but. Kerry (13:08.662) Not being on any medications has been a big game changer for me too. But I have so many important whys that I don’t want to change. But the biggest reason is it just, feels so natural. feel incredible that I haven’t changed or even struggled on it. Cheryl McColgan (13:23.31) That’s amazing. And I want to make sure that I mentioned this resource for people since that you mentioned that depression was one of the biggest things. I’m sure you’re familiar at this point with Dr. Chris Palmer. And he wrote a book called Brain Energy. I’ll put the link in the show notes. But what Carrie is experiencing on this diet is not an isolated instance. so Chris Palmer is a Harvard educated doctor. He is doing all this research around using ketogenic and know, carnivore is kind of a subset of the ketogenic diet, but to use that to treat really serious depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, things that were not amenable to any other treatments have gotten exponentially better by changing the diet. And so if you’ve never heard of this before, I just wanted to put his name out there and mention the book so that if you’re first of all, don’t, you know, obviously don’t go off your medication or do anything without talking to your doctor. But I do think exploring this diet brain connection is really worthwhile, especially if you have not had success on the antidepressant medicines that we have, because it’s very common that they don’t work for people, unfortunately. They only work in, I think at last stat I heard was something like maybe 30 % of cases, but most people don’t get full relief from their depression just by drugs. So anyway, I just wanted to make sure I put that resource out there for people. And then my follow up question for you, Carrie, is, you you mentioned the heart component because you’d already had issues with your heart in the past. Before you went on this diet and you said people were already calling you crazy and all of this, did you do any of your blood markers before you started carnivore? And is that something that you continually follow? I’d just be really curious to hear what your experience with that has been. Kerry (15:11.15) Yes, so I was to the doctor so much before this, so I had blood work done. The biggest thing I had was the, I had a heart echo done before doing carnivore, not because I was doing carnivore. I had just had a couple done because I have had a lifelong irregular heartbeat since birth and highly erratic to the point every time I’d go to the doctor, you know, the nurse will take your blood pressure. They’ll check your heart every single time. They’re like, do you realize you have an irregular heartbeat? And every single time I’m like, Yes, it’s in my notes and you guys tell me this every single time and I’ve worn probably 20 different heart monitors. remember in kindergarten I’d wear these big vests and then in the last couple years it was just like this little thing but to always check my heart. So I had that done, cholesterol, blood work, had most of that stuff done as well. One of the craziest things, so six months into carnivore I had all my blood work done and everything looked excellent. The only thing that was elevated was my total cholesterol number, but there’s a lot of misconceptions with that as well. I’ve actually talked to Dr. Philip Ovedia now. who was my inspiration initially, I’ve since interviewed him for the documentary we’re working on, but he talks about cholesterol and it’s not the quantity of your cholesterol, it’s the quality. That’s what Dr. Ovadia talks about as a heart surgeon and you can do an advanced lipid panel to see if you have like the dense particles or the puffy particles and there’s a big difference, there’s a lot of science into it when… A lot of people just like, what’s the total number? So my total number was up, but when you actually dig into the quality of it, it’s excellent. In fact, all of my markers are better now on carnivore than they’ve been my entire life. My blood pressure is like 120 over 80. The craziest thing is this, and everything I’m telling you right now is verifiable in my medical records, which I’ve shared on my YouTube channel and we’re sharing in the documentary. Anybody that wants to see it, because people just, they don’t even believe me when I first started talking about this. Kerry (17:04.956) one year into carnivore, went to the doctor because I’m like, I want to check up this congestive heart failure. When they diagnosed me with that, ejection fraction 44, congestive heart failure, it’s really scary. am I going to die? What does that mean? Heart failures. What they told me was it’s chronic. Heart failure is chronic. And they said the best you’re going to be able to do, Carrie, is keep it the same, but it’s probably going to get worse. You’re not going to get any better from this. But I’m one year on the carnivore I felt like I could run a marathon and prior to this I would stand up and I would get dizzy and I’m like I just this feels so much better and then my wife and I were watching a movie at home kind of laying down and she had her head on my chest and she said your heart is beating normally for the first time and my wife and I have been together since age 14 she’s been to many of my appointments and I’m like You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not a doctor. There’s like, there’s no way I went to Walgreens and I bought a stethoscope and I listened to it. I’m like, my goodness, this sounds normal to me. And I felt so much better. So long story short, I’m like, I’m going to go into the cardiologist first time. All of these appointments I’ve had throughout my whole life on carnivore. I wasn’t sick at all that whole first year. I wasn’t sick at all. Didn’t need to to the doctor for anything. But I’m like, just want to check this out. They set me up for a heart echo. They checked my heart. And my ejection fraction is 65, which is normal. For a lot of people out there, I thought, why isn’t it a hundred? I want a hundred. It doesn’t get to a hundred. would die. 65 is perfect. So my irregular heartbeat is the other thing. So I reverse a congestive heart failure and my irregular heartbeat that my wife checked, then had, they checked it in the echo and the cardiologist checked it. The nurse checked it. Normal, normal, normal. For the first time in 43 years, my heartbeat is normal. Cheryl McColgan (18:31.863) You Kerry (18:52.654) which that almost blows my mind more than the congestive heart failure. I’ve heard of people like have temporary irregular heartbeats, but since birth I’ve had it and it’s completely normal now. It’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s crazy. Some of this just blows my mind. I talked to Dr. Philip Ovede about it. like, how is this possible? And he said, well, there’s a couple of things. The heart performs much more efficiently while in ketosis. When your body is burning fat for fuel instead of sugar, the heart and the brain perform more efficiently. But he hadn’t heard of cases like this. It’s really uncharted territory. People that get congestive heart failure don’t normally go, I’m going to only eat meat now. So it’s kind of a rare thing. But he also said, you lost a bunch of weight that first year. right now I’m down 100 pounds since my heaviest. Cheryl McColgan (19:31.2) All Kerry (19:38.974) a lot less stress on your heart and then also I took some electrolytes on carnivore, like some magnesium and things like that and he said that could help as well so it could be a couple factors but he’s like it’s basically it’s uncharted territory. The last thing I’ll say real quick I announced this on my YouTube channel I had a ton of responses and I have had dozens of people tell me the same thing that they’ve either reversed their congestive heart failure or their irregular heartbeat. I know it’s all anecdotal and it’s not real science, a lot of people coming out of the woodwork saying similar results. it’s kind of interesting. Cheryl McColgan (20:15.374) Yeah, that’s amazing. And I hope that you have the ability to get some of those people on your documentary as well, because that’s really interesting evidence. mean, like you said, it’s not a controlled study or anything, but you can’t deny, and especially when this is something that you’ve had your entire life, and then you get this change from a diet. I mean, that’s almost like a legitimate miracle, honestly. Kerry (20:38.372) Yeah, I mean, I tell people it really saved my life. Like I was, it was so hopeless there at the end and within the first 30 days of me doing carnivore, I stopped snoring almost right away. The depression anxiety took a while longer, but three weeks in I had this, whoa, what is going on? Like I feel my mood is better. The depression wasn’t completely gone, but, and then the IBS within a couple of weeks, my stomach, at one point I said to my wife, I’m like, I can’t feel my stomach. Like what is going on? There’s always been this weight or this pressure there and it was just completely gone. And, Yeah, was just so excited from there and then I started doing more research and hearing more people sharing similar results. Cheryl McColgan (21:22.318) So what would you say to someone, somebody that’s out there that’s hearing this, maybe they’ve had depression now or in the past, maybe they feel like they would feel better if they lost some weight. What advice would you have for them having gone through this process and having been someone that has tried every diet out there, what would be your advice to how to get started? Kerry (21:43.896) I love your question. This is the biggest reason I’m so passionate about this. was hopelessly depressed and I thought it was something wrong with me. There’s just, it’s a fluke, it’s a genetic issue, it’s a chemical imbalance, it’s hormones. I don’t know. It’s just, there’s something wrong with me that I’m always going to be depressed. And sadly, I think there’s a lot of things that happen in healthcare that do that. They almost put the blame on us or it’s a fluke or we don’t know. And then you go, it’s hopeless then because you’re never going to treat the root cause of the problem. I don’t believe anyone is hopeless or they have from what I’ve heard. you mentioned Chris Palmer. He’s incredible. Absolutely incredible. The work he’s done. There’s also Dr. Georgia Ede. She recently came up with a book, change your diet, change your mind. And it’s speaking about a lot of the same stuff and expanding on what Chris Palmer talked about. So many instances of people overcoming horrible depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. It’s, like, It’s at the early stages because it’s kind of a new area, but it’s happening on just a huge scale right now. So my advice for people would be just try this. You don’t have to be hopeless. And carnivore sounds crazy. But what I’ve realized afterwards is what I am doing is returning to what is natural for humans as close as possible. As humanity, we’ve gotten so far away from what is natural. The 60,000 products in the grocery store, that’s a new phenomenon. Like being able to go on your phone and just tap and have food here. The foods that we’re eating now, it’s crazy. Some of it’s starting to come out now, but people argue like even vegetables. When you look at vegetables now versus 50 years ago, they have one seventh the nutrients they did 50 years ago. Plus you have pesticides, plus you have glyphosate. Even on organic vegetables, 60 % of those have glyphosate on them. 60 % of them, and glyphosate is an antibiotic. So… Kerry (23:36.47) We have escaped so far from what is natural. My advice for people that are hopeless with depression try this. spent 15 years on so many different SSRIs and antidepressant medications and I would have given anything for just an additional tool in the toolbox that would have given me hope and I’m telling you like this is what it is and it’s not just me. I have interviewed hundreds of people that have done a carnivore diet both for my documentary and YouTube and almost every single one of them had some component of mental health issues. Some of them had major depressive disorders, bipolar, almost all of them though have brain fog, anxiety, and every single one of them has noticeable improvements or complete reversal or remission of depression, anxiety when they eat a proper human diet. The encouraging thing is for a lot of people, it happens within three weeks to a month. Not everyone, it’s different, but there’s a lot of people within three weeks. So I always tell people, if you’re suffering this bad, 30 days goes by so quick. You’re going to go by your whole life. It’s such a shame to me that most people are going to go through their whole lives never feeling the way I feel right now because… Cheryl McColgan (24:36.59) Man. Kerry (24:44.408) It’s absolutely incredible when that brain fog lifts the depression’s gone. anxiety is gone. The energy goes up. But when that brain fog lifts, you can’t see the fog while you’re in the fog. And a lot of people watching this are like, I got a little bit of brain fog. I’m here to tell you, have no idea how bad that brain fog is until you get out of it. It’s not just myself saying that I’ve it from probably a hundred other people saying it as well. So Cheryl McColgan (25:08.356) Yeah, and I would agree. I’ve shared this on my channels before, but I had depression on and off my whole adult life was on different antidepressants. None of them really ever worked. Fortunately, it wasn’t a super severe depression or anything like that, but it was always there with me. And it was like, like I said, on and off, I’d try different things, it would never work. And it wasn’t until I went keto. that I really noticed a significant difference. And ever since I keto in 2017, I haven’t been on any antidepressant medication since. And that’s not to say, know, every time there’s times in your life where things are going on and things shift. And it’s not to say you never feel sad again or you never get depressed for a short amount of time, but it’s not the same thing as what we’re talking about as being like, you’re depressed enough that you need to go on medication. So yeah, I would totally agree with you and we’re not the only ones out there. There’s plenty of people that have had this experience and I think the more that people talk about it and the people that actually somebody that you know in real life that knows you and has seen the experience of you changing from how you were, you know, for the last 20 years of your life to how you are today, Carrie. It’s like they’ve got to just have no question in their mind that this is what promoted such a huge change. So I’m guessing like you, You went through this transformation and not only like weight, but the mood and everything else and your IBS. And I just feel like you want to shout it to the world. So I’m guessing that that’s how you got started with this documentary. And I’d love to hear who you’ve been talking to. I know you’ve got Dr. Ken Berry. You mentioned the iFixHearts guy. Who else have you been talking to and what’s kind of your goal with the documentary? What do you hope to accomplish and who else do need to talk to in case anybody hears this and wants to tell their story to you? Kerry (27:00.292) Yeah. It was day 67 of carnivore for me. said, we need a documentary about this because this is powerful. did a video on my YouTube channel on day 30, my 30 day update, and it just kind of went crazy. which was great, but the comments I was getting, it was like, I had comments from people in their sixties, seventies, eighties. They’re like, I’ve been doing carnivore for five years. I’m thriving. And they’re telling me all of these things, overcoming depression. And my worry was though, Dr. Barry and some of these other guys, they’re doing a great job on YouTube, I’m like, YouTube’s such a small subset of the population. learned about keto through a Netflix documentary years ago. So I’m like, we need a, we need a documentary on carnivore. There’s a lot on keto that are very good. And so I just announced it rather foolishly actually, cause I’ve never done a documentary before. and actually it was, it was sort of my idea and my daughter, my daughter, Emma, my wife and I have triplets plus one and my daughter, Emma was vegan for five years and she decided to completely switch from vegan to carnivore. I didn’t force her, didn’t even tell I never thought she would even do it, she was just suffering. And she came up with this shirt, it was called Compassionate Carnivore, because she’s vegan for compassionate reasons. She’ll only eat meat if it’s compassionately raised, we get a lot of our stuff from our neighbor. It’s grass-fed, grass-finished, the cow is a good, no feedlots, nothing like that. So I said, you’re a compassionate carnivore, she made this shirt, we were gonna sell the shirt, and I’m like… I don’t feel right profiting off of this. feel like I was so sick for so long because of greed sort of run amok. And I was like, maybe we could use the money from the shirt to do a documentary. That was how it sort of started. And it just went crazy from there. just, like, let me just try Dr. Ken Berry. This guy’s a bestselling author. He’s got 3 million subscribers. There’s no way he’s going to talk to me. Let me see if I, if I’ll just email him or whatever. it was amazing how accessible these people were. guess they saw my story too. And they saw that I had lost a bunch of weight and overcame depression, but Kerry (28:52.17) Dr. Chafee was the first one I reached out to I went on YouTube video with him and I just said I don’t want to put you on the spot Dr. Chafee, but I want to do this documentary I need an expert in it. He said a hundred percent. I’m in and then Shortly after I was, connected with Dr. Barry and I did the same thing and he’s like, I’m in and these guys have been just incredible. So after that, Dr. Philip Ovedia, then Dr. Sean Baker, who was the original, he wrote the book, Carnivore. He was on Joe Rogan. I’ve since met him and interviewed him and actually he lifted me up like a little baby cause he’s like a bodybuilder. We did a little thumbnail picture. Me and my buddy, Adam lifted him up and it wasn’t as easy as him lifting us up, but. Yeah, we’ve got Dr. Philip Lovadia, the heart surgeon, Dr. Georgia Ede. I’d love to get Dr. Chris Palmer in there as well, but Georgia Ede is incredible. She’s a Harvard trained psychiatrist. She’s been doing this for 25 years. In fact, just last week I was down in Florida and we filmed her. The biggest reason I wanted to do the documentary was mental health and depression. It’s just was such a game changer for me. was so hopeless. I’ve learned that it’s helped so many other people. Initially, it was going to be let’s do a carnivore diet documentary. it’s no longer it is since changed its carnivore even the name the name is healing humanity the power of a proper human diet what i have learned is i am healing and doing so well because i returned to what is natural for humans as crazy as that sounds i believe eating beef ruminant beef grass-fed grass finish of beef has like a multi-chamber stomach of its eating grass as glyphosate or pesticides on it most of that is processed out so given the sixty thousand options i feel like i am eating as natural as possible but Kerry (30:34.126) Besides the food we’re eating, it’s like sitting under fluorescent lights all day, staring at screens. We’re doing things that are so unnatural for humans. that’s really what I’m advocating for in the documentary is returning to what is natural mainly through diet, but also our other everyday activities. It’s mostly carnivore, but we have a woman that had stage four cancer and she did fasting and she used a strict ketogenic plant-based diet and she had really good success with that. So for me, I’m not like, it’s not us against them or anything. It’s just returning to what is natural. We also, the last thing I’ll say real quick is we have Tammy Peterson, Jordan Peterson’s wife. She had stage four cancer and she’s been carnivore for like six years. It turns out she’s been watching my YouTube videos, which just completely blows my mind. She emailed me and said she wanted to have me on her podcast. And then in turn I said, I would love to have you in our documentary. You overcame stage four terminal cancer. She was told she’s gonna die and she’s been in remission for years now. She attributes that to prayer in the carnivore diet because she’s starving the cancer of glucose and she was doing some fasting I think as well, but. Long story short, she agreed to be in the documentary, so we’re filming her in January. And her husband, Jordan Peterson, watched our little teaser trailer with her and tweeted it out. This was just a couple, like two months ago, tweeted it out, which just blows my mind. So we’re filming Tammy Peterson. We have a couple more people to film, but the whole purpose of the documentary, real quick, because I even think I mentioned this, is we’re following real individuals over a year that are doing a carnivore diet, proper human diet. to overcome various health issues. One of them has obesity, one of them has cancer, one of them has horrible depression. We’re gonna check in in the beginning and then a year later and then in the middle we have a bunch of other shorter stories and then all of these good doctors like Dr. Berry and Dr. Chafee and so on. Cheryl McColgan (32:28.876) Yeah, sounds amazing. I can’t wait for this to come out. if there’s any way, anything I can do at all, I don’t have a huge audience, but I would be happy to promote it in any way that I can. So, Carrie, that being said, when do you anticipate the documentary coming out? And in the meantime, where can people sign up to like be on a mailing list or something so that they know when the documentary is live? How can they follow you? Where are the best places to visit you online? Kerry (32:57.572) We’re hoping to launch the documentary in the middle of next year, summertime. the reason it’s kind of taking so long is cause we’re following a couple of those people for a year and some of them haven’t quite hit a year yet. And yeah, if you want to learn more, here’s the interesting thing. So we’re doing the documentary, healing humanity. We have had so many incredible stories come through that I’m like, this documentary is going to be nine hours. How do I cut this out? Like, how do I not share this story? So we’ve decided we’re going to also do a series afterwards. And I’m really excited about the series because we’re to have a whole series on just cancer, a whole series on just type two diabetes, a whole series on depression. So whatever your issue is, can watch that series. It’ll be specific doctors and experts and individuals that overcame those things in that series. I believe this is going to go on forever. It’s like, it’s my passion in life now. I don’t imagine I’ll ever stop doing this. The series will probably have seasons. So if people want to share their story, they can do that. Or if they want to support our documentary, it’s completely crowdfunded. We don’t have any bias. A lot of documentaries nowadays are sponsored by Beyond Meat or some pharmaceutical or some bias. Ours has been completely crowdfunded. Cheryl McColgan (34:00.43) Right. Kerry (34:03.13) funded I’ve been doing live streams we did a 24-hour live stream so the website is healing humanity dot movie you can go there to register if you want to share your story to sort of follow along we have a separate YouTube channel for that if you’re interested in donating and supporting what we’re doing we like sell the shirts and every penny we get from the shirts the donations that it goes a hundred percent to the documentary I’m not taking a salary I spent thousands of dollars my own money I want to do this all as a a passion project. just want to do something where there doesn’t have to be profit or money involved. Cause like I said, I feel like that is why I was so sick for so long was kind of greed run amok sort of thing. So yeah, healing humanity.movie is the website and we have a little teaser trailer on there. If you click on the little about us that, that’s the one that Jordan Peterson tweeted out. If anyone wants to watch that trailer. Cheryl McColgan (34:52.26) Yeah, amazing. And you also mentioned you have a YouTube channel, of course, so people should follow you there as well. that something with Homestead, right? Kerry (34:59.246) Yeah, it’s a little unusual. it’s called Homestead How, H-O-W. I’ve been homesteading for years and doing YouTube and then I found Carnivore. Now I just do Carnivore videos, but I have hundreds of interviews on there. In fact, just yesterday I interviewed Dr. Ken Berry again for the second or third time. That one’s not quite live yet, but I do lots of Carnivore interviews and have the good doctors on and live streams and things like that. So that one’s Homestead How. Cheryl McColgan (35:24.164) Well, Keri, it was so nice hearing about your story today and I am going to thoroughly enjoy following you now myself now that I know about your story and know about your passion and your work. I just love it when people take something like this that has improved their life so much and start sharing it with others. And that’s kind of how my little podcast and situation got started as well. So I really appreciate that. But anyway, thanks for taking the time to share your story today and I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of you. Kerry (35:53.412) Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Health and Alcohol Use in the Modern World 47:31

