Dr. Meg Mill discusses the need to consider histamine issues when addressing gut health. She explains the role of histamine in the body and how it can affect various body systems. Register for FREE with this link for the Histamine Summit to hear more in depth discussions of this topic.

Check out my previous interview with Dr. Meg on migraines and headaches.

Takeaways

Visit Dr. Meg Mill online at MegMill.com.

Free Gift: The Essential Guide to Histamine Intolerance

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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

Episode Transcript

Cheryl McColgan (00:00)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Meg Mill and she has been a guest on the show before so I forgot to look up the episode but that will be in the show notes so if you’re listening to this it was another great episode with her before be sure you go check it out. But before we get started we got a great new topic today which I’m super excited about and also a cool summit that Dr. Mill is running coming up so more on that later. But first Dr. Meg if you could just share with everybody.

your background, your PharmD, you now do a functional medicine practice. So I’d love for you to just share how you got into all that for people that didn’t listen to the interview yet. And then we’ll start chatting about our new topic for the day.

Meg Mill (00:40)
Yes, yes. Well, so I, like you said, I graduated with a doctor of pharmacy and then I actually went on to do a residency and was practicing as a clinical pharmacist. And I kind of have two reasons that I switched to functional medicine. And one was that I knew all the protocols. I knew what to do. We had what we should do and people just weren’t getting better. I’m like, okay, we’re putting them on more medication, but we’re not seeing them improve. It’s just like, okay, we’re sustaining this place. And then at the same time, I was having a lot of my own

health issues. So I was having, you know, a lot of digestive issues. I was having anxiety. I actually started getting panic attacks. And that was when I was at the point where I have to change. So I remember sitting, like my kids are playing on the beach and I’m sitting there and I’m like, okay, I’m here, but I’m in so much, like my stomach’s upset. I can’t eat anything. I, you know, I’m having all this anxiety. I need to make a change in my life. And that’s kind of when my journey shifted and I started to really look into more holistic ways of healing.

And that led me to find functional medicine for myself and finally get answers. I’ve been to like five different gastroenterologists I you know was we moved a lot at the time so I’d be like I’m gonna get an answer now when we moved to a new place and it just it was just not everyone said you’re fine you look like the picture of health of Listeners if you’ve been told that and you feel terrible go with your instincts because that is not true But when I finally found answers, I was like I need to share this with others. I opened my virtual practice

and functional medicine and really it’s been been able to heal help not heal really help other people heal so many different things and see these health transformations it’s been amazing.

Cheryl McColgan (02:23)
Yeah, and I’m sure a lot has happened over the last year since we last spoke. It might even have been longer than that at this point. But so I think you mentioned, you had some gut health issues before. Before we move on to the new topic, that’s such a kind of a, it’s really popular to chat about that right now. So I’m just curious, since we last spoke, is there…

maybe anything additional that you’ve learned in the last year or so or new practices that you’ve put into place to really support your gut health. Because I do think that that is such a good foundation for a lot of the things. And probably we’re going to talk about that more in an upcoming topic, but I’d love to just hear if you have anything sort of new to share or new thoughts on that since we last spoke.

Meg Mill (03:07)
Yeah, so I think a lot of it comes, you know, what we’re going to talk about some of this, because one of the things that I am finding is that more and more people have histamine issues in our world. And when you’re, when you have histamine issues, you actually have to look at gut health a little bit differently. So a lot of people are hearing from influencers and practitioners for good reason, but fermented foods, bone broth, probiotics. But if you have histamine,

issues, those actually can make you feel worse. So some of the things that we’re doing actually to help our gut can be making us feel worse or having flares and other things, you know, maybe you’re getting more anxiety, maybe your hormones are out of balance, maybe we’re having some of these other things happen because of some of the things we’re being told to do.

were our gut health. And so it’s tricky. I think a lot of times people just are out there saying things, you know, we’re in that world of information, which is wonderful. But then we hear, okay, I have to do this. I have to do this. You know, now the new thing is colostrum and that’s great. Colostrum can be good for a lot of people, but then someone that I was working with, we said, well, you know, colostrum is not what you need right now. And so we took her off of it because she had just heard someone say, everybody needs to go to the classroom. And she’s like, my gosh, I feel so much better.

because it’s not what she needed. So I think really my best advice is to get a stool test. I mean, stool tests give us so much information and we can look at your individual microbiome. We can really replete that bacteria that is low. We can get the invaders that we need. We can improve your digestive function. So it’s more about personalizing it to what you need than maybe just following just a general protocol because that’s what I see. Everybody’s a little bit different in what they’re needing.

are a little bit different.

Cheryl McColgan (05:01)
Yeah, and that’s such a great point because really things do need to be individualized. And so even if you’ve learned something new in the past year that worked for you or one of your patients regarding gut health, that doesn’t mean it’s gonna necessarily work for the next person. So I guess that being said, we should just, you mentioned it, histamine. So let’s talk about it. That’s kind of your new passion at the moment. And I would love for you to first just maybe start for people, you know, they hear this.

word histamine. And the first thing that probably comes to mind, especially this time of year, if you live in Cincinnati, like I do, is antihistamine because the pollen is insane. But I think people have kind of a sense that it’s sort of like a reaction maybe in your body histamine, but could you just kind of give a broad definition of it and then maybe go a little bit more detail into how it relates to your overall?

Meg Mill (05:49)
Yes, yes, absolutely. So, you know.

