How to Fix Your Metabolism | Haylie Pomroy

You cannot out-medicate or even out-supplement a bad metabolism.

You've become one of the best in the world at helping people fix their metabolism. What are some of the first practical things that they can start to do? Remove, add in, the things that are the biggest needle movers.

Food is not the enemy, it's the things that are allowed to be called food, and then once it's added, insult. The way we stay alive is to alter our metabolism. So if you are gaining weight, thank yourself. Be grateful because the environment you're in will kill you and poison you, or you will store fat-soluble toxins in a safe place, which is your belly and your butt. I mean, if you plan on eating, breathing, drinking, you know, sleeping for the rest of your life, you are going to be exposed with thousands of toxins. And even in a body that's in optimal condition, right, can get prone, flat from what we're currently being exposed to. We are designed to survive, and allergies are a symptom of a body surviving in crisis.

This is such a fatal flaw most people make is they think, well, I just need to cut all carbs out to fix my thyroid.

And it's torture. And I'll tell you one thing, is there is no species in the world where diet means deprivation. I believe that you can eat— if the more you need to lose, the more you need to eat. So I always say diet means, did I eat today to achieve whatever it is you want?

Are you tired of doctors dismissing your symptoms, or worse, even making you feel crazy? Even if your blood work comes back normal, it doesn't mean your health is where it should be. Think of Think of your blood like a delivery truck carrying nutrients and hormones, but the real payoff happens when your cells open the package and use what's inside. If your cells are stuck in what's called cell danger response, triggered by stress, toxins, or infections, they go into protective mode. In this state, cells close off and don't properly take in or utilize the hormones or nutrients they need from the bloodstream. Now, this makes the blood work often appear normal, so doctors often miss the deeper issue, leaving you feeling tired, gaining weight, experiencing mood swings, and dealing with other symptoms while other cells remain in a state of limbo. Visit beyondbloodwork.com to learn how you can start changing this in as little as 30 days. Hey everyone, welcome to Dr. Josh Axe Show, where each and every week we dive deep into the science and principles behind how to heal physically, mentally, and spiritually. Today I've got an amazing amazing guest on, and we're going to be talking about how to heal your hormones and fire up your metabolism. If you're a person that's been struggling to lose weight, you know, maybe you're holding, holding on to fat in your midsection or on your hips, and it's just, it's been something you've been dealing with even though you're exercising and you, you're eating better. The weight still isn't coming off. I have an expert, one of the world's leading experts. She's going to get into this today. She's a New York Times bestselling author. She's working on her PhD in neuroimmunology. Her name is Haley Pomeroy, and we're going to get into how to fix your metabolism, how to balance your hormones. We'll talk about everything from hormone replacement therapy to methylation and so much more on today's episode. Haley, welcome to the show.

Josh, thanks so much for having me. I'm just super thrilled to be here.

I've been wanting to interview you for a long time. I read your book about 10— or I think you're telling me 11 years ago now it came out, the Fast Metabolism book. And this is a book that sold so many copies, and it was a New York Times bestseller. And I've always been fascinated with a lot of your work on metabolism. I know one of the other things you're working on now, you're working on your PhD in neuroimmunology. And that's going to be, um, you know, congrats on, on getting, getting close to the finish line there. You know, I want to talk about a lot today. You know, there— I have questions constantly from people asking me about metabolism, right? And one of the things I know that you're an expert in, and I know you've worked with everyone from JLo to Cher to Robert Downey Jr. and helped a lot of people really stoke their metabolism. And I tend to specialize a lot in people with hormonal issues like hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's, right, low testosterone. And one of the things I hear, especially from my patients with, hormonal imbalances is that, hey, I've put on an extra 5, 10, 20 pounds and it just won't come off. I'm trying exercise, I'm maybe trying to eat a little bit better, it's still not working. Talk to me a little bit about the connection between our hormones and our metabolism.

Yeah, it's, it's not just connected, it is the same, one and the same, right? So how we secrete our hormones, how we then make them bioavailable so the body can utilize them, how we bind with receptor sites, are all metabolic processes. They're all nutrient dependent, right? When an individual's metabolism is so out of balance to the point of disease, like myself with autoimmune disease, or like an individual that has hypothyroidism for whatever reason, right? There can be many reasons. There are metabolic pathways that are less efficient than we're designed to have. So we have to go in and we have to kind of correct those metabolic pathways. We have to heal those metabolic pathways, and we have to look at it from a biodynamic perspective. It isn't just that you're producing enough T4, or it isn't just that you've suddenly created an autoantibody to the thyroid hormone that you are secreting. It's why are you doing it? And that's where healing the metabolism comes in. You cannot out-medicate or even out-supplement a bad metabolism. You have to actually use the nutrients like you guys do to heal the metabolic pathways that are out of balance.

You know, one of the things I've always done is followed first principles and doing a practice called the 5 Whys. Yeah. And getting to the root cause. Yeah. Follow this, this sort of idea for me in, in terms of an issue like hypothyroidism where T3 is off, right? Okay, walk us a little bit through, if you would, not, not too complex, but generally the metabolic pathway, because there are a lot of people saying, okay, well, my T3 is off, so I need to treat T3, right? That's not the real issue, right? So, so walk us through a little bit of that pathway and maybe even some ways to start to change it at the root, right?

And sometimes we use a Cytomel, which is a synthetic T3, or a compounded T3 to stabilize the levels so we can jump in and do healing. Like, I get it, but we cannot forget to jump in and do the healing, and my goal is hopefully to not have to intervene that way. So our thyroid primarily produces T4, and we use the number 4 because that's 4 iodine molecules, okay? Our body then goes and metabolizes and plucks it off and converts it into T3. We do produce some T3 in the thyroid, but the larger proportion— and it's methylated, right? It's converted from T4. T3 is the one that actually binds to the receptor sites more efficiently and activates a cascade of hormones. One of those, and it's— I'm going to distill it down because it's quite complex, but one of those is how our pituitary communicates with our thyroid to secrete more thyroid hormones. So if we just look at that really simplistic distillation down, uh, one, are we producing enough T4, right, to give enough, um, let's say, a substance, right, to convert it to T3? Are we— everybody's talking about the term methylating. Do we have the savvy engineering in our body's biochemistry to pluck that iodine molecule off in the right bond angle, right? Because you can plunk it off here and get reverse T3, which doesn't bind then. So, so do we secrete enough? Do we have the capabilities to cleave? Then are our receptor sites receptive to T3? So there's a lot of liver cytochrome P450, that second phase of liver detoxification, that can be responsible for it. There's a lot of methylation, right, which has, you know, gut bringing nutrients up in the vasovagal nerve, to even talk to the pituitary. There's a lot of components that are in there. The receptor sites are also disrupted by hormone disruptors. So things like plastics, things like chemicals, things like artificial sweeteners, preservatives, anything that makes your food way more colorful than it naturally should be. So we gotta look at it from A to Z in order to truly heal the metabolism. The thing that's really critical and was like a big aha moment for me, coming from soil sciences and agriculture to neuroimmunology in my own health journey was that every single, every single thing that we just talked about and all the hundred thousands of nuances that happen within that are nutrient dependent. So first and foremost, we have to focus on the nutrients, nutrition, what we put in, but also what our body has the capability of converting into bioavailability. So your bone is not an apple. When you consume something, right, our body has to remodel it so that it can actually make tissue, that it can actually secrete hormones. Our hormones don't just sit there, they have to be modeled and secreted, right? They have to bind. And one of the things is what's getting in the way? So you take out everything bad, you heal what is broken and identifiably, if you can identify it, if you get there faster, you gotta do it. And then you're really cognizant that you're not continuing to insult the body. When we can't metabolize hormones, we store fat-soluble toxins. Fat-soluble toxins create the inability to metabolize hormones. There's not one or the other, they work together. We're a biodiverse body having an incredibly eclectic, and unique experience. So you will store fat, you will gain weight, you will not receive your sex hormones even if they are being produced. So you can give them through injection or pellet them or create your own, right? So we have to go through all of those metabolic pathways. I think first and foremost, remember, it's nutrient dependent, but it's not just what you eat, it's what you have the capacity to utilize. And so, like, I know you are— you— I love how much you focus and talk about the gut microbiome right, that, that more than 3 pounds of little bugs that kind of hang out just in our gut. Um, all of that has to be nurtured. And so that's why for me there's not a one-size-fits-all nutrition program. I believe that we treat everybody nutritionally uniquely, and we develop programs for the body that is experiencing the actual experience it's having right now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the way that I know that you and I both tend to practice. I think, you know, when you look at the top 1% of practitioners, uh, you know, the, the difference between them and the other 99% is it's very personalized. It's really getting down to your unique needs. When you look at a lot of, you know, I've really enjoyed—

you know what puts you in the top 1% first and foremost?