10 weeks fa47:31

47:31

In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, host Cheryl McColgan interviews Ian Anderson, founder of the Sunnyside app, which focuses on alcohol moderation and mindfulness. Ian shares his personal journey, including his family’s struggles with alcohol, and discusses the impact of the pandemic on drinking habits. The conversation highlights the importance of harm reduction and the shift in understanding alcohol use and recovery. Ian explains how Sunnyside works as a tool for individuals looking to build healthier relationships with alcohol. Ian discusses the evolution of Sunnyside, an app designed to help users moderate their alcohol consumption. He emphasizes the importance of personalization, gradual change, and the power of tracking drinking habits. The discussion also covers the upcoming Dry January initiative, which aims to provide inclusive challenges for users looking to cut back on alcohol. Ian highlights the benefits of using Sunnyside , including improved mental health, better sleep, and financial savings, while encouraging listeners to join the community for support and guidance. Go to HealNourishGrow.com/sunnyside to join the free Dryish/Dry January Challenge. You can choose to go fully dry, dry on weekdays or any number of other custom options! Follow Sunnyside on Instagram here . Takeaways The pandemic increased awareness of alcohol health issues. Harm reduction is a crucial approach to alcohol use. AA has a low success rate for long-term recovery. The definition of recovery has evolved to include moderation. Many people want to drink less but don’t know how. Tracking alcohol consumption can lead to healthier habits. Sunnyside aims to be a supportive tool for change. Understanding alcohol’s health effects can empower better choices. Personalization is key; users set their own goals and track progress. Gradual reduction in alcohol consumption is more effective than immediate cessation. Tracking drinks helps create conscious interference and awareness. Dry January offers various challenges to accommodate different user preferences. Community support enhances the experience of moderating alcohol consumption. Sunnyside provides a safe, anonymous space for users to seek help. The app encourages users to reflect on their drinking patterns and triggers. Sunnyside aims to create lasting behavior change, not just temporary fixes. Watch on YouTube: Episode Transcript: Cheryl McColgan (00:00.814) Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Ian Anderson and this conversation has been a long time coming. He is the founder of Sunnyside, which is a really awesome app that I’ve been checking out for the last couple of years, because you know I like to bring you guys all the things that will help you in your health and wellness journey. But we’re going to save that for little while because Ian has a really interesting backstory and an interesting, I think, perspective on how he created this product to really help people. And so Ian, I’d love for you to share some of that now, maybe first talk a little bit about your professional background and then like what led you to create this product. Ian Andersen (00:37.766) Yeah, absolutely. Well, Cheryl, thanks for having me on the podcast. Like you said, it’s been a long time coming. I’m glad we finally got to make this happen. And it’s always a pleasure just to be able to meet new audiences and offer, you know, my personal story and whatever wisdom I can offer around alcohol health. It’s something that’s really important to me. So. The product is Sunnyside and it’s an alcohol moderation and mindfulness app. So we will get to that, but I’ll tell you a little bit about my story and how it led me to create this product that tens of thousands of people are using. So professional background, I was born and raised in California. And I went to school at UC Santa Cruz and studied sort of information systems management. So like kind of the blend of technology and business. I started my career out in web development, which isn’t that exciting. This was many years ago, but I was having a blast at the time. And I kind of weaseled my way into marketing and learned how to help position products to help keep consumers find what they needed. Fast forward many years later, I started working, I had the opportunity to work at a mobile app company called Mile IQ, which did mileage tracking for people that drove for work, which was pretty neat because we were helping people get their biggest tax deductions. I met some people there that were really instrumental in helping me kind of navigate the business world at that point. They were startup founders and that sort of gave me some of the early. skills or at least confidence that I needed to branch out and start Sunnyside. So I call myself a sort of marketing generalist by trade and at Sunnyside I lead marketing and growth along with many other things. We wear a lot of hats because we’re still a small company where I call us like a medium-sized startup at this point. We’re based in California technically but we have employees all over the world. Cheryl McColgan (02:45.166) Yeah, and it’s such a, you’ve done a great job with the marketing part because I’ll just share, I came across this. I think during, I think it might’ve been my first thought during the pandemic. I don’t know what year you started, but I think there was a little push during that time because especially in my health and wellness space, you know, it really started to blow up on social media, how much additional trouble people were having with their drinking habits during the pandemic and how that really increased during that time. And then fast forward kind of to today. Ian Andersen (02:49.127) Thank you. Cheryl McColgan (03:14.882) the last year or two years, mean, Andrew Huberman, he’s a huge podcast and a lot of other people have really been bringing this idea about alcohol health to the forefront. And I think it’s caused a lot of people to really start looking at their behaviors and just noticing, you know, if it’s really serving them and kind of looking for tools to help them along, to make them either more mindful, which is, think is one of the great things about your app. It’s not necessarily like quit it all together. But it might just be like, hey, you’re going out for the night and normally you might go a little crazy with your friends and have five or six drinks, but it’s kind of just touching base with you to remind you to just be more mindful and be in the moment and make good choices. So I think it’s a very interesting product in that regard and really useful for this new push into the wellness space about alcohol is a poison. The previous episode I had on alcohol, we mentioned that it’s a neurotoxin. There’s really Ian Andersen (03:46.609) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (04:10.87) not a lot going for it other than the social aspects that a lot of people do find relaxation in those things in it. But I do think it’s just great that you’re bringing this idea to be more mindful about it to the forefront and just offering more education in the space about drinking habits. Just so if you make the you know what you’re getting into, I guess, is kind of part of the point. Ian Andersen (04:31.632) Yeah, absolutely. You said a lot of great stuff there. I first want to recognize that the Andrew Huberman podcast on alcohol was, I had already been digging into alcohol for two years before that came out and I was still blown away. So I think I like to think of Sunnyside as an essential tool in your toolkit for building healthier habits around alcohol. But I think it’s best when used in a combination with something else in your life, whether it’s an additional piece of education, like a really great podcast or a therapist, or maybe even just connecting with a friend on the idea. Because alcohol is the way that it integrates into our lives is very personal and sometimes feels complex. So Sunnyside, we like to think of ourselves as the front door for anyone looking to make a change when it comes to alcohol, whether they plan to eventually quit, or maybe just try to find moderation with alcohol in their lives. We want to be the place where tens of thousands and eventually millions of people start making that change on their alcohol health journey. And we will provide all the tools and sort of programming to help you build that healthy relationship. I’d love to get into more detail when the time is right, but we can talk about like how we actually make that happen. Yeah, I just wanted to recognize Huberman was a great podcast for me as well. I was pretty blown away and I would I’m still a mindful drinker myself Or rather a drink I still drink alcohol way less now especially since starting Sunnyside and one of the main things for me aside from all the things that we built within Sunnyside is Simply educating myself more about how alcohol actually works. You mentioned that it’s a poison, but it’s also true that it has these sort of tendencies and addictive qualities that make you seek out more after you start. And one of the biggest learnings for me was to understand that I wasn’t sort of going to be an exception to the rule when it came to alcohol, that because when I drank, I wanted to drink more, that that was actually alcohol doing exactly what it was supposed to do on me. And it almost made me feel like I had more power understanding that knowledge when it came to moderating my own alcohol use. Ian Andersen (06:47.95) I should also say, Cheryl, that we did actually start in 2020 right at beginning of the pandemic. And it absolutely was not because we were trying to take advantage of that moment. It was totally coincidental. My co- Cheryl McColgan (06:52.59) You Cheryl McColgan (07:00.358) You don’t just suddenly magically have a company go live in three days, right? mean, this was a long time in the works, I’m sure. Ian Andersen (07:04.133) No. Absolutely. We actually started cooking things up in 2019, the initial ideas and the initial product. And then in 2020, everything just kind of lined up for us as a business. It was really a good year, but also for us to be able to be there for people that needed to moderate their drinking at a time when adults were drinking more than almost ever at the beginning of the pandemic. It was just a really nice way that everything lined up. Cheryl McColgan (07:35.874) Yeah, and so to get back to, and like you said, we’ll talk more about how the product works and how it’s useful and all that kind of good stuff a little bit later. with most founders that I talk to, I people that have listened to this podcast before know that I love hearing the backstory because I think it shows you that for the most part, people don’t start a company to make a lot of money, right? I mean, you hope that you make money, you hope you make a living at it, but people start something like this podcast or Heal Nurture or whatever it is because they have a passion. Ian Andersen (07:41.585) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (08:04.856) for what they’re doing. So I would love to hear what in your world kind of was the impetus to want to do something like this to help people with alcohol use. Ian Andersen (08:14.694) Yeah, thanks for asking. It’s a bit of a heavy story, but I think it’s one that a lot of people can relate to. I’m an identical twin. And several years after my twin and I were born in sort of Northern California, my mom and my dad both took to drinking heavier than they ever had. When I was a young child, let’s just say it’s around five years old, because it’s all pretty murky. Cheryl McColgan (08:25.697) Ian Andersen (08:40.78) And my dad was a carpenter and he got into a daily ritual where he would start drinking beer after work. This went from the way he explained it from a beer a night to six beers a night to 12 beers a night pretty quickly. And this was happening at a time when my parents were starting to sort of lose interest in each other, if you will. And they had a rocky relationship for most of my childhood. So my dad also started coupling his drinking with some other drugs on the job site. And so I just learned about this recently. So there were some pretty vicious cycles going on there. My mom, on the other hand, she was a very private drinker and she actually, she would literally go into her room, sober and come out totally drunk. And these were very traumatizing events in my childhood. I think one of the things that probably saved my… sanity in my life was having a twin. There’s a lot of probably psychology and stuff to study around that, but I was very blessed to have be able to have my twin and I like create a support system and a comfort system for ourselves. So my parents started growing apart and their drinking started getting worse around seven or so things started getting really bad with my mom and my dad decided to go to to stop drinking altogether and he went cold turkey through the AA route. So I have all of the highest respect for AA as a path for people that need to seek sobriety. And I don’t know if he ever hit like what you would call a rock bottom or anything like that. That’s kind of a tricky term anyway, but what his rock bottom was, was realizing that if he didn’t make a change, that my brother and I would probably end up in foster care. So he actually left the household and found sobriety through the support of AA. While my mom unfortunately didn’t find Her way out of her disease, you know, we call that alcoholism at the time these days It’s more commonly known as a alcohol use disorder Regardless, she was highly addicted to alcohol and it was a very very destructive path for her so my dad eventually got my brother and I out of the house after he got sober we moved to Novato, California Marin County and Unfortunately after not seeing my mom for two years. She died from liver failure due to alcohol and so her path was one of sort of Ian Andersen (11:05.254) Deepening self-destruction when it came to alcohol and my dad’s was a path of finding sobriety because he decided that he wanted to live a healthier life and I I believe one thing I’ve reflected on a lot since starting Sunnyside is at that time there weren’t digital apps to help my mom and dad find Take the first step to finding a healthier relationship to alcohol. It was still very much the all-or-nothing approach around AA you know, if you want to stop drinking or cut back on your drinking, you go to AA. Otherwise, you’re perfectly healthy. And I’m sure I’m paraphrasing that slightly wrong, but we do know that today with harm reduction having been studied for multiple decades as an approach to moderation, that there are lot of additional options out there when it comes to people wanting to make a change with their relationship to alcohol. Cheryl McColgan (11:57.708) I think you’re really accurate on that just to interject really quickly because my minor is actually in addiction studies. this is like 25, 20 ago at this point. And at that time really AA was still the best and only option. And it was either kind of like you’re an alcoholic and you’re going to AA and you have to completely stop or you have a… Ian Andersen (12:01.126) Yeah, of course. Ian Andersen (12:05.36) Amazing. Cheryl McColgan (12:25.544) social relationship with alcohol and you’re totally fine. And there was kind of nothing in between at that point, at least that’s how I remember it. So I think you’re totally spot on with that. And so anyway, you’re saying about the harm reduction studies now, I’m sure you’ve taken a deep dive into all this now that you’ve gotten the app out there. Ian Andersen (12:40.722) I still sometimes feel a bit like an imposter when it comes to these things. You you’ve studied addiction, but I’ve had the pleasure to talk to a lot of people, especially customers. I’ve talked to some experts in the space, so I’m getting more informed as time goes on. But one of the first people we talked to was Andrew Tytarsky, who’s been studying harm reduction mostly in alcohol for three decades. And he is probably one of those sort of like… forefathers of that movement and he’s actually seen sort of a pushback against harm reduction when it comes to alcohol to lately a major acceptance to the harm reduction approach when it comes to alcohol. And just to touch on what you said, this is something that I’m deeply passionate about is where AA plays in all of this. My dad went to AA and it saved his life and it saved my life potentially, but AA ultimately has, I believe like a 9 % success rate. And the other thing that AA did for my father was he was an alcoholic until he died. Last year he passed away, unfortunately. And he, thank you, he’s still identified as an alcoholic because AA indoctrinated that into him. And even though he was 30 years sober and it just created this really tough life for him to accept. And I don’t think he was an alcoholic for 30 years before he passed away. I think he was an amazing person that sort of beat a rough patch when it came to alcohol. And the harm reduction approach says that actually it’s really interesting, the National Institute of Alcoholism and Addiction, it’s the NIAAA, I always get it slightly wrong. A couple of years ago, they updated their definition of recovery to remove the requirement of abstinence from the definition of recovery. But they did say that you have to stop heavy drinking patterns and that you have to seek out support and you have to basically work on identifying internal issues. So the fact that they sort of quote, still allow Ian Andersen (14:56.838) Drinking in the definition of recovery, this is a major change in the understanding of how alcohol and addiction impacts people and how people can sort of be recovered from a rough patch with drinking or even years of overdoing it. So that is the crux of the Sunnyside’s approach is using a scientific sort of formula based in harm reduction, based in the work that our advisors do to make sure we’re on the right track. to help people find balance and also find other solutions within their lives around how they can find balance with alcohol. Cheryl McColgan (15:37.858) Yeah, it’s interesting that, again, I think that the pandemic helped bring some of this to the forefront. But even prior to that, it’s kind of this an interesting social acceptance, I think, of these. Like if you’ll look on TikTok or Instagram or anything, there’s this kind of like this mommy wine culture. I’m sure you’ve run across this in your work where it’s really or, you know, taking your Stanley Cup to your kids games full of booze or just these kind of really Ian Andersen (15:43.036) Mm-hmm. Ian Andersen (15:58.128) Yeah, absolutely. Cheryl McColgan (16:07.136) interesting things in our society that were really never really acceptable before and somehow now they’ve become this and I think it’s becoming a contributing to factor to why people are starting to behave the way that they behave and I’ll even say you know just in my social circle and friend group and something stuff it is I mean by the definition of how many drinks per night or per week or whatever is acceptable I would say widely in my social circle that that does not follow it whatsoever. is far more drinking than that. And these even are among people that are into health and wellness and taking care of themselves in so many other ways. And yet it has become acceptable for some reason to do this. And I think, again, a lot of it has to do with poor coping skills and people kind of leaned on that. during the pandemic and are now realizing, okay, the world is back to normal. I can go outside again. I can use the other things I was using to cope, but then they’ve found themselves in this place with alcohol that is no longer really a healthy relationship. So being said, think maybe it’s a good spot to bring in how this actually works. Because again, I said, I found it during that time. I was reading these articles, always doing research. And I thought, well, this is a cool tool. I want to check this out. Ian Andersen (17:05.83) Mm-hmm. Ian Andersen (17:15.346) Sorry. Ian Andersen (17:21.733) Uh-huh. Cheryl McColgan (17:27.438) So think at the time, like when you first launched, you had a free trial and maybe that still exists too. Yeah, and I’ll just go ahead and say this now for people, just in case you don’t get there, but heelnourishgrow.com slash Sunnyside is the link where you can go and find the app and get that free trial. But then I just found it so useful because I was using it for myself to be more mindful. I had just gone through my dad’s, I was a donor for his bone marrow transplant and I was Ian Andersen (17:30.692) Yeah, it does, yeah, yeah. Cheryl McColgan (17:56.632) traveling during the pandemic and you know, I’m worried that I’m bringing something home to my family every time I’m on a plane and it was just really stressful and I found myself in a place where I was definitely drinking more wine at night and yeah, so I got the free trial. I found it useful, paid for it, kept using it, liked it so much that I wanted to become an affiliate because I do think it really helps people and I would love to like just go into a little bit how you explain to people how it works. Ian Andersen (17:59.346) Bye. Ian Andersen (18:25.19) Yeah, I’m gonna sort of connect a couple of dots here. You said a lot, there’s so much to unpack in 30 or 45 minutes on this topic. Okay, so the pandemic was a shock to a lot of people. And I think a lot of people found themselves drinking more, even not realizing they were drinking more initially and not understanding why they were drinking more. And there were just these underlying stressors that… Help that sort of caused us to lean into the thing that would help us sort of decrease anxiety at the end of the night. We, believe most of us know that alcohol actually increases anxiety, but for a drink, for one drink, it can help decrease anxiety. When you get to two or three drinks, it starts to impact your sleep and recovery and cause more anxiety the next day. I found myself drinking more than I expected at the beginning of the pandemic too. I’m sort of like a… I like to quantify my behaviors. I got the, I got the, I love it. And I, I was, we were locked inside and I was using my Peloton and yet I found myself drinking quite a bit at the beginning of the pandemic and, kind of wondering why that was happening. But I think as we sort of get some space from the pandemic, we can all realize that it was sort of just shocking to us. And, parents out there were having different stressors. everyone kind of had their own reasons. Cheryl McColgan (19:25.804) Yeah, all the things. Huh! Ian Andersen (19:53.126) So with that said, when we look at the data, 49 % of people that drink in the US want to drink less. And that’s been sort of corroborated by multiple studies. Yet only about 10 % of those, and it might actually be less than that, actually do something to make change and to take the first step to drink less in their lives. So 50 % want to drink less. and only 10 % actually do something about it. I think this is still because most people, there’s still so much stigma in a black and white approach to alcohol. think if I walking down the street and I asked somebody, if you were to cut back on drinking, you’re drinking, what would you do? I think that most common answer would probably be still something like AA. And then I would say, well, would you do AA? And they would say, no, because I’m not an alcoholic. So it just creates this cyclical problematic understanding of what we’re supposed to do when we want to cut back. What we’re trying to do at Sunnyside, and let me tell you a little bit about how this started. My co-founder, Nick, was in Mexico with his wife about five or six years ago. He now has a couple of kids, so this was like pre-kids. They were doing a little hiatus in Mexico, and they found themselves enjoying their time off and having wine almost every day. And him being sort of a quantified health nut as well, wanted to see if there was an app that would help him track his drinks and plan his drinks. And when he found nothing out there, he realized that there might be an opportunity here. Like how can this, how can all of the apps out there focus on alcohol be all about sobriety and tracking your sobriety streaks? Because that’s really what was out there. So he set out to build the first version of Sunnyside. And it was just, it was a text message system that him and his wife could use. for themselves. So he understood how to, he works in marketing too, and he understood how to build a two-way SMS little platform. And he found it really kind of effective and fun. now his wife and him and his wife were on this vacation, but now they were like using this tool that he made to plan their drinks every week over text message and track their drinks. And he found that this is actually creating behavior change within him and his wife to a point that was, Ian Andersen (22:18.3) kind of profound. So he started sharing this little text message program. It wasn’t even an app at the time with his friends and they kind of liked it too. And they kind of all saw this. Of course there were the early rumblings like friends would kind of tease us for like, you’re trying to make us quit drinking. And what we really want to emphasize to people is that my co-founder and I still enjoy alcohol. We are just way more mindful about it now, especially as we get older. And that’s what we’re trying to do is introduce new ways of. Cheryl McColgan (22:33.71) Yeah. Ian Andersen (22:46.866) tracking and planning and quantifying alcohol in your life so that it doesn’t become sort of a slippery slope issue. We track everything else, right? We track our running and our calories. We track our sleep. And yet we have this sort of mental pushback against tracking alcohol. But in reality, alcohol has, well, here’s the right way to put it. Drinking less alcohol has a positive impact on almost nearly every area of your health. So you don’t have to quit to see the benefits of drinking less. And that’s the thesis on which we started building Sunnyside. So my co-founder came to me and asked if I’d be interested in talking about this idea. He then learned about my family history with alcohol. And I learned that he also has two parents that are in recovery from alcoholism, having gone through AA for 30 years. So it was something that we really connected on. And what we did from there was set out to make, turn this into an actual business. we’re in California and we decided to, to start making it happen. The fast forward about four years later, we’ve really matured the product significantly. It’s not just an SMS text message system anymore. It has an Android app. has an iOS app. And when you sign up for Sunnyside, I’ll start getting into just kind of the how it works now. The first thing that we do, and this is very common with apps like Noom or Calm, we collect a bit of personal information upfront. We ask you about your goals, your motivations. We ask you about your baseline drinking behaviors, and it’s all private and anonymous. And from there, we’re able to kind of personalize your experience using Sunnyside because it wants us to feel like a really one-on-one interaction. We want it to feel like we’re creating plans specifically for you. We also ask you if your goal is to ultimately quit drinking or… cut back on your drinking. And regardless, whichever one you choose, Sunnyside does not bring you down to zero drinks on day one. Our goal is to find a gradual path of decreasing your drinks over time. And if you’re on a moderation, if your goal is moderation, we’re gonna try to bring you down to the CDC recommendations, which is no more than, I feel like I’m gonna mess this up right now. 14 drinks a week for men and I think seven drinks a week. Cheryl McColgan (25:10.424) think it’s seven, yeah. Ian Andersen (25:11.388) For women, yeah, thank you. I’m getting mixed up with the binge drinking ones, which are a little bit different. So yeah, 14 for men and seven for women. We should caveat though that there’s a lot of studies saying that those guidelines might be outdated. Canada recently updated its recommendations to one drink a week. And a lot of science is coming out now saying that no amount of alcohol is healthy. So we’re not here to demonize alcohol. Our job is to simply, I would say, help you reach these recommended guidelines from the CDC and avoid… Like bringing yourself down slowly to a nice new baseline with a system of habits in place that work is much better than leaving your sort of drinking patterns unregulated to where they might slowly build up over time because alcohol is one of those substances that’s really easy for it to just stack over time. If you don’t pay attention to it mindfully, it can get there for a lot of people. So we want to make sure that you kind of put a system in place of moderation, tools, best practices and education. so that you keep yourself healthy for the longest amount of time possible. So after the signup, the main sort of tenets of Sunnyside are tracking and planning. So every Sunday we offer a suggested plan for you for the week ahead. We’re not condoning drinking, but we’re looking at your previous patterns and recommending a slight decrease week over week over week. The longer you stay with Sunnyside, obviously the better. And then tracking drinks is really a powerful habit. that we help you build. And you can track your drinks in the app. You can track them over text message. Excuse me. You can track them in real time or you can track them the day after. And there’s absolutely science behind the act of tracking your drinks. It creates sort of a, what we call a conscious interference. If you’re doing it in real time, it helps you pause and understand and kind of evaluate if you really want that next drink. I’ve also found that our customers will say that tracking their drinks they thought might’ve been kind of silly. or simple, but it turns out to be the most profound thing they’ve ever done when it comes to changing their behavior around alcohol. And before starting Sunnyside, I was tracking my drinks in an Excel spreadsheet and it was profound. helped me sort of map patterns over time for one, as a kind of a quantitative person, I liked to see things going down, but it also helped me start to correlate increases in drinking to things like stress, work, Ian Andersen (27:36.978) other behaviors and patterns in my life so that I could start to undo those correlations and start to be more proactive about how I could live a healthier life. Cheryl McColgan (27:47.526) one thing and I don’t know maybe I’ve missed it somehow because I haven’t been using the app in the same way lately but I think it’d be really and maybe it’s probably in there and I just don’t know so I want to ask the question if there’s a way to tag like for example Thanksgiving week like obviously Thanksgiving you feel like you’re around family it’s a festive time you might be extra stressed there’s a number of things happening there like if you can tag Ian Andersen (27:58.125) No, well. Ian Andersen (28:08.914) you Cheryl McColgan (28:10.476) Was it a party? Was it a night alone where I was stressed? Is there something in there like that and I’ve just missed it? Or is that a nice idea for a future upgrade? Okay. Ian Andersen (28:18.874) It’s a little bit of both, I would say. We actually just introduce notes, which is a way that you can, when you’re tracking your drinks for the previous day, you can add a little note in there. So that’s the most direct way that we have it at this point. We have a little bit of work to do to make that searchable and sort of mappable in a longer period of time. And we also have those, the ability that when you type in those notes, you can send them to a coach. so that the coach can respond to you and offer you sort of a real human touch when it comes to support. Great idea though, we will work on that. I will say, sort of in relation to that, we’re working on a complete revamp of our analytics and progress tab. So it’s one of those things that… Cheryl McColgan (28:51.406) you Ian Andersen (29:02.148) A lot of people have been telling us needs to improve. And I think a lot of people don’t realize how much they’ll use it once we have made it way better. And that’s actually going out into beta like as we speak. So we’re hoping that within a month or two, we have a fully refreshed analytics tab on the app. I don’t know about you, but like my whoop analytics are killer. I look at those every morning and with sunny side, we don’t want to, we don’t want people to like obsess about. Cheryl McColgan (29:25.154) Yep, same. Ian Andersen (29:29.924) alcohol because sometimes that can feel triggering to people. But we want to surface just the right data so that it’s motivating them on a daily basis to keep their quantities down and their healthy streaks alive. So we have some room to improve there and I think we’re going to crush it in the next couple of months. Cheryl McColgan (29:48.088) Well, that might be one of those questions you ask at the beginning, like, are you a data nerd or not? Because I will say one of the other things that’s been a great behavior modifier for me is the aura ring. And I just got my note. I think it was today that said I’ve been on it for two years, actually. And what I observe and people will know this if they’ve heard the Huberman podcast or if they’ve dug into a little bit, there’s like so many negative effects of alcohol, especially when you have it excessively. But one of the main ones is how much it affects your sleep. Ian Andersen (29:53.208) Orderly. Ian Andersen (29:59.537) Yes. Ian Andersen (30:03.612) Cool. Cheryl McColgan (30:16.11) And so I will notice on nights that I drink even, I mean, one is usually okay. But if I have two or more, my HRV, it’s like my, the ring thinks I’m dead, basically, it’s so bad. so it’s like, it’s like that is a really motivating thing to see. So that with being more mindful, because I think one of the things that you mentioned that I just want to call out for when people go to the link and they try the service is that I think it’s most effective when you track in real time. Ian Andersen (30:29.095) Thank Ian Andersen (30:33.447) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (30:46.38) And it’s kind of fun because you can just send like a little cocktail emoji on the text thread. And then it kind of gives you a message like, hey, think about whether you really need to have another one or something. Whereas I feel like if I wait until the next day, I kind of just do whatever I want, whether it’s one or three. And, you know, I’m not having that cognitive intervention. And I think that that’s really the main point. And maybe also sending text at like seven or eight o’clock at night. I think sometimes when I get the text, it’s either too early or too late to like have an effect. Ian Andersen (30:46.842) Nice. Ian Andersen (30:50.192) Yeah, you can. Ian Andersen (31:15.302) Yeah. Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (31:16.416) on my behavior. But anyway, that’s just a Cheryl thing that might not be for everybody. But it’s just kind of interesting because I think the most effective behavior interventions are when you can catch yourself in the act kind of like a dog or something. You know, got to like get it right then. Ian Andersen (31:27.068) I like that. I totally love that. I totally appreciate that. First of I just want to say you can actually adjust the timing of the messages now in your settings. Yes. Cheryl McColgan (31:37.174) Aha, so I need to do that. Okay, that’s good to know. And see, this is good, because when people try it, they’ll know that they can change these things. Where I’ve just been using it for so long, I kind of forget to even go in there and see what’s new. Ian Andersen (31:43.377) Yeah. Ian Andersen (31:47.17) Absolutely. I also find that tracking drinks in real time is more beneficial for me. But I also have a tendency that to not to try to like avoid it. So I think that tracking in real time can feel like a challenge for a lot of people. But to your point, if you can get that habit ingrained, it really will start to make change because you’ll become more conscious of the drinks that you’re having. And we do want you to do that at Sunnyside. We know that that’s actually the more scientific route is to track in real time. It creates that conscious interference. Although like you can’t always do that if you’re out at a party or something, you don’t. Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (32:23.916) Especially if you’re trying to be mindful, like be in the moment with your friends or something when you’re doing that. there is a little bit of a conflict there. But anyway, maybe there’s something else. Ian Andersen (32:28.049) Yes. Ian Andersen (32:32.628) but and I mean to that point, there’s so many strategies we can talk about about being mindful in the moment, such as rotating with non-alcoholic drinks. It’s the most simple thing. But probably my favorite when going into a social situation, I’m just going to drop this little nugget here, is to not have an alcoholic drink first. It sounds so simple, but when everyone else goes to order the first drink or pour the first drink, just don’t have alcohol. Cheryl McColgan (32:42.542) Mm-hmm. Ian Andersen (33:01.218) and let that first non-alcoholic drink just settle for 30, 40 minutes and take a chance to mindfully settle into the party or the vibe that you’re in and… It really changes the game in terms of feeling like I’m speaking for myself here because I have this sort of tendency of chasing the next drink. Cause once alcohol gets in my system, I’m like, okay, let’s go. Like, let’s get more alcohol. But if I can slow that down and kind of observe the world around me a little bit more, I might even decide just to not drink after that because a lot of us have a drink because of social anxiety, whether we think we do or not, it helps us settle into that situation. And if you don’t have a drink while everyone else is, you’ll realize you don’t really need that drink because everyone will start kind of vibing around you. that’s the one thing that I like it a lot. It’s like a little mini challenge. And if you decide you still want to have a drink after that, you haven’t really lost any time. You can still make it happen. Cheryl McColgan (33:51.275) Wow, love that tip. Cheryl McColgan (33:59.758) Yeah, I love it. Speaking of time, before we run out of time, I really would love to get to the part where you have this thing coming up in January, because when this airs, it will be in December, people will start thinking about New Year’s resolutions, and dry January has become such a thing that I’m sure that that will be on some people’s minds. So could you share how you guys are kind of celebrating January with your app? Ian Andersen (34:05.158) Yeah. Ian Andersen (34:14.267) Awesome. Ian Andersen (34:20.945) Yeah. Ian Andersen (34:25.744) Yeah, this time went by really fast. Absolutely. Cheryl McColgan (34:28.406) I have idea, I’ll have to have you back. Ian Andersen (34:31.014) I mean, yeah, there’s so much to dig into here and we can spend a whole 45 minutes on techniques, we could spend time on science in the future, but yes, dry January. So let me start by saying that 75 % of US adults will partake in dry January in one way or another. That’s what the last couple of years of surveys have said. And a lot of people are saying that because they’re like, yeah, I’m gonna cut back a little bit or I’m gonna… track my drinks in a spreadsheet. And I think most people say I’m going to do dry January and they fall off. And from what we’ve seen, people fall off around the day seven or day 10, just because you get to that first weekend and motivation starts lacking and it just becomes stressful. What we offer at Sunnyside is a system for doing dry January. So we call it our challenge and it changes the way that you start with Sunnyside. Normally what we would do is take your data and then propose a plan of sort of diminishing drinks over time. with the dry January challenge, you get to go right into a preset template of like a commitment for yourself. So the cool thing that we do at Sunnyside is we call it dry-ish January. And we want to offer you four or five different challenges that you can choose. The first is going fully dry. 32, I want to make sure I get this right, about 32 % of people that have done our challenges choose the fully dry path. The reason that’s so interesting is because a full 68 % actually opt to do the non-fully dry paths. And to me, this shows that when we talk about dry January as a dry challenge, that’s actually excluding so many people from even trying a challenge in January. What we want to do is make dryish January feel super inclusive to anybody that has an inkling that they might want to drink a little bit less. We’ll provide you a fully dry challenge if you want. We’ll provide you a where you can cut your drinks back by 50%, by 30%. There’s a challenge to only drink on Friday and Saturday night. We call that like the work night challenge. And then you can fully customize. And by doing this, we opened the top of the funnel as big as possible for people that want to make change. And we actually studied about 30,000 participants in our Dry Ice January challenge in the past. And we found that it didn’t matter which challenge you signed up for. You still saw a significant decrease in your drinking. Ian Andersen (36:52.506) over the course of that month. And that’s the crux of this is like, if you think that you want to make a change around your alcohol and you think that January might be the right time to do it, come join us for the sunny side, dryest January challenge. And you won’t be disappointed because we’re not going to pressure you to quit. We’re going to hold your hand. We’re going to give you tracking and planning tools. We’re going to give you a lively community where you can get support and have a little bit of fun chit chatting with people. And we also have real human coaches, but I just want to say it’s totally optional. A lot of people don’t want to chat with other humans around alcohol and that’s fine. And it’s also anonymous and discreet. So like you’re not going to see anybody that you know in this community. Also, Sunnyside has a 15 day free trial, which you will get for signing up for Dry Ice January. And after that, the subscription is only $99 a year. We do encourage you to try the annual plan, but if you want quarterly or monthly, just message your coach and we’ll make the switch for you. So. For less than the cost of one drink per month, one or two drinks per month, we will help you save money, live a healthier life, cut out some calories, improve your sleep, and never pressure you to quit drinking. So that’s the promise of Sunnyside. And we expect a huge number of people to start in January, and we’d love to have as many people as possible join. Cheryl McColgan (38:11.222) And two of those things that you just mentioned are especially relevant to this audience because a lot of people come to HealNursery around like weight loss kinds of things. And that is one of the things that I noticed around when I can’t, think you’ve always had this in there maybe with the app was it would say how many calories you’ve saved by not drinking that week. So if you’re looking to lose weight in the new year, cutting back on your alcohol is one really simple way to facilitate that process. You mentioned good sleep. What was the third thing? I lost it. Ian Andersen (38:18.961) Okay. Ian Andersen (38:27.91) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ian Andersen (38:41.382) Well, I have a whole list here. Yeah, yeah. So exactly. We have a customer that saved $23,000 on cutting back on alcohol after like two years of using Sunnyside. So once you get into it, the savings are real. I also want to say like people’s experience in much improved mental health and physical health as well. And I think mental health is one of the really important topic to me and probably you and a lot of other folks. Cheryl McColgan (38:41.856) was another really good one. Save money, save money. I mean, everybody wants to save money. That’s one of the better things too. Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (38:56.344) Wow. Ian Andersen (39:11.282) So you will experience a huge wealth of benefits from taking a step back from your drinking. And one of the coolest stats we have from this survey is that 92 % of participants, no, it’s even, higher than that. I think it was like 96 % said that they are going to continue using Sunnyside into February. So we want to make sure it’s not just a flash in the pan challenge where you slingshot back to your old habits. We want to make sure you put a lasting system in place. Cheryl McColgan (39:42.144) And like I said, I mean, I don’t know, I’d have to go back and look when I first signed up, but I’ve used it for at least two years, if not three or four, because I first, like I said, became aware of it during the pandemic. So I think it’s a super awesome tool. I love that you created this. I love how much you’re helping people with this. And yeah, thanks again for coming today. And so again, for the free trial, go to heelnourishgrow.com slash Sunnyside. Ian Andersen (39:48.562) Awesome. Cheryl McColgan (40:06.074) of final words of wisdom or do you have a personal social account where people can follow along with your fun times or any other links you want to mention? Ian Andersen (40:12.178) I wish I had time for that. You can follow us on Instagram or visit HealNourishgGrow.com/sunnyside . My personal bit of wisdom is if you, like you know if you should be seeking a healthy relationship without alcohol and if you’re feeling that inside of you, it’s not as scary as it sounds. We at Sunnyside will help you take baby steps. And we’re going to do it in such a kind way that I think you’re going to really appreciate having, having this like digital anonymous approach. So if you’re feeling it inside and this, this podcast is resonating with you. Come sign up. It’s our, it’s our passion and we’d love to have you join the community. Cheryl McColgan (40:56.908) Awesome. All right, thanks again so much and I hope to chat again with you in the future. Ian Andersen (41:00.732) Thanks so much, Cheryl.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