Histamine we generally think of as allergies like you’re saying but it’s actually so much more we’re finding more and more research on How it’s affecting so many different parts of our bodies because we actually have four different types of histamine receptors in our body So it’s actually an overall body issue and we can get into that but it’s actually what we call a bio Genic amine which is the scientific term but it actually the purpose so when the immune system detects an allergen

or an invader, its histamine is released from our mast cells and our basophils and it’s actually part of our immune response. So it increases the permeability of our blood vessels which allows our immune cells to reach the affected area more.

quickly and it’s kind of like cortisol where I feel like if there’s purpose but it gets a bad rap because there’s so many negative symptoms but we do need it for immune defense. It actually regulates our gastric acid secretion to help us break down foods. It can affect our neurotransmitter activity so it can affect serotonin, norepinephrine. It’s part of our body’s response to repel allergens and also can even cause bronchoconstriction in our lungs so if you breathe something in you’re

it prevents it from getting deep into your airways, and it actually creates an inflammatory response. And so in the purpose of an acute situation, this is important because we need to increase vascular permeability to allow the blood to flow to the area that needs help. But the problem is when we start to see this happen long -term, and we’re starting to get this long -term inflammation because it’s not being turned off.

Cheryl McColgan (07:33)
So similar to the same thing like inflammation gets a bad rap. It’s very important process in the body, but if it’s a chronic long -term thing rather than acute, so just to remind people acute sort of what happens in the moment, like you get some pollen in your nose and you sneeze, that’s an acute reaction because it’s just like maybe a one -time thing. Whereas like if it’s more of an extended period of time, your body can kind of almost go into overdrive. Is that how you would describe it? When it’s more like of a chronic condition that causes the issue.

Meg Mill (08:01)
Yes, so I like to think of it like a bucket. I mean, it’s just a good way to give an analogy. So think of your body like a bucket with holes in the bottom. And so as long as we’re pouring things in and draining out, so you need to fill the bucket, drain it, fill it, drain it. And as long as that’s happening, your body’s in balance and you’re using histamine for the purposes that we need to, and you don’t really feel the effects. But what starts to happen is if you either get holes in the bottom,

the bucket or you get an overflow of things filling your bucket up or both. And so when we’re looking at the plugs, like if we’re getting plugs in the bottom of that bucket, we’re looking at a breakdown in the way we’re processing histamine. So we process histamine in two ways out of our body. And the first one is diamine oxidase and the other one is histamine and methyltransferase. So the diamine oxidase is in your gut and then the histamine and methyltransferase is a

a process of methylation. So we need to be able to methylate to break down the histamine. And so what starts to happen is when we start to get different things happening in the gut, we can either have, well, we can either actually first have genetic factors that are variations in the way we produce the DAO enzyme. But then we also can have an imbalance where we start to get what we call dysbiosis. And we start to get this imbalance of this good and this bad bacteria.

and it can create.

different problems. So the DAO lives in the mucosal layer of the gut lining. So if we have issues with that mucosa, we start to get a compromised DAO. And so we can’t break down the histamine that we eat from our foods well. And then we can also start to get a leaky gut, which can also cause more inflammation, and it can actually cause more down regulation of the DAO. So we need to have those good DAO enzymes in order to break down the histamine.

We also can get nutritional deficiencies because DAO requires certain nutrients. So like vitamin B6, copper, vitamin C.

You need to be able to make sure you’re actually digesting and absorbing those nutrients. And so we need to make sure all of these factors are happening in order to break down histamine in our food. So we have histamine in some foods and we’ll get into that. They’re often healthy foods, but we need to make sure when we eat those foods that we’re breaking it down. If that happens, you’re not getting symptoms. If not, you start to get the symptoms.

Cheryl McColgan (10:40)
Okay, and I definitely have some follow up questions on what you just described, but before we do that, I think what you just mentioned is, you’re getting some histamine from foods. Are foods the only source? Are there some foods that more commonly cause this issue than others? Or where else might you find histamine? Because I think, again, going back to the pollen analogy, or example, everybody knows about pollen, but I think fewer people know what are histamine causing foods, or are there other things outside of food that can cause this histamine response?

Meg Mill (11:11)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, even even things like stress, actually, so stress affects everything so stress.

Cheryl McColgan (11:17)
Nobody has that.

Meg Mill (11:20)
So stress can actually stimulate the mast cells, so it can lead to a release in histamines. So that’s one thing. It also can modulate the immune system and lead to an imbalance in the TH1 and TH2 immune response. So that’s something that we’re not even maybe thinking is bothering us. We have the histamine -rich foods, which we can get more in depth, but I’ll just go through some of these other things and then we can talk more about the foods. But there’s also environmental, so think of your outlet.

our seasonal allergies, they can cause the release of histamines because our immune system has tagged those as invaders, even though they’re not some of that’s dangerous to us. So that’s an important point here to make is that what can start to happen, and we see this, so one of the things that can cause a big factor for causing histamine intolerance. So right now we’re kind of switching gears and we’re talking about what fills the bucket up and we’re looking at these things. And one of the things that can be a big factor,

factor is mast cell activation syndrome. And so what starts to happen is you get this immune dysregulation. You can get some nervous system dysregulation, immune hypersensitivity, and we start to see the mast cells release histamine from everyday things. So…

you may just start to react to so many more things than you should be. We see this, it depends on the person, but we can see it really vary and your body starts to react to everything. And so some of the things that can start to cause that are toxins, mold, we can have other environmental factors. And then we can even have illnesses like viruses like EBV, we have tick -borne illnesses.

We see we’re seeing this more and more in COVID. And so we’re starting to see our immune system have to deal with other assaults that are going on, which is causing it basically think of it getting angry. So it’s like, okay, I’m dealing with this. I’m doing this to this. And the imbalance gets off and it starts to just overreact. And so once it starts to overreact to things, then it’s releasing more histamine and then you’re...

In this episode, Cheryl provides an update on her personal health and wellness journey, as well as the recent changes in her life. She discusses her move from Utah back to Cincinnati, her husband’s open heart surgery, and the challenges of managing her online business. Cheryl also shares her experience with consistent weightlifting and the positive impact it has had on her health.