Caring. I don't know.

Well, thank you. You believe your patient. Yeah.

Period.

Yeah. Like, their experience is real.

Yeah, it's true.

You, you want to be amazing at what you do? Like, you don't even have to be that brilliant like you. You can just believe them.

Well, can I tell you one of the things that I've seen too? And this one of the things I really appreciate about sort of the ancient forms of medicine, especially ancient Asian medicine, Ayurveda, even a lot of the Middle Eastern and biblical medicine, is, is that they, they really incorporate body, mind, spirit. I think one of the things that's happened in the Western world today is we've kind of said, well, you know, your mental health and your spiritual health especially, well, that doesn't even exist in terms of how it impacts your physical health right now. We've seen the last 20 years people start coming along a little bit more on this, of course, but we're still not completely there. But yet we—

yet in medicine, believe you can surgicize your appendix, you can remove the gallbladder, but there is not a doctor on the earth that believes that you can remove the brain. And you sure as heck can't live without a heart. Yeah, right. And, and I think that it's silly science to think that we can separate who we are, right, which is mind, body, spirit, in any way and have health.

Yeah.

Like, it— I, you know, we grew up Native, we practiced all kinds. My mom's an acupuncturist, um, my dad— like, we have massive crazy science. Yeah. In our space, I was a Future Farmer of America. I wrote wore the, um, blue corduroy jacket. I raised beef, I showed sheep and pigs. Like, I grew up with an agriculture aspect of it. It is medical gaslighting to think that you can separate them. And, and in true science, any medical journal, in true science, there's no separation.

And, you know, one of the things that I believe is, is that what's even more important than nutrition is your mindset and your spiritual health, your relationships, in terms of how it impacts your physical health. Because, I mean, I mean, I know in practice I've seen patients who You know, they can go out and eat pizza and somebody with inflammatory bowel disease and just wreck their body. However, I've seen them been eating perfectly and they have relationship stress going on. It's the same reaction essentially that they're having. So, so we know that, that there is that connection there. I want to jump back to something else here that you had, you had just mentioned in terms of these pathways. You know, we hear a lot about, um, MTHFR, right? That's probably the most important one people are hearing about methylation. Of course, there's much greater than that, but that's the one in particular that I think people focus on the most. But one of the things I I kind of want some backup here. You know, one of the things I tell people is, listen, just because you have one of the genes or both of the gene variants, that doesn't mean it's impossible for you to methylate. Like, there are other ways to optimize your methylation. You can still create methylfolate. There are actually other things you need, not just methylfolate, in order to methylate properly. Well, walk me through a little bit how that would work if somebody does have one. What are some things they should do? But also Why is that not a sudden, to where you're just, you know?

Right, so I love, and I think it pays homage to how amazing the human body is, right? And what an amazing spiritual experience we're having here, is that, wouldn't it be cool if we could reduce it down to one thing? So I actually am homozygous MTFHR reductase, and a whole lot of other things that I should have probably been turned in on the Lemon Law, as far as genetic epigenetic expressions. So the second we stop methylating is about 3 days after we die, right? So whether you're heterozygous or homozygous, you are still methylating. It just means your capacity is reduced. So the way I always tell my clients is think about it is, you know, you've come off a vacation, you're relaxed, you're not stressed at all. You've, you know, your partner is just the most beautiful person. Your children are all sitting, you know, just finished their organic meal. Life is good. Your job just gave you a massive promotion. And someone says, hey, can you help me pack my house? I need to move. You're like, sure, no problem. Right? That methylates really properly. Let's say, you know, all— you know what's broken loose, you know, life's a little crazy, um, you love your friend to death, they need to move, and you, you drag yourself out of bed and go help her pack and move. You can still do it, it just takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of, you know, calling into your, your energy, your spiritual health, your mental health, um, in order to pull it off, right?

Yeah, you're pulling from your bank account, you're pulling more, right?

So people that don't methylate or they don't metabolize glutathione properly, sodium oxidase, you know, whatever you're learning about yourself. The one thing that I want you to get out of it is that you need to nurture your body diligently to be able to jump up and respond to life. So you've got— like, I have an autoimmune disorder, right? And I have all the genetic things. So it doesn't mean I can't. It just means that I have to be strategic, right? I, I was on 80 to 60 milligrams of prednisone. I was on anti-rejection drugs. I was on Imuran, CellCept, Mepron. And I said I ended up in a health crisis and, and my option was chemotherapy drugs and getting my spleen removed. That wasn't an option for me, right? So I had to learn how to heal my metabolism. So it's not a one thing. It is a thing that says, cool, you need to focus on what you eat. Cool, you need to make sure that you detox your home. Cool, you need to probably do seasonal detoxing. Cool. It's okay to not just survive those kind of genetic expressions. You can actually thrive because of them. Because they tell you it's a playbook, right? Like, then you need to do lots of fruits and vegetables. You need to make sure nitric oxide level. I— so funny enough, I had the patent to bring methylated folic acid from Merck Germany many, many— this tells you how old I was. Oh yeah, got cease and desist by the FDA. It was cool. I had it for 7 years. So all the fertility stuff that was out there had to run through me. It was kind of a fun space to be in. But I, I, and I've shared this openly, my sisters were all three were pregnant together, all miscarried together. Oh, wow. Right. We all found out that we had the genetic expression to not methylate. Right. And we all— that's when I brought it in. And so we all have three children because of me, like breaking down barriers. Yeah. Internationally. But it's not a life sentence. But, but, but, but look at your body more holistically. Right. And it goes back when you say ancient medicines or when you say traditional, I call them traditional medicines because of the native aspect. Um, we are not deficient in a drug, right?

That's right.

Yeah, we are not even deficient in a singular nutrient, and, and it's not even a genetic expression. We are in need of supporting our body based on what hormetic events, what stress events we're exposed to.

Yeah, yeah, explain that a little bit more, because when you talk about hormesis, uh, or these hormetic events, uh, you know, one of the things that I explain sometimes is, is Listen, you wanna have stress. You just want the right amount of stress and also have the right perception of stress. And you know, Chelsea and I love taking trips out to Napa and Sonoma. And you know, we did this to Italy recently, and where the wine is the best is where the grapes are the most stressed to the point of not totally breaking, right? And so they tend to be on hillsides. So you've got more of the heat, but it also, you have more of the coolness. And then also they're dry farms, so there's no irrigation. So the roots have to go deeper to make them more resilient. And what happens is there's higher resveratrol, there's higher levels of anthocyanins and certain antioxidants that occur. And so if you stress your body the right way, and I think this is a principle around a lot of biohacking, right? Infrared sauna, red light therapy, cold plunge, right? If you do it the right way, your body actually becomes more resilient via hormesis. However, I just wanted to say though too, a lot of people, the problem is that they don't approach the stress with the right lens in, in the right way. Like, I think about if somebody has hypothyroidism and they're cold plunging every day, right, they're probably going to hurt themselves. So they just— and that's, that's why it sort of irritates me. Everybody's like, cold plunge every day. Everybody's like, cold plunge, right? Well, not for a lot of you who have really stressed adrenals and, and thyroid.

Yeah, it's super cool if you're a 35 dude with an 8-pack. Like, I'm sorry, I'm just gonna say that.

I'm 50.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I had premature ovarian failure. Like, I have genetic issues. I've gone through menopause. I got some issues of— I've got some hormetic events in my life, right, that have tipped the scale for me to not be in a healthy space. So what I do is I do counter-positive hormetic, or like you were talking about with the grapes, positive hormetic events, right, to get my body back into a metabolic state that's natural for me. So, so it is interesting to me to think, and I love infrared sauna, and I'm totally not opposed to cold I love IV therapies. I'm not— there is nothing that's bad except for forgetting to put you in the equation.

That's so good.