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Neuromodulation Tools for School and Work Performance: 99 56:57

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In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, Cheryl McColgan speaks with Guy Odishaw about the challenges faced by children in the school system. They discuss the impact of technology on children’s behavior, the rising incidence of ADHD , and the importance of regulating the brain to improve outcomes. Guy shares insights into innovative approaches to brain health, including the use of neuromodulation devices that help solve dysregulation in the brain, ultimately aiming to enhance focus and learning in children. Guy discusses the importance of moderating dysregulation in children to improve their learning outcomes. He highlights the positive effects of audio visual entrainment in educational settings, sharing success stories from schools that have implemented this technology. The conversation also addresses the challenges of sustaining such programs and the need for passionate advocates to drive change. Additionally, Guy explains how families can access this technology for home use and emphasizes the importance of integrating it into daily routines for maximum benefit. Find Guy at Cerebralfit.com Takeaways The school system is facing overwhelming challenges post-pandemic. Teachers are often left without adequate resources to manage classroom behavior. The rise in ADHD diagnoses is linked to various factors, including technology. Dopamine regulation is crucial for children’s behavior and learning. Neuromodulation devices can help regulate brain function effectively. Parents and teachers can benefit from brain regulation techniques. Simple interventions can lead to significant improvements in children’s focus and learning. Regulating dysregulation can significantly enhance learning outcomes. Audio visual entrainment has shown positive results in educational settings. Anxiety reduction leads to improved self-esteem and performance in students. Integrating technology into daily life can enhance its effectiveness. The rental program allows families to try the technology before purchasing. Positive changes in schools can lead to a more engaged classroom environment. Teachers’ stress levels decrease when students are well-regulated. The device can benefit multiple users in a household. Watch on YouTube Episode Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:00.826) Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Guy Otishaw. Easy for me to say, right? It should be easy to say because this is the third time that you’ve been on this show and happy to have you back. Before we get into the topic of the day, Guy, can you just share with everybody, I’ve read your official bio of course, like always, but could you just share a little bit of your background and how you got into this work and what makes you so passionate about helping people in the way that you do? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (00:30.23) Well, it’s great to be back. Thank you. So my background is primarily in integrative medicine and kind of two main tracks for me, my private practice as a practitioner, but then in some ways really my more full-time job, which is building clinics. My biggest clinic was a large integrative medicine clinic with 30 providers kind of across the spectrum of care from allopathic MDs all the way to energy work of various kinds and everything in between. And then my own private practice has been primarily kind of on the orthopedic side, pain, trauma, working on the body. But then over time, I got interested in bioelectric medicine. And then that led me down the path of bioelectric medicine. And then that led me to brains in particular. And now I spend most of my time working directly on the brain with neuroimaging. neurofeedback, neurostimulation, neuromodulation. so, so now my private practice and my clinic life are much more similar as I’ve kind of dropped the big integrative clinic and moved to a more focused, you know, kind of brain centric bioelectric medicine specific approach for brain health. Cheryl McColgan (01:49.168) Yeah, love that. the fact that you’ve done so much work with these clinics and have that background, I think makes you really uniquely positioned to have a lot of knowledge across various subjects. And when we chatted before about what we wanted to talk about today, because you are such a wealth of knowledge, but I thought that the topic that you proposed was really good because it has to, almost everybody has a child in their life in some way, whether it’s a niece, a nephew, their own child. something like that, somebody they know is probably in school in some capacity. And one of the programs that you’ve been working on has been with children specifically. And certainly since the pandemic, there has been a lot of changes in schools, a lot more stress in schools in a lot of ways. And the teachers are fighting a lot of this too. So I’d it if you could just share some of the things just more broadly now in the school system. What are their challenges? what kinds of things are children experiencing, and then we’ll get into obviously kind of the ways that you deliver the brain health part, how you can actually help them with some of these methods that you have. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (02:57.304) Yeah, it’s a favorite topic of mine and program that we’re developing at the clinic. So I’ll, you know, go back. I don’t know. You know, I have a mantra, don’t do the math, right? I’ll go back about 40 years. But when I was first in college, I went in for education and I got, I don’t know, about three years into the program. So far enough where I was doing internships, so was out in the schools. And I learned very early on that I was not wired to be in the elementary school setting. Like, it was just clear, like, hey, nope, this isn’t gonna go for me, it’s not gonna go well for the children. So I moved on to then post-secondary or secondary and then had a similar realization there that, nope, still, this is not a good match. Eventually… into adult education and then that’s where I was like, okay, this is my place. I can have a reasoned conversation with my students and that worked for me personally. So what that gives me is an immense respect for the people who can be in the classroom, know, K through 12 really, but we tend to focus a lot on K to eight. Cheryl McColgan (03:56.614) You Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (04:21.302) And so I’ve always had that, right? The thing that I couldn’t do, immense respect for the people who do it. But now when I listen to my clients who are teachers and friends and neighbors, but mostly the detailed stories I hear from my clients and what an average teacher puts up with today is so far removed. from my worst day in the classroom, which today any of the teachers would beg to have that be like their best day isn’t that good. And so again, hard for me to imagine that these folks get up and go back to work every day and do what they do with what they have to deal with in a classroom in terms of behavior and. And not that any of it is considered acceptable. It’s just the ability to try and manage it. And what are the resources that a teacher can call on, whether that’s parental involvement, administrative involvement. The problem has outscaled the available resources. that’s what we hear over and over and over again from teachers is the overwhelm. Cheryl McColgan (05:45.166) And I mean, I’m sure people can imagine that there’s any number of things from behavior, but the reasons for behavior I think might be a little bit interesting to go into because one of the things that I’ve heard from previous guests and that I have seen data on it myself is that the incidence of ADHD is climbing as is people that are on the autism spectrum. And all of those things kind of come along with behavioral challenges for sure and sometimes severe enough that it puts them in a Individualized education program kind of situation. So that’s a little different They might be in a classroom with other kids Are there other things outside of those two things that I just mentioned that teachers are experiencing? Is it? That the parents are involved in a different way or the kids are acting a different way or is they’re on their phones all the time What’s what’s the thing that you kind of hear the most that makes it more challenging for them? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (06:41.974) Yeah, yeah, I mean it’s it’s so multifactorial with sometimes small but sometimes large shifts across many different points in the average child’s life and and so everything you just said But there’s so many variables within that, you know, so it’s I think it’s too easy to simply shift towards the parents and just say, all of this lands at you. Or as maybe certainly teachers would say, or anybody in the school system would say, too often it’s the other way. It’s oriented towards the school and to the teacher and saying, this is all on you. And you’re the origin of the problem and you need to be the origin of the solution, figure it out. And so we tend to have this kind of back and forth teachers pointing to the family and the families pointing to the teacher. And there’s truth in all of that. So, I mean, there’s just so much research we could go through around what seems to be the explanation for the changes we’re seeing. As you mentioned, the increase in kind of diagnoses of various conditions. So on one hand, yes, I want to hold that as valid. But on the other hand, I think we have to look at this is too much of a common approach in our culture is to put a diagnostic code on something, make it a pathology, make it a condition, and then want to treat it. for the cases where that’s true, Absolutely. But we need to, you know, really be able to pull apart the places where, you know, a child doesn’t need a diagnostic label. They need something else. But so some of the great the research, Jonathan Hayes research on the impact of the smartphone. So social media and that. mean, I think the the research there, the statistics. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (09:01.484) I think it’s undeniable how big of an effect we could argue over that, but it’s a significant impact that it has had on Again on the in terms of the person it isn’t across one system We can’t just say it’s attentional like it. it’s just it’s what’s led to this ADHD epidemic No, because it is it’s about the person’s kind of self-esteem It’s about their reward system. Like we see this so much in the brain clinic in when we’re looking at brain imaging and we’re seeing just this reoccurring pattern in mostly children. We see it in adults, but it is much higher prevalence in our younger clients. Is this dysregulation in… What we could shorthand is say kind of the reward system or the self-regulation system. And it maps very well from what happens to us when we engage in kind of modern technology, screens, social media, but it isn’t only that. We could talk about the gaming and the gaming doesn’t have to be kind of the first person shooter. type game that people get all excited about, it could be Wordle or, you know, anything where that device becomes your primary form of engagement and it’s driving the dopamine system. And people are disproportionately spending more time engaged with their device because of how it’s driving the dopamine system, the pleasure system, the reward system. Then they’re not doing the other things they need to be doing right so if you know it’s parent It’s a parent on the device. It’s the parent not parenting if it’s the child on the device. It’s the child not childing and Right, so I mean this is this is It’s massive. I mean and I’ll just so my my family was just here Cheryl McColgan (10:50.833) You Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (10:59.864) visiting, so my adult children and the grandchildren. And I would have these moments, I’d walk into the room and so the whole family sitting in the living room and everybody’s on a device. And I was like, wow, like in my own home. Right? Cheryl McColgan (11:09.734) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (11:16.452) Yeah, it’s unbelievable. It’s almost I have honestly almost given up at this point because it’s almost impossible to be in a group and to not have at least somebody in the group on their phone at some point, which is which is just a really sad state of affairs. But before we move on with that, I want to go back to something that you said about dopamine because it reminded me I heard an interview recently and they were talking about the dopamine system. I think it was an addiction conversation actually. And Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (11:22.36) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (11:44.036) the person said, and it was something I had never really thought of it in this way before for some reason, but it’s something so simple. And it’s just that we have gotten with all these devices and online shopping and all these very addictive type behaviors that we, it’s all available with no work. Like before, at least to get a dopamine hit, you had to work for it a little bit. Like maybe you had to go for a long run or something to get your dopamine hit, but now you literally just click buttons or somebody likes. you know, like something on your social media or whatever, and people are just getting these dopamine hits all the time with no work involved. And I think that that disconnect from the work and the reward is maybe at the crux of how we go after it. I don’t know. What do you think about that? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (12:29.272) Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think the no work thing and That this is a system like any other system in the body and it can fatigue it will adapt to its environment and so if if and it’s not if but You know when people engage in these activities that deliver them dopamine You know free right just moment after moment after moment after moment, can scroll, scroll, scroll. if, if, you know, if Tik Tok runs out of dopamine for you, you can switch to the next platform and then to the next platform and, know, just keep, juicing the system. Well, the system starts to break down. Right. That, that we get, we get a dopamine fatigue. And so then the, you know, there’s a need for more and there’s the dysregulation, you know, downstream from when that core mechanism starts to go awry. Cheryl McColgan (13:04.774) Right. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (13:25.91) So yeah, there’s so much right in this system right here. It could be enough to say, okay, if all we did was focus on fixing this, we would have a large demonstrable positive effect on culture, society, and then here, we’re talking about schools, on what’s happening in schools. If we just change this mechanism, But of course, that’s not the only mechanism. There’s many at play. But it’s part of what makes this conversation, I mean, it’s an important conversation, a good one, a challenging one. And part of the challenge is there’s this tendency to kind of want to make everything down to a single variable. Like we have this idea culturally of a silver bullet. Like there’s one solution, right? And So we have that mentality, like somehow we could solve the problem of education or the quality of life in our schools, outcomes for our children through some singular magic fix. no, that’s just no. Not true. Yeah, exactly. And we really need to have this. There’s all of these. Cheryl McColgan (14:43.59) I know, we wish it did. We wish he just had a magic wand to make it better. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (14:52.312) issues going on. And then, you know, we come with a very, like, our clinic comes with a very specific place where we engage, and we help solve one of the thousand issues. It happens to be that ours is fairly far up in the stream, which is, you know, what we say in our clinic, our mantra is we regulate dysregulation. So we could take a lot of the specifics we get into, say we’re talking about the dopamine network, but there’s also the self-esteem and there’s just so many different aspects of self. If we regulate the dysregulation in the brain, that’s very much a kind of a catch-all for all of those different subsystems that we could talk about that might be going on to the attention system, the reward system, the, again, self-efficacy. just, you know, cognitive function, like just pure, intelligence and how well any one brain can navigate the landscape of school academically, but also socially. So when we regulate the brain, we actually get a lot of value out of that because it’s not a singular intervention at a behavior. Right. Right. Kind of out on the surface where. regulating the mechanism that is the architect of all behavior. And so, and then also, it isn’t just for students. We encourage teachers to use these devices to help regulate their nervous systems. We encourage parents to use them. the goal is, again, we say, our ideal client is anybody with a brain. That’s a pretty large population. So if we look at all of it is for everybody, it’s the toothbrush for the brain. But if we look at all of the people involved, if all of those people were more well regulated, that would have a dramatic positive impact. Cheryl McColgan (16:52.198) Sort of. Sometimes. No, all kidding aside, it’s for everyone. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (17:18.858) on the entire process. So even though we fully acknowledge we’re coming in with one solution to a multivariate problem, it is a solution that actually has a lot of downstream positive effects. And that’s part of why we’re passionate about it is this simple intervention can have a massive positive impact. And it’s been shown, I there’s decades of research You know in general across healthcare for neuromodulation And I should just say just to take takes out of any sense of mystery here Primarily what I’m talking about is a device that does audiovisual entrainment so it’s a neuromodulation device that uses light and sound and a microcurrent to modulate the central and autonomic nervous system very very simple benign harmless I tell my clients, you couldn’t hurt yourself with one of these unless you trip over it. it’s giving the body the inputs, the body is, been doing for as long as bodies have been bodies, right? It’s taking light, which we all use light to function. uses sound. We use sound to function. And then we are chemical electric beings. electricity is part of our makeup. So delivering a bio identical electrical current is is all stuff that the body is 100 % uses all day, every day to function. So we’re not putting in some synthetic, exogenous force that might compromise the system, which is more like you could think like pharmaceutical. We’re going to put in a synthetic chemical that is going to impact Part of the system positively and then part of the system not so positively, hence side effects. We’re all familiar with that model. What we’re talking about here is just using natural functions of the body to help regulate the system. So it’s a benign intervention. They’re low cost. They cost about $600. But that we’re regulating the brain, that’s Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (19:44.268) That’s why it has high impact. Cheryl McColgan (19:47.18) Do you find that people are generally more accepting of this kind of program because it doesn’t really require them to sort of do anything really they just put on this device and I’m picturing I don’t know you’ll have to describe it to me because it’s so far in my head I’m picturing like some kind of you know helmet kind of situation that they put on their head but maybe you can describe the device a little bit and speak to you know the ease of use if that’s helping some of the results because there’s not a big barrier to getting people to say meditate every day for example. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (20:17.43) Right. So a couple of things in there. I’ll quickly describe the device. So it’s set of glasses that have pulsing lights, headphones that have pulsing sound or binaural beats, and then ear clips that have a microcurrent. So that’s what we’re doing. So you put it on, like, yeah. Most people, kind of laugh. They’re like, I look ridiculous. It’s like, yeah. But so, you know. Cheryl McColgan (20:48.784) Maybe you can get a photo that I can clip into the video at some point, just so people can see what it looks like. That would be awesome. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (20:52.428) Definitely We’ll get you that but and also and Glad thank you for saying that is I will send you some of the the documentation that we give to clients around IEP programs for school funding and We’re we’re in Minnesota. So all of our stuff is geared around what’s available in Minnesota, but some of the programs are federal but even What I would encourage, even if a person isn’t in the state of Minnesota, is your state likely has a program like this, even though the name might be different and some of the particulars might be different. But what we provide our families, teachers, school administrators with are kind of a… template that allows them to access county, state, or federal funds to help either buy these devices for a school so that they’re in the school, students can access them there or staff, or some of the programs will pay for these devices for the family to have. So it’ll go home with the student. So I’ll get you those as well. So you can put it in the show notes and people can download them there and take a look at this information. So we’ve had social workers who navigate these programs to help get their clients assistive technology. We use the same pathway that they might say get an iPad for a student to get this assistive technology. Same process. So we’ll get that information. Yeah, so the device, it is kind of goofy, but once you have it on, you can’t see yourself. yeah, exactly. You don’t know how ridiculous you look. And then the other part of that, of course, is the effect. When people start to experience the effect, that goes a long way in counterbalancing. Cheryl McColgan (22:44.006) So you’re like, you may feel ridiculous, but you won’t have to look at yourself doing it. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (23:01.77) the like, have to put this thing on and wear it for 30 minutes a day or, know, and the 30 minutes a day isn’t a, you know, an all encompassing, accurate treatment plan is highly variable depending on the person and what’s the nature of the dysregulation and, you know, but a common one for students. So let’s say the issue is focus and concentration for whatever reason, lots of things bring out, you know, focus and concentration. could be ADHD, could be anxiety, could be post-concussive syndrome, you know, there’s any number of reasons why people have attention challenges. So you can, the device, you can get a set of see-through glasses. This is a very common thing we do with our students who have attentional issues, is we’ll have them wear the device when they’re doing their homework. And you see, like, within minutes, and this is the thing that… It’s hard for people to believe until they see it. As you can take a child who’s got attention difficulties and have them read a paragraph and maybe they get three sentences and they’re already distracted. But you get them through the paragraph and say, what did you read? And they can’t really tell you. We put the glasses on and then they read three pages and they can tell you what they read. And that that’s the difference. we, we know from neuroimaging that within three minutes, the device is changing brainwaves. Right. So we, we know that it works. People are, you know, find that difficult to believe that, you know, it’s like they’ve spent, you know, five years where school has been difficult and they can’t do it. And now all of a sudden I put on this device and. I can read and comprehend what’s going on. And it’s really just a simple matter. Again, regulating dysregulation. We can get incredibly, you know, complicated in describing the nature of the dysregulation, where it is, what form is it, and, you know, a theta gamma, you know, phase amplitude coupling issue. Sure. mean, there’s all kinds of that exists and that’s the work we do in the clinic. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (25:16.748) But the simple form is, if we regulate the dysregulation, we can improve function. That’s it. It’s that simple. And so this is one of the ways we use the device is simply that to help children be able to do their homework faster. more accurately have better retention, less anxiety, a better outcome. And when you start to iterate that, if you can take away that anxiety of I have homework and I’m not going to understand it, it’s going to be frustrating, and I’m probably going to have a fight with my mom or my dad around it. But then that doesn’t happen. Or again, without. being overly dramatic, let’s say there’s, in the beginning there’s less of a fight about it and the struggle is less of a struggle and the outcome is a little bit better. But when that iterates day after day after day, what we see in not that long, weeks, months, there isn’t the fight to do the homework. The homework gets done, it gets done well, there’s retention. Anxiety goes down, self-esteem goes up, performance in school, it translates into school. In schools where they have students wear these devices, and we have schools, mostly special ed smaller classrooms, but it doesn’t have to be limited to that, where they’ll have the students wearing the device in the classroom when they’re doing certain projects together as a group. And we see exactly the same thing happen there, where the challenges that the students had, the resistance, the acting out because of the anxiety about having to do the math or the reading or the, you name the activity for any given student, that’s anxiety producing. Regulate the nervous system. They go into the activity with less distress, less acting out. They do better at it. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (27:26.37) There’s more learning that happens, which means just that in and of itself is going to mean they’re going to do better the next time, and they’re going to have less anxiety, more learning, better outcome. When you have that additive across all 10 students in the room, what you get is a classroom that functions more like what we all would like to see an optimal classroom be, which is students are generally, you know, well regulated, they’re cooperative, they’re excited, they’re curious, they’re engaged in the activity, there’s more positive social interaction, that becomes reinforcing for the whole, you know, collective activity of school, and then that has an effect on the teacher. When the teacher is is managing a classroom of more well regulated students that teachers stress level goes down They show up with you know more of the goods more resilience So now they have more to bring to the classroom and they have students more able to receive that and the whole collective moves forward and more of what we want from the educational process happens. Cheryl McColgan (28:44.762) Yeah, that sounds like the ideal scenario. I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t want that. If you’re what you’re describing is like school Nirvana basically, right? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (28:54.983) Absolutely. and, and but this is the thing, like, like, like you said, like, who wouldn’t want that? So I mentioned before we came on air about the this program that ran in Minnesota, about 20 years ago. And it was a, as often these projects in schools are, it was a passionate teacher who was aware of this technology. advocated to bring it into the school, put together a group of people here locally, specialists. They implemented what was going to be a study, it turned out, I mean, the study was very positive. The program lasted a number of years. So what the program was doing is using audio visual entrainment in schools. So they would use it in various ways, but much the way I described it, know, groups of students in a classroom doing audio visual entrainment in the class as a group. And when they measured the, you know, the various statistics, the outcomes, academic, social, you know, parental happiness, teacher happiness, measure all the statistics. everything improved. This is great. There’s just no doubt there is a cross the board positive effect here. And not just on one test, they followed these students for the years of the program and they continued to excel through their academic career. So everything about it positive. When the teacher retired, the school ended the program. And to this day, now we’re kind of picking up 20 years later where they left off. when we saw the statistics and saw what was happening in our own client population, we went to the people who did this work and said, what happened? How did this not just become, at least in this school, the… Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (30:58.048) a norm that got iterated across all classrooms and all grades and has maintained. And it’s this strange phenomena that happens and we’re all familiar with it. Like we know, we’ve been told ever since I was old enough to realize I was being taught anything, I’ve been taught the value of exercising, eating well and exercising, right? Lifestyle medicine. how many of us actually do it, right? As a population, we’re immersed in this information from birth on, we’re surrounded by it, but how many people actually exercise 30 minutes a day and eat zero processed food and minimize their carbs and maximize their protein? Like, like. 0.001 % of the population. Cheryl McColgan (31:57.03) It’s a very small number. I know that I heard a recent stat about how many people regularly exercise and it was astonishingly low to me. I want to say under 20 % of people that exercise on regular basis and I was just really blown away by that. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (32:14.314) Right. So if these basic things that are self-evident, we don’t need randomized double-blinded placebo control studies to know that getting some exercise is better than not getting exercise. And again, I’m not talking about ultramarathon. The choice isn’t sit on the couch or do a triathlon. It’s sit on the couch or You know, look, go walk a couple of blocks, right? Like that’s where we’re at, right? And we just cannot get that adopted at scale. Or again, a simple thing of highly processed food is not good for us. Self-evident. don’t, we have the studies. But we don’t really need the studies to, and we can see that having the studies doesn’t change behavior. People always say, well, guy, what’s the evidence for this? Well, there’s 60 years of evidence, right? But the evidence doesn’t change behavior. So there’s just like a, you know, we have. encultured a, I don’t even know what exactly to say, right? Just kind of a resistance to doing what’s good for us, no matter how it comes packaged. And that’s our biggest challenge. And that’s what we face with this program. And again, back to that example of here’s a school where they’re doing it and we’re seeing positives across the board, right? No negative side effects. No adverse effects not a single one Positive change you would think this is a natural like this school will just continue this program. Nope Soon as the teacher was not there to advocate for it it ended and and we see the same thing today I mean we’re getting better uptake right that they were able to get it implemented in one school Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (34:11.448) You know, we’re probably in five or six schools right now. And so that’s good in the sense of uptake is better. But it’s still the same thing. It’s because there’s somebody in that school that is passionate about this. And they are tearing down the barriers and implementing it through just sheer will. And that’s great, but I have no doubt the moment that person stops being a passionate advocate, the momentum, right? really the inertia for status quo will, you know, these devices will be sitting in a shelf someplace and nobody will ever look at them again. And it won’t be because there isn’t science or because they don’t work. It’ll be because of an inertia that is just not about doing what’s good for us. Cheryl McColgan (34:50.256) Take care. Cheryl McColgan (35:05.328) which is a really sad statement. But I’m sure some people will be hearing, there’ll be probably two or three different kinds of people hearing this. There’s gonna be one that’s gonna be a teacher, hopefully, and hear this and be like, my gosh, I need to get this started in my school. So we’ll have that resource that you mentioned in the show notes where they can learn more about the program, get in touch with you if they need to, for example. And then I can see some other people that are gonna be like, okay, I don’t have time to try to. implement this in my school, but I have kids and I think this would really help them. If they can’t go through one of these federal programs where it’s more related to a school for funding, is this something that they can buy at the Cerebral Fit website or if they reach out to you, can they learn more about how to get this device so that they can at least implement it in their own home? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (35:50.725) Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So they can purchase them. They’re easily available online, whether it’s through the CerebroFit site or… the Bakhti Brain Health Clinic. So that’s my kind of brick and mortar here in Minnesota where we’re doing these school programs through the Bakhti Brain Health Clinic. So available there. think the site is Tech4Brains with the number four in their Tech4Brains. So the devices are easily available. We sell them. So $600 for a basic one. you put… some like add in the see-through glasses, add in a few other accessories that can be helpful in certain instances, you’re still all in at about $750. Not expensive at all considering the significance of what it can do in terms of changing a life course. And it isn’t really a single user device. So often there are multiple children in the home, there are adults, and everybody can use the device. again, where we see the best outcomes is, again, regulate a whole household, not just one person, right? One more well-regulated person in the midst of an otherwise dysregulated environment, not as good as regulate the whole environment, and everybody moves forward more fully than if presumed that, you know… You know, our one child is struggling in school. So they’re, you know, they’re the problem that we’re going to fix. Like that’s, that’s again, that kind of pathological approach where we really prefer more of a positivistic approach, which is just optimize the brain, no matter who you are. Right. You’ll do better with a brain that does better period. Right. Cheryl McColgan (37:44.614) Now, say you’re a fairly regulated person versus a fairly dysregulated person, just naturally or by the nature of your brain or by the nature of the other behaviors you do, maybe to exercise the meditation. You are one of those 1.001 % of people that are doing things. Say you bring that into your house. Theoretically, is the person that’s already more regulated, I mean, they’ll still benefit, but maybe they don’t need as much time on it, or is it kind of a time and dose? response or is it more like if you’re severely dysregulated you might want to do it a few times a day kind of thing? Can you talk a little bit about how it works as far as the regulation? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (38:17.272) Yeah. Yeah, I’m to say one other thing about the acquisition. So we also have a rental program that is also a rent to own program. It’s kind of like a payment program. So people can rent a device for $75 a week. And that gives them a chance to try it. And the question there isn’t so much is it going to work, because a week is not a lot of time to know. The question is, am I going to do it? That’s first question a person needs to ask. They get this thing. They take it out, they put it on, they go, this is ridiculous. I will never do this. Pack it up, send it back. Great. You just saved, yeah, you saved $525. That was brilliant. But if they’re like, yeah, OK, this isn’t so bad, right? I’ll do this. Then you run with it for a couple of weeks. And then you can start to ask the question of, does this seem to be helping? Yes, great. Then just make the payments, pay it off, and away you go. So we really try and take. Cheryl McColgan (38:55.058) That’s awesome. Right. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (39:19.042) you know, money as a barrier and minimize it as much as we can to make it so people can try the technology to see if it helps. whether you purchase it or do a rental, there are options. And then again, the kind of different financing through the school systems. And I’m sure there are others. People can use county like caddy waivers, disability waivers, so all kinds of options. Now back to your question. protocol. The device has 25 different protocols on it. so there’s some, you know, kind of getting to sense of like which, which of the 25 is kind of right for me. some experimenting there, they vary in time from maybe the shortest at seven minutes to the longest at 80 minutes. So there’s a little bit there, in terms of a protocol and time. and then how often, you know, these are more challenging questions, right? Cause so much of this is going to be driven by personality more than rationality. Right, like what I might articulate. And my big believer in the optimum treatment plan is the one the person will do, not the one I can think up. Right? And so if a person is willing to put in, let’s say, 30 minutes a day, then great. Like if that’s what they’re willing to do, there’s no sense in me saying I need you to do it 30 minutes twice a day because you’re not going to do it. Right? So. Cheryl McColgan (40:43.558) Right. And is this something that people could do? Like say I’m sitting here editing our video for the channel or I’m doing some other kind of work. Could I have it on then or could I be on the treadmill walking for a half an hour while I have this thing on? Talk to people about like how to have it stack it or how to integrate it into their day. Because I think no matter whether it’s a device or meditation or whatever it is, if you can kind of glom it onto something else and multitask as much as we hate to do that. probably for our brains would be better if we just like chill out every once in a while. But realistically, if we want people to do this, they’ll probably feel like they need to be doing something else. So if you can just chat about that a little bit, is it as effective or are there certain activities that pair better than others kind of thing? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (41:15.298) would be. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (41:26.402) Yeah, yeah, great question. So this is very much the frame that I use when talking with clients is it needs to be integrated into a lifestyle. And if we do that, we can be successful. So yes, the see-through glasses, although they’re really made for task-based activity where you’re trying to increase performance in that activity, you can use them in other places. So again, you could be on the treadmill. you could be on the computer. do it frequently. I will, my team, you know, has, has, they’re all like finished laughing at me for my different ridiculous things that I do. you know, I’ve got a nasal laser in my nose and you know, these goopy glasses on and maybe a, know, a red light mouth guard in and there’s like whatever guy, you know, sure. So if I’m in a, in a zoom meeting and it’s just Cheryl McColgan (42:11.494) You Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (42:23.446) You know, one of those meetings where you have to be there, but it’s not all that exciting. I will put my glasses on and put it on kind of a brain brightener, you know, like a stimulating protocol to help me stay more engaged in the meeting. And it’s just that simple. so there’s any number of places that we can kind of weave it into our day. And I’ll give you great example. So for, I don’t know, a few years, my wife had a Cheryl McColgan (42:36.198) Mm-hmm. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (42:53.464) audiovisual entrainment system sitting next to her on her nightstand and wouldn’t use it. And it was the, had the opaque glasses, the non see-through glasses and the chances of her taking 30 minutes out of her day and laying down and doing nothing and doing a treatment, clearly zero, like 0 % chance she was ever going to do that. She’s just not wired that way. I’m a meditator. So for me to take 30 minutes and do a session, no problem, right? Like I’m wired to do that and it’s part of my day. For her, no. So then I got the see-through glasses for her. Well now, she’ll happily put it on in the morning when she’s having her coffee and tootling around the new sites and Facebooking with friends. So that was it. That was the solution, was find her a way that she could do it while she was doing something else. Now doing a treatment every day isn’t a problem. So yeah, I’m very much a believer in if you figure out how you as an individual are going to integrate this and then that’s what you do. Yeah, turn it into a part of the routine, part of a ritual, part of a habit, and then it gets done. again, so I’m, although I can be prescriptive and say, well, given what you’re going on in the the symptoms and all of these things. This is the protocol you should do and you should do it like this and great. But again, if the person isn’t gonna do that, then that whole activity was a waste of time. And so I really work more with people from what are they willing to do? What can we get? Because the nice thing about the device is, as I said, 25 protocols, there’s nine different benefits one gets. from doing audiovisual entrainment, eight of the benefits are the same across all 25 protocols. So you get the bulk of the benefit regardless of the protocol you do. The ninth thing that is protocol specific is kind of the state. So it puts you into more of an energized state, more of an alert, aroused state, or more of a relaxed awareness state, or more of a meditative internal state. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (45:16.632) And then we go down the scale like even more into kind of a drifty dreamy state and then sleep. So state is this other piece. And, that’s fairly simple. If a person is, is like, you know, I’m doing this before going to school as a way to optimize school. Does that person need, you know, more arousal? Does their system need to be, kind of boosted or are they the opposite? That what they need is actually to be calmed and settled. to make their school day better. Then we just pick the protocol that has that state effect, but the other eight benefits you get no matter what protocol. So the way we can make the whole process simple, and I’ll say, you person doesn’t have to do the glasses, the headphones and the ear clips all the time. You can pick and choose. So if the glasses are, it’s not an appropriate place and it would be easy to have earbuds in and just do the binaural beats. do that, that’s nice and easy. And then the other one is the transcranial stimulation, the ear clips. Again, super simple to just run that wire up your shirt, clip it on your ears, put the device in your pocket, and just go about your day doing whatever you’re doing. Again, you can have a student sitting in a classroom doing the transcranial stimulation with zero interference in what they’re doing in terms of classwork and what’s required of them physically. Cheryl McColgan (46:46.49) Yeah, amazing. This sounds so useful. So you already mentioned your various websites a couple of times, but to wrap it all up here at the end, again, we mentioned that all of this will be in the show notes, but you can use share with people where they can find you. You mentioned you’re in Minneapolis if they happen to be in that area, but where can they find you online? Are you active on any social channels and what’s the best way they can get in touch with you? Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (47:07.64) Sure. So the Bhakti Brain Health Clinic, so this is a mouthful. So bhaktibrainhealthclinic.com. What might be easier for folks is cerebralfit.com. So just cerebralfit.com. So either of those sites, you’ll find my direct number, direct email. So you can reach out that way. We have a free consult that we do with folks. So you can book that right online on either one of those sites. And so if this holds interest for you, or if you’re a teacher or a school administrator or a parent who has a child in a school and you feel like this is something you might want to bring to the school, perfect. Like reach out, let’s schedule a consult. Let’s talk about what makes sense again, either for your personal, you know, regulating the dysregulation, or maybe you think that you’re fine, but other people need it and you would like to help bring it to them. Great. Either way. Cheryl McColgan (48:12.838) Either way, you should still probably use it yourself too, right? Well, Guy, as always, it has been such a pleasure chatting with you and thank you so much for sharing about this technology and how it can help both students and teachers. I personally feel like this should just be a federal program. It should be in every school and maybe we’ll get there eventually, but thank you for doing the work that you do to kind of make those things happen. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (48:16.192) Yeah, exactly. Guy Odishaw, CerebralFit (48:36.684) Well, thank you, Cheryl. It was a delight chatting with you again. I look forward to more. Cheryl McColgan (48:41.03) Sounds good, thank you.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Gain Muscle, Lose Fat, Feel Better With Just Two Days a Week? 48:22