Takeaways:

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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

Connie Zack, co-owner of Sunlighten, shares her journey into the infrared sauna business and the benefits of infrared sauna therapy. Influenced by her brother’s health turn around, Connie left her job in pharmaceuticals to bring infrared saunas to the market.

Infrared sauna therapy has been found to have numerous health benefits, including detoxification, reducing inflammation, improving cardiovascular health, boosting brain function, and promoting relaxation. It also has positive effects on the skin, improving cell turnover, reducing fine lines and wrinkles, and giving a healthy glow. Connie shares her personal experience with sauna therapy as well as what she has learned about infrared therapy over the years.

She shares how infrared heat can improve cardiovascular health, enhance athletic performance, aid in weight loss, and promote relaxation.

Learn more about Sunlighten and be sure to mention Heal Nourish Grow to get an amazing discount.

Watch the episode on YouTube

Takeaways

Episode transcript

Cheryl McColgan (00:00.814)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Connie Zach, who is one of the co -owners of Sunlighten. And she said such an interesting story and background about how she got into this business. Her brother was having some health issues and I think it would just really be great to share with everybody. Not only how you got into this, but obviously some of the benefits of sauna in particular, infrared sauna, because this is all of a sudden, I mean, I’ve known about it for years and have wanted one for many years.

but I think in recent podcasts and just internet, social media, everybody is all over infrared sauna, otherwise known as photo biomodulation, say that five times fast. And so Connie is going to obviously share with us a bunch of that information today. So welcome and would love to just have you share about what got you into all this. I think your brother had some stuff, so let’s hear about it.

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (00:56.034)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I’ve been super excited all day, so excited that it’s time. So this started over 20 years ago. My brother was chronically ill, had chronic fatigue and vertigo and fibromyalgia and a host of other conditions over general malaise and a lot of pain.

Cheryl McColgan (00:59.79)
Yay!

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (01:18.914)
He tried everything he could. It wasn’t until he went to his dentist where his dentist said, Jason, I think you are leaking mercury into your body from your fillings. And I would diagnose you with heavy metal toxicity without any like blood work. I think that’s what’s going on and you need to figure out how to get this out of your body. And the dentist had done some research on infrared and shared it with my brother and said, there’s technology. I’ve been reading some articles in Asia and

this wavelength can help detoxify the body and pull the mercury out. And I think you should try it. And so that’s what my brother did. He bought it in for its own at the time. It was really only one on the market and it was antiquated, but you know, it started to make a little bit of a difference. And I watched his transformation and was amazed. And simultaneously I started doing my own research. I was at Procter & Gamble on the pharmaceutical side and

I was really driven to make a difference in this world in the healthy aspect of life and thought I was doing that in pharmaceuticals, but I was really just putting a band -aid on everything. And once I started to do the research on infrared and the host of studies that had already been done specifically in the cardiovascular arena, I mean, it’s just, it’s still when I think about it, it was my blog only because my job at PNG, I was in the cardiovascular division and we were bringing anti –

We were working with all the big giants out there and trying to find a way to develop drugs that would help the body while providing as little adverse events as possible. It’s just really, really, really hard. First of all, it’s really hard to bring blood pressure down and stabilize that just in itself. Anyway, that’s a long answer to the story.

When I saw all the great science and I saw my brother’s transformation, I eventually left my wonderful job at P &G and brought sunlight into the market and the rest is history.

Cheryl McColgan (03:22.446)
That’s such an interesting way to hear about it that your dentist brought it up. So that’s very forward thinking of him at the time. I think we are all a little bit more in the health space, at least, aware of heavy metal toxicity and that it can be a real thing. But I’m sure at the time you must have heard that and thought, is this for real? Is this legit? And maybe your background gave you a little bit different perspective. But I also would have thought, you know, hearing about a light therapy at that time, before you dug into the research, I mean, you had to think like, this is a bunch of…

hokey, lumbo jumbo, right? What was that experience like?

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (03:50.178)
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, yeah, my brother used to say, because I did that for years. I mean, I was just like, what, what, what, whatever, you know? I mean, especially coming from my corporate background, even though it was on the scientific side, I was on the medical and the MD side. I mean, it was just very, very different. And my brother kept saying, come over and see me and like see this and experience it for yourself. And I was like, I would remember the first time I got to the sauna.

I got in and I swear I got in for 10 seconds. I’m like, nothing’s happening. I opened the door, he screamed up and he’s like, close the door and sit. I did it for 45 seconds. I’m like, I’m not sweating, nothing’s happening. And he’s like, oh my gosh, you’re crazy. But I mean, I was so skeptical. I’m like, what? I just don’t get this. So it took me a while. The cardiovascular studies, especially with coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure and just seeing,

the markers, the key markers such as triglycerides and systolic and diastolic blood pressure and some of the endothelial pictures of changing in the lining. I mean, just with infrared, not with other, nope, not with drugs. I mean, and I was so, I mean, I had just been so trained in the pharmaceutical that I was like, and furthermore, on the side effects standpoint, there weren’t any side effects, right? These people were like getting healthier hearts and.

They felt great physically. It wasn’t changing because pharmaceuticals, antihypertensives, will typically affect, not typically, always affect something else in the body. It’s just pick your poison. Are you going to have to go to the bathroom more often? Are you going to have lower libido? Are you going to be fatigued? You’re going to have to alter something. Yes, it may be at a lower dose. It may not be significant, but it still changes your body. So yeah, I was blown away.

I loved the fact that this was natural, you could do in your own home, it was working with your body, and it was making significant changes without taking another medication.