So I always say this equation, E M H, right? So you have to eat, you have, plus looking at it metabolically from the metabolism equals health. But also you have to, in order to, the M is also me. So we do this like self-assessment questionnaire on this health wishlist. And we actually do also, what's called a request for care. So how to engage with your healthcare practitioner effectively. If you got 7 minutes or 7 years, I don't really care. You have to be an effective communicator to get what you want. You have to have really good health goals. But I think we forget to really look inside first and understand where am I at and where do I want to go. And for me, my advocacy work is always that dream really, really big in your health. I can't be the only person in the world that came off of 60 to 80 milligrams prednisone, off of 2 anti-rejection drugs and an anti-malaria drug, right, in my 20s, and live an incredibly healthy life. And my hematology panel is beautiful. What I did was I learned about what was going on with me. I focused on healing the metabolic pathways that were off. And if a margarita slips into my mouth and I party like the rock star I'm not, right, I turn back towards healing my metabolism and burning fat for like those are the principles and the tenets that make all aspects of true medicine healthy, getting the H at the end, right? We want to be healthy, we want to be happy, we want to have vibrancy. And why I love neuroimmunology so much is we talked for so many years about adrenal stress and adrenal fatigue and how our bodies adapt, right, under pressure, like the grapes that you just talked about. Neuroimmunology is how our immune system engages with our adaptive system, right? How we— yeah, how it actually— guys, it actually can make you sick. It's the study of you're under stress, you're under stress, you're under stress, you're sick, right?

And, and to your point, again, the, the, the— just for everybody listening, I think it's so helpful to think about it like this. If you're going to go and train for a marathon or a race, there's a way of sort of building up to things versus if you go out there in your first day of trying to train, you're trying to do 26 miles. This is what a lot of people do. People ask me, should I do it, you know, a heavy parasite cleanse or this or that? I'm like, well, you know, let's build up your body, let's build a foundation, let's do some other things first. And I think a lot of times we're in this really aggressive, fast-paced, you know, sort of, sort of mentality in order to fix things, and it's not always the best way to go about it. And to your point with the immune system, this is another thing I mean, if you think about a baby, like I'm looking at our— we have a 1-year-old right now. She just turned 1 last weekend.

Congratulations.

Thank you. And, um, and so for her, it's like, okay, well, we started with breast milk, and then we added in one single food, you know, it was like green beans, and then we added in, you know, egg yolk, and then bone broth, and this and this and this, slowly over time. And these little microorganisms, it was natural immunization, right? You know, and, and so you do want to have these exposures lightly, but if you have too much you're going to destroy yourself, right?

But you also can't live in a bubble, so you have to make yourself resilient. That's right. I mean, if you plan on eating, breathing, drinking, you know, sleeping for the rest of your life, you are going to be exposed with thousands of toxins. And even in a body that's in optimal condition, right, can get prone, flat, from what we're currently being exposed to.

You know, we had Marty Makary on. If you know Marty, but yeah, um, he was on here a few weeks ago And we were talking about allergies and food sensitivities, and we specifically discussed peanuts, how when they removed peanuts from the diet, well, now all of these kids had more allergies versus when peanuts were a regular part of kids' diets. Explain how that happened.

But even if we look from an immunological perspective with peanuts, right? So it's the one nut that's grown in the earth. So I think, I feel like the next coming massive food allergy is going to be soy-based because of how we're growing that legume currently. Like I said, I have a degree in ag.

Mold and mycotoxins.

Exactly. So I do think there's an aflatoxin response that happens with peanuts. The other thing is when you have a fat— when you have a lipid and a protein together, it, it can be more impactful. And it's loaded with a mycotoxin. It can be more impactful to two things. One, your immunoglobulin response, right? The other thing is your mast cell production. So we have these types of immune cells called mast cells, and if you will, think of them like a big balloon. And in those in the balloon, there's several things, but the largest part of them is histamine, right? So they go out and they circulate. We're not supposed to release them like crazy, but we do because of stress, environmental toxins. We know this from an immunology perspective. And we release them out and histamine is elevated. Our body's immune, I'm gonna call it identifiers. They go out and they go, what's going on? What's going on in the environment? What's going on? When we have a protein and a lipid together in a food, more prone to having reactivity. I have some theories about that.

Like, yeah, I'm curious if it has to do with the cellular, you know, in terms of, you know, your— the cellular— when you have a fat, yeah, it, it's going to typically cause greater absorption or passability into this. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting.

Yeah, the permeability is there in our gut. So if we don't have a good gut microbiome and we have a lipid that has a mycotoxin in it, which peanuts are one of the highest— yeah, soy's coming up, guys— but I'm, I'm like I said, from the agriculture perspective, we have it. It's lipid permeable. Right? We also produce different digestive enzymes. So our gallbladder, if we have one, is more active. If not, we put the brunt on our small intestine. That's why we get SIBO a lot of times when we have a gallbladder resection. Our gallbladder creates the bile salts, which lowers the acidity level when we eat a lipid. One of the things that can break down— so I, I wouldn't go too far into the hypokalidria space, but one of the things, when we break down those lipids, we lower the acidity level, which just does not break down our mycotoxins, so they migrate further down the gut. So if you have a toxic mold in a fatty food, I love the fats. The other thing to think of is when we metabolize fat, so natural cholesterol, whether it's in avocado, whether it's in shrimp, whether it's in a peanut, right? When we metabolize cholesterol, we manufacture a class of hormones that are called glucocorticoids. Glucocorticoids are our natural antihistamines. They're our natural anti-inflammatories. So you swallow a peanut, it's got a mycotoxin, you lower the acidity level, means you don't break your mycotoxin down. It migrates further in the gut. The body slows the metabolism of the cholesterol molecule in your peanut. You now don't produce antihistamines naturally. So that's what I mean by channeling or cha— and I, and there's a million processes that I skipped in that, but basically we are designed to survive and allergies are a symptom of a body surviving in crisis. So we've got to unravel the crisis in the body.

Yeah. And, and one of the points I was trying to make, and again, I think your point is probably more important, but also is that if you are exposing yourself to things when you're younger, your body typically does create antibodies and is more resilient even to the toxins that you're exposed to later on in life.

And mom needs to be eating super diverse during pregnancy too, right? And, and out in the farm and digging in the dirt. And yeah, you know, our kids are out on the ranch, in the farm, in the dirt. You know, uh, it It was kind of funny. We were at Disneyland one time, and I always joke that I turned around and my daughter was licking the pole. She's gonna love that I tell this story. Back and forth, licking the pole, and my sister, who was always a big-time germaphobe, it was kind of funny. We were on such end of the spectrum. I said, "You know, Gracie, stop." My sister was like, "Get the stuff and wipe her tongue," and you know, I was grossed out, don't get me wrong, but I was like, "Yeah, she's strong. She's resilient. She's healthy." Yeah.

Man, that's so funny. Well, I want to go back to the conversation around metabolism because this is something people are very, very conscious of. They really care, they want to fix their metabolisms, right? And you, you've become one of the best in the world at helping people fix their metabolism. So, so we have a lot of— there's a lot of men, there's a lot of women, but I specifically want to talk about, um, you know, the person with hypothyroidism, right? Person with Hashimoto's, and they've gained the 20 pounds and it's sitting in their midsection, and they want to be able to to get their metabolism to where they want it to be again, what are some of the first practical things that they can start to do, remove, add in, the things that are the biggest needle movers at fixing and stoking up their metabolism?

Absolutely, I always say a great litmus test is if it's become easier to gain weight than it has to lose weight. Like all of us, especially women, have little tricks in our back pocket that if we, you know, feel a little fluffy, we can kind of pull out those tricks, the weight drops off and we're good and we go about our lives. Cool, that means your metabolism's doing pretty good. If you deploy a few of those, you clean up your diet a little bit, like you said, you add a couple extra salads, you maybe get off sodas and you drink a little water, and the weight doesn't fall off, then that's a good indication that you actually need to do strategic repair. So a couple things to think of is, so we start with, like, in the Fast Metabolism Diet, we do a 28-day rehab, right? And I think I'm gonna talk about some of the tenets of that and why. So first I deploy what we call almost like an allergy elimination diet. Elimination diet in Western medicine, but it's a food rotation diet. So I focus on complex carbs for the first 2 days. I mean, lots of complex carbs. We're doing things— and, and high glycemic fruits. So we're doing things like mangoes and watermelon and brown rice and, um, uh, sweet potatoes, right? Things that are going to naturally sugar the body up. There are some stress hormones that are reduced when we have carbs. We do know that we can model serotonin, dopamine, L-dopa, PEA in the brain when we can effectively metabolize carbs.

Well, let me just say, it's so interesting because this is the exact opposite of what most people do in the functional medicine space.

Yeah, 30 years though and millions of pounds lost, yeah.

But I do want to point out that this is a fatal flaw I see people make with hypothyroidism is they will, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had people with infertility and with hypothyroidism and their doctor will put them on a paleo or a no-carb diet. And I had a woman recently, she was a chiropractor, her husband was a chiropractor, and same thing, they had her on low-carb, paleo, and I saw her, I'm like, listen, I need you to do some rice and sweet potatoes and berries because we gotta get the GABA up. We've gotta fix some of these hormonal issues. And so, but keep going. I just wanted to point out, this is such a fatal flaw most people make is they think, well, I just need to cut all carbs out to fix my thyroid.