17 weeks fa48:22

48:22

In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, I share my journey of returning to strength training after a long hiatus. The importance of strength training for longevity and health span, the benefits of starting at any age, and how to overcome common barriers to consistency are topics in this solo episode. I provide practical tips for getting started, understanding progressive overload, and the significance of workout frequency in gaining muscle. I discuss the role of nutrition in supporting strength training goals and resources to find reliable resources for effective training. Science Backed YouTube Channels: Renaissance Periodization with Dr. Mike Israetel , Dr. Menno Henselmans , Dr. Milo Wolfe and Jeff Nippard . Newbie Gains: https://youtu.be/om7ow5PFhSE How to Maximize Muscle Growth: https://youtu.be/55nfFfWXSTM Hume Body Composition Scale, Big Black Friday Discount Plus Code HEALNOURISHGROW stacks on top ! Takeaways Strength training is crucial for maintaining bone density as we age. Starting strength training early in life can have long-term benefits. Progressive overload is essential for muscle growth. You can achieve significant results with just two workouts a week. Body weight exercises are a great way to begin strength training at home. Nutrition, including carb intake (GASP), supports muscle growth and recovery. Finding reliable sources of information can enhance your training effectiveness. Strength training is more effective for fat loss than cardio alone. Tracking body composition can provide motivation and insight into progress. Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here . CONNECT WITH CHERYL Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts ! 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight Dry Farm Wines, extra bottle for a penny Drinking Ketones Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life Clean Beauty 20% off first order DIY Lashes 10% off NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life Facebook YouTube Pinterest TikTok Amazon Store Getting Started with Keto Resources The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide Watch on YouTube Episode Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:01.346) Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I want to share with you some things I’ve learned when going back to gym over the last 16 months. I guess what I really wanted to share is that I know a lot of people are going to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions here soon and you know that I usually do some content towards the end of the year and the beginning of the new year around diet, around exercise, about… tips and tricks and things that you can do to make these things easier if you are adding these into your life. And so this has been a lot on my mind lately because I just made a change at the gym and I’ll kind of go a little backwards and share with you just some of the things that I’ve been learning, what has helped me stay consistent and if you’re going to start doing this in the new year, some things that you can do to hopefully make it easier for yourself and not make some of the same mistakes that I did going back. So, Just to give a little bit of background for those of you that may be new here, I’ve talked about this and shared this a bit in the past. I’ve been super active my whole life. I was a runner for 17 years, had to quit that because of my knees and I love hiking and anything outdoors. I am very excited to do and love doing. I walk almost every day outside. But what I haven’t done consistently over the years is lift weights. And there’s just been more and more content and research coming out lately around the benefits of lifting and strength training as far as longevity and just better daily life and the ability to live a better life into your old age. And I know if you’re out there and you’re younger and you’re listening to this, you might not think that you need to start thinking about this now, but the sooner that you can implement this in your life and get it started, the better. There’s actually research showing that. Children in particular and young adults like building as much muscle as you can when you’re younger can actually help you when you get older because if you even take time off from those things from strength training and stuff at some point in your life and you come back to it if you had built a lot of muscle at a much younger age, then it’s so much easier to get it back. So there’s that. So even if you’re younger and then also there’s just, you know, being the ability to Cheryl McColgan (02:16.492) be fit and do more things when you’re young before you have all these aches and pains and issues that you tend to have when you get older. So caring for your body when you’re young as much as possible is a really good practice to do no matter what your goals are. And then if you are already older though, it is never too late to make some changes to help your joints, to help you feel better, to help you feel stronger and ultimately help you have a better quality of life. So the history with lifting is I actually first started lifting when I was playing basketball in the eighth grade. This is going way back here into the eighties and we had a weight bench in our garage. My dad had always lifted weights. So it wasn’t foreign to me, even though this was not a thing at a time. It wasn’t like the women’s sports teams were like they are now where I think just about every sports team, men or women in high school do some sort of strength training in the gym. And I think that is so amazing and something that I wish had been more prevalent when I was younger. If I had my teammates to do it and stuff, maybe I would have stuck with it longer. But so I did that sporadically. And then as an adult, when I was married the first time around, we also had a weight bench in our basement. And I would go through phases where I would do that fairly consistently for a few weeks. Usually what would happen is I’d get injured because I probably wasn’t doing it right or I was doing it too much or I was running in addition to that at the time. I’m playing a ton of golf. So I would quit for extended periods of time. So it’s not like I’m totally foreign to lifting, but I’ve never done it consistently through my whole life. And then over the last several years, as I’ve become more focused on Heal, Nourish, Grow, and producing this content all around health and wellness and writing articles and doing research and more and more research about how to live better, how to feel better, all those sorts of things, what has been coming more to the forefront and what is particularly in the forefront in social media these days is strength training and particularly in women in perimenopause or menopausal age because they’re just finding that bone density in that age group is really poor. And the problem is once you get to be that age, it’s not impossible to reverse it, but we’d be so much better off if we were paying attention to this earlier in the process so that people never got osteopenia or osteoporosis. Cheryl McColgan (04:40.344) If you’ve never heard of, most people have heard of osteoporosis at this point, which is basically weak, brittle bones, but osteopenia is what happens as a precursor to that. So it’s like you’re on your way to osteoporosis and they’re just finding that this is super prevalent in the population. And one of the best ways to prevent it is actually strength training. I actually recently became aware of a study that they did over in Australia with people that were post-menopausal that had osteoporosis. and they had them start strength training and they were able to get some of their bone mass back, which is something that they had never, nobody really thought that you can do that beyond taking some drugs that they have to prevent it from getting worse. But the idea that you can get more bone mass even in your older age just by strength training is pretty amazing. And then outside of that, it’s just about living better and longer, right? So even, if you live a long life and you can’t get out of your chair when you get to that long life, then that’s not gonna feel very good in your body. You’re going to be dependent on other people. So the longer that you can maintain the ability to pick up and bring in your groceries, get yourself in and out of a chair easily, safely get yourself in and out of a tub. It just will make you more independent and have a better quality of life as you get older. So all that being said, I finally… was able to flip the switch in my head that I really needed to start strength training. And when I first started thinking of this, I think I’ve talked about getting my DEXA scan in the past. And thankfully for me, a history of being active my whole life, I have really good bone density, like very high, like 75th percentile, maybe 90th percentile for somebody my age. So I don’t have to worry about those things, but it’s because I’ve been active so much up to this point. But really what I was struggling with is, you know, because of all the years of running, my knees are bone on bone osteoarthritis. arthritis so I have some pain there and I have a tendency every once in while for my knees to just kind of give out. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this term or why and nobody really knows exactly why. Thankfully I don’t have any meniscus tears. Sometimes when this is cropped up I’ve had to get an MRI in the past and basically it just involves a period you know months and months and months of rehab before I can get better again. So when I originally had this idea to do this and I had planned on starting it well before my 50th birthday. Cheryl McColgan (07:00.216) got injured pretty bad with my knee and so I had to take some time to re-tap so I wasn’t lifting. But at this point, and this is, we are in November of 2024, so whenever you’re listening to this, you can do the math. But to this point, I’ve now lifted consistently for 16 months, which is by far the longest that I’ve ever done this for an extended period of time in my life. And so that being the case, I wanted to share with you some of that background that I just described because really learning all about that and hearing it more and more and more over the years, that helped it solidify in my head that it’s something I need to do even though I really don’t enjoy it. Although I do have to say, just lately, I’m starting to finally enjoy it more. So there is this kind of idea of fake it until you make it or just do something because you know it’s good for you and you know you should. As much as I hate to say that, sometimes that is part of the thing. So it’s not about know, willpower or passion to do it. It’s more just about the commitment to do it. And so that’s something that I’ve been about a lot of things in my life is just, you know, doing that process until it becomes a habit. And then it just becomes something that I do. And if that’s something that you’re interested in learning more about, if you go back in my channel, there’s a video on my YouTube, five things you need to create better habits. And that kind of walks through some of that stuff, my thought process and how to do that. and then other content as well as I’ve had in the past just talking about maintaining habits. And I am certainly not the best or the most authority on the subject. There are plenty of books about it. The one super popular book about habits, the name’s escaping me at the moment. But anyway, if you just go to Amazon, type in habits, you’ll find James Cleary, I think is the author and I still am having the name escape me, but I’ll put the link in the show notes for you. So anyway, I thought I would share like what is the way to get started again, especially if you have joint problems, if you are an older person, if you’re a woman that’s afraid of the gym. First of all, the thing to say is you don’t have to go to the gym. You can do so many things at home for such a long extended period of time without a lot of equipment and a lot of things with zero equipment at all. So the first thing is just body weight exercises. So things like squats, pushups, sit-ups, all those kinds of things you can do at home without any equipment whatsoever. Cheryl McColgan (09:20.086) And then if you have some light weights at home, that will get you pretty far for a while, especially if it’s been a long time since you worked out because you’ll be kind of not very strong. You’ll be a little weak. And so those smaller weights can work very well for a long time. And if you go on Facebook Marketplace, you don’t have to buy them new. There’s plenty of people just looking to get rid of dumbbells and stuff because they’ve been sitting in their basement for a long time and they haven’t been using them. And they’re finally ready to make peace with that and just get rid of them. Their loss is your gain because you can pick these up for very cheap. Same with certain types of exercise equipment, whether it’s an old bike or a treadmill or things like that. And in fact, treadmills have gotten, and we’re talking mostly about strength training here today, but if you live in an area further north like I do and where there’s occasionally snow and weather in the winter, you might find it useful to have a walking pad or a treadmill in your house just to get your steps in. And those have become exceedingly inexpensive over the years. I think I picked one up, maybe it’s about about. It was before the pandemic because I was using it when I was writing the book, I was doing a standing desk and walking on that little treadmill. And I think I picked it up on Black Friday, which is coming up here. If you’re listening to this in real time for, I don’t know, no more than $150 on Amazon. It might even been a hundred. And before I go on with this, I will mention one other thing. Since Black Friday is coming up every year, I put out a gift guide of like health and wellness products that I’ve been using over the last year and testing out. And I always If I like something and use it, I go out of the way to get a discount code for you guys. And then I put all of those in a guide. So this year it’ll be heelnourishbro.com slash black Friday, 2024. That will be the URL and look for that coming up here soon. But if you go to the URL, it’ll have all the best health and wellness deals, things that I’ve been using, things that I love. And usually if you put in code heelnourishbro or H and G 10 or some variation of that. But the best thing is to just go to the website, click. link and that will take you there and automatically apply discounts for the most part. So if you’re looking to get back into working out that might be a good resource for you coming up here with a lot of sales going into the holidays. And I’ll save one other thought on that for the end. But so starting with virtually no equipment you can get a lot accomplished and start to get stronger just doing body weight exercises. However at some point you might find that either Cheryl McColgan (11:43.98) going to the gym or having a gym membership might help you in your process of getting stronger. And it certainly makes it easier when you have access to a lot of equipment. Where I got started again, is I just signed up for Planet Fitness. had actually, speaking of the pandemic, I had been going to Planet Fitness during the pandemic. That was another one of my little stints where I started lifting and quit again. But, you know, that’s a good basic gym. They have everything you need. They really promote. this idea of no judgment. And whenever I go into the Planet Fitness gyms, there’s people of all sizes there. Everybody is for the most part doing their own thing. Nobody’s really paying attention to anything anybody else is doing. And that’s one thing I can say is having been a yoga instructor for years and years and years and you know, people would be nervous when they would come to yoga class, that people were looking at them or judging them and those kinds of things. But quite honestly, when you’re working out, whether it’s with weights or you’re in your yoga class or whatever, everybody is so wrapped up in what they’re doing and concentrating on what they’re doing that for the most part, they are not like concerned or looking at you in any kind of way. So as hard as that is, try not to let that be a barrier for you going back to the gym or to get a membership somewhere. And you know, there are good gyms everywhere. It doesn’t have to be Planet Fitness. just, that happens to be the one that was close to my house and it was easy and it’s inexpensive. So that’s what I did. And My biggest first tip for going back, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve been lifting and like I was rehabbing a knee injury, so I really had to pay attention to this first principle very much. And I already have joint issues, so I need to be aware of that. So when I went back, I was very careful to start with light weights and just get my body used to doing the movements again and just staying in a rep range that is like in the eight to 12 range, which I will tell you some things I’ve learned scientifically about that. since then. But just to get yourself used to it, that’s a good thing to have in your head. It’s a good amount of time. It’s not overly taxing if you’re not using a heavy amount of weight. And, you know, most machines are self-explanatory. Also at Planet Physicist, they have some barcodes on the machines where if you scan it, it’ll show you a video on how to use it. So it’s pretty simple. Also, you can ask any of the people there to help you use a particular machine. It usually has the body part on it. So whatever body part you’re wanting to work on first. Cheryl McColgan (14:07.052) that’s a good place to start, find that machine and then just try it out and do the things. Maybe only do one set, just when you’re getting used to it, do one set on one machine, go to another one. They also have a circuit area there at Planet Fitness that you can do, which is basically the purpose of that is a half an hour workout. So you just do each machine in order. And that’s a good way to get started again. But so what I learned about that is it just like, again, it got me used to moving my joints again. And as time went on, what you really need to do to get stronger is this idea of progressive overload. So progressive overload is one of two things. Progressive overload means either more weight, more resistance. So you’re adding weight as you get stronger, or it can be more reps. So you’re using the same weight, but you’re doing more reps each time. Either one of those is progressive overload. And here’s where I go into the geeky thing, because I don’t know why it took me so long this time, because I think in my head, I just somehow didn’t believe I was finally going to stick to it this time. so I waited until this point to start kind of digging deep into the research and into the science and like kind of how to get bigger and stronger and hypertrophy and you know, anabolism, catabolism, all these things in your body that these processes that bodybuilders go through to make themselves stronger. And the one thing I learned about the progressive overload thing is there is a pretty wide range of reps that can actually grow your muscles. So if you’re looking to grow your muscles and get stronger, the rep range that can reduce that is anywhere between six and 30. So if you’re scared of lifting really heavy or you have bad joints, it might be a good idea to test out these two things because the one thing with higher reps, obviously you’re bending that joint more, which could be irritating. But generally heavier weight on the joint is going to be more stressful. So if you want to do higher reps and then you use a lower weight, anything that’s up to 30 reps will get you stronger. Beyond that, you’re really not giving your muscle enough stimulus to make it grow. So stay somewhere between six reps and 30 reps. And it could just be, you know, a time constraint thing because part of the thing of doing that eight to 12 Cheryl McColgan (16:30.24) Rep range is number one, it puts you on the machine for a reasonable amount of time. It makes the whole workout a reasonable amount of time. If you had to do every exercise for like 30 reps, you’d be on the machine for a long time, number one, which might annoy others there in the gym trying to use it. And number two, it would just take a lot longer. So something in the lower rep range might be good just for time constraints. But anything in that range will get you stronger. The other thing that I learned about frequency is people always want to know how many times a week do I need to go to the gym to really see some gains. And when I started going back, I decided on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, give myself two days on the weekend off so could have some good recovery. And it was just an amount that I felt comfortable with and I could commit to. I think actually at the very beginning, I might have only gone twice a week when I was just getting used to it again. But in any case, what the science says about that is that Even one time a week going to lift weights, you can get about 60 % of the muscle growth that you would get anyway, which is pretty amazing. So if you’re already having trouble convincing yourself to go to the gym, which was a struggle that I always had just once a week, I mean, that is not asking a lot of time to do that. And that could be a great way to start. You’re going to give yourself plenty of recovery time. So if you get a little sore, especially when you’re first going back, you’ll have six days in between before you have to go again. But to really get that good balance between muscle growth and keeping the muscle stimulated, really two to three times a week is best. So at two times a week, you get something like 80 % of the muscle growth that you would get in an entire week. And then as you go up to three, you’re getting closer to that 100 % of muscle potential that you’re gaining by doing as many workouts. But so two times a week is a pretty amazing thing. Two times a week, you’re going to get 80 % of the muscle that you would grow anyway. That’s pretty good. So if you can only convince yourself to go twice a week, that’s still going to give you benefits, still going to make you stronger, still going to make your muscles grow. So that extra, the third day or the fourth day in the week might just be because it’s in your routine. It could make the workout shorter amount of time if you go a few more times a week. And also the more times a week you go, the more you’re stimulating that muscle. So that’s where you get those little more incremental gains that you might get up to 100%. But I thought learning that science Cheryl McColgan (18:50.872) really just made me feel like it could be accessible to so many more people because you don’t need to be in the gym. And this is what has always kept me away from the, I don’t like being in the gym. I don’t want to be in the gym. I want to be outside. If I’m doing something, I want to just go for a walk or go for a bike ride or go for a hike. So being in the gym has just never been my thing. But had I known like years ago, really solidified it in my mind that if I went two days a week, that that was going to give me some great benefits. I think I might’ve gotten around to this a lot more quickly. So that’s just what I wanted to share about getting you back in there to encourage you. Cheryl McColgan (00:01.13) I can’t believe I almost forgot this part. So I’m slicing this in. So if it’s a little disjointed, you’ll understand why. But maybe I was reflecting on this after recording the information earlier. And I, when I originally had the idea to record this and to give kind of my thoughts on it, there was one thing that I really meant to address that I completely forgot when I first recorded it. And that is that there is such a thing in the first year as newbie gains. It’s a proven thing. And so while I’m saying to give yourself an adjustment phase where you get your joints used to lifting and all of that, there may be a reason to consider in the first year to eat in a slight surplus or if you’ve got a lot of body fat to lose, maybe just eat at maintenance and don’t cut back too much so that you can really take advantage. of your body’s desire to put on muscle during that first year. And so if you’re not trying to lose weight, you’re just trying to get healthier and gain muscle, maybe eat at a slight surplus. And then also maybe consider just for that first year to go ahead and go to the gym three times, four times a week if you can tolerate it. Now, I think obviously kind of what I did, whatever I needed to do to get myself in there on a consistent basis. And that was to not load it up, because even if I really would have fully known that newbie gains was a real thing and that it was my best way to maintain muscle. I don’t think if I would have started out saying, I’m going to go five days a week, given that, I just don’t believe that I would have stayed as consistent. So finding some kind of balance there between getting started again, getting consistent, but then maybe some time during that first year of lifting to actually ramp it up so that you can take advantage of that. I’ll see if can find the video again, but I thought, I think it was Minnow who did a good explanation of that phenomena and how you can take advantage of it. Or it could have been Dr. Mike, I’m not sure. It’ll take me a while to dig back through that and find that video. But maybe consider taking advantage of that while you have a chance. And the same applies for people who maybe lifted in the past but have taken an extended period of time off. It seems that those people can also take advantage of a period where they have increased muscle growth when they first get started again. Cheryl McColgan (02:22.474) So anyway, now back onto the rest of it. The other thing is when you’re first getting started again with any habit is people, especially with New Year’s resolutions, you tend to go overboard like, I’m going to eat so clean and I’m going to go to the gym every day and I’m going to walk every day. It’s too much. And if you go back to some of my other content that you’ll hear around this time of year, some are like look at episodes that came out between November and the end of January. And some of them are even talking about like New Year’s resolutions or whatever. And the thing is, don’t take on too much at once. Make your goal reasonable and achievable. You’ll be so much more likely to stick with it and so much easier to make it a habit if you start slow and then build up. And so speaking of build up, this is where I’ve gotten to this point. So up to this point, I had chosen those three days a week. Do full body every time I’m at the gym. Takes a little longer, but then I only to go three times a week for the reasons I just described. I don’t like going to the gym that much. But what I was finding as I started lifting heavier, as I started getting stronger, I became familiar with this term of systemic fatigue from Dr. Mike Isertel because I was adding more lifts, more sets, more weight. my body was just starting to, like I would still recover every time in time to go to the gym the next day, but I by far always felt best on Mondays after I’d had two full days to recover. I always felt like super fresh and I could just hit it so hard on Monday. And then by the time I get to Wednesday, still had this like, even if my muscles weren’t sore anymore, I still just had this like a little bit of lingering fatigue, but I would do my Wednesday workout and I’d do my Friday workout and then I’d recover over the weekend and start over again. And so as I’ve been learning about this over time, as I’ve been looking at more and more YouTube videos with these scientists, I’m gonna list all of them below and I might as well just say them all right here right now in case you’re wondering who I’ve been listening to because this is the other thing. Don’t just go on YouTube and listening to… Cheryl McColgan (21:11.768) any random people about lifting, about working out. If you want to be serious about making the most of your time in the gym, and this is one thing I wish I would have done sooner now that I’ve been so consistent because I was probably, you know, working all this time to a point where it was not super effective because I was just kind of left my own devices and not paying attention to the science yet, which is very unusual for me. But again, this whole process in my brain, like I said, took a while because I was never a person who really enjoyed. So to me, was like just a miracle that I was getting myself there every week and I was letting that be, you know, they say don’t, you know, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I really had that in head. like, hey, I’m going, I’m doing it. That’s going to be good enough for now. I’ll worry about the rest of later. I’ll figure it out. And now as time has gone on, I’ve gotten more interested in it and I’ve gotten, like I said, I’ve solidified it where I’ve convinced myself, you know, I’m solid in this, I’m going now. And I felt like I could dive in a little more and try to get more out of my workouts now that I’m more consistent. So that’s why I started diving into the science and the people that I’ve been enjoying listening to the most Dr. Mike Isretel, he has tons of videos on YouTube. He really, he has two different kinds of videos for the most part. Ones where he works out with people in the gym and really pushes them to their point. And if you watch those, you might think, I have no interest in doing this at all, right? Those kind of videos, people are just in pain and they’re really, they’re, you know, they’re bodybuilders. They’re, they’re looking to get the most growth out of every single session and they’re just really going after it hard. I’ve found those entertaining now. I think if I would have been watching those ones at the beginning, I might’ve been like discouraging myself a little bit quite honestly. But then the other videos that he does that are really amazing, he really goes into the science of what makes your muscles grow the most, what makes you the strongest, what’s the minimum stimulus, different body parts that he talks about. If you have a specific body part that you would like to grow more. And then he just breaks it down and makes it very simple, even though it’s very science based. Particularly when he talks about fat loss, he does an amazing job of talking about fat loss and that process. And like I’ve said in the past, is I’ve been focused on health and wellness and a lot of people that come to a low carb space are very focused on weight loss. so I’ve over the years read tons of things about that. I’ve always said that I just think that whole foods are the way to go. Cheryl McColgan (23:33.858) Personally, I do low carbs, that works for me. I have been experimenting with adding some more carbs since I’ve been lifting consistently because there is some evidence that adding carbs around your workouts is anti-catabolic, which is what you wanna avoid. So catabolic is muscle breakdown. Anabolic stimulus is muscle growth. That’s mostly for the proteins job. But that’s adding some carbs definitely helps with this process of not breaking down. So I thought that was pretty interesting and that’s made me start experimenting a little bit. I’m still like, you know, lower carb obviously than the standard American diet. But it’s just been something interesting to learn about. And I also think when you work out on regular basis, you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you’re metabolically healthy. There’s no reason that healthy carbs can’t be on the menu if they work for your body and it’s not causing you to, you know, blood sugar, average just to skyrocket and cause you to go towards diabetes, then maybe your metabolism is not ready for that yet. But if you’re really, really healthy, carbs aren’t a problem for everybody. So it’s like, I feel like I’ve never demonized carbs in my content. But definitely, like for a lot of people, low carb can be very, very healing. It’s not necessarily something you have to do forever once your metabolism is healed. If you’re working out more, there’s so many factors, right? If you want to go back to a good episode where I think we talked about that a little bit more, Alan Aragon is also a great person in the health and wellness space that’s very science based. I’ll put that link in the show notes. can’t remember the episode of that. But anyway, so Dr. Mike Isretel channel on YouTube, the link will be below. Dr. Minow Henselman’s, Dr. Milo Wolf. Those three have been the ones that I’ve primarily gotten onto lately. There’s this one other guy that I’m, his name is escaping me, also a doctor. But those, does that, That information is just going to ensure that they know how to do things properly. They’re giving you science-based information. They’ll make your workouts more effective because like I just said about the knowing that two times a week can get you 80 % of the way to get you’re getting stronger and getting more jacked goal or whatever your goal is or losing some more fat. That’s all really important stuff, right? So listening to people that really know. I mean, there’s plenty of workout people on YouTube that are more for entertainment purchases. Cheryl McColgan (25:56.344) And I’ve been enjoying some of those channels too. One of them came across as Will Tennyson and the other one is… His name is escaping me at the moment too, but a guy that he’s actually played lacrosse, which is kind of funny to me since our kids both play lacrosse. in any case, those… And they actually do a great job. And I think at this point, both of them have been lifting long enough and doing it long enough that they are reliable sources of information as well. And there plenty of people that are reliable. But I’m just saying, for my brain and the way I like to approach things and the effectiveness that I want to get out of my workout now, that’s why I really rely on the science-based people to a certain degree. So all that being said, here’s the other part of this. You might be thinking, well, I don’t really want to get jacked. I just, you know, I could stand to lose 10 pounds or 20 pounds and you know, yeah, getting stronger. That’d be great. So I should probably just use my exercise time doing cardio, right? No, that’s not right. That’s unfortunately what we’ve all thought for way too long for so many years. You do absolutely still need to move your body, do cardio for heart health, for mental health, all of those things. I’ve talked about that in the past, but really for fat loss for is strength training is going to be one of your most effective tools. It won’t make you as hungry when you’re working out as much and won’t increase the appetite as much. So that’s a good thing if you’re really, you know, focused on fat loss and it’ll actually make you look better once you do start losing fat. You’ll be able to see the muscle underneath. And they’ve just shown time and time again with controlled groups, people doing cardio only versus lifting only that resistance training beats it for fat loss. So that is no longer. I think it’s still in the general population, the idea that you need to be running or doing a bunch of cardio or these kinds of things to lose weight. Definitely still true in the general population. But in these science based communities and people that have done the research, it is just really unbeatable as far as something to add to your fat loss program is getting stronger. yeah, so that’s kind of what that has been all about. Then I have another I’ll have another video coming out. I think I’m going to go ahead and Cheryl McColgan (28:13.272) it out on the podcast is kind of like a special episode. But I’ve been testing a new product, which is the Hume Health Scale. It’s a body fat scale. And I’ve used a bioelectrical impedance home scale for probably over 10 years now. And I’ve talked about them in the past. They’re fine. They’re a good tool. They can show trends, but they’re not really all that accurate for body fat levels. However, this one that I started testing back in October September actually, so it’s going to be coming up on three or four months that I’ve been using it now. it is, well, to go back to, this is what I was going to come back to with the Black Friday thing. They’ve got a huge Black Friday sale and my code stacks on top. So you get an extra 15 % off of the big Black Friday sale. And that link is heelnourishgrow.com slash Hume, H-U-M-E. So if you go to that and you use my code, check out, it should auto apply, but… put in Heal Nurse Row and it gives you the discount on top of the Black Friday deal. So that’s pretty cool. But the full review is coming up. But the short version is, I think it is very, very good. It’s the best one I’ve ever used. It’s so good that they say it correlates 98 % with Dexa, which talked about Dexa in the past here. It’s pretty much the gold standard for body fat at this point, even though it’s not perfect. is one that people use the most when they’re doing studies and that sort of thing. But I had gotten a DEXA right when I got the body fat scale just to see did they match up? Was it close? Within a percent of body fat, it was the same. And I’m going to go over all this more in the review. And then as I’ve used it over these last several months, what I’ve noticed is the trend over time is exactly matches my training and what I’ve been doing with my diet that I’ve lost about an additional two pounds of fat and gained some more muscle, which I will be testing that again in December when I go back for DEXA. to give really this full three month of testing the scale versus the DEXA and see what those are and see how accurate it is. But I’ve been really pleased with it. Like I said, by far the best I’ve ever used. It seems to be tracking really well with, like I said, the first number when I first did it was absolutely spot on. And where it is now, based on what I’ve been doing with my training and my body fat, I think that it’s very accurate. Cheryl McColgan (30:36.824) And they have like a 60-day money-back guarantee. So if that’s something you ever thought about using, especially if you’re going to start, if you’re thinking about going on this strength training trip, it’s really nice because the number on the scale for me, since I started this process, has actually gone up because I’ve put on like at this point, I’m probably up to like maybe nine pounds of muscle that I put on over this last 16 months of this process. And so my number on the scale is actually higher, but my body fat is lower. I have much more muscle. So I look smaller, but that number on the scale is bigger and that freaks people out. It freaks me out. It freaks me out. Like the last three months, I’m like, my gosh, I’ve been working so hard, training hard, you know, doing really well with my diet, just a slight deficit. And the number is staying the same. But if I didn’t have that body fat component and the muscle component that I have on the scale, it’s showing me that I am making progress. You know, it’s easy to throw in the towel. So Anyway, if you’ve been thinking about looking for a tool like that, I think this is super useful and it’s a great time to get it. So I did just want to mention that even though, like I said, it’ll be on the Black Friday list of tools that I love and make great gifts for health and wellness people in your life. So I think that kind of covered everything that I wanted to share with you today and talk about. I hope that if you are not strength training now that you’ll consider. doing that going forward, knowing how good it is for you and convincing yourself like, hey, Cheryl said, I only have to do it twice a week or even once a week. And that is a great place to start. Like just once a week. If you’re not doing it now, like I said, start out light, start out easy, start out with body weight stuff at home, do it once a week, get used to that, add on another day. And if you get to a point like me now, where I was getting that systemic fatigue, I think I forgot to finish that. thought earlier about where I was going with the systemic fatigue. So I was doing my three day week program. I just this week decided, okay, I’m going to go to the gym four days a week. Like I said, I’m not happy about that. It’s not a place that I like to be. But I am starting to like it more. And more like having these goals in mind, having these strength goals, having also in my head some other goals that I’m not going to share. I don’t know if I’ll actually do it, but something I’ve been toying with the idea of doing in relation. Cheryl McColgan (32:56.098) to strength training just to give me a goal, but you know, like something out in the future to work towards. But so the four days a week now, so now I will not be doing full body every time I go to the gym, I’m doing upper lower. So I started out on Monday with a hard lower body day today, I went and I did upper body only. And I think I’m gonna really like it, even though it requires another day in the gym, just the mental break of not having to do. everything while I’m there every time. Like I went in, I did legs and I was like, I really hard on legs. And then I, and I like felt like it was really weird. I left and I was like, God, I felt like I didn’t do much, you know, cause I’ve been used to doing full body. And then same thing when I did the upper body, like my lower body was really sore, but upper body, hadn’t touched it. So I did all the upper body things. And now tomorrow I get a full day off and then I do that again, Thursday and Friday, and then two days off again. So, Seem to see how over time, you know, it’s all a progression. It’s all in good fun. It’s all meant to, you know, challenge you, get you healthier, help you reach your goals. The other reason I’m doing it is because, and here’s where you do need to be careful, is I’ve gotten some pretty flared up elbow tendonitis happening on my right arm. And so I also thought that switching to that split would give my upper body an extra day off during the week so that hopefully this can calm down a little bit because it’s been going on. for months and I just haven’t wanted to stop training. And it’s not bad enough that it made me stop or anything like that. But I’ve been using my, you know, the other tool that I love to use so much. using my Kenyon red light on it every single night. And they also have great Black Friday deals. So definitely check that out. heelnurshershow.com slash Kenyon. I made all the links like that now. So this would be super easy, you know, whenever you’re looking for those. also, just any time of the year. Go to my shop page. I put all of those on my shop page. It has a little blurb that talks about like why I like it and has a discount code. So you can always find that stuff there or you can always email me and ask me. But yeah, so that’s the other reason I did it I need to give my upper body a break so can hopefully heal that a little bit more. And I’m also looking to push through the next Cheryl McColgan (35:15.608) I think it’s an eight or 12 week cycle because number one that’s really a good way to do your training just to go in cycles where you kind of have these certain exercises you’re working on. Keep building your strength over time over those 12 weeks and then maybe take a little what they call a deload week or a break. And what my goal is is to make it to mid January when I will be going snowboarding and you know getting really strong for snowboarding season which I’m super excited about. This would be by far the strongest my legs have ever been on the mountain. So I’m really excited to like test that out and see how it affects my snowboarding. So to push through to then, and then we’re actually going on a trip. And so what I will do then, since I haven’t really done this at this point, is one of Dr. Mike’s tips was to take like a week or two off on vacation. Don’t train, just let your body like heal, relax, recover. doing that every once in while is actually really good for your body, probably mentally too, just a good break from it. And I did a little break from that when we went on the trip in September. I only trained one day that we were there because I was also sick the entire trip. So I really, really couldn’t do too much outside of just dealing with being away on vacation and getting around and having the energy to do that. So I’ve really only taken one break like that during… the time that I’ve been training so far, but I also had not been training probably as hard as I am now. And so I think that my body is going to need that more going forward. So in any case, hopefully that was helpful in some way. Now I really will wrap it up now that I’ve explained all the things how I got to this point. So I didn’t start out with going four days a week, obviously, like I said, I started out slow, lighter weights, build myself up, got used to it, tried not to hurt my joints, still did it. So you just got to be careful, especially the older you are. And this is one final, okay, then I’ll say one final thing and then I really will wrap this up. The one thing I would recommend doing sooner in the process than I did is the reason I started, so I just started going to a new gym as well that has different equipment, but it’s because that I found a trainer that I’m going to go to once a week for a few weeks so that I can learn some more things, learn some better techniques, learn some workarounds for this elbow. And just, you know, Cheryl McColgan (37:31.896) progress. Once you get to a certain point on your own, feel like I’ve kind of learned the things I can learn on my own. And now that I’m diving into these videos, I’m certainly learning much more that it’s going to propel me after I have these few more sessions with the trainer. But it’s also just good to learn new technique, be pushed a little bit more in a different way. And had I done this sooner, maybe I would have mentioned. to whoever I was working with. whenever I do this exercise, I’m getting this pain and it kind of just came on really slowly. So I’m usually pretty good about at this point, paying attention to my body backing off because several points throughout this, I’ve had like a little things with my knee kick up and I’ve kind of had to back off lower body a little bit or change the exercises that I’m doing to better accommodate how my knee was feeling. So I’m overall pretty good at that after all these years of having those issues. But for some reason, this one just got me. And I feel like if I would have maybe started working with someone sooner or talked to somebody about it, somebody who trains regularly and that knows what they’re doing, that I might have been able to avoid making this as bad as it is now. So obviously that does cost money. It’s not cheap, but I actually found something that’s very reasonable. And I think it’s worth it for investment because once I learn how to do this properly and learn more things that I can do as workarounds and different ways of doing things, then I can carry that with me into the future and hopefully avoid having this problem ever again. Probably not because I always seem to have some kind of joint issue, but I’ll do my best. So anyway, if you have any questions, definitely get in touch. If you happen to be in Cincinnati, the gym I’m going to, really like the trainer Steve Ross. He’s close to my age, which I like because he’s been training for a really long time. He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to work with older people with achy joints because he’s done it all himself too. But it’s finished strong if you happen to be in Cincinnati. And yeah, so that is it for this week and look for the Black Friday deals update. Like I said, it’ll be at the link heelnurserygrow.com slash Black Friday 2024. And yeah, if you have any other questions, let me know, get in touch. The other thing I will, I don’t know if I’ll have it in time for the Black Friday thing, but Cheryl McColgan (39:48.631) I also cleaned out the basement because I’m looking into getting a home gym after, like I said, being committed to this for so long, I finally feel like, okay, I can get a home gym and that’ll actually use it. And so I’m in the process of researching those now and looking into, you know, ones that have affiliate programs so that whichever one I choose based on like doing all this research that hopefully that you’ll have a way that you could, if you’re interested, get the same thing, get a little discount, that sort of thing. So anyway, I haven’t. picked it yet, still working on that research. You know how I love to do a deep dive on these sorts of things, so it’s taken me a little bit. Anyway, I hope you’re having a great rest of your week wherever you are. As always, get in touch if you have questions or need help with anything, and I will talk to you again probably next week. Cheryl McColgan (40:44.696) So hope you’re having a great week wherever you are and I will obviously be putting, you know, it’s supposed to be weekly. I’ve missed one here and there occasionally, but I have no plans on stopping. So just bear with me when I might miss a week. But hopefully I’ve had a couple of interviews lately. I have those in the queue to edit and get them up for you. And we’re coming up on almost a hundred episodes, which I can’t believe. So crazy. I was trying to think if I should do some kind of. event or giveaway or I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I’ll definitely if I do something like that, you’ll be the first to know. So anyway, I will talk to you again soon.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Science of Music for Memory and Brain Health