Cheryl McColgan (05:58.318)
Yeah, I think that is what’s really exciting about it because people are becoming more aware of the negative side effects of pharmaceutical interventions and sometimes even have, you know, a lot of, um, you know, conspiracy theories with all of that stuff and, and do, does the industry really have, you know, our best health interests at heart. So it’s kind of nice to have this thing that has no side effects. Like you said, you can do it in your home. It’s really simple. Um, people that,

have cardiovascular disease can safely use it. So that’s all really exciting. So when you were first researching then, it seems like it was mostly focused on cardiovascular. Since then, there’s been even more and more research down the road and it affects so many body systems. So could you maybe just share some of your favorite sort of like a broad area of improvement, let’s say from the therapy and kind of what you could expect if you started to…

use this on a regular basis. And obviously with the caveat, as usual, that we’re not medical professionals and we’re just sharing information here. So yeah, I would love to just hear about what else you ran into after the cardiovascular stuff.

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (07:03.65)
Yeah, that is such a loaded question. So I, you know, when you said the word favorite that that because there’s so many benefits, but when you said the word favorite that just it drew me to where I just was. What is she? So like a couple last week I was in California at an amazing, amazing YPL Longevity Summit with like all the world’s leading experts and fields relating that kind of lead up.

Cheryl McColgan (07:05.742)
I’m sorry.

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (07:32.29)
into longevity such as sleep and Alzheimer’s and you know mental health and hormones and I mean just more depression I mean they just get list goes on anyway at this summit Dr. Hyman shared some great new information on longevity switches and how there’s really four key longevity switches.

in the bodies and ways, I won’t go into obviously all the science, and ways to be informed about that and how it works, and then how your take home, how to help either improve the switch or decrease the switch. And what was really interesting to me is two of the switches that he talked about that are so key, two of the four, heat therapy, such as sunlight and therapy.

it needs to be used as an option, not just a needs to be, but it’s an option for regulating and activating the switch to decrease the rate at which you’re aging. You can’t stop, obviously, the chronological clock, but you can impact your biological clock and you can slow down the rate at which your chronological clock ages. So that to me, just the whole concept of…

You know, being in control, I get really, I have little patience for just accepting, well, that just comes with aging. I just, I, and that like puts my whole body, I’m just like, oh, that makes me just heebie -jeebies. I just don’t like that. I’m like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t believe it. And so I love this whole concept and, and infrared can really help. Cause so let’s break it down a little bit. So the way.

Cheryl McColgan (09:01.07)
I’m going to go to bed.

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (09:21.826)
you know, infrared can help one of the many different ways is by activating your heat shock proteins, you know, and that ultimately is going to slow down the rate at which you age. It’s going to decrease inflammation, otherwise known as inflammation, but now we’re in everybody’s calling it the aging because it’s the number one reason that you age. It’s also infrared is going to be able to help.

your brain function is by detoxing the body, by clearing up the mental fog and just the overall toxic load. Because I feel I bring up brain, because that’s another one of my favorite things lately is I feel that there’s so many things going on now, post -COVID, that everybody is running a million miles an hour.

they were overstimulated with our brain. We really need to make sure we’re stressed. We really need to make sure we’re taking control and taking care of ourselves and treating ourselves with kindness and great wellness tools and infrared, you know, sauna, sunlight, sauna is a great way to do that because it really helps to decrease cortisol and helps you stress less and manage the stress as well as…

the detoxification relief and getting purging all those toxic elements like my brother, you know, going back to, you know, having metal toxicity, but there’s, you know, lots of other toxins, you know, that can, that we were exposed to 700 ,000 chemicals every single day, you know, and, um, we need to get those out of our body. And it, so it shouldn’t be just a normal routine, right? It should be just corporate it part of your daily lifestyle. If you can only do it a couple of times a week, that’s fine, but just getting into your lifestyle versus doing it.

as a treatment for something once in a while.

Cheryl McColgan (11:17.55)
Yeah, and once it’s once your health has already been negatively impacted, I mean,

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (11:22.786)
Right, right. I’m not sure if you wanted to share your story, but I’d love to hear your experience and everything that you do. But once you’re having to respond, it’s a different path than using as a proactive tool to be healthy, to decrease inflammation, I’ll say it the right way.

to decrease inflammation, to detoxify, to de -stress, to allow the body to be in a parasympathetic state. These days, I just feel like that’s so needed and so good for us, is to just sit, breathe, absorb the healing energy, and have mindfulness. All things that…

Separately independently are good for us, but if we can do them all together, I mean wow what a wonderful experience What a great thing to do for our body mind and spirit

Cheryl McColgan (12:25.326)
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s probably one of the most underrated. You said, you know, maybe sharing a little bit about my experience, my experience with the sauna specifically. I think I mentioned, I mean, they’ve been on my radar for so long. I can’t even, for much longer than this whole, you know, recent kind of frenzy about the infrared. And part of that is just because of my overall, you know, interest in health and wellness, but also due to, you know, family history, there’s a lot of…

everything in my family, a lot of cancer. My mom had a heart attack at a pretty young age. She’s a smoker, so hopefully that’s not, hopefully that’s more related to that. But you know, learning about something that I could do that’s so simple. And it is, I mean, you know, if you get a full -size sauna, it’s a financial investment. But you know, if you can afford it, I mean, I’d rather do that and have my health than.

be dealing with cancer treatments and stuff like that down the road. So for me, it makes sense. I totally get that it can be, you know, cost prohibitive for others. But I think one of the most underrated benefits of the sauna is simply having this new ritual. I’m very into rituals in my life around health and wellness and going down in the morning and just, it’s almost, it’s almost like a meditation practice, right? So I just go in there and I stay for a pretty extended amount of time, but it’s my time to just.

not feel like I have to do anything else. Like I don’t have to be exercising and listening to my pod, you know, the other podcasts that I listen to to keep up on everything. I can literally just lay there and just soak in the healing, you know, basically, and get caught up on some of my podcast stuff or sometimes I’ll just, you know, listen to some nice music. But I think the most underrated aspect, this is a long answer to your question, is just the relaxation aspect of it. And because it’s in some ways it seems like it’s definitely a little bit intense, right? Like it’s the heat. And so you kind of have to

I find toward the end of my session, I have to focus a little to kind of, you know, stay in there, but it’s, that’s all really good. That’s all part of like a meditation practice. So I think the relaxation aspect is, is absolutely amazing. And, you know, I didn’t really cover this up, but you can see I’m a little red in my face right now, because I actually did my sauna before this, just kind of have it fresh in my mind. And, um,

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (14:36.642)
Awesome!