And it's torture. And I'll tell you one thing is there is no species on the planet, right? Not your dog, not your cat, not, I worked with the black rhinos at the Denver Zoo. I worked with the chimpanzee population in Africa. Nebraska. I worked with the Division of Wildlife in Colorado. There is no species, right, in the world where diet means deprivation. We spend millions of dollars to focus on the diet for every species, and it means infusing to get the positive output. So I always say diet means did I eat today to achieve whatever it is you want. Like, it's not about abstaining. So when the metabolism is broken though, we use a cycle of risk rest and repair, because that's what your body naturally does— the sleep-wake cycle, the autonomic nervous system cycle. So we focus for 2 days on high-complex carbs. I— so there's some metabolic pathways, like for example, when we eat a lot of lipids or healthy fats, called beta oxidation. It's— we don't ever turn one off, but it's used less in complex carb consumption. Complex carb consumption engages the pancreas more, the parotid gland more, especially those individuals that have things like long COVID, that are dealing with Epstein-Barr virus, that have viral reactivation of the herpes viruses, right? We have to heal the parotid glands where we store a lot of our viral residuals. So we do those 2 days and then we want to let those metabolic pathways take a little bit of a rest. The next 2 days we focus on heavy lean proteins, but we balance that with alkaline vegetables. So we need to be able to break our macro protein into micros amino acids. It is so critically important that that is what your DNA is made made of, right? It is so critically important that every hormone or peptide that we secrete in our body has an amino acid derivative. But oftentimes we focus on the macro, getting, you know, 20, 30, 80 to 140 million grams of protein in, but we forget that we have to have the appropriate enzymatic secretion in order to break those down and make them into the aminos. And even in those 10, uh, PVT, TIMHA, all the Private Tim Halls, how I always remembered it, those 10 essential amino acids, we have to be able to then remodel those into the peptides and the hormones, right, for true healing. Critical with a person with hypothyroid. So it's that balancing of the alkaline vegetables strategically when you have a high protein diet. But we only do that for 2 days because we have to cycle between rest and repair. Then for the last 3 days of every week, we go to the higher, uh, complex carbs, the, the lower glycemic, higher fiber-based complex carb, lower glycemic, higher fiber fruits. And I— while I do that, so it takes less stress off you enzymatically, now I'm going to really lean into the gall water. I'm going to lean into the liver, right, with Phase 2 of liver detoxification and lipid metabolism. And we add those healthy fats in, but we only do it for 3 days because we need to cycle between rest and repair. So our rehab goes 28 days. So the other thing that— it was really funny, I had, um, an immunologist that was coming in. We were talking about gut microbiome, and he had this like gauntlet. The only way you're going to ever heal the gut microbiome is diversity and changing your diet. That's why I rotate the diet through the week. So there's foods you eat on Monday, Tuesday, foods you eat on Wednesday, Thursday, foods you eat on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We want to reinoculate. We have to excite enzyme and hormone secretion. We have to wash hormone receptor sites, and we have to reinoculate. And it's not just the gut microbiome as far as the large intestine. We've got to think about the small intestine. We've got to think about the oral cavity. So important, right? Um, so, so that That's what we do. So if I managed to like break it down, it's super simple. I believe in eating within 30 minutes of waking. If you just follow the natural cortisol curve in the body, you might want nutrients when cortisol surges 30 minutes after you wake up.

I, I want to ask you intermittent fasting. Before I do though, one of the points I would want everyone to think about is this, is that, um, you want certain organs to be resting at certain times. You want certain organs to be working at certain times. And this is why, you know, I have people ask me about, hey, should I do a keto diet? And my answer is, I mean, it's very, very dependent upon— listen, if you have brain cancer, do you have epileptic seizures, right?

Then yeah, right.

And if you—

but it's illegal. The ASPCA will take your license away from raising cattle if you put cattle into a state of— spot of ketosis, just so you know.

Yeah, so it's not the ideal place to live for most of you for most of the time. And, but what that does is, just to let you know, is the keto diet works for certain people in certain time periods if you need to. Let's say you need to completely rest your pancreas for the most part. Well, the pancreas is dealing primarily, it's dealing mostly, not saying with other, not other things, but it's dealing a lot with carbohydrates. So when you're doing it, you're resting the pancreas. If you're doing high protein, so fat stresses more the liver gallbladder, carbs stress more the pancreas, and then you've got protein, which is more, it's sort of, it is pancreas, but it's also stomach, but it's also kidneys. A lot of different areas there, but there's an element there of kind of fasting, not totally, but kind of strengthening and tonifying certain areas and letting other areas rest. And this is how you'd work out, right? You're not gonna go and lift heavy every day, every muscle group every day. You cycle back and forth. So anyways, I think what you're sharing makes a lot of sense in terms of the rest and recovery for our organ systems.

Right, right, and also the biodiversity. So, so many times when people wanna lose weight, they do the same foods. It's like boiled chicken and broccoli. I don't know, I'm dating myself. Maybe tuna, broccoli.

Yeah, I used to do the same diet back in college for a time.

So that biodiversity, first of all, it makes the body, it creates excitation in the body, right? I believe that pleasure stimulates the metabolism. I'll never forget, I was brought in on a job. It was to do the movie "A League of Their Own," right? Women baseball players.

First off, can I just say, I love that movie. Tom Hanks, I mean, it was great. What was the— I'm trying to think of the female, the two female actresses.

Reese Witherspoon and Gina Rodriguez.

Well, even Madonna was in there. Yeah, Madonna was in there. Rosie O'Donnell. I mean, there was a whole, that was a great movie.

So what are the women?

There's no crying in baseball.

Well, there was crying getting ready for baseball. I got brought in, one of the women was on this really strict diet for the first time. She was gonna show her the back of her body. And I walked in the room and I'm sassy, you guys all know that. And I walked in the room, I said, Who's gonna return the Southwest Airlines food? Like, it was just this crazy, disgusting little packaged food that they had her on this diet to prep for this movie. And I'm like, no, we're talking abundance, right? I believe that you can eat, if the more you need to lose, the more you need to eat. If food is going to be the way you're gonna do weight loss, right? So our portions, if you need to lose 20, 40, 60, 80, we have clients in our community that have lost 130, 135. We have one right now that's going, a gentleman that's gonna break into the 200s. You know, we have, because we've been doing this for 30 years, we have millions of testimonials, right, of people falling in love with what they eat. But pleasure stimulates the metabolism. And I'm not just saying like it's fun to have a good time at dinner. Genuinely, the hormones of pleasure stimulate the metabolism. So the very dieting or refraining from food slows your rate of burn. All of your excitation hormones actually increase your rate of burn because in order to have excitation hormones, you have to burn fat. To secrete those hormones. When you burn fat versus a carb, you get 27 times more ATP or energy, right? So when you have all this energy and you consume something, I have funny texts from a client that says, "I just ate a cheesecake. I had so much fun doing it. I can't wait to see how much weight I lost in the morning." And I'm like, "You go, girl," right? Because if you're gonna do it, don't hide in the closet and eat food. So on the fast metabolism diet, we celebrate food. And the other tenet is, if you wouldn't be proud to pack it in your kindergartner's lunch, for the love of God, don't do it to yourself.

You know, this brings up another point that we started with in terms of sort of the emotional connection, spiritual, mental connection around eating, is that if you have shame, if you're feeling shame and guilt, what that is doing to your cortisol, what that's doing to your adrenal hormones, what that is doing to your metabolism, it's tanking it, right?

And it's so hard. You gave me chills because it's so— I really appreciate you said that. I always say we're drawing a line in the sand right now. Guilt and shame has no place in getting well. Guilt and shame has no way to move the scale, period, right?

When you think about how most doctors, you know, sort of treat patients today, it's, hey, we're gonna create fear in you, guilt and shame around, you know, what you're doing, and that's how we're gonna sort of—

Oh, I'm savvy, and I just— and I got, you know, a million docs in my clinic and friends. I just got medically gaslit so hard the other day. I got crazy food poisoning. I went in and I said, I want you to run some labs. You don't think it's medically necessary? I'm like, you No, Dr. Wong, I don't think you work for me anymore. I mean, we're a partnership here, right? I mean, it was very interesting, and I called in another colleague in his clinic, UCLA, love you UCLA, tons of doc friends over there, and I just went, it's just not an option to not treat me with respect and for us to work together to get me really healthy. So the diet world is the worst. I had no intention into going into the diet space, right? It's nothing but guilt and shame and refraining. Other industry that you would say there— when you have gained weight and you can't lose weight, your body is struggling, it is not your fault. There is no other time in mental health, hopefully in any other health, you get diagnosed with cancer and we say, okay, you're going to do less and your cancer is going to go away. But we do that in the diet space. Eat less, refrain from food, wire your jaw, staple your stomach, get get a shot, take metformin. It is a sign that your metabolism is off, and the metabolism affects every aspect of your life.