19 weeks fa

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In this conversation, Dr. Victoria Williamson discusses the profound impact of music on the brain, exploring its role in memory, emotional connection, and cognitive enhancement. She highlights the significance of music from infancy through adulthood and introduces the concept of binaural beats as a tool for sound therapy. The discussion also covers her company, Audicin , which aims to provide sound solutions for wellbeing and productivity, backed by scientific research. Stay in touch with Dr. Victoria and get a free trial of Audicin at this link . Takeaways Music has been a part of human life for millennia. Newborns can remember melodies they heard in utero. Music is deeply tied to our emotional experiences. The brain processes music in a unique way that enhances memory. Binaural beats can help synchronize brain waves for various states of mind. Music can be used as a mnemonic device for better memory retention. The right kind of background music can enhance focus and productivity. Nature sounds in music can significantly reduce stress levels. Research is ongoing to explore the benefits of music therapy for various conditions. Watch on YouTube Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here . CONNECT WITH CHERYL Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts ! 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight Dry Farm Wines, extra bottle for a penny Drinking Ketones Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life Clean Beauty 20% off first order DIY Lashes 10% off NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life Facebook YouTube Pinterest TikTok Amazon Store Getting Started with Keto Resources The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide Episode transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:00.868) Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal and Rosh Ro podcast. I am so excited. I I think I say this when I’m talking to every guest, but that’s because I only choose people that I really want to talk to for the most part. So today I have with me Dr. Victoria Williamson, and she is basically her life’s work is all about music in the brain. And this is a topic that really gets me excited because I was a musician most of my time throughout school. I played saxophone for many years, also sang. and then my interest in psychology and the brain. And at the time, even way back when, when I was in school at this point, there was a lot of research on the really positive effects in a child’s developing brain with using music. So I know that that research is out here, but what I’m really excited to talk to Dr. Williamson about is how they’re finding that music also works wonders on the adult brain. So very long introduction there, Dr. Victoria, but I kind of wanted to let you know where I’m coming from as well. So welcome and could you just give people some background on how you got into this work? What sparked your interest in music? Dr Victoria Williamson (01:04.371) Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It’s my absolute pleasure to be with you today. We share a lot in our background, you and me. So I paid for school teaching music. I’m a guitarist, classical guitarist, but I love all instruments. I love all forms of music, impossible to name a favorite. But I studied psychology. That’s what I was drawn towards was understanding human behavior and I was going to school in the sort of late 90s, early 2000s, where neuroscience was blowing up. And we were getting all these cool studies where you could see actual pictures of the brain working. And that was just magnetic to me. when I found out I could combine my two loves, I could combine psychology and music. That was it. That was my pathway right there. And it mattered not that I had to study for so many years and have this kind of uncertain academic life. Cheryl McColgan (01:57.112) haha Dr Victoria Williamson (02:01.587) because you follow your passion, right? And that’s what you’re all about. So we absolutely share that as well. So my pathway through research always clung to this idea that music is transformative in human life. And we’ve been making music as a species for as long as records exist. The oldest musical instruments we’ve ever found on planet Earth are 40 ,000 years old. And these are very intricate bone flutes. They’re carved from the bone of a vulture wing, and they use the same musical scale that we use in modern folk music. Cheryl McColgan (02:42.082) That’s absolutely amazing. I never heard that before and I’m totally going to go look this up after we finish chatting. Dr Victoria Williamson (02:47.887) You will find it. It’s a National Geographic and all kinds of things that were discovered in caves in the south of Germany. And it’s absolutely transformative in our understanding of the importance of music in human life, because not only have we been making music for millennia, we’ve been making the same kind of music. So humans have intuitively developed with music, but music has been an agent of massive change in the human brain and body. And there’s a professor called Annie Patel. He’s at Tufts in Boston. And he’s talked about the impact of music on the human brain, mind, and body as being akin to that of the invention of fire. And what that allowed us to do was to cook our food. And once you’re able to cook food, you change completely the aspects of nutrition you’re getting, the job of consuming the food, the jaw changes, because we don’t have to chew so much. The gut microbiome changes because of the different kind of food compounds and structures that we’re getting. And the invention of music and the use of music in human culture, there has never been a human society on earth found that hasn’t used music of some kind. So it’s universal. So the impact on the human brain and body has been this transformative. There isn’t a special musical box in the brain anymore that there’s a special area for cooked food. The evolution. of our brain and body is one which takes best advantage of what we have. So what you find with music is something that stimulates multiple areas of our brain, all at the same time, visual area, auditory area, memory, pleasure centers, the thinking frontal planning areas of our brain are all studying music. So it’s the perfect medium for our brain to engage. The brain loves music. And so there’s so much power in there to do good. And my whole career has been about firstly trying to understand that and then thinking about what’s the little way that I can make a message of transformation through music because people do it in all kinds of wonderful ways. Music therapists, music healers, doctors using medicine and intensive care and stroke recovery, neonatal units. I see myself as part of a massive community and I’m here with my message, getting really excited about one kind of music, one aspect of music. Dr Victoria Williamson (05:12.147) that can make a difference in the world we live in today. Cheryl McColgan (05:15.404) Yeah, and I really am excited to get into that towards the end because I went to your website and listened to a couple of the clips of the music before we got on the interview. And it’s really, really different, but I kind of want to save that for a little bit later when we get to that. In the meantime, though, you mentioned a couple of things there as far as the music’s effects on the brain. And one of the two things come to mind when you were saying those things, the first was Dr Victoria Williamson (05:30.898) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (05:43.832) I think one thing that people focus on and as we get older becomes more of an issue is memory. And I think in your work, reading your bio that that’s something. I think that would be really interesting to chat about because maybe there’s some actionable things that people can find their ways to use music to improve their memory. And then the second thing that you mentioned, you said there’s a lot of power of music to do good. And I think like 99 .99 % of the time music just… makes me feel good in so many ways. But in your bio, it mentioned something about earworms, which I think is such an interesting phenomena. So I don’t know which one of those you want to take on first, but music and memory would be an awesome thing with some actionable tips. And then I really need to know about this earworm thing because that happens to me sometimes and it drives me crazy. Dr Victoria Williamson (06:16.615) Right. Dr Victoria Williamson (06:32.221) you’re not the only one. And actually they’re beautifully linked because ear webs are a music memory phenomenon. So they’re kind of part of what comes with the gift of how beneficial music can be for the memory is that means music is powerful in memory. And if it’s powerful in memory, it’s going to go awry occasionally. And that’s the kind of earworm side of things when it gets stuck on repeat. But let’s go to the general. Cheryl McColgan (06:33.652) I… Good. Cheryl McColgan (06:54.306) You Dr Victoria Williamson (07:01.139) memory area first. So we know that music marks human life. So I wrote a book about 10 years ago called You Are the Music. And the way I set up the narrative of that book was to look at human life from cradle to grave, and how important music is throughout each of our journeys, how it’s woven into the life course, the human life course, even if you tried and avoided music, I don’t think you could manage it. especially these days. But right from when we are born, there’s crazy evidence. Did you know that newborns are already remembering music? Cheryl McColgan (07:42.06) Wow, that’s great. I didn’t know that. Dr Victoria Williamson (07:45.085) So there have been studies done where they played in utero babies, very simple melodies. And then when they’re born, they’ve played them those same melodies compared to other similar melodies that the child has not heard before. And they get a significant relaxation effect to the familiar melody. Cheryl McColgan (08:05.676) Very cool. Dr Victoria Williamson (08:06.003) So already in utero, that memory is starting to cook. It’s starting to take in sound messages, because we can hear long before we can see anything notable. So your brain is starting to learn about patterns, predictions, and memory from sound principally. And the Cradle to Grace thing plays out there because there’s a lot of evidence that one of the last senses that we’re blessed with on our journey is sound. But right from the start, we have this powerful memory for sound. it’s starting to tell us all the important things we need to know about our environment. Newborns also react to the sound of their caregivers’ voices far more strongly than anybody else. And that’s based on the Neutro Exposure Party as well. They become familiar with the sounds. particularly as the mother. Everything from her heartbeat to the way her joints sound to the rhythm of her walk. This is all musical signals that the child has picked up on and is starting to build. So before our children can speak, which is an enormous cognitive effort in a typically developing child, we signal to our infants with music. We talk to them like this. Right? Cheryl McColgan (09:25.592) Yes! Dr Victoria Williamson (09:26.279) We use infant directed speech, which is essentially musically loaded. We’re using musical structures to emphasize the shape of the language, the pauses of the language, what the vowel sounds are, which is the first thing a child will start to repeat. So that’s our form of communication. It’s our form of connection with our young, but it’s our first form of communication as well. And if you have a neurodivergent child like I do, my son is nonverbal, non -speaking. And so music is a large part of our ongoing communication. And the memory system is what supports that. And the memory system of the human brain, there isn’t a special memory for Musicbox, rather it’s hyper -connected, as I was talking about before, to all kinds of powerful systems, particularly the emotion system in the brain. So right in the core of your brain, you’ve got a system called the limbic system, which is attached to your brainstem. Imagine this is your spine coming up. It goes into the brainstem first and the hindbrain, the mammalian hindbrain. And on top is that wiggly brain structure, the cortex that we’re all familiar with when see a picture of the brain. But right in the middle are the ancient senses. And in there is emotion and memory. And they’re tied up together with superlane highways, which is why, as our emotional development begins, as a teenager, And we have first love, have emancipation, we have financial freedom, we have heartbreak, we have all of these first really emotional experiences. The music that is tied to those transformative times in our lives becomes our soundtrack. That’s the music we forever remember. That’s the music we can recognize at half a second exposure. I know what that is. I know all the lyrics. Wash. Cheryl McColgan (11:18.636) And not only, yeah, and not only that, it makes you feel a certain way, right? Like when you hear a song that you first heard in high school or something that you loved, it’s a flood of memory that comes back with that and feelings too. I can see now how you’re saying it’s all tied up in that kind of ancient brain area because the amount of things that come up for me when I think of that stuff and certain songs come on or whatever, it’s… It’s really amazing. Like I can get sad instantly or get really happy instantly depending on what song comes into my memory from that time period. And I think it’s especially tied to, as you’re saying, that period of time where we’re really still developing and having all these major life changes like in late or early, late teens, early adulthood kind of timeframe. Dr Victoria Williamson (12:11.357) You’re so right, you’re so right. And that sort of minimally conscious experience is similar to smell. You had that experience as well when you smell a perfume you haven’t smelled for years. Right, I was doing my daughter’s hair for dance class the other day. It’s first time I’ve sprayed hairspray for a while and I went, the 80s. Cheryl McColgan (12:20.056) Yes, hairspray for my skull. Cheryl McColgan (12:30.324) Yeah, right, exactly. Dr Victoria Williamson (12:35.187) I was right back there. But that is the same kind of brain connection. It doesn’t have to go through the conscious processing, those big evolved human cortex centers right sitting on the top doesn’t need to pass through those. So it’s fast. It’s quick. And these are memories are like the pathways we would make through long grass. So if you imagine you find a pathway to a beautiful beach for the first time, it’s all long grass and you walk through it. And the first time you walk through it, you’re going to make a little indentation. The more you go down and visit that beach, the more you’re going to tread that path, the easier it’s going to be and the quicker it’s going to be for you to get there. Well, that’s what happens with memory. When people ask me, why can I remember the song that was playing in my high school dance, but I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. Cheryl McColgan (13:28.119) Right. Dr Victoria Williamson (13:29.383) It’s like, how many times have you thought about that dance versus how many opportunities you’ve had to think about breakfast yesterday? It’s the way that we process our life experiences that says a lot about our memory experiences and because music weaves its way into so many of our significant life moments. And this is to say nothing of our favorite films, our favorite concerts that we go to. The connections we make with people, the songs we associate with people. First dance at a wedding, all this kind of stuff. Music is part of human ceremony, it’s part of human celebration, it’s part of human commiseration worldwide. And because of that intimate relationship, there’s an intimate relationship with our brain too. Cheryl McColgan (14:19.19) And now that you’ve kind of explained how this is in the, you know, a deep part of our brain, but it can also, I think, affect, you said that the centers that are more cortex and memory related, any tips or tricks for, you know, those of us who are getting older and finding themselves forgetting things a little more often, you know, there’s, there’s a bigger catalog up there now is what I like to think of it as it takes me a little longer to go through the memories, you know, but Dr Victoria Williamson (14:45.543) Right. Hugely valuable. Cheryl McColgan (14:47.96) How can we use or is there a way to use music, say as an adult you’re trying to learn something newer or trying to remember something well, is there a way that you can use music to make that memory stick a little easier or have it stick around longer? Dr Victoria Williamson (15:06.707) Okay, that’s a good question. let’s deal with the sort of two parts of that, which is music for learning, essentially. So creating new memories that you want to hold on to, maybe music for studying. And then there’s this idea that music can help keep your memory healthier for longer, which is 100 % true. And the neuroscientists are starting to now reveal why. So in terms of the learning, I’ve often spoken about the power of music as a mnemonic. And mnemonics are what world memory champions use to recall 40 ,000 cards shuffled at random. Just so it’s a fancy word for memory tricks. And mnemonics rely on allowing us to encode large amounts of information with little effort. So they put 40 ,000 cards to remember. How do you get that into just a few bits of information? And the trick to it is to link different things together. It’s how musicians go on stage and play an hour of music from memory. It’s because when they practice, they’ve linked sections together. They’ve played always this section this much and then the next section this much and then they join them together and they’ve become a bigger section and so on and so forth. When you remember a dance routine, when you remember a workout routine, it’s the same. You remember in sections and then it starts to stitch together and it gets to be a bigger thing. All of a sudden you can do an hour without thinking about it. Well, music can be a connector. Putting music to memories can give you triggers as to what piece of information should come next. You can do this small scale. So if you’re trying to remember a pin number, try putting it to a little four -tone melody. Try singing your pin number to a musical note. You’ll remember it better than if you’re just trying to remember the numbers themselves, because the music has a more natural fluid link from the memory. It’ll help you link those things together. If you’re studying, I always used to use exactly the same playlist in the same order. Dr Victoria Williamson (17:15.655) when going through my study notes. And my study notes would start to take on the form exactly how a musician would study a large piece of music in order to perform it from memory. Things like studying, taking exams, they are a performance from memory. Same thing preparing a large presentation or a talk from memory. Having music as your cue, as your background, will help you encode larger bits of information better, quicker. Cheryl McColgan (17:42.11) that’s brilliant and something that I never seemed to be and I you know everybody learns a little bit differently or their brain works a little bit differently and I would think I would think having a background in music that that would have worked well for me but I often find if I play music in the background if I’m trying to write in particular I just find it’s very distracting but I could see like maybe if I were studying and just had it quietly in the background maybe it’s sort of Dr Victoria Williamson (17:52.033) sure. Cheryl McColgan (18:11.296) subconsciously links or is there a particular kind of music like you said when you studied you had this was there a particular type of music that facilitates that better because I don’t know in some ways my brain friends that distracting with certain tasks but I can see the utility of it it seems like something that would work for me if I could figure out how to do it properly. Dr Victoria Williamson (18:24.721) Right. Dr Victoria Williamson (18:31.231) Right. the key to making effective background music is something science has been interested in for a couple of decades now, because you’re absolutely right. It is not just you. Music is very distracting for a lot of people. And that’s because there’s a lot of overlap in the brain between the parts that are interested in language and the parts that are interested in music. They’re both sounds, they’re both sequences. It’s not surprising the brain is kind of seeing them at some level as the same thing. So how do you create music that goes effectively into the background? So part of the work I do at Audison at my company is to use all of this science to create effective background music. But to give a couple of simple tips, avoid any music with lyrics in it. Even if they’re foreign lyrics, there’s a cool study that showed that people were trying to study and they tested them with German opera in the background. It’s as distracting as any type of the brain does not care. Cheryl McColgan (19:15.861) Yeah Dr Victoria Williamson (19:29.821) that it’s not your language, it’s a verbal signal. So it thinks, I should pay attention to that. It might be important. So anything with lyrics, nah, that’s going to hamper your chances. So pure instrumental music is going to be a lot better. You also want to choose instruments that have things, musically we call them lower attacks, softer decays. So they’re basically instruments that are less bright. So think a trumpet is bright, cymbal is bright, something that has a sudden onset, it has lots of high frequencies. That’s more alerting to your brain. That’s pure evolution. If something is making a very high shrieking sound, it might be an emergency. It might be another human screaming, it might be an animal about to attack you. So avoiding those kind of frequencies and sticking to lower frequencies, so lower piano, softer flutes. kalimbas, soft drums, the sort of meditation instruments. The shamans of the past knew what they were doing when they were choosing the instrumentation that formed part of chants and formed part of meditations, ancient Asian meditations, for example, ancient Indian meditations. They knew what they were doing. All we’re doing with science is looking at the brain and saying, okay, that makes sense because of aviancy what’s going on. But all the human instincts are right in terms of what music is best for us when we’re trying to focus our mind. Cheryl McColgan (21:04.482) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think now you mentioned that science has been working on this. One of the things that I’ve seen come up lot more commonly lately, and I don’t know that I’ve ever actually looked into what the definition of this is or what it means. And I would love to hear your perspective on this, but binaural beats. And I think it’s used quite often to help people sleep. But I could also imagine maybe it’s this kind of repetitive thing that could be a nice background. Can you speak to maybe how that binaural beats, what effect that has on the brain? and what they actually are. Because I don’t, like I said, I don’t think I’ve actually looked up what that definition is. Dr Victoria Williamson (21:35.035) Absolutely. Dr Victoria Williamson (21:39.793) Yeah, sounds cool, listening to binaural beats, but what are they? Absolutely. So I got into binaural beats about three years ago when I co -founded this company, Audison, which is audio medicine. So we were trying to create audio treatments to improve wellbeing and productivity. And from what I knew coming from my academic background, so I was in a university studying away, trying to make my career. And I decided to break away, partly for personal family reasons. and also to try and chase my dream of making the world a better place with music. And with Audison came the