Cheryl McColgan (14:39.566)
The skin, like can we talk about skin benefits from red light and infrared? Because I think that’ll definitely interest people a lot too. So it’s a lot of your internal wellness, of course, but there’s also some external skin benefits as well.

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (14:42.178)
Yeah.

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (14:52.738)
Yeah, yeah. So I want to build on two things. I’m going to answer your question, but I want to also come back and tie into because I heard a talk from Peter Atia at the at the YPO Longevity Summit and I want to tie into something. Yeah, so I want to tie into something he said. I think you’ll I think you’ll enjoy it, but I’ll come back to what he said. So first, let’s take a talk to the skin, but let’s take a step back because I want to I want to break down the.

Cheryl McColgan (15:05.166)
One of the ones I’m usually listening to in there, by the way.

Connie Zack – Sunlighten (15:22.37)
infrared spectrum because that helps people understand the different parts because we’re bringing up we’re talking about photobiomodulation, we’re talking about infrared, we’re talking about heat, we’re talking about light. Let me break it down and let’s also let me explain the difference between the infrared spectrum and traditional heat. So I’ll start there and then we’ll kind of drill down and then just stop me if you want me to clarify any of the parts of that. So.

Cheryl McColgan (15:40.974)
Yes,...

In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow Podcast, Susan Salenger discusses her book ‘Sideline’ and the issues women face when navigating the healthcare system. She shares her personal experience with unnecessary surgery and how it sparked her interest in women’s medical decision-making.

To write this book, Salenger conducted interviews with women who had different diseases with a variety of treatments and found common themes in their behavior and decision-making. Learn more about the importance of being an informed patient and advocate for your own health along with actionable tips you can use at your next doctor’s appointment.

Get the Sidelined book here and visit Susan’s website here.

Takeaways

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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

Episode 85 Transcript

In this episode, Renee Jones shares her weight loss journey and techniques she found to deal with emotional eating. Renee shares her background of yo-yo dieting and her eventual discovery of emotional eating as the root cause of her struggles. She explains how she found what works for her body through a specific software program and emphasizes the importance of an individualized approach to weight loss.

She provides practical tips for overcoming emotional eating and maintaining weight loss, including the HANG acronym for addressing emotional hunger. She also shares the role of coaching in helping others resolve emotional issues and live authentically.

Connect with Renee at PackYourOwnBag.com.

Watch the episode 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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

00:00 Introduction and Background
03:20 Discovering Emotional Eating
06:32 Finding What Works for Your Body
09:29 Practical Tips for Weight Loss
16:21 Replacing Unhealthy Behaviors
18:54 Renee’s Coaching Approach
23:14 The Power of Authenticity
24:07 Getting in Touch with Renee

Cheryl McColgan (00:00.874)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Renee Jones and we are going to talk about something that’s a very popular topic at the beginning of the year and that is weight loss. Renee has had a very interesting background as you heard in her bio, but now I’m gonna let her share in your own words, Renee. How did you get into this work and kind of, but maybe start with the background. I think you said for 40 years, you were kind of just like yo-yoing around. So I’m really curious to hear about your backstory, like what sort of things you tried, what were your challenges. So I’ll let you take it away with your introduction to your history there.

Renee Jones (00:37.652)
Okay, well, thanks for having me for a start. But my first diet was when I was 10, and I know that sounds awful, but my mother thought, you’re a bit young, but if we start now, maybe you’ll learn how to do this. And the problem was, I didn’t know what I was doing. She’d been heavy all her life, so she didn’t know what she was doing.

Cheryl McColgan (00:49.902)
I’m sorry.

Renee Jones (01:02.192)
And we sort of would start and stop and then we’d say, oh, do you want to do the diet again? Yeah, okay. And we’d start over again. And it would go for a while until we either got fed up or went somewhere, you know, either visiting family or holiday or something like that. And it, you know, it just went on. I didn’t learn how to first believe that I could keep the weight off that I lost.

but also what was really good for my body. It was usually sort of a whatever the diet of the day was. So I think we tried them all, honestly. I think there are two diets I have not tried. And one of them was that HCG thing. And the other is the Whole30.

Cheryl McColgan (01:50.499)
Mm-hmm.

Renee Jones (01:55.636)
Because I’ve done something close enough to that. I thought, got the idea. I’m good. But that just went on.

Cheryl McColgan (01:55.992)
Yes.

Cheryl McColgan (02:00.114)
Right. So out of those ones, and so out of those ones that you tried, you never really found, I mean, did you ever feel particularly good on any specific diet, or was more just like, you’re kind of waiting for this mental shift to happen where it was became more clear to you what needed to change.

Renee Jones (02:20.248)
Um, actually that didn’t come until I was staring down my 50th birthday, because I didn’t know what, what call myself. But when I was doing research, because I was about to be 50 and I thought things change for women, if I don’t lose the weight now, I’ll never lose it. And I discovered that this term emotional ater, I thought, oh, that’s what I am. So.