What do you think of Ozempic and Wegovy?

It breaks my heart. The peptide's been around forever. Again, I've been doing this a long time. They were using this peptide probably when my kids were born, right? It's been around for a long time. Um, I, I had a real sassy colleague of mine said it's going to keep you in business forever, and it broke my heart because it's wrecking immune— uh, uh, not just the immune system, it's wrecking the metabolism, right?

Share why that is. Why, why these peptide weight loss drugs are, are so bad for us.

So I'm, I'm actually— I like peptides.

Oh, me too. Yeah, no, I know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so the science of peptides, um, is a— I just had a phenomenal— with one of the big gurus in peptides on the podcast. Peptide science, right? How we can take a structure and modify the delivery, the reception, the receptor sites, the reception, and the ratio of secretions of hormones is fascinating in the peptide space. With this one uniquely, I think the dosage is criminally high, right? I also think that we are modifying a metabolic pathway and not giving the nutrients to keep that pathway healthfully modified. So we have individuals that I, you know, we get brought in where they are on a drug or a medication, or like myself, originally was on a drug or a medication in my 20s. And we have to back the body out of the dependency or the need for that. Or let's say a person is on a lifetime medication for something like seizures, potentially. We have to nutritionally support. All you gotta do is plug it in and see what nutrient deficiencies that drug cause causes. Oh yeah. And if you look at the nutrient that they're willing to disclose, the nutrient deficiencies— nobody's going to have hair, skin, bone, nails. I mean, it depletes.

Can I tell you, I think it's one of the biggest forms of malpractice when doctors do not disclose the nutritional deficiencies that are caused by the drug. I mean, and I talk about this one a lot, birth control. I mean, it is, it is one of the absolute— I mean, you know, B vitamins, selenium. It's like, well, everything, everything that thyroid needs actually specifically is just terrible.

And to go in, because I'm in the research space, right, to go when they got approved to do research on animal subjects, not even on human subjects, right, they had to supplement in order to continue.

Really?

Oh yeah, in order to continue ethically to give a mouse the drug, they had to supplement. Then you go in the real world and you're taking it now as a human being, and you are chastised for supplementing. We supplement our soil. We cannot sell dog food legally in the United States without supplementing it. We supplement every animal in captivity. Legally, we have to, or we will lose our license, right? And then you get chastised for supplementing. I am, I have, I grew up all my life. I am a big supplement girl. I was always interested in it. And then when I got into health crisis, I became committed to it. Wow. My labs are gorgeous and they shouldn't be. It makes no sense, right, to Western medicine.

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I'll give you like a really basic example. So we have, in industrialized farming, we have recognized that we can poison our soil and we can focus on 2 to 3 key nutrients, the number one being nitrogen, right? We can give nitrogen—

Phosphorus, potassium.

Yes, phosphorus and potassium. But we have realized that we can grow pretty fast hybridized and genetically modified, right, agricultural crops in a poisoned environment with very little nutrients if we just just use key ones and targeted ones. That to me is symbolic of Western medicine. And when we have people that say, well, my kid grew up on chicken nuggets and Froot Loops and Cocoa Puffs, and they ended up actually taller than your son, so I think it was okay. But it is the all— so we have anatomy and we have physiology.

I have a theory around that. It's this: you aged your child.

You not only did you age your child, you just seized your child.

There you go. Let's be really clear.

They're not going to just look older. They're going to have massive medical issues, period. I've been in clinical practice for 30 years. They're going to have— and we are seeing it. My daughter, we were in Vegas for the, uh, NFR, right? She rides pro rodeo. We were sitting with 20-year-olds, a group of gorgeous, amazing, wonderful human being 20-year-olds that grew up in families that, you know, they didn't do a bad job. We're not talking I mean, God forbid you have government-based food, right? Yep. That's just a heartbreak and a half. The amount of issues with their periods and their hormones, the amount of, uh, POTS, the amount of adrenal fatigue and exhaustion, the dark circles under the eyes, the allergies, right, the headaches, the migraines in that group of 20-year-olds It was not one of them, as we were sitting at the table, was not peppering me with questions about what they could do for their health and wellness. It used to be what they could do for their grandma's health and wellness, right? Now, it's like my son, we were walking the other day down our neighborhood, and our neighbors oftentimes come out and ask health questions. And my son said, "What's the difference? What's changed? Is everybody just interested?" And I said, "No, it used to be one on our cul-de-sac needed some sort of metabolism intervention." Now, I can tell you, as we walk our neighborhood, there's not one person that I know I know that isn't battling something from a health perspective.

Give me the top 3 things today in those cases that are destroying the metabolism, starting with these kids, that then we feel later on in our lives.

So I would say number— so I am, and I, and I, I'm so proud of people that are talking about it now. Um, I, I will say it's the additives, the preservatives. It is the things that we allow to be called food that are not food. Yeah, agriculturally they are not are not even allowed to be called food. They should be called ingestible, right? And I think they should be called ingestible chemicals. They are designed, are allowed in the United States as ingestibles. I think where we're going, I don't wanna say the word wrong, 'cause every effort is valiant right now and it has to happen. But I think if we altruistically think that some company that's making millions of dollars, right, is going to suddenly pull the product because a bunch of people are upset about it, wrong. I think it should never be allowed to be called food in the United States, period. So you can't separate yourself from agriculture right now. You need to lean into regenerative farming and farming and understand what the principles are of what you eat. And I talk a lot about soy, but, but look, guys, if anybody— has anybody noticed that we have tons of sunflower seeds, tons of sunflower butter, tons of hemp products? The reason why we have tons of that is because all of the soil that was deemed by the U.S. government to be too toxic to grow anything agriculturally is allowed to grow hemp and sunflower seeds because the basic fiber in both of those plants absorb more toxin than any other agricultural product. The other thing is coffee. I got a beef on coffee. Oh yeah, because coffee's not tested when it comes through. The Fair Trade Act allowed chemicals in coffee that are not even allowed in Froot Loops.

You know, I, I've had patients who, they were addicted to Starbucks, did a lot Starbucks, and many of them had headaches. And by simply switching them from Starbucks to a higher quality brand, you know, whoever, Blue Bottle, Stumpf County Organic, whatever, it just went away.

You asked me a question that I didn't answer, I'm sorry, but what are we doing? Why are we so sick? Chemicals, additives, and preservatives that we're ingesting that we think are food, first and foremost. I also believe that we are disproportionately negating stress that we're under, right? We don't have good, stress reduction. I mean, I had a client the other day, and I was— so one of the things that I do as a health strategist is I integrate with all the practitioners that a person's seeing. I was talking to a person's psychotherapist, and I said I would really like her to go somewhere. And he said, I don't care how much money you have, there's no place that deals with mental health wellness in the United States. And that broke my heart because I thought, I thought, you know, if I say someone got diagnosed with cancer, there is, you know, Dana-Farber and MD our great friends in immunosignia, people that are at least researching and studying and have some options in that space. He literally said to me, I don't care. I said, you know, cost not a day. I've got to give her an opportunity to get a handle on some stuff. He said, there's nowhere. And it broke my heart. So I think we don't deal with stress. I think our kids, I mean, our kids are under tremendous stress, but I also think that if we just look in our environment, there are so many toxins that we're exposed to on a daily basis. And I don't want people to go around and say, I can't eat anything, I can't breathe anything, I can't drink anything. What I want you to do is focus on nutrition so that you can be more resilient in the environment we're currently in. I don't believe the environment's going to change in my lifetime. I think my children's children, right, or what they call the honey badgers that are coming up, I think that there is going to be some change. But it can't be propagandized, right? It can't be that cattle's bad for you, or beef is bad for you, or butter is bad for you, because that's not true. Yeah, food is not the enemy. It's the things that are allowed to be called food. And then once it's added insult— the way we stay alive is to alter our metabolism. So if you are gaining weight, thank yourself. Be grateful, because the environment you're in will kill you and poison you, or you will store fat-soluble toxins in safe places, which is your belly and your Yep, yep. Then bind the toxins, heal the metabolism, and lose the weight. If you strip your body while you're losing weight, you will gain it back fast, and you can put yourself at a huge— in my opinion now, don't feel like this when I first started practicing— but a huge detriment to being exposed to more toxins. I have so many people that do these Ozempic or Mounjarno, or I mean, we have a lot of surgery, we get a lot of, um, gastro guys send me clients, they've been surgicized, they lose the weight, and they are so sick. The thyroid hormones are off. They've now got autoimmune Hashimoto's thyroiditis because what was being stored in those adipocyte or fat cells are released into the bloodstream. The metabolism was broken. That's why you stored it. You shove it or force it out and you don't heal the metabolism, you will poison somewhere else. Our brain and our immune system, that's where we have mast cell activation, in my opinion. It's why we're getting this rash of, in my opinion, of Alzheimer's. We are storing toxins in places that aren't meant to be. It's why we're getting visceral fat, why we have fatty liver disease in 20-year-olds. Did you ever see that?