opportunity to dive into binaural beats, because this was a new technology at the time, but it had a lot of promise. So I got to asking in the labs around the world that were using this, because the science that you see published is about two to three years least behind what’s actually going on in labs. So the stuff that’s going on in labs right now, for the most part, apart from bulletins, you’ll see in major, you know, public conversation in two to three years time. So I was asking around and they were saying, yeah, this is promising. You need to look into this. This, this, this can have a transformative effect. Okay. What is it? Right. So a binaural beat is an auditory illusion. Makes it sound like magic. What it is, is you, when you’re wearing headphones like me, You send a signal of a certain frequency into one end and a slightly different frequency into the other end. It can be slightly higher or slightly lower, doesn’t matter. The brain is really interested in the fact that these don’t meet up. It’s interested in it, but it doesn’t like it. The brain likes consistency. It likes to understand its environment. So what it does is it actually generates its own frequency that represents the difference. So let’s say I sent 150 hertz into here and 155 into here. The brain says, OK, I’ll create a 5 hertz frequency to match them up. Dr Victoria Williamson (23:43.665) And that is the binaural beat. So it’s binaural because it’s come from a signal from two ears, b, two, aural ears. And then the beat is the frequency beating between those two bands. So it’s actually coming from your own brain, is the binaural beat, as a result of the sound that you’re exposed to. And if you hear it, it sounds like a soft beat or hum in the background. Now, I listened to pure binaural beat tracks when I was first, I thought, people can’t listen to this. It’s like, I’m not working to that. Dude, that’s impossible. Like three minutes and I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, my brain’s going to explode. You can’t do that. And then I got talking to our amazing engineer, Marie Souza Aghiya, and she has studied human sound perception and performance. And she knew about how to best embed binaural beats in real music. So it’s like, if you had a supplement that tasted foul, but was brilliant for your health, what do you have to do? You have to hide it. You have to mix it with something else to get it in. Can you think of something like that? I’m struggling. Creatine doesn’t taste bad. It doesn’t taste of anything. Cheryl McColgan (24:59.928) I’m a weirdo because, no, I’m weird though because if I know it’s good for me, I’ll just do it anyway. But it’s like, you know, the old adage that they’d say a teaspoon of sugar helps the medicine go down. Like you just make it taste better or sweeter or different somehow, right? Dr Victoria Williamson (25:06.215) You’ll just do it anyway. Dr Victoria Williamson (25:13.819) Right. Dr Victoria Williamson (25:18.821) You absolutely got it. So she convinced me that if you engineered binaural beats properly, it’s like putting the medicine of binaural beats into sugar. So what you need to do to make binaural beats effective is have them properly engineered, because the pure form is just a bit tasteless and difficult to swallow. And we’re only human. If something sounds horrible, we’re not going to listen to it. And if we don’t listen to it, it can’t do us any good. So what does it actually do? What does medicine actually do? So when the brain generates this frequency, what the other brain waves start to do around it is to synchronize to it. The brain’s generating this signal. It must be important. So the other brain waves start to synchronize, and they start to entrain. So we entrain to a beat when we dance to music. It means to move along with. So your brain waves start to centralize and to synchronize to this signal. Good is that. Well, the speed at which the brain is synchronizing will help you get into different states. If your brain is synchronizing at a very low, slow way, you’ll get sleepy. If your brain is synchronizing to a reasonably high medium wave, around 10 hertz, you’ll feel relaxed but awake. And the higher you go, to about 30 hertz, you’ll start to get into flow, focus, and then up to creativity. So you’re basically helping the brain slowly and gently move into states that you need it to be in for whatever the task is or the time of day is that you need it to be in. Cheryl McColgan (27:00.672) Okay, I’m so excited to do this trial of autism now because this could be life changing. What was going through my mind when you were saying that is, is that, is binaural beats the only way that you can cause these effects in the brain? Or are you working with other sound patterns or sound technologies that do something similar depending on what you’re trying to achieve? is that really the best way that you found? Dr Victoria Williamson (27:27.539) It’s the best way I’ve found to do brain entrainment in a way that is palatable. It’s like you can listen to a pure binaural beat track. You can put yourself through that and it may have a similar effect, but there’s actually scientific studies out there that pure binaural neural beat tracks can impair productivity. And in certain frequencies as well, when they’re not well engineered, especially in the theta band, so that’s relatively low, not quite sleep, but not quite awake and focused. It can induce nausea and headaches. The problem is if it’s not engineered well, your brain is very good at spotting something that isn’t quite right. And the brain’s response to something that isn’t quite right is universal. It thinks it’s a poison. It’s exactly why people get car sick. It’s because the brain is getting signals that aren’t quite right. You’re still but your eyeballs are moving. This doesn’t make sense to the brain. So its reaction is I must have been poisoned. Therefore, I must purge it to make my system healthy. That’s why we feel can feel nauseous when we travel. And the same can be true of something like binaural beats. If it’s not engineered well to be palatable to the brain, then it can damage productivity and it can even make you feel unwell. So I’ve always prided ourselves at autism that we test absolutely everything on ourselves and we make sure that it is safe before it goes out to anybody. Because music is power. It has the power to do good. It can have the power to do harm if you’re not putting all the testing in there. And that’s what we do. So. Cheryl McColgan (29:05.912) Yeah, I think that’s a great point that you brought up because my first experience with this when I first learned about it and kind of wanted to see, of course, you know, I went on YouTube as one does. And, you know, I think you’re right because I think some of them that were designed for sleep and I would try that and I would be laying there listening to it and I would be thinking, well, you know, I don’t know if this is as relaxing as I, I don’t know if it was having the intended effect. So my guess is. Dr Victoria Williamson (29:15.944) Bye. Dr Victoria Williamson (29:31.483) Hmm Cheryl McColgan (29:32.234) any random thing that you find on YouTube, much like anything, it may or may not be accurate, factual, all, you know, everything. So it’s nice to, you know, if you’re going to use this for purpose, for memory, for doing better work, for focus, that it makes total sense to, you know, use a product where you know that there is some science behind it and that somebody’s actually Dr Victoria Williamson (29:41.309) Right. Cheryl McColgan (29:53.398) looking out for your best interests because again, like I said, I had varying experiences with what I found there and not all of them were great. I didn’t get nauseous or anything like that, but I just felt like they just didn’t really do anything. And that’s why I wanted to ask you about it. Because so many of these kinds of things come up and you wonder, is it just like the next fleeting thing that people think is gonna work, but it doesn’t actually. But it sounds like now that there is some good research to back it up too. Dr Victoria Williamson (30:02.661) Me too. Dr Victoria Williamson (30:17.863) Mm. Dr Victoria Williamson (30:22.705) Yeah, so the thing about binaural beats is in the pure form, in the basic form, they’re not hard to make. You can make them in any audio synthesizer, which is why you can find loads of free ones on YouTube. would most of us order our medicines off the internet without knowing what kind of lab they came from and ingest them and hope for the best? No. And some of these binaural beat tracks are designed for elderly design for children. And I’m thinking, as a scientist, I’m thinking, my hackles are up because I’m like, this isn’t fair that this is out there, but it is. But we’re really hoping that we can, we can bring some trust, we can bring safety, we have a lab, we’ve done all the scientific studies, because the beauty of binaural beats is it’s come from science. Right back in 1852, this was discovered by physicists called William Henry Job. And since then, It’s science that has been studying this phenomenon. So how to apply it into something we can use in our everyday life is something that’s come from evidence. And the way we do it in autism, everything comes from the evidence. So what we want to do is drive forward a responsible and ethical product that people can trust and that I would be happy if it was in my grandmother’s care home or if it was in my child’s therapy center, you know? That matters to me. Cheryl McColgan (31:50.52) And I’m sure, and you mentioned your son before, and I’m guessing that at least in part, some of this work is finding new ways to communicate with him or new ways to help him just have a better experience in his world. And you mentioned your company, Audison, so think now’s a great time that we just move into that. it’s basically, I went to the website earlier today, and like I said, I experienced some of the music. And so now I’ll just describe that from a lay person who had no idea what to expect. And so if you go to the website, which by the way, Dr. Williamson is generously giving listeners a 30 day free trial. So you’ll go to healnurishgrow .com slash audison. And that’ll take you to the website. You can get this 30 days for free so you can experience it too. But also on the website, before you even sign up, there are like three little play buttons that you can click. And my experience of it was there was definitely something like underlying that I couldn’t put my finger on. But then there were some sounds that I recognized. There were some nature sounds, some water sounds, and it kind of reminded me like, I don’t want to say this because it’s not exactly like this at all, but it definitely reminded me of massage studio type of music in the way that it was like the cadence and it was relaxing. But it was just a different in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on. So. Dr Victoria Williamson (32:55.707) Mmm. Dr Victoria Williamson (33:05.245) Mm -hmm. Cheryl McColgan (33:14.784) Anyway, I’d love to have you expound on that. That’s the experience from a lay person. I didn’t get to listen to it for an extended period of time, so I can’t say any effect as far as focus or any of that. But it was just, I didn’t dislike it and it was different. And that was my initial impression. So I’d love to hear more about that. Dr Victoria Williamson (33:32.925) Well, thank you for listening. That’s very kind. Yeah, so the three samples are there to sort of give an idea of some of the different kinds of music that Audison makes. So part of what we do is we pioneer the background music, because that’s what people need. You we don’t need another thing taking up time. Audison is about providing nervous system regulation on the go. You don’t need to do anything. This is about getting you the benefits of mindfulness, meditation, yoga on the go. And it takes as little as 10 minutes a day listening to autism to get the benefits of your nervous system. So that includes building up your HRV resilience, improving your late levels of relaxation, improving sleep, reducing irritability. And then once you’re in a nicely regulated state, you can boost productivity, creativity. We even have Finnish, our company is from Finland originally, beautiful Finnish forest that you mentioned there, you’ve heard a little bit in the sound. It’s even being used by Finnish Olympic athletes as part of their training because nervous system regulation benefits everybody. We are all in a world where our nervous systems are being pushed to beyond anything they were ever designed to cope with. Cheryl McColgan (34:34.647) Yes. Dr Victoria Williamson (34:54.141) So having the audits and sound there is a period of time where you can be doing something else. You can be training, you can be doing housework, you can be running around after the kids. As long as you can wear your headphones, which I run with my kids on the headphones sometimes. As long as you can wear your headphones safely, you can have this sound on and your nervous system is being regulated. What that means is it’s triggering the parasympathetic nervous system, getting you out of fight and flight. and into rest and digest. Whether it’s nervous system is relaxing, respiration is regulating, heart rate is regulating, blood pressure is lowering, and the body is centralizing and it is becoming present. This is what the binaural beat achieves because it synchronizes and entrains and calms the brain. So the way I use it going about my day, As you mentioned, I have a son who is severely disabled with autistic traits. So he’s nonverbal. He has a lot of meltdowns. He has very strong difficulties regulating in a world that wasn’t made for him. My day, when it isn’t about audison, is about helping my son to regulate in our world. And that’s about at the moment, a lot of external things that people on the spectrum find to be helpful for regulating the nervous system. He does his stimming, does his trampoline, he does lots of, I do massages, lots of movements. This is like the internal sound version of that. It’s regulating the nervous system for you from within. And the scientific studies that we’ve done, we’ve studied people for weeks, months, our longer studies are over years. And the month long study is my favorite because if you listen to Audison, you get a significant relaxation effect within 10 minutes. We’ve done a scientific study showing that. But the month long study is where you start to see the cumulative benefits of using Audison. That’s where you start to see really cool things in heart rate, heart rate variability. Dr Victoria Williamson (37:09.351) which is the hot bio measure that everybody’s talking about right now, which is a measure of how healthy your nervous system is. Measure it with the aura ring, measure it with your Apple watch. I’m all into this kind of bio measuring. There you go. Totally right. We’ve got the original aura team, a lot of them who created the aura ring is now on the audison team, making audison alongside us because they’ve seen the effect. The original CEO, Petri Latunen. Cheryl McColgan (37:20.002) Totally gonna do it. Cheryl McColgan (37:30.84) Sound very cool. Dr Victoria Williamson (37:38.596) is on record saying that Audison has impacted his HRV more than any other form of external method he’s found, as measured on his own device. Cheryl McColgan (37:47.768) That’s amazing. Cheryl McColgan (37:51.564) Wow, that’s really amazing. Okay, everybody, she’s giving you a free trial. I better hear from everybody that they’re doing this. And I wanna track this, because I do track my heart rate variability. So think that’s very, if nothing else changed in your health world other than that, that would be a huge worthwhile benefit of your service. But it’s not just that. As you mentioned, it’s this overall nervous system regulation, which I think, I don’t know. Dr Victoria Williamson (37:54.227) It’s super cool. Cheryl McColgan (38:18.744) again, 99 .999 % of people really need in this world that we’re living in. Any other? So you mentioned the way that you use it. mean, we’re primarily trying to get that rest and digest. you doing anything? You mentioned the Olympic athletes. I’m wondering if, okay, so that’s more for recovery. I’m wondering if you’re doing anything with like, you know, helping like physical performance kind of things, or is there any way to tap into that for, like you mentioned, training or going to the gym, that kind of thing? Dr Victoria Williamson (38:24.723) Totally. Dr Victoria Williamson (38:35.399) Bye. Dr Victoria Williamson (38:48.433) Yeah. So when we first heard from the Olympic athletes who were interested in audison, we were a bit abused because we thought from everything I knew about music and training, audison didn’t seem to fit. You know, there’s a there’s a large body of wonderful research on music and exercise led by people like Professor Costas Cariagoris in the UK that details the kind of music that is good for training. And it’s a lot about the beats per minute and this sort of thing that’s good for training. And I thought, that’s not autism. We don’t make that kind of music. But it’s the people themselves. It’s these wonderful athletes who said, you’ve got the wrong idea, actually, because what you really need for a good training session is flow. You need to be in the zone. I want to tune out all the signals that are telling me. tired, don’t want to do this, whatever, I’m not enjoying this. Those need to be quiet. And I need to be focused and present. And when that was explained to me, it clicked. Okay, I get it. Like, this isn’t if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t need to really motivate you, and you might be and if you are cool, fantastic, there’s music for you. Absolutely. But there are athletes out there who’s really are seeking flow. And that’s what certain app tracks within Autism will do. If you open the app, you can select what you want to achieve from the app. Just select Focus. any of those tracks are a binaural beat frequency level that will induce this experience of flow, getting you in the zone. Now we originally can see that as being for work. Dr Victoria Williamson (40:35.613) But out there in the field, being used for two, three years now, we’ve learned that people training feel the same benefits. That actually being in the zone is such a precious thing. And the great thing about Audison is like all music, there’s variety there. So if you like darker music, we’ve got beautiful composers who grew up in the sort of Finnish, you know, dark, inspirational, atmospheric. There’s tracks like Lava that are there too. capture that. And then there’s beautiful light stuff, know, like Lakeview, I saw you light and shadow. These wonderful tracks are much, much lighter. They will feature a lot of nature sounds. You’re absolutely right. Of the kind I saw you working in your yard, in your new yard, a few months ago that you have looks beautiful. And the benefits of being out in nature, of hearing those sounds and being out there. Now we’re not always in a world where we can capture that. I don’t have a garden. Cheryl McColgan (41:22.486) Yes. Thank you. Mm. Dr Victoria Williamson (41:34.077) Certainly nothing as beautiful as yours. So it’s very nice that you let me in to see it. But having those nature sounds, we know significantly reduces cortisol, significantly increases HRV, significantly lowers heart rate. There’s loads of research out there that nature sounds versus urban sounds has this beneficial effect. So that’s partly why it’s in order to see this well. We’re putting all that science into the sound. Cheryl McColgan (41:38.21) You Dr Victoria Williamson (42:01.127) But ultimately it is music and people come to music with their own preferences. So there’s a variety of tracks in there. So whatever works for you of the kind that you need, it’ll be there. Cheryl McColgan (42:12.386) Yeah, and I would imagine, mean, this seems like such a fun project. I mean, obviously it’s doing a lot of good with just whatever library you have now, but I can imagine that over time, like you’ll get more and more people interested in maybe musicians that want to work with you and do this kind of, you know, interesting new kind of thing. So I don’t know, I think it’s really exciting and I can’t wait to implement this into my personal health and wellness routine because I can totally, what I was thinking of when you were talking about flow, how certain sports, are much more amenable to that. So can see how you’re saying like some sports that might have to be the more like pump you up kind of, you know, fast beat hardcore music. then on the other hand, like I was, I played golf in college and, you know, golf is very much a flow state sport. And I can totally see how if I would have been walking down the fairway, you know, listening to one of these tracks and coming up to my next shot, I just I think there’s something there too, if you haven’t worked with any Finnish golfers yet, I would definitely have them check it out. Well, anyway, Dr. Williamson, this has just been amazing. Before we go here, I do want to share with my audience, you have a really amazingly cool study coming up. Anybody that’s interested in anything that we talked about here today, or if you’re just a biohacker and you’re interested in optimizing your experience, which I know is a lot of you out there listening, Dr Victoria Williamson (43:12.541) noted. Thank you. Cheryl McColgan (43:34.968) Dr. Williamson has a very cool study coming up. So can you share a little bit about that and how people can get in touch if they’re interested in participating? Dr Victoria Williamson (43:43.571) Thank you so much. we are just in this coming to the US in very soon. We are launching a study which has been funded by public funding in Finland. We are looking for people from particular groups to try our orders in and let us know how it impacts their daily lives. So this would be paid research. We are more than happy to recompense people for their time and effort. But we are science driven but with people. We want always to write something that works for people, that fits into their lives. And the only way we can do that is by asking them. So the study is interested in three main target groups within the US, and that is nurses, people with diagnosis of ADHD, and biohackers. So these are three target groups that have very potentially different requirements from autism. but that come down to three groups of people that would benefit from nervous system regulation to meet their goals or to help meet the demands that they’re facing. So if anybody sees themselves in one of those groups or knows anybody who is, where the Audison website is going to have a sign up link on it. But if you would like to know more, my door is open. I’m victoria at audison .com. You’re more than welcome to get in touch with me. If you’ve tried it and you want to give me some feedback as well, that’s always more than welcome. If you want to know more about the study before clicking on anything, just let me know and I’ll be more than happy to talk to you about it. Cheryl McColgan (45:17.688) Dr. Williamson, has just made my heart so happy today to have this conversation because I love it when people are doing the work that is so meaningful to them and that brings them joy and brings joy to the world and helps people feel better. So thank you for taking the time today and thank you for making this amazing product and your life’s work, like all this years of music that you did coming into this thing. So amazing. It is. Dr Victoria Williamson (45:34.707) Thank you. Dr Victoria Williamson (45:43.737) It’s exciting. It’s so exciting. It’s just wanted to make a difference with music is what they’re to ride on wherever I lay. And if they can say tick, I’ll be lying happy. Cheryl McColgan (45:56.044) love it. Thank you again so much. Dr Victoria Williamson (45:58.767) And you. And you. Thank you.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Hormone Health Tips with a Functional Medicine Doctor 40:32