Prior to that, I was probably never satisfied. I was always hungry. And I thought with my New Year’s resolution that I was gonna make it happen, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t stay on track for very long. And started at New Year, had to restart every month. And by the time we got to April, I actually needed a bigger size. And I thought, this is going the wrong direction. And I thought,

I can’t do this by myself. I just can’t. So I tried out a short program where you buy the material, read it, do the exercises. And what I realized was that this person knew something that I did not. So I eventually hired her as my coach and she helped me get there. And she introduced the idea that, oh, yes, you could lose it and keep it off without doing the yo-yo thing.

So that’s how I got to that point.

Cheryl McColgan (03:55.626)
And so was it the, so you heard emotional eating and she was the one that you really found that kind of meshed those two things together with a program in the emotional eating and kind of tackling some things. One of the things that struck me when you said you were an emotional eater, but then you said you were always hungry. So maybe if you could share with people now, what is the idea behind emotional eating? Because the hunger that you had was obviously not a physical hunger.

it was some kind of emotional state. So if maybe if you’d go into that a little bit more for people that haven’t heard that term before that don’t really know like how to conceptualize that, I guess.

Renee Jones (04:30.028)
So I call emotional eating, eating for any reason other than hunger. Right. If you’re hungry, you may actually need something to eat. It could be emotional hunger. But often it’s it is just that and we have to figure out how to deal with that. Now.

It could be eating for joy, as in a holiday, right? It could be eating for sadness. It could be boredom. It could be sad, mad, frustrated, exhausted. I just need something to make me feel better. So that’s what I think of as emotional eating. And for me, what I found out, I mean, I lost my weight on one diet, right?

But two years later, I was still struggling with it, trying to keep the weight off. And I was tired, hungry, and cranky all the time, which was not good for my dear sweet husband, right? So I did some more research, because that apparently is what I do. And I found a software program that tells you what your unique nutrition blueprint is.

And I looked at those results and I thought, that’s never gonna work for me. But, you know, I’m at my goal weight, so we’ll give it a shot. And I was absolutely amazed because I lost two pounds that week. I have never lost two pounds in a week. And I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t hungry, so I wasn’t cranky. And what I learned from that experience is that everybody’s different.

It can’t be a cookie cutter. It has to be what works for your body. And I finally found what works for my body. And that was 10 years later, I’m still doing the same thing because it works for me.

Cheryl McColgan (06:32.958)
And so what you said is it is so individual and everybody needs to kind of experiment for themselves or find these programs that help them discover what works best for them. But because I know everybody’s thinking, because I’m thinking I hear, well, what was it that you found that worked for you personally in this scenario?

Renee Jones (06:48.328)
Seriously, it’s a software program that I have and I just run it and it asks you a bunch of really awkward questions. And I think you could do it yourself if you would take enough notes because essentially it asks you questions about how do you feel after a meal like this? How do you feel after a meal like this? And it asks you some weird questions like, you know, how white is the white of your eye? Odd questions that

Cheryl McColgan (07:07.761)
Mm.

Renee Jones (07:17.912)
Obviously, I don’t know enough about science to deal with that, but it’s just something that I now give all of my clients because It helps you find what works for you

Cheryl McColgan (07:30.666)
And do you think it’s honing in on any specific aspect? Cause you say tired, hungry, cranky. To me that sort of would signal maybe some blood sugar regulation issues. Does it try to hone in on those things? Or is it really just a more holistic thing where it’s, I know you said like the whites of your eyes, for example. So that might not be as much blood sugar related, but is there any particular aspect you feel like it’s trying to hone in on?

Renee Jones (07:52.82)
I think blood sugar is a big part of it, absolutely. I also think, you know.

My cousin can’t do the same diet I do. She just needs more of some things than others than I do. I need a little more protein, good fats and fewer carbohydrates, whereas she needs more carbohydrates. So it kind of zones in on, okay, what, how does your body run best? And you know, we’re all such a mixture of

families and heritage that we’ve got to figure out, okay, what does my body actually need? And I mean, you can say, how do I feel after I have a heavy meal or a light meal? Do I do better with breakfast? Do I do better with an evening meal is the largest meal? And those things will give you an idea. If we can pay attention to that and take enough notes, we can figure it out ourselves. But I was in a hurry.

Cheryl McColgan (08:59.599)
As are most people when they finally get to that point, right? Like you’ve had it. I’ve tried all this stuff. I’m ready. I’m ready now. So that, that is great though. I think that, so that self reflection part, I always think can be useful. It’s sort of no matter what kind of, you know, challenge you’re facing. It’s like, that you’re saying you got to kind of quiet things down enough to really get to that point. So going back to the emotional eating, once you found this coach, you started working on these things, you found this great software program.

Renee Jones (09:02.64)
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s get this figured out.

Cheryl McColgan (09:25.954)
But at the end of the day, you still have to do the work. So I like to try to find some kind of practical takeaways or tips in these interviews for people because you’ve done it, you’ve kept the weight off. Can you say what may be some of your most important, either new habits that you found or kind of in the tips and tricks category of things that have really helped you maintain that weight loss?

Renee Jones (09:29.108)
Absolutely.

Renee Jones (09:46.585)
Sure.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing that had the biggest effect on me was recognizing that I was trying to stuff down my feelings and follow it with a food chaser. And my mantra when I was losing weight and still now can be, face your stuff, don’t stuff your face.

Cheryl McColgan (10:14.361)
That’s awesome.

Renee Jones (10:16.176)
Because we do, it’s like, I want to feel better, let me put something in my mouth. And that’s common. It comes from birth. Because you have a baby and it cries, we put something in its mouth. It’s a real soother for us. But we just have to find a different soother. Now, I do say it’s not hard to overcome emotional eating. But you do have to get the hang of it. And hang is an acronym. So the H, am I actually hungry?

If you’re not, what is your A? What is the attraction to food in that moment? What do you want it to do for you?