No, it's, it's wild. It's wild how it's increasing. It is crazy. Yeah. And so as you're saying here, I mean, the first thing that's really the big problem here is that it's, it's the, it's the food dyes, it's the BHT, it's the genetically modified organisms, it's the pesticides. Hormones, they're all in, and they're not food. That's the thing, it's not food. That's number one. Number two is stress, social devices, all of these things that kids are dealing with. And what's the third?

The third that I would say is, um, not repairing what's broken. So sometimes we think that we remove the stressor and we forget to honor the injury, right? So that's why for me, you've got to heal the metabolism and you've got to repair or even encourage some of the metabolic pathways that have slowed down. So use the example when someone's doing keto and you've pushed them into beta oxidation, that metabolic pathway has been heightened, right, to kick off what they call ketone bodies. A person says, I'm out of keto, yay. When there's been suppression in pancreatic secretion, there's the beta cells— when you talked about the pancreas and carbohydrates, there's the beta cells in the isles of Langerhans that are really excited and activated. They have shown that there is loss of blood flow into that region of the pancreas post-keto diet. So you've got to revascularize the tissue that has been insulted during injury. And if a person has hypothyroidism and they're going through menopause, or they're through menopause, and their hormone called FSH, which is follicle stimulating hormone— it is a communication between the pituitary and the ovary that works. We're going to talk about Asian medicine, right, in the triple warmer, pituitary, the thyroid, and the lower Xin Jiao, the ovaries and the adrenals, right? There is this feedback loop that happens. When a person goes through menopause, E2 secretion, I'm gonna go Western here for a second, is not happening in the ovaries. We no longer produce a significant amount of estrogen, E2, in the ovaries. The pituitary yells at the ovaries, "Come on!" That's why FSH it goes up, it counter starts screaming at the thyroid in TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone. Come on! That's why it goes up, right? Our body responds by disrupting the ratio of ghrelin and leptin so that E1 can be produced by the adrenal glands and the adipocytes or the fat cells. What does that mean? We get stressed more easily and we gain weight. So it is a natural metabolic process that happens when it's not primed, pumped, or efficient. So you can say, okay, I'm going to eat less, I'm going to be under less stress, but there is a hormone feedback loop that if you don't do something to reset it, will prime you to gain weight and feel stress. Yeah. So I think the third thing is honoring the injury and healing the injury, and you have to do that strategically. I have clients that I have had for 30 years, 3 generations. I want people to give me at least 28 days to go to metabolism rehab. If you want to shift things, there are lifestyle, mind, body, spirit changes that have to happen. But I implore you to heal the injury.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's so good. I think that, you know, one thing I'm hearing is, is that if you're really going to heal, you need a system, you need a practice, you know, a top 1% practitioner. You need somebody that's really going to help walk you through how to do this. Or, you know, listen, there is a level of self-learning that a very— you know, some people can do and absolutely heal yourself in this way as well. So I think if you can, you know, I want to, I want to mention this too. You know, I think that I was, I was, I do a group call once a week with patients. Yeah. And I was doing this yesterday. And one of the things I was talking about was very much what you were just sharing of you've gotta heal that thing that's injured. You've gotta heal it. And somebody asked me the question, they said, I've noticed that my antibodies this time of year in November, they tend to jump up. Right. And I said, and they said, why is that? And I actually, I've never had that question. I said, well, here's why it tends to happen more this time of year. Now, if I'm gonna go back and look at ancient classical, you know, traditional medicine, the fall is connected to the lungs and the colon. Colon. It's connected in the Chinese medicine, they would call it metal element. It's the time of loss. Trees are losing their leaves, they're letting go, they're releasing things. This is the time of year where if you've had something you're still holding on to from the past, it could be your shame, it could be guilt, it could be regret, it could be you went through a divorce, you lost a loved one a few years ago and you still have not been able to move on and you're holding on to it. That's why this is happening. So you need to be able to let go and move on. You need to cry, you need releases.

Can I add something? Yeah, please. I think it was beautifully given to me one time, which is, you know, they always say you can't see the forest through the trees except for in the fall. So your peripheral— so I'm taking immunology into this— your peripheral vision, your ability to see further innately, right, in our epigenetics, happens in the fall. There are many times where we couldn't see other villages because of the thickness of the forest. When the leaves fall, we can suddenly understand that Someone has created culture there. Someone has moved in there. There could potentially be enemy there, right? Our immune system. So when you said they're an— I got so itchy.

And this is immune time of year too.

Yes, this is the immune time of year, but we wonder why we get sick and cold. It's not because— so oftentimes our immune systems are— so we are now, it's like head, when I fish a lot and it's moose season, right? My guide always says, you know, Hailey, head on a swivel, head on a swivel. I'm not worried about the bears and the mountain lions. I'm worried about the moose. Right? And so I'm going like this, like this, like this. And I always go, "Josh, stop." His name's Josh. "Josh, stop it. I don't fish as well when I'm stressed," right? And I have an autoimmune disorder and I know my antibodies are going up. Stop, you know, stressing me out about the moose. It's the same way when the leaves fall, we see further. We also, in my opinion, there are some thionosan— there are poisons that are released in the plants in order for it to drop off and die, right? Right? Those are also in our atmosphere. And if you have an autoimmune disorder, it's like something— so, so we have some things that we do. And I know why you do a group call. We have an online community for the same reason, right?

And we do private with coaches too, but we also do a group.

Yeah, but like, I had no intention of writing a book. None. I had an amazing clinic. I had a client that was Mason Novick, right? He did, uh, Juno, 500 Days of Summers, um, and he was after me, after me, after me. And And he did lean into the fact, he leaned into my heart and he said, "You're helping one to one to one, right? What if you could help millions?" And I was like, "Okay." I just never thought of it. We've sold millions of copies. We're in 47 languages. Like, I know that Katie in Kansas or, you know, Lois in Milwaukee, like, and the other funny thing is someone said to me, "It sounds like you're reading the book to me." I'm severely dyslexic. I didn't know if you knew that. No. Yeah, I can't read my own books. Third grade, when I went set for my last year, I was third grade, second month. I'm getting better. My reading capacities. So everything was audioed out, right? So it's that kind of talking and communicating. I also feel I'm, again, the talking stick. There's a lot of spiritual medicine that I think is critical and important for that. But looking at time of year, time of season, but bringing it back to that person, what's going on with you? Do you, is there some release that is not flowing through you, but your body's calling attention that you need to infuse yourself with more support so that you're resilient going through it.

Yeah, it's so good. Yeah, I want to go back to this idea around the metabolic pathways because this is such an important concept for people to understand. And I'd love for you to share, when you have worked with people and helping them repair their metabolism, and you've looked at blood work and done some of those things. What do you see as typically the biggest nutritional deficiencies— vitamins, minerals, other compounds— that you think can really start to help people metabolically?

Right. So I— when people, you know, people— and I'll like, what do I give to all of my kids' teachers every year? Just say, let me give you the gift of health. You know, I do believe in a high-quality multivitamin. I really do, because I think it just levels the playing field. And I I think our food is deficient and devoid, and I think we don't always make the best health choices from a food perspective. I see— so it's really hard to do traditional tests and see fatty acid deficiencies, right? There's not a great CBC or a chem screen that says, "Oh, you need more omegas." However, we know that they are naturally the building blocks for— they are not anti-inflammatory. You don't take it and it works like an anti-inflammatory. Insad, right? Right. You don't take it, it works like prednisone. What it does is it is the nutrachemical building block for your natural anti-inflammatory hormones. We talked about those glucocorticoids, right? So I find that most people don't get enough healthy lipids, so we use a plant-derived— but I'm a big 6 also. I'm not a big— I didn't buy into that whole bull, you know what, that you just need omega-3s. I believe you also need omega-6s. Yeah, in my Personal opinion, yeah. But I would say, you know, we have a lot of B vitamin deficiencies, but you can take B vitamins until the cows come home. If your gut microbiome's not good, it's really hard.