21 weeks fa40:32

40:32

In this episode, Dr. Malaika Woods discusses her journey from traditional obstetrics to functional medicine. She is now focused on the importance of understanding hormones for optimal health. She shares insights on personal weight loss journey, the mental aspects of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and the common hormonal issues women face, particularly during menopause. Dr. Woods also explains the significance of hormone replacement therapy, different methods of administration, and the importance of testosterone for both women and men. You can find Dr. Woods at her website, https://drwoodswellness.com/ Takeaways Weight loss is easier than maintenance; mental aspects are crucial. Nutrition, stress management, and inflammation are key pillars of health. Women often experience hormonal changes in their 40s and 50s. Hormone replacement therapy can reduce risks of various diseases. Bioidentical hormones are preferred for their safety and efficacy. Testosterone is vital for women’s health and often overlooked. Men also experience low testosterone, impacting their health significantly Watch on YouTube Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here . CONNECT WITH CHERYL Shop all my healthy lifestyle favorites, lots of discounts ! 21 Day Fat Loss Kickstart: Make Keto Easy, Take Diet Breaks and Still Lose Weight Dry Farm Wines, extra bottle for a penny Drinking Ketones Wild Pastures, Clean Meat to Your Doorstep 20% off for life Clean Beauty 20% off first order DIY Lashes 10% off NIRA at Home Laser for Wrinkles 10% off or current promo with code HealNourishGrow Instagram for daily stories with recipes, what I eat in a day and what’s going on in life Facebook YouTube Pinterest TikTok Amazon Store Getting Started with Keto Resources The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide Episode Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:01.111) Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I have Dr. Malekah Woods and she is a specialist in women’s health. She talks a lot about hormones and she also sees men patients. So if you’re a man, don’t click away. Plus you need to know this stuff about women’s health as well. So all that being said. Dr. Malaika Woods (00:17.592) Bye. Cheryl McColgan (00:19.428) Welcome Dr. Woods. I would love if you could share with people a little bit about your background. How did you come to this line of work and any personal health and wellness thing that speaks to why you’re so passionate about this now. Dr. Malaika Woods (00:32.175) Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Cheryl. So just to give you kind of a brief synopsis of my background, I actually wanted to deliver babies back in eighth grade. So that’s how it all started. ended up being fast forward to 2011. I was a full -time OB -GYN and a very busy practice. I was a year out from having my second kid and seeing 30, 40 people a day. It was supposed to be the ideal job, but I was stressed out. I was a mother with, you know, a five -year -old and a one -year -old. And I was overweight. I was about 240 pounds and I knew I needed to do something different with my own health. And so that was my first step into looking at something other than traditional obstetrics and gynecology, which is what I’m board certified in. So my first journey was weight loss and I actually got board certified in obesity medicine. And over the course of 2011 to 2013, I lost 60 pounds. I tried a lot of different things and we may get into some of that down the road. And then I learned about bioidentical hormones. And I thought, wow, I’m an OB -GYN, but I don’t really know anything about bioidentical hormones. And so I got certified in BHRT, bioidentical hormones for short. And then I learned about functional medicine. And all of this happened in a short span of time, probably around 2011 to 2014. And when I learned that functional medicine was about root cause approaches and natural solutions, I was like, okay, wow, this is what I’ve been missing all along. And so functional medicine is now what I do. It is the umbrella under which I offer those other services, whether it’s hormone optimization, weight loss, thyroid support, a lot of different things, but that’s kind of what brought me to where I am today. Cheryl McColgan (02:11.612) my gosh, I get so excited when I talk to health professionals like yourself that are really going away from sort of the traditional paradigm of just, you know, fix it with a pill or something and where it’s really like a whole systems approach and, you know, getting to the root cause with functional medicine. Do you think that, you know, you mentioned that you had a weight loss journey, which I think is a really amazing background for you to have as an obesity medicine specialist now. Can you maybe share a little bit with people, you know, what were your frustrations with that process? What did you learn along the way? Just speaking from not as a doctor, but just as a person who had success losing a great amount of weight. I’m sure everybody would love to hear how you did that. What were your struggles? What were your triumphs and you know, any tips and tricks you may have. Dr. Malaika Woods (03:00.463) Yeah, absolutely. I would say one thing for sure that everyone really needs to tap into is the mental aspect of weight loss. And so one of the things that I say to people all the time, and I found it to be true with myself, in a lot of cases is easy to lose weight, but it’s harder to keep it off. So it’s kind of that idea that you can jump on a bandwagon for a short period of time, but it’s hard to sustain something. And something that was a game changer for me, and I actually have, think the workbook behind me, kind of that pink book. It’s called, train your brain to think like a thin person. And it’s actually using the concepts of cognitive behavioral therapy to help you with weight loss. And it is written by Dr. Beck, who is the daughter of the original Dr. Beck who came up with CBT to begin with. But I found that what I was doing as a heavy person is that I was looking for excuses, honestly. And I was thinking like, life is unfair, like it’s unfair that this other person is so thin. I’ll take, for example, I had a medical assistant in my office who was very fit. And when I really analyze it, it’s not like, it’s not fair that she’s so thin. She brought her workout clothes to work every day. And she went to work out after work. And when the drug reps, before I went all functional medicine, when they would bring us lunch, she would have a salad and I would have a sandwich and a cookie. So you start to really say, hmm, what am I doing? Cheryl McColgan (04:25.049) You Dr. Malaika Woods (04:28.612) So one of the things that I learned is that I have to take responsibility. The other thing I learned is that, you know, it’s important to have a community and to have support. So one of my phases of weight loss is that I got into P90X back when that was popular and I did it with my husband and he was a great support. And we did all those, you know, crazy videos together. I’ll say crazy because, you know, there were stories that people were hurting themselves and kind of doing a little too much. Cheryl McColgan (04:43.642) Yes. Dr. Malaika Woods (04:54.95) but we did that together. And so I think the community and having support is important too. And I think what I’ve realized working with patients is that the traditional advice of eat less and exercise more is not enough for most people. That is a first step, but you have to take into account how are the hormones affecting your ability to lose weight? How’s your metabolism and all the things that impact your metabolism, how is that affecting your ability to lose weight? So you really wanna take a more comprehensive approach. So those are some of the things that I learned along. Cheryl McColgan (05:28.654) Yeah, and those are awesome, really good, just succinct, take away things that people can look at, taking personal responsibility, having a, I always call them accountability buddies, which the first time I heard that phrase was, it’s from South Park. I don’t know if it was somewhere else before that, but that’s actually where I first heard it. But anyway, so I think those are awesome tips. And I love that you mentioned P90X also, because that was such a thing in that timeframe that was very, yes, in fact, my husband just. Dr. Malaika Woods (05:39.792) Love that. Dr. Malaika Woods (05:44.26) Okay Dr. Malaika Woods (05:53.083) It was a big deal back then. Cheryl McColgan (05:56.592) brought it up the other day, we were talking about something and he said, yeah, I used to do the P90X yoga. anyway, all that being said, so you mentioned hormones and thyroid and a few things. if people are say, you know, whether they’re just not feeling optimized, or they do have some extra weight that they’re carrying around that they’d like to lose, what are the sorts of things that patients come in and say to you like how they’re feeling and things? And then how do you move forward with identifying Dr. Malaika Woods (06:01.681) Mm -hmm. Cheryl McColgan (06:25.882) what their hormones might be doing or how you might be able to shift that to help them feel better basically. Dr. Malaika Woods (06:32.051) Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of times when I see women, usually they’re in their mid 40s, early 50s. That’s probably the most common age group that I see. And they’re coming in and they’re telling me, and I see virtual. So when I say coming in, I’m using that figuratively speaking, coming into the video room, if you will. And what they’re telling me is they’re like, doc, I’m having hot flashes, nice sweats. Even on video, they stand up and grab around the middle and say, I don’t know where this belly fat came from. It wasn’t here 18 months ago. haven’t. Cheryl McColgan (06:47.398) Yeah. Cheryl McColgan (06:58.671) You Dr. Malaika Woods (07:00.872) change what I’m eating, I’m still exercising the same as I was before, and the libido is completely gone. Those are some very common things, and fatigue. So those are the things that are the common concerns of the people that I see. And so the first step that I do, first of all, I just like to get a very detailed history. And because I have a non -traditional practice, I really have the opportunity to sit down with my initial patience like 90 minutes, we like go in depth. And even our paperwork is more involved than patients have ever done before. We wanna get the entire backstory. I also start with a comprehensive lab panel, which I think is very important, where we’re looking at hormones and thyroid and inflammation markers, and a lot of other things to really get a good idea of what’s going on from the patient’s perspective. And then also what is the body telling us about what. about what’s going on and we put those two things together to develop a plan of action. Cheryl McColgan (08:04.198) And you said that typically people are coming in between maybe age 45 to 50. I would love for you to maybe talk a little bit to those people that aren’t in that age group yet. They know it’s coming. Before we move on to talking about how we deal with that, like once we’re there. But when you know it’s coming, do you feel like there are things that women can do to better prepare to go into that stage of life? Things that they can kind of do to either Dr. Malaika Woods (08:17.511) Yes. Cheryl McColgan (08:32.28) mitigate some of the symptoms or to just have more knowledge going into it so they’re not shocked when these things come up because I think, know, once you’re there, you’re of like, yeah, now I know all about that with the heat and all the things you mentioned. But they, they’ve at this point, hopefully they’ve just heard about it and they’re like, I wonder if there’s anything I can do to like to my health now to maybe counterbalance some of that, I guess going. Dr. Malaika Woods (08:43.614) Mm -hmm. All right. Dr. Malaika Woods (08:54.441) Yes, absolutely. so, and functional medicine is for everyone. Hormones, you know, not everyone needs that. But the functional medicine approach really encompasses a few pillars that we like to work on. So one of those pillars is nutrition. So really, you know, cleaning up your nutrition. And even for the younger women who may be in their early 40s, now some of them are truly experiencing what we call perimenopause. So you’re around the menopause, but you’re not at the exact menopause. And just for definition sake, menopause is a whole year without a period for women who are still having periods. The average age of menopause is at 51. But a lot of women can start having symptoms prior to that. So again, in those early forties, what can you do? One of those pillars is nutrition. And I tell women to be wary of what I call the menopause pretenders. So you may be young and you’re having hot flashes and night sweats and you’re like, 39, 40, am I going through menopause? Likely not, but you may be dealing with a menopause pretender. And two of the biggest ones that kind of go hand in hand, one is alcohol. So, know, a lot of times women are thinking, let me get a glass of wine so I can relax at night, but the swing in the blood sugar overnight can actually precipitate and bring on hot flashes. So that is a menopause pretender to be aware of. And then also sugar coming from other sources, know, cookies, candies, et cetera, especially if you’re eating that at night. So nutrition is a pillar. Another pillar is dealing with stress. And this is one that we just don’t do a good job of because stress is so hard to kind of define. But stress has a real role that it plays in your body. It can wreak havoc on your sleep, on your ability to burn fat and so many other areas. So stress is an important pillar. Thinking about dealing with inflammation and where it may be hitting you, moving your body. is important. So those are some of those basic pillars that you can start to work on. And I kind of think of it this way, like, if your body is in a hammock, and that hammock is being held up by four or five of these pillars, if you can really raise those pillars, you’re really off the ground. And so when you get a hit like menopause, you’re not smacking down to the ground if you’re already kind of upheld, if that analogy makes sense, by some of those good, you know, basics to be working on. Cheryl McColgan (11:15.386) Yeah, love that analogy. it’s also, I mean, everything that you spoke to is really some just speaks to just the greater health that you have overall going into this, the more resilience your body has to deal with these extra things down the road. Excellent points. So okay, so we were talking about have have as good a health as you can going into menopause. But the truth is, once you get to be into your 40s and early 50s, Dr. Malaika Woods (11:27.663) Absolutely. Yes, yes. Cheryl McColgan (11:41.67) There are hormonal shifts that naturally happen that do cause these symptoms that you talked about. Is there, and I guess we should go to, think, I feel like everybody knows this at this point, but they probably don’t. A lot of women know about the Women’s Health Initiative study, which, you know, there was this big headline 25, 30 years ago that, you know, these hormone replacements cause cancer, which actually is not the case at all. So that’s like the really simplistic explanation, but I’d love if you could share a little bit about why that is not the case and how, you know, what kinds of things this hormone replacement help if you decide to, you know, go down that road. Dr. Malaika Woods (12:21.879) Absolutely. So yeah, I was a resident, was an OB -GYN resident when the Women’s Health Initiative was published in 2002. So I remember it very clearly. And you’re right about that headline. What we understand now about that study and the OB -GYNs, we were understanding it in real time and we were the only ones still prescribing hormones. I kind of imagine all the other doctors just ripping up prescriptions, know, like no more hormones for any of you. And unfortunately, an entire generation or two, you know, 20 years of women have suffered from minimal access to hormone replacement therapy. So some of the big errors in that study, first of all, they were giving women hormones for the first time at the average age of about 62 or 63. Cheryl McColgan (12:47.304) Right? Dr. Malaika Woods (13:09.836) That is not the real world. I just mentioned women in their mid 40s and 50s, that is when we usually start hormones. And the thing with estrogen, it is time dependent as far as how it works with your cardiovascular system. So if you give estrogen in a younger woman who does not have any plaque development in their vessels, estrogen can be protective. And there’s lots of studies, longitudinal studies like the Nurses Health Initiative. that shows a 30 to 50 % reduction in cardiovascular disease in women who take estrogen, who take hormones. And I’m gonna particularly, and they don’t even make the distinction all the time between estradiol, which is bioidentical versus ethanol estradiol or what you get from your primarin, your pregnant, major and the synthetic. So sometimes even if you’re on synthetic or bioidentical, you see that benefit. If you give estrogen in a woman in her 60s, when she is likely already to have some plaque development in their vessels, that is a potential disruptors what that thought was. One of the biggest things that came from the Women’s Health Initiative and my assessment and with my colleagues is that it was the synthetic progestin, madroxyprogesterone acetate that was really the culprit as far as the increased risk of breast cancer, heart attack and stroke. It wasn’t even really the synthetic estrogen. And so if we think about what does estrogen do for you outside of even just helping you with hot flashes and night sweats, and the Women’s Health Initiative taught us this, you see about a 30 % reduction in colon cancer, you see a 30 % reduction in osteoporosis, and those are major issues for women as they age. Cheryl McColgan (14:53.274) Yeah, I’m so glad that you gave a much better explanation of that because I’ve heard this story multiple times, but not being a practitioner, I don’t have to explain it to people very often. And I just tell my friends, I’m like, that’s been debunked. then, you know, it takes a little research on your own to really get to that place. So where I’d like to go now, after learning all of that over these many years and knowing risk factors that I have in my family for various health things, Dr. Malaika Woods (15:06.892) You’re right. Yes. Cheryl McColgan (15:22.392) including that my sister that’s a year younger than me does have breast cancer. She’s an ED right now. So that’s one thing that people, and they recommended for her to not do hormone replacement, for example, different situation. But knowing the other factors, I did decide to go down that road. And I guess my question is there’s a lot of, so you mentioned bioidentical, there’s a lot of different routes of administration that you can take these different hormones. There’s creams, there’s pellet that you get in your subcutaneous fat, there’s pills that you might take, and obviously you’re not giving medical advice here, but with not going there, can you maybe describe each one of those methods of administration and why some may be better than others? Dr. Malaika Woods (16:08.6) Absolutely, and I’ll give you kind of my opinion as far as, you know, least effective to most effective or, you know, least popular, most popular in my office and amongst my patients. And so I will start with a cream. A cream is something that you apply daily. You can combine hormones in the cream like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, those are kind of the main ones. I had one of my patients say she’s on the strony soup talking about, you know, her different hormones. Cheryl McColgan (16:34.47) I like that. Dr. Malaika Woods (16:37.56) But the issue with the cream is that people absorb it differently. Sometimes people don’t like it because it’s messy. With the testosterone in the cream, you do have to be careful not to transfer that to like other people, pets, children, things like that. And with progesterone in particular, this one is very important, Cheryl. You cannot get a good blood level of progesterone. It’s very hard with the cream. And so, and let me say why that’s important with progesterone. Progesterone, I call it my secret weapon hormone. because it has two really great benefits. It has a natural sedative effect, so it can help you sleep at night. And a lot of women are dealing with trouble sleeping insomnia when they hit this age range as well. And secondly, progesterone has a calming effect. It helps the mood. It really works on these GABA receptors, which are calming. Now I veered off, so there’s cream. Next, we have a troche. Cheryl McColgan (17:29.186) you Dr. Malaika Woods (17:32.404) A trochee is like a throat lozenge. It’s usually a square wax -based preparation. You hold it in your inner cheek and it’s not considered an oral administration. It’s a submucosal. in most cases, you wanna bypass the stomach in particular. You wanna try to get right into the bloodstream with all of these hormones. They work better that way and less risk to your liver. With capsule, can do progesterone as a capsule. You can do… estrogen as a tablet oral. Then you also have an injection. And this is something that is actually very popular in my office. With injections, it’s a little bit more potent administration, particularly for the testosterone. You can dial in the dose very specific to the individual. And so that’s why we like that. It’s every two weeks for women. And then you mentioned the pellet. I really liked the pellet, Cheryl, but it is not something that I start with. And so… When you talk to traditional OB -GYNs, they kind of lose their minds about pellets and they hate it. And the reason why they do is because I feel like there’s people out there giving pellets not in the best way. And then the woman ends up with all this irregular bleeding and they go to their traditional OB -GYN to fix them. So that’s why they hate the pellet. Now, I love the pellet because it gives you a steady administration of the hormone for about three months. And so you only have to do it maybe four times a year. So that’s wonderful, but you shouldn’t start, I don’t think you should start a person on a pellet because once the pellet is in, and let me say it is a little compressed powder of hormone, like the size of a Tic -Tac or smaller. It’s a little procedure that happens in the office. So we make a little tiny incision kind of nail to nail, if you’re kind of doing a little pinch. And we slip that pellet into the fatty tissue and it’s absorbed in the body. over the course of again about three to four months. So wonderful for a steady state of hormone. But if you have an unwanted side effect, we have to then wait it out for three or four months because you cannot go and take that pellet out. That’s why I don’t start there. I start with something that’s easily reversible. And once we get a sense of how a woman is gonna do on her hormones, then we will consider a pellet. Cheryl McColgan (19:45.466) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. just if anybody’s listening to this thinking, gosh, that’s horrible. I would never like want to have this. It’s really easy. This is actually what I get. It is. And it’s interesting because, you know, it just feels like a little pinch. They have me ice it. There’s lidocaine in the shot. They give you, it feels like a little bit of pressure. But for me, I think what you said, the convenience of it is just amazing. Dr. Malaika Woods (19:55.542) super. Yeah, it’s super convenient, isn’t it? Dr. Malaika Woods (20:06.98) Mm -hmm. Cheryl McColgan (20:13.328) The one thing I had heard recently though that was interesting and I pride myself on, I’m one of those crazy people that like I researched the heck out of things before I do it. And of course I was on PubMed doing all this research before I decided to do that. But then just lately I saw a couple people, know, menopause is suddenly much more popular on Instagram and other places where people are talking about it, which I think is amazing. But with that comes the same thing as fitness, nutrition, everybody’s got an opinion. You never know exactly where they’re coming from or if they’re right. one of the doctors commented on somebody else’s post and he was saying, never appellate for women. And I just said, I said, that’s interesting. Why do you say that? And he said something about big overdose. He didn’t like explain it very well. But I guess the thought was that maybe it doesn’t try trade evenly throughout the three or four months. So I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that or have any thoughts on that, but I’m just curious. Dr. Malaika Woods (20:59.43) Mm -hmm. Dr. Malaika Woods (21:10.62) Yeah, my understanding of how the pellet works, and this is partly subjective in some of the research that I’ve done as well. It takes about two weeks for the hormone levels to peak, and then they’re pretty steady again for about three months, and then they’ll start to decline. And for women who have done pellets, you know this because as soon as you say, hmm, I think my pellet is wearing off, like I’m starting to get hot flashes again, probably by 10 days later, it’s like taint. Like, you know, it’s kind of out of your system. So, but I think… symptom -wise, a woman can also attest that she gets a nice steady state. As far as overdose, again, I think it’s the way that you’re giving it. Each practitioner and the way that they administer the pellet, particularly the dose that they use, is probably unique. And so are there some people out there maybe getting overdose perhaps? But again, I think that the experience that I have with my patients, they do very well and we track their hormone levels. If we’re talking about testosterone and Cheryl, you’re probably familiar with this since you do some hormone yourself. With women, our goal is actually to super optimize their testosterone level. That’s kind of how I explain it. And that also is sort of, you know, people kind of lose their minds on that concept as well for people who don’t get it. But I would direct them to, I believe it’s Dr. Glaser. You’re probably familiar with her. She’s done a lot of research on testosterone in women. She’s based out of Ohio. Rebecca’s her first name. Cheryl McColgan (22:25.37) right? Dr. Malaika Woods (22:38.334) and she published a paper of 10 ,000 of her women patients and the average testosterone level was 299. And so, yeah, and so when a woman gets their testosterone level checked, the range only goes to like 30 to 50, 48 maybe. And so she super optimizes on purpose. And this is the same doctor who has looked at testosterone experimentally as a treatment for breast cancer. So. And this is the other thing, let’s say for you example with a family history of breast cancer, a woman like you, you may have some legitimate concerns about hormones. And even though you and I kind of understand they don’t cause cancer, but that mindset is hard to unwind. And let me also say caveat, if you get a breast cancer that is estrogen receptor positive or progesterone receptor positive, then no, you should not. beyond those hormones. It doesn’t mean that those hormones cause the cancer though. Again, it’s complex. It’s a lot to unravel. However, a lot of times if a woman has a concern about breast cancer, we start with testosterone. There’s absolutely no concern about cancer there. There’s really no controversy about breast cancer as far as testosterone is concerned and it actually might be beneficial. Again, I’m just telling you based on some of the studies I’ve seen. Cheryl McColgan (23:53.478) And would you say when people come in and so you said you’re testing the hormones and they’re telling you how they feel and things, when you test, actually when I first had my testosterone tested, this is, I guess it was about four years ago, so I’d been 47. And my doctor came in, she said, well, congratulations, you have the testosterone of an 85 year old. And I was like, okay, that can’t be optimal or good in any way, I’m only 47. So. Dr. Malaika Woods (24:17.576) Right, absolutely not. Cheryl McColgan (24:21.306) Would you say that when you test people that are coming, now you’re seeing people that are having some issues already, right? That’s why they’re coming to you. So it might be higher, but what percentage of women would you say come in and have low testosterone, for example? Dr. Malaika Woods (24:34.267) I’d probably say 80 % easily. And let me also say this too, for your younger women who suspect that they’re having issues, we do see low testosterone in younger women too in their 30s as well. And I think, and this is with men too, let me say that, like there’s a lot of the technical term for guys is called hypogonadism. There’s a lot of men also who are coming in in their 30s with low T, you heard that word, low testosterone. And I think it’s environmental and just things that we’re exposed to and just how our diets are different. There’s a lot of factors, but I don’t want a younger person to discount their symptoms and not get things checked out if they’re worried about their hormone levels. And understand too, that your traditional doctor is likely not going to check your hormone levels. They don’t believe in checking hormone levels. They believe in treating symptoms more so. And again, it’s just their style, not throwing any shade. I grew up in the traditional world. But now that I do hormone replacement therapy, we take a different approach. We want to look at labs and yes, we understand that the hormone levels fluctuate, but we also can look at relative changes and relative differences, you know, prior to hormones, after hormone administration. I think that’s important. And the thing that I tell, you know, the folks that I talk to all the time, Cheryl, is that the lab tells part of the story and you tell part of the story. And I think it’s important to find a physician or a practitioner who is going to consider both of those things. Cheryl McColgan (26:01.42) so many pieces of excellent advice there that you just hit on and the one that I think I would say to people if they happen to be listening to this in their 20s, whether they’re male or female, there’s plenty of online services now where you can pay out of pocket to get tested. I would get your hormone levels tested as early as you can, early 20s, mid 20s so you have a baseline so you know as you age how much you’ve lost or if you’ve lost any. Dr. Malaika Woods (26:15.081) Mm Dr. Malaika Woods (26:19.979) Mm -hmm. yeah. Cheryl McColgan (26:25.426) and it might give you a better idea of how to optimize it in the future. That’s not to say you probably can’t get there eventually without knowing what you were originally, but I always thought that would have been like, that’s a basic biomarker. I’m not really sure why doctors don’t test for that. Dr. Malaika Woods (26:36.49) Yeah. And to your point, when you come in, let me switch gears and talk about thyroid, because that’s another huge travesty, tragedy, all of that tragic that so many people are walking around with poorly optimized thyroid. And so again, you might come in and have all the symptoms. I’m tired, I’m constipated, my eyebrows are thinning, my hair is falling out. I’m cold all the time. And you get that one number, they check the thyroid stimulating hormone and it’s quote unquote normal, okay? What they don’t know, and again, if you’re 35, we don’t know what it was when you were 25. Maybe there has been a significant shift and not just in the TSH, but in your actual thyroid numbers, but you don’t have a comparison. So I think that’s a great point that you mentioned there to know your baseline. Cheryl McColgan (27:28.112) Yeah, if we could only get people to have it as standard practice or standard of care, think that would be amazing. Dr. Malaika Woods (27:34.783) Right. I think unfortunately the traditional world is so occupied with just sick people. And that’s just sort of where we are. And so those of us who are the true health seekers, like people listening to your podcast, people who come to see me, they are the ones who are looking for optimization. And you’re not going to really find that done well in the traditional world. It’s okay. We need the traditional world. You know, when we break a bone, surgery, cancer, et cetera. But when it comes to optimization, when it comes to prevention, not so much, and that’s okay. Cheryl McColgan (28:09.754) Yeah, but to your point, mean, there are more people like you and others that I’ve interviewed that are really into this functional health paradigm now, and they do no insurance care, concierge care. mean, it’s a shame because maybe the average person can’t as easily afford it since it’s not covered by insurance. But by the same token, at least we’re moving in a direction where that kind of doctor is available and that there are people that can help you do that if that’s your goal rather than just sick care. Dr. Malaika Woods (28:26.817) Mm -hmm. Dr. Malaika Woods (28:37.575) Absolutely, Cheryl McColgan (28:38.566) It just takes time, right? We’ll get there hopefully. So you mentioned that you also see men as well in your practice. And I think you mentioned low T men in their 20s, 30s. I think I read a study recently that the average testosterone in men is significantly down from where it was even just 20 years ago. Can you maybe speak to a little bit on the men’s side? Dr. Malaika Woods (28:58.836) Mm Mm -hmm. Cheryl McColgan (29:04.816) tend to see in your practice and what kind of things do men struggle with when they’re having low T. Dr. Malaika Woods (29:09.779) Absolutely. So jokingly, I’m going to tell the ladies and the men to watch out for what we call the grumpy old man syndrome. So if they’re, you know, they’re irritable, you know, they’re lacking motivation, they’re getting belly fat around the middle, they’re losing muscle mass, certainly their libido and, you know, erections and things like that can be impacted. So those are some of the signs when you know that the testosterone is low. And you may not have all of them. It may just be fatigue and lack of motivation. And it actually can manifest as something that looks like depression in men also. Speaking to the testosterone levels in men, the standard lab test says that 250 or something and above is okay, but optimal is really 800 to 1 ,000. And to take it back to connecting it with health outcomes, There’s a study of veterans where they divided them by testosterone level. The male veterans who had a testosterone level under 500 had a higher rate of diabetes, high blood pressure, risk of death, any comorbidity problem that you could think of. In men with the testosterone below 500, it was higher compared to above 500. So I would say at least based on studies like that, we should be shooting for at least above 500, not. So again, there’s a little bit of disagreement in the hormone replacement world about where these numbers need to sit. And another thing that I learned from my mentor is that normal is not optimal, but optimal is best. You don’t want to be normal and feeling terrible, right? You don’t want a normal lab, but you feel horrible. And that’s why I say the lab tells part of it, you tell part of it. So we have to put those two things together because Cheryl McColgan (30:51.514) The right. Dr. Malaika Woods (31:00.771) Again, men are walking around suffering as well. you’re just, it’s sort of like, unfortunately in the traditional world, like you come in and your testosterone’s 500, you feel horrible, talk about a guy. Then next year, you know, maybe it’s 420. And then, so they’re just waiting and waiting and waiting. And for years you’re suffering without, you know, taking action. And I can give that same analogy with so many other instances for men and women. Cheryl McColgan (31:25.734) Yeah, and that’s such a great point too, because I think that people forget in the general public that laboratory norms are based on the whole population of people getting labs, which are generally, they’re already sick, right? And they’re going to get all these labs. Dr. Malaika Woods (31:36.092) my gosh. Thank you. I say that to everybody. I’ve said the standard lab is based on all the sick people coming in and out of the lab. You don’t want to base your normal off of their normal. That’s exactly right. Preach into the choir. Cheryl McColgan (31:49.528) Right. Yeah. So I’m with you there. know, it’s amazing when you when you think you learn to think about these things in a critical way and you know how to read studies and stuff. It’s like people just see these headlines and they don’t kind of think more critically about what does that mean. Well just because you’re in the normal range you’re comparing yourself to all these people that aren’t very well. So so Dr. Woods you’ve mentioned that you see people online. Can you Dr. Malaika Woods (32:04.709) Mm -hmm. Cheryl McColgan (32:18.998) share a little bit about your practice, where you’re licensed to do that, how you like to work with people, your website, all that good stuff. Dr. Malaika Woods (32:26.136) Yeah, absolutely. So I am a hybrid practice. So I’m mostly virtual. And then the people who come into the physical space, which is in Missouri, it’s a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri called Lee’s Summit. Those are the people who are doing injections or doing pellets. Otherwise I see people virtually, which is great. It’s convenient for them. They can be on their lunch break and all of that. I see people who live in Kansas, Missouri, and California. So anybody living in those states, I can actually be your provider. And so ways to reach out to me, my website is drwoodswellness .com. That’s just drwoodswellness .com. I do have a private Facebook group called the Natural Hormone Fix. And so those are for the ladies who want to come in and learn about hormones and the functional medicine approach to that. I would say those are the two places to check me out. Cheryl McColgan (33:19.174) Okay, awesome. And one final question, just because you mentioned that people from other states, for example, say I lived in California and I would like, I would love for you to be my provider. I don’t live in California, unfortunately, but I live in Ohio. But how would that work if they reach out to you and start to work with you if they need to do something like have, get medications or get a pellet or something like that? How does that part of it work since they’re not physically there with you? Dr. Malaika Woods (33:29.835) Mm -hmm. Okay. Dr. Malaika Woods (33:44.389) Yeah, so pellet would be hard to do unless they’re coming here to Kansas City. But otherwise we can prescribe the other modalities. Our compounding pharmacies can send medications to all 50 states. I just happen to be licensed in those three. And so actually it works great to do this remotely. And think about it, you’ve got those examples of all these online big companies that do this as well. The difference is you know the doctor that you’re working with. we get to develop rapport and have an ongoing working relationship together. Cheryl McColgan (34:16.558) Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge and some amazing tips and nuggets in here that I hope people take to heart and use to better their health. So again, Dr. Woods, thank you so much for joining us and hopefully I’ll see you again in the future. Dr. Malaika Woods (34:31.769) Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