The N is what do you actually need in this moment? Because maybe you need to walk around the block or to play with the dog or get a hug, right? What do you truly need right now to make you feel better? And then the G is go, go get that. Because that will soothe you more than food ever possibly could.

Cheryl McColgan (11:17.674)
Such an amazing acronym and it makes me think of how you could really apply that to any addiction like process because my minor is actually in addiction studies and what I’m thinking of when you say that is it’s the same thing for when you’re looking for an alcoholic drink or people who are looking for drugs as a soother or sexuality any other behavior.

Renee Jones (11:37.364)
shopping.

Cheryl McColgan (11:38.974)
It’s shopping, online shopping. Like you do not need something else from Amazon, right? It’s probably like you’re feeling something else, but identifying that isn’t always so easy. So I love that. That’s such a great acronym. What else did you learn about yourself in this process?

Renee Jones (11:46.202)
Yeah.

Renee Jones (11:51.4)
So.

Um, that I was not addicted to peanut butter, but I used it a lot to soothe myself. So I had to actually stop buying it for a period of time, which really upset the dog. Cause I’d get some, he’d get some, it was great. But sometimes you have to make a clean break with a food that you cannot say no to.

Cheryl McColgan (11:59.286)
Hehehehe

Cheryl McColgan (12:11.741)
They do love that.

Renee Jones (12:22.5)
Even today, it lives in the garage, in a refrigerator out there, because I need a few steps to think about what I’m doing, because it’s so easy to go back to it. And honestly, it was tied to my relationship with my grandmother, because she and I had a bond around peanut butter and chocolate. And particularly after she was gone, if I needed her,

If I needed the love and encouragement that she always gave me, peanut butter would sort of soothe it. But in that quantity, it’s not a good idea. So sometimes we have to say, okay, I can’t keep this in the house for a period of time. And the good thing is that other places will keep it for you and they’ll keep it fresh and they probably have your brand. And they even call it a store.

Renee Jones (13:24.24)
They will store it for you until you are ready. So you just kind of have to figure out what. Yeah, absolutely. Making rules for yourself can be good. Like the kitchen is closed after seven or after dinner or whatever it is. And I don’t go back in there except for water.

Cheryl McColgan (13:28.042)
Yeah, that’s another great practical.

Cheryl McColgan (13:50.018)
Did you find that you were able to follow that? Because I think some people set those and it’s like an easy mental switch where other people kind of, they don’t follow their own rules kind of thing. Was that an easy transition for you or?

Renee Jones (14:03.96)
It became easier over time. I had to practice it. And honestly, do I go back into the kitchen in the evening sometimes? Yes, because I take a vitamin before I go to bed. But I can do that with water. So it’s something that you… Whatever will work for you, if you don’t like rules, don’t do that. Because that will be your reason for breaking your commitment to yourself.

So we don’t want to do that. We have to find ways that work for us. Sometimes people say, you know, I have a family and they have food that I don’t want to take in. Okay, so what we do with that is the foods that are good for you, you put in the refrigerator or the pantry at your eye level and you put them in a clear container. So you can see it. And if it’s...

In this episode, Dr. Michael Biamonte discusses his background in nutrition and naturopathy, as well as his interest in understanding the role of nutrition in health. He explains the importance of lab tests and how they can provide valuable insights.

Dr. Biamonte focuses on thyroid function and the challenges of diagnosing and treating thyroid issues. He also delves into the topic of Candida overgrowth and the symptoms and causes associated with it. Additionally, he shares his experience in using computer software to analyze patient data and develop personalized treatment plans.

If you’re interested in optimizing health with labs, Dr. Biamonte provides valuable insights and resources. Connect with Dr. Biamonte at www.health-truth.com, on his Facebook page and on YouTube.

Takeaways

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
03:28 Focus on Lab Tests and Analysis
07:16 Understanding Thyroid Function
13:28 Identifying and Treating Candida Overgrowth
29:17 Using Computer Software for Data Analysis
36:49 Working with Dr. Biamonte and Contact Information

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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

Cheryl McColgan (00:01.288)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I have Dr. Michael Biamonte with me, and we are going to chat about a variety of topics. One that is kind of interesting and unusual that he said they just started learning about recently. Anyway, before we get to that, I would love it if you could just tell everyone in your own words a little bit about yourself and how did you get into this whole topic of nutrition.

drbiamonte (00:28.554)
Well, let’s see, I’m a clinical nutritionist. I’m a naturopath. I’m certified in New York State, which is where that’s where my license is. And I got into nutrition because I was very curious as to why medical doctors poo-pooed it.

I had a relative who had cancer, who was ill, and I kept asking the doctors, well, what about vitamins and what about, this is back in the 70s, I said, what about Leutriol that I’ve heard about from Mexico? And they said, no, well, that’s all baloney. None of that works. None of that’s good. But I said, but couldn’t, wouldn’t giving him vitamins help his body even if it doesn’t cure the cancer? Wouldn’t it still help him be healthier to try to?

fight the cancer a little longer and maybe live longer and they just poo-hooed it. And around that time I started running marathons. So there was a great interest around, and this is again in the 70s. So this is all these things were in their infancy back then. Billy Rogers was first winning the New York Marathon. Carlton Frederick’s was on the radio talking about vitamins and talking about the dangers of too much sugar. Adele Davis had her book out. So.

this was all kind of new. And I wanted to know why these doctors were so adamant that all this stuff was a waste of time. So the more I started studying it, the more I started to tweak on the fact that, gee, you know, if all this nutrition stuff actually works the way they say it does, I could see this being a problem for doctors and drug companies. I could see where they wouldn’t want this to be around. And…

Cheryl McColgan (02:11.584)
Yeah, that’s some conspiracy thing you’re throwing out there a little bit, right?

drbiamonte (02:15.79)
Yeah, well, it’s common sense though, in a way. I mean, it looked like with Candida, people are constantly asking me, why is it that medical doctors don’t recognize Candida? Why don’t they know even a quarter about it, a quarter of what you know about it? I said, well, can you imagine if a medical doctor came out and said, gee, people, you know those antibiotics I’ve been giving you? Well,

Cheryl McColgan (02:18.576)
It’s all of the money, right?

drbiamonte (02:41.634)
That’s really what caused this candida that you’ve been fighting with for 20 years that’s caused you not to be able to continue in school, lose your job, go on disability. I said, can you imagine the lawsuits that we’d have going back and forth? So yeah, follow the money works. Follow the money works.