Yeah. I mean, this is why, let me share. When I have people come in with the, and you know this even better than I do, the pathways, but the MTHFR. And I always encourage them, I said, "Listen, take a methylated B, but take a probiotic and do higher doses of probiotics because that's for, actually, your methylation channels, you have to have it.

And if you have any depression or fatigue or brain fog, like you get, you, you know, you can't, you, so in neuroimmunology, right? The brain has this phenomenal thing called the blood-brain barrier. And so, and it's what's so awful right now that's happening with Alzheimer's and cognitive issues in general, right? Is it's very hard. You can hit the body, but it's very hard to hit the brain. We, in our neurology department, we have so many conversations about this. It's why we do things like intranasal sprays if we're gonna use naltrexone. Or something so that we can migrate into the blood-brain barrier. The only way to potentially get to the brain is to get to the gut. So it doesn't matter. Like, I mean, you know, I, I believe— so, so you, you hit it for me. The fatty acids, the probiotics, then the vitamin B. I think it's worthless to take a vitamin B if you're not doing a probiotic, personally.

Yeah, I agree.

The other thing that I think we are so deficient in is vitamin C. But I'm going to say something about vitamin C. If it's corn-derived, you're doing more harm than good. In my— in this, I can give you a whole ag week.

And I mean, I mean, most of it's under— it's 90. I mean, the majority of vitamin C today is corn-derived.

Yeah, you have to make sure that you are sourcing non-corn-derived vitamin C. That's my personal opinion. Yeah, especially if you have any kind of mast cell activation, mast cell symptomology. So you get a food baby after you eat, right? Your gut swells, you have, uh, fogginess, fatigue. You have raspberries, you're having food allergies, um, you get that flush, right, response in the body. The vitamin C is really important, like a minimum of 3 grams a day from a supplemental perspective. This goes back to my ag base, right? We can't as humans manufacture vitamin C. We are reliant on getting it from our fruits and vegetables. If you are doing a bang-up job on your fruits and vegetables and you don't have any pancreatic insufficiency, right, so you're not a mangiorno, you're not you haven't just come off keto, you might be able to extract if it's really close or you just patted the farmer on the back or you grew it yourself. Our ecosystem is not conducive to delivering vitamin C, and yet, as a species, we cannot manufacture our own. So that's a big one for me, and it became like, so, you know, you get a cold, take C. I think that with adrenal fatigue and immune insufficiency, long COVID, right? Minimum of 3 grams a day.

Yeah.

Yeah. So those are kind of my, like, don't, I mean, personally, you wanna know what I take? I got a purse full. I make sure I have my zinc. I'm diligent. We have a lot of individuals with thyroid issues, and I like the guggensterones. I think it's a flavonoid.

Yeah, yeah, guggen's pretty amazing. Yeah.

And so I have a theory. I think it helps wash the receptor sites. I think it makes the body excited for whatever little bit you're squeezing out or whatever you're supplementing or supporting. I think it's like, "Here thyroid, come bind to me." I've used that even more with hyper, actually. Have you?

But it makes sense with hyper. So that it binds and burns. That's right.

Yeah, I think it works on, I've studied the secondary metabolites of that, 'cause it was always so fascinating to me, and I think it has a receptor site component. I mean, there's a ton of studies, like you can go to Lavelle in Canada and get anything studied and a positive outcome if you pay him, enough, right? Did I just say that out loud? I did. So you got to be careful where the source is. I'm a scientist at heart. We go back to the agriculture regenerative aspect for a second. We have to watch what's happening. So we are growing in the soil, the stress, the nutrients that we are currently in. And if you study agriculture— we raise cattle, I raise cattle also— if you you know, what happens to the structure of the body, if you study what happens to the health of the species, if you study what your grass looks like— it's very different when I have my horses on my property versus when I have my cattle on property. The fracture of the soil from the cow hooves versus from the horse hooves, the nutrients, the way with the 4 stomachs in the cow versus the 1 stomach and no active cecum in the horse, depends on what their poop has from a nutrient perspective, right? How it fertilizes the soil. We are not separated from that. So if it's so evident in our soil, in our land, we've got to just kind of not be— I think we've been propagandized and gaslit medically, quite frankly, right, to believe that we are somehow separated from the earth we live on. We can't live without it, period. So how do we not— how does it not influence us, and how do we not influence it. It was safe. You can remove an organ, I, you know, okay. But if you definitely know you can't remove an organ, you probably should take pretty good care of it. I don't want anything. I want you coming in with it and coming out with all your parts. Like, that's my hope and dream. But if that isn't the case, we know we can't take your brain. We can't take your heart. We can't, you know, remove it. If we can't live without the earth and the earth cannot live without us, we need to engage and we need to look for signs. Like, when I have weeds— and I don't spray on any of my agriculture property— when I have weeds, I look at, did I put the horses on too long? Did I leave the cows on too long? Did we have, you know, not enough storms? And then I modify based on that. We need to give ourselves the same respect.

That's right. Yeah. I mean, in listening to your body, you know, I, I was, I was sharing this on a recent podcast I did, and that is, you know, the people that reach the highest pinnacle in certain areas are the ones that are the most aware in that area. So it's like, if you're going to be healthy, fostering the highest level of self-awareness is one of the greatest things you do. It's like, hey, if somebody— the people that are the most spiritually mature I know, the pastors, the priests, the rabbis, the monks, they are very spiritually aware. They're very emotionally self-aware. And it's a very similar thing for your body. It's like, you need to— I mean, yeah, I know people love blood work, and I think it can be good, but I would rather have somebody that's very, very self-aware of what goes on in their in the body, that'll tell me more than blood work.

So I always use the analogy with blood work, it's like, you know, you're going down the street, you've seen this place on Zillow, well, actually, Zillow gives you data, but you're going down the street and you see a place for sale and you go, I'm gonna buy the house. I love it, I'm gonna buy it, right? And it's been inhabited with vermin and you didn't know that. Getting lab work's like looking through a window in a 3-story house, right? That's good. And that's why we have so much medical gaslighting. Your labs came back good. Really? But you're telling me that you're having all this symptom expression. No, no, no, no, your symptom expression always trumps labs. Always. That's right. If you can get something to match or marry, it can tell us how we can use mostly nutrients, and I believe food is the number one, it's the most impactful medicine. We know that for sure, right? Just take someone healthy and feed them poorly, and they will not stay healthy. Yeah. That is in a state of dishealth, you can't always repair if you don't repair the injury, right? But you can modify and change your health for a positive perspective. So labs are— I mean, I love them, but it's like peeking in a window. I'm not going to buy a house because I just peek in one window, right? And I'm also not going to say like, I love the upstairs when I peek in the downstairs window. Yeah, we're only looking at one window, and we're also looking at one window at a time. Well, you talked about hormones. My favorite thing is when women get hormones tested and they get told they're fine, and one time in their cycle, or they check thyroid one month, you know, in day 3 of their cycle, and they check progesterone in day 28 of their cycle. I mean, you can have a difference between 0.7 and 325 be normal depending on where you are in your cycle. And they give hormone replacement therapy or Pelladom and tell them they're fine. It's the study of the human.

I want to come back around to hormone replacement therapy because you said this. And listen, I understand I'm a male and I am, you know, I'm not a woman, and so I have not personally had the hormone fluctuations and those levels myself. But I recently did a show and I talked about how my first option for women is not to jump onto hormone replacement therapy. And yeah, can I tell you the number of like someone— and listen, it's a very specific group, it's like the 2% is okay. Well, like, like They were like, "You're oppressing us. You're a man. You're—" I'm like, "Did you listen to the whole podcast?" There was a little, like, there was a little 1-minute segment taken out. And here's what I said. I said, "Listen, hormone replacement therapy at some point is okay, but it's not the first thing you should do. The first thing you should do is try and help your body make more estrogen, make more progesterone in the right levels yourself." And I started talking about how, you know, Chinese medicine, a big part of what I study, studied is, okay, well, let's first change the diet. Let's get some sweet potato. Let's do some kidney yin-building foods. Let's do some black cohosh. Let's do some wild yam. Let's do the probiotics. Let's do the methylated vitamin— let's do these things. Let's reduce the stress. And then if you do that for years and still your hormones aren't right, well, then get on a doctor who wants to get you on the lowest dose while we still try and do these other things. And in Chinese medicine, if you take hormone replacement or you take something exogenously from the outside in, like a testosterone or an androgen. What they believe is you turn off your own tap in your own body, and what that does is it causes something called a qi stagnation, which actually is linked to— in Chinese medicine, they believe it's, it's, it's, it's a contributor to certain types of cancers. Absolutely. Yeah. And, but, but anyways, not a lot of people are talking about this right now, and I think you want a woman's perspective. Well, could I, could I get one here? Can I get some, can I get some backup here?