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Power of Diet and Lifestyle for Health 40:17

24 weeks fa40:17

40:17

In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Sharp discusses various aspects of health and wellness. She emphasizes the importance of diet, lifestyle and stress management. She shares about her journey into functional medicine, which led her to the the significance of gut health and hormonal balance. Dr. Sharp also highlights practical strategies for stress management, the impact of food sensitivities, and the role of habit stacking in creating sustainable health routines. You can find Dr. Sharp at Health Meets Wellness. Takeaways Diet and lifestyle are crucial for overall health. Daily movement, like walking, is essential for stress management. Mindful eating can improve digestion and reduce stress. Food sensitivities can significantly impact gut health. Gut health is interconnected with hormonal balance. Chronic stress can lead to various health issues. Habit stacking simplifies health routines and reduces decision fatigue. Maintaining muscle mass is important during weight loss. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/PjnqETV5X2Q Episode Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:00.908)Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Elizabeth Sharp and we are going to talk about all different kinds of aspects of health, but a couple of things I think you guys will really appreciate, especially since we're coming in to this busy time of year with the holidays and stuff coming up, a lot of stress, so we're going to talk about that. But before we get into all that, Dr. Sharp, I'd just love if you would share with people, kind of a little bit about your personal… background because you have lot of interesting things that you've done. You've done some amazing hiking. You're also a yoga instructor. So you're obviously really passionate as am I about health and wellness. I'd love to just hear some of that background so that people can get to know you a little bit and understand why you've become so passionate about helping people on their personal health journey. Elizabeth (00:44.559)Yeah, so I would say I've always been interested in primary care and that's why I did the internal medicine training that I did and I knew that I wanted to go into primary care in residency. But as I started to practice, really started to appreciate the importance of diet and lifestyle and also the impact overall and kind of wellness and a general feeling of well -being in terms of the mind -body connection. And I think also that ties in with the gut -brain axis. And so I try to tie in all of those things with my practice because I've noticed the difference in my own personal health. When I'm active, when I'm eating a healthy diet, it makes a big difference. Right. And so that's kind of part of what got me into functional medicine is GI related conditions. Generally, I had a lot of patients coming to me with some kind of symptoms that were all very similar. So, you know, gas and bloating, abdominal discomfort that were really explained by the traditional medical work. And so I just thought, you there has to be more that I can do for these patients, more that I can offer. And so once I opened up that door, I really started to explore a bit more in terms of lifestyle medicine, a little bit more with expanded testing and understanding how you can incorporate general internal medicine with, you know, botanicals, nutraceuticals, supplements, that kind of thing. And ultimately how you can create a healthy lifestyle. which is really what sustains people for the rest of their lives with their health as opposed to just treating symptoms. Cheryl McColgan (02:21.56)Yeah, love that. And it's definitely a paradigm that this audience is used to hearing about kind of this functional health approach where it's not just, okay, take this pill is more like, hey, you're gonna probably have to do a little more work than that to move on and really have an optimally healthy life.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

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Harnessing Neurofeedback for Better Sleep 44:58

25 weeks fa44:58

44:58

In this episode, Cheryl interviews Michael Byrne, CEO of BIA Neuroscience about their new biofeedback sleep mask. Michael shares his background in psychology and how he got interested in sleep. He explains the connection between stress and sleep issues and the importance of accurate data collection for neurofeedback. The sleep mask uses conduction drivers to provide audio stimulation to encourage the brain to enter desired sleep stages. The mask also mimics sunlight to wake users up gently and offers features like meditation and affirmations. The wake up experience Michael describes is amazing and we're looking forward to sharing more about it when it finally arrives! Order now at an insanely discounted price with a lifetime subscription to the software. This article is a great resource for more better sleep tips and strategies. Takeaways: Stress is a major factor impacting sleep, and accurate data collection is crucial for effective neurofeedback. The sleep mask uses conduction drivers to provide audio stimulation and encourage the brain to enter desired sleep stages. The mask mimics sunlight to wake users up gently and offers features like meditation and affirmations. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/V7KhtqU6f0M Episode Transcript: Cheryl McColgan (00:01.068)Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Michael Byrne and he is with BIA Neuroscience. And just me saying the word neuroscience, know that that's one of my things just to remind you about my previous content. I have a background in psychology and actually went to graduate school for a bit for clinical neuropsychology. So the brain is definitely something I'm always interested in. So I'm excited for you to share more about your company today. Michael, welcome. before we… get into all that and how this is going to help people with sleep, which is another one of my favorite topics. I'd love for you to just share how is it you got interested in this kind of work and kind of what inspired you to, you know, make a sleep product? Were you having personal trouble with sleep? Like what's the scoop? Michael (00:44.354)I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'll give a long -winded story and edit it as you feel. I went into biopsychology myself. I was very interested in the why behind people's behavior. Why do we do anything? And originally that led me to psychology. And then more I studied it, more I realized the brain was behind it. So I went towards biopsychology. And I ended up doing an internship with a group in paranoid schizophrenia. Cheryl McColgan (00:51.84)you Michael (01:14.38)Very quickly learned studying and working are two vastly different things in the field of psychology. So, you know, I was expecting something like a little bit more exciting and fast pace. And instead it's really quite upsetting and requires a significant amount of empathy and, you know, emotional backing behind it that can be quite draining. So I decided to just get into the working world and see what I liked. So I ended up getting a position at a neurofeedback clinic. I became a certified neurofeedback technician and just saw everything under the sun. And one of the things I noticed and one of the things that we emphasize every single time was when someone came in for a session, we asked them, how was your sleep? And big reason why we did that is it's a more objective way to get an understanding of someone's current cognitive state, so to speak. When you ask someone who's, for example, going through depression and you ask them, how are you doing today? it's one a negative trigger and two you might not get as direct of a response in terms of their current state of mind then if you ask something along the lines of how was your sleep? How was your energy? How are you feeling? It gets you a bit more of a rounded understanding and we asked that no matter the reason someone came in to the neur...…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

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Foot Health to Combat Full Body Aches and Pains, Tips and Exercises 50:57

26 weeks fa50:57

50:57

Dr. Emily Spichal, a functional podiatrist and human movement specialist, discusses the importance of foot health and the role of functional medicine and movement in podiatry. She shares her journey into this field and the development of her sensory-based product line, Naboso. Dr. Emily emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to foot health and the impact of footwear on foot function. She also explores the connection between foot posture, movement patterns, and overall body alignment, as well as the importance of foot health and its impact on overall posture and movement. She explains the benefits of using toe spacers to reset the feet and improve conditions such as bunions, hammer toes, and plantar fasciitis. Dr. Emily also emphasizes the role of sensory perception in foot movement and the importance of reconnecting with the sensory side of ourselves. Her new book is called Sensory Sapiens, which explores how modern movement is aging us and the need to prioritize movement longevity. She advises releasing the feet daily to reduce foot stress and pain. Connect with Dr. Splichal at her website and if you check out Naboso products here, use code HEALNOURISHGROW for 10 percent off. Kineon red light therapy for body pain was the other tool mentioned in this episode. After chatting with Dr. Emily, I bought the toe spacers as well as the sensory ball, I'm obsessed! Takeaways Foot health is an important aspect of overall well-being, and a holistic approach that considers factors like movement, stress, sleep, and diet is crucial. Functional podiatry focuses on treating feet in an integrated way, considering complex human movement and the sensory side of the foot. Footwear trends, such as the current maximalist shoe trend, can impact foot function and movement accuracy. Understanding foot posture and its effect on body alignment is essential for addressing movement patterns and preventing injuries. Setting a stable base by activating the foot tripod, externally rotating the hips, and connecting with the toes can improve foot function and overall body alignment. Toe spacers are an effective tool for resetting the feet and improving conditions such as bunions, hammer toes, and plantar fasciitis. Sensory perception plays a crucial role in foot movement and overall posture. Reconnecting with the sensory side of ourselves can unlock proper movement and support longevity. Dr. Emily's upcoming book, 'Sensory Sapiens,' explores how modern movement is aging us and the importance of prioritizing movement longevity. Releasing the feet daily can reduce foot stress and pain. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LMvMop1P71U Show Transcript: Cheryl McColgan (00:01.026)Hey everyone, welcome back to the Here and Learn, Grow podcast. Today, I'm already tongue twisting myself, because I'm already thinking about Dr. Emily's name, it's Dr. Emily Slickle. And we were just chatting before the podcast, I was hoping not to butcher that, but I think I got it right. So Dr. Emily, welcome. I am so excited to chat with you today about all things foot, because we have not had that subject on the podcast yet. And I think… what you're doing with the way that you treat people virtually and the products that you have brought to market to really help people with their foot health is pretty incredible. So all that being said, I would love for you to just kind of introduce yourself and tell us how you got into this line of work. Dr Emily (00:39.508)Of course, well, thank you for having me on Dr. Emily. I am a functional podiatrist. that's, to me, that's very important to have that distinction. So that means that I treat feet, but I treat feet in a very integrated way. think very much about complex human movement, but also stress, sleep, inflammation, diets, how do people breathe? So a lot of stuff that I bring into it, almost like functional medicine, functional movement into my podiatry.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
How I Gained Almost 7 Pounds of Muscle and Lost Fat at the Same Time 47:54

27 weeks fa47:54

47:54

In this episode, Cheryl McColgan shares her journey of strength training and body composition changes over the course of a year. She emphasizes the importance of tracking body composition, not just scale weight, and highlights the benefits of consistent strength training. She discusses her approach to strength training, including progressive overload and full-body workouts. She also mentions the use of supplements like creatine and the importance of proper nutrition. Throughout the year, Cheryl gained 6.5 pounds of lean mass and lost 2 pounds of fat, demonstrating the effectiveness of her approach. Takeaways: Consistency is key in strength training and body composition changes. Tracking body composition, not just scale weight, is important to understand progress. Progressive overload and full-body workouts can be effective in building muscle and losing fat. Proper nutrition, including adequate protein intake, is crucial for muscle growth. Supplements like creatine can support muscle growth. Gains in lean mass and fat loss can occur simultaneously with the right approach. Addressing foot health can improve overall strength training performance and reduce pain. Creatine and aminos I use Foot health tools from Dr. Emily New Sleep Technology Bia Body Pod at home body composition, 98% Correlated to DEXA Study on full body workout vs split training for fat loss https://youtu.be/T_ANk5OEF_g Show Transcript Cheryl McColgan (00:00.748)Well, hello friends, welcome back. It has been a little bit, but I am excited to be back on the mic and have several interviews scheduled coming up over the next. few weeks, so it should be back to a more regular schedule going here into fall. I promise if I'm ever going to peace out for an extended amount of time again, I will definitely let you know. So don't worry if occasionally there's a week skipped or something like that. I used to put this out religiously every single week on Wednesday and it was a lot easier when I had some interns helping me produce the podcast. But now it's just little me again, all by myself. So and a few things have been going on in not only my life, but in the business. And so that has made things not as regular. But anyway, I have no intention of going away at least not right now. So I will let you know if that ever happens. But anyway, for today's solo episode, I have something to update you on that I've wanting to share for a while. And I've mentioned this before in the past. And that is my Dexa body scan. that I was keeping track of since I started lifting again. And so I've talked about this a little bit in the past, but I might as well share the history again with you before I get into what I've been doing over the last year to increase my strength. and how that's been going and what I've been doing and some lessons that you may want to take away from that process. But anyway, how it all started is that I've been active pretty much my whole life, was a runner for 17 years, played sports in both high school and college. so my first experience with weightlifting was way back in the eighth grade basketball, which at my age is kind of shocking that it Cheryl McColgan (01:58.306)even in my mind to lift some weights to have better sports performance because it definitely, especially in high schools then, you maybe the boys were in the weight room, but it was definitely not a thing for the girls teams. And I think the only reason that I had it in my head was just because I've always had such this personal interest in health and wellness and because I had watched my dad my whole life. He was a runner and he had always lifted weights. He's basically like Jack LaLanne. If you don't know that name at the younger people listening here, go Google Jack LaLanne, but he's very inspirational, was very ahead of his time in terms of being into health and wellness and lifting weights and being very fit.…

Heal Nourish Grow Podcast

1
Stem Cells for Healing and Anti-Aging Benefits 46:28

30 weeks fa46:28