Cheryl McColgan (02:55.475)
Yes.

Cheryl McColgan (02:59.572)
Yeah. And so you got so interested. I love that you got into this because, you know, it wasn’t making intuitive sense to you. You saw somebody in your life that was struggling with their health and you’re thinking, okay, well vitamins, minerals, something’s got to help this. What you put in your body has got to be of some use. Plus you’re into the sports and marathoning. And when you do that, you learn, you know, you need to fuel your body in a certain way. So when you went to school for this, what was it that you decided to focus on? Like what was your primary area of focus at that time?

drbiamonte (03:28.662)
Well, I was very analytical when I was young, maybe more so than now. Now I tend to be a bit more open-minded, but back then I was very black and white about things. So my major in nutrition school was interpretation of lab tests, because I felt that lab tests was something definitive. And it showed you black or white, what was going on. And it gave you a marker that you could come back to.

Because later on, after I graduated school, my first gig, so to speak, was working with engineers at Grumman Aerospace, who were all systems analysis engineers. They were all people very well trained in aerospace physiology, but they were engineers. So they truly taught me the true scientific method, which an engineer works, that’s the engineer’s Bible. So you have a parameter, right? You see the parameter, the parameter’s incorrect.

You do something to tweak it, you come back and watch the parameter again. So if it gets better, you know, you were right. If it doesn’t get better, you know, you need to tweak it again. Something else is the reason it’s very, it’s common sense in a lot of ways. But I felt lab work was the thing to concentrate on. That’s what would, um, separate me from the other people out there. And I, so I studied, um, Jim Seema’s work and, um, uh, Ken Brockman, Ken Brockman was, um,

a barnstorming chiropractor who was using kinesiology to further understand blood work. So what Brockman would do was an example. Brockman would be kinesiologically testing somebody and if he found their anterior pituitary was weak, he’d look in the blood work and he’d try to find something about the blood work that could relate to their anterior pituitary. And then when he would fix the anterior pituitary, he’d go back and see if the blood work corrected.

And Ken Brockman did this for years with all blood chemistries. Like anything, like if you went to get a standard blood work up, and we called it an SMA 24 or 26, or a ChemPak, with a CBC or WBC. It’s pretty much standard routine blood work. So he perfected this in that blood work. And that’s one of the things we eventually then used, we incorporated in our computer model of the human body was a lot of Brockman’s work and Jim Seema’s work.

Cheryl McColgan (05:58.016)
Very interesting. I love that. But so, you know, like you said, it makes a lot of sense and it’s very, a very engineer way to approach things like let’s try to fix this and then see what that matches to. And yet for some reason, that’s not how a lot of traditional medicine approaches things. They kind of go off on here’s a symptom. This is the drug that we have that can treat that. You know, that’s about all they think of.

drbiamonte (06:19.598)
Well, yeah, unfortunately, traditional medicine doesn’t really always have to do with science. Traditional medicine has become, doctors nowadays are becoming advanced salesmen from the drug companies. They have the salesmen from the drug company come and tell them what the latest drug is and what it treats, and they become extensions of that. They don’t have to do that much with science, unfortunately.

Cheryl McColgan (06:47.688)
which is why it’s so great when you can find practitioners that are more functionally inclined or that do things with labs. I think your work is really interesting in that way, which kind of leads me to one of the things I was reading about your background and I thought was an interesting topic because I’ve heard so many people talk about it in many different ways, but you have this piece about learning your labs with thyroid. And I think that this is an area where people really struggle because

they’ll go to their doctor, they have some of these classic symptoms, low body temperature in the morning, which somehow everybody seems to know about except for the doctors and they’ll have, you know, some other symptoms like being tired or having trouble losing weight. And it just seems to be sort of a quote unquote classic thyroid symptoms. And then yet when you go get some labs from your doctor, they’ll be like, well, everything’s normal. So I think there’s some more.

subtle things maybe there that you could speak to and maybe give some people some information about you know how should they be going about learning whether their thyroid really is you know if it is truly fine or if there are some things that they could do to better optimize the function there.

drbiamonte (08:00.17)
I became interested in thyroid and adrenal function because of my specialty being Candida. That’s the one thing that a Candida ravages in the person is their thyroid and adrenal function. You can be pretty much guaranteed that in any Candida patient that you treat, who you treat successfully, the very first thing you have to do after you have handled their Candida and you’ve repopulated their biome correctly is deal with their adrenal and thyroid dysfunction.

And unfortunately, blood work can really lead you down the wrong path because blood work is very, let’s say, what they test typically for thyroid is not enough data to really base anything on. The typical doctor looks at your TSH or maybe your T4 and that’s all they look at. The best test, the least expensive test for your thyroid function.

is your body temperature. Because everything that your thyroid metabolism does is the end result is your body temperature. That’s the whole reason your body produces thyroid hormones to keep your body temperature at a certain level. That’s the end result. So if your temperature is low, if it’s below 97.8 consistently, then you have functionally low thyroid. And now what you need to do now is reverse engineer.

to find out why it’s low. You already know that it’s low, your temperature’s low, it’s a fact. Ideally