Exactly. Especially a woman that went through— so I got rickettsia typhus. I ended up with viral meningitis. I was in the hospital for 3 weeks with an autoimmune disorder. Fun times. How long ago was this? Maybe 10 years ago. Yeah, something like that. It was kind of a crazy series of events. Again, luckily I have amazing buddies at UCLA and they let me literally have acupuncture in my room. They let me do nutritional IV therapy. In my room, um, along with every diagnostic that I wanted to. We have partners in care, that's why I consider it, right? Um, never had another period. Like, I went through menopause in a blink, right? I had such a hormetic stressful event in my autonomic nervous system and my immune system that my body said, you will no longer ovulate. So, um, lost a ton of hair. It was like, it's all back, but it's— that's Google steroids in my T4, T3, and fatty acids, um, and vitamin C. But, but so that's when I started going bonkers about that. That was not going to happen to me. But I was especially being as young as I am, was at the time, hormone therapy was like, you know, you need to get pelleted this and that, you know, for me, right? I need to understand if anything is right for me. And so I sometimes feel like we get medically gaslit as women to put a patch on and shut up. And it really is insulting. Insulting to me because I cannot tell you how many times I have had women that are back converting to testosterone, or DHEA is through the roof, which is the precursor for pregnenolone, or one of the metabolites of pregnenolone, right? They start pooling cholesterol and now they're on a cholesterol medication. You pool it because it's up chain. Then they go, well, let's— you're not losing weight, your estrogen level's stable, so let's now give you a progesterone, right? Oh, you're not sleeping well, let's go up to 200 on progesterone. I It is such a wild, wild west with hormone replacement therapy, and there is— it is not like having your tonsils removed when you have a tonsillectomy. However, if you have historical strep in your tonsil and you remove the beacon that says there's a problem, you'll get things like PANDAS. Your bacterial infection will go somewhere else in the body, right? So we need to understand why there's disharmony hormones. We need to maximize the metabolic pathways. So I always say this, yeah, if you're gaining weight and your hormones are low, do not support your hormones in your weight gain. And that's what I believe hormone replacement therapy in that situation does. All that fat that you're storing are the building blocks for your sex hormones. So like we talked about the metabolic pathways, and out of cholesterol, I'm gonna go— we go cholesterol, pregnenolone, we go, uh, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, and vitamin D. Those metabolic pathways choice, right? And they all balance each other out. We can take progesterone and back convert it into estrogen. Men that are taking testosterone often back convert into estrogen so bad. Oh yeah, yeah. So what do they do? They put them on Arimidex or, uh, uh, tamoxifen, but they call it something froofy for you guys. Like, it's like more manly. You're on breast cancer drugs, dude. Like, it's like, it's like, we gotta see what they're— and you're not deficient in it, I can promise you that. So 4 women, I always say if the thyroid's off, if weight gain is easy, be very careful with hormone replacement therapy because those are two symptoms that your body's saying, I don't metabolize hormones well. We know that for sure. It's not me saying so. So be very careful, understand what's going on in your body, try to repair to the maximum capacity first. And when we do that in our labs, we're testing every 4 to 6 weeks. We're also testing day, you know, day 3 of the period. So, if you're still having any period at all, day 1 being first day of bleeding, day 3, we start counting from there. We're also counting more like day 18. So, after the luteal phase has happened, and we're looking at that cyclical ratio. I don't think they should be given. I mean, I think you can take, personally, I think you should be able to take whatever you want. That's my personal opinion. I believe in freedom of medicine. I don't think people should be gatekeepers. I think if they're that darn safe. Someone that sees you for 7 minutes probably knows less about you. That's my opinion. I don't think they're that darn safe. I don't think they should be given out like candy. I think a lot of thought. The other thing that's happening is I was just in a medical ethics course and they were talking about that, you know, this whole Dr. Google that patients are researching. If you're not doing ChatGPT about your health, Lord help you guys. Get out there and get super savvy. Buy the AI, buy the medical AI. I can tell you a funny story about that, but walk in informed. So that's why we do a request for care, so you don't piss your doctor off by being Dr. Google, but you are the most knowledgeable person in that space. So I want you to be able to have the nomenclature so that you can get your labs approved by insurance. You gotta be able to talk to insurance, 'cause that's the only reason why the doctors are reluctant, right, to run labs. So what I told you when I walked into the doctor's office, he's like, "I don't see it medically necessary." Let me give you the verbiage my chart so that it's medically necessary. And he's like, oh yeah, that's right, you're in immunology, you know what I mean? I'm like, like, but, but it's not fair to have to play that game, but it's the reality of things. So from a woman's perspective, I'll say having a deficiency in hormones is a symptom of the metabolism being off. We are designed to go through menopause and feel amazing just because Just because it's normal or common not to does not mean it's okay. So be a fierce advocate for feeling 100%, not 90, not 70, for feeling 100%. Get the data, get the information, educate yourself, and then make the decision. That's where I say, don't get a patch slapped here so that you stop complaining about night sweats.

Hey, hey, biggest way to know you've got a good doctor versus a bad one— the bad doctor says, don't read, don't learn, don't educate yourself, you're crazy, you know, versus the other one says, I know, I went to medical school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want you to learn. Here's some articles, read up, I want you informed.

Medical school's amazing, right? Like, it's really cool. There's things, there's aspects of it that are really, really, really cool. We're part of the Osteopathic College of Medicine. And, um, there's like— I dig on our dean, Dr. Kleinman, it's like, you know, I dig on all of them if they understand that they're part of a team, right? And they're probably the least important part of the team unless they're doing surgery on you, right? I mean, the anesthesiologist, even then, is even more important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got to wake up. Yep, yep. Yep, yep.

Well, Hailey, this has been awesome. I want to encourage everybody to check out Hailey's— I— it's not a new book, it's 11 years old, but it is still incredibly popular. There's a New York Times bestseller, it's called The Fast Metabolism Diet: Eat More Food and Lose More Weight. And this has been Hailey Pomeroy. She's working on her PhD in neuroimmunology. And, um, this is a book— again, I remember reading this like 11 years ago and being so impressed with it. And you've just done such a fantastic job. You're helping so many women with their hormones and stoking their metabolism. And again, this is great for, for men to understand and read too. So I want to encourage everybody, check the book, bookstores nationwide. Amazon.com is a great place to get it as well.

So for your viewers, just— I don't know if you know this, we're, uh, our publisher is supporting giving away free books. So you can go pay $26 for it, and fine, that's fine. Or you can go to my website, Haley Palmer drmarie.com, put in free books, and I'll send you a free book. You just pay shipping. Amazing. It's crazy. So the book's done really, really well. It's one of the most successful books actually in the Crown Random House. Besides, it was— got honored with both Obama and Bush, President Bush. Wow. Yeah, I— and for some reason, I wonder why, it's been crazy, crazy successful because of that. My goal is that people don't— I want my whole purpose for doing what I do is to shorten the chasm between where I was in a health crisis to where I got to in a health victory. It was shocking what it took, how many people I had to beg, plead, kick the doors down. My whole— I don't have to do anything anymore, which is great. My whole goal is to shorten that chasm. That's why we give away free books. That's why we have free communities. That's why So we do what we do. So grab a book, join the movement, you know, have a fast metabolism. Everything is nutrient-dependent. Your metabolism regulates everything. And if you don't spend time to heal it, it's really hard to be healed.

Yeah, it's so good. Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Hailey, for coming on. So grateful for you. I just want to say, hey, thank you everybody for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. Remember, each and every week we're diving deep into the science and principles behind how to grow in body, mind, spirit, and take your health and your life to the next level. Hey, please share this. You know, there are millions of women right now and men struggling with their metabolism. They can't lose the weight. They're trying very hard but don't know the secrets of the pathways and the hormones as Dr. Haley shared with us today. And so again, I want to encourage you, share this on social media. Please share it via text message with your family and friends who need to know this truth. And hey, thank you, all of you that are subscribing, that are on mission. We've got so much more great content coming your way. Thanks so much for watching and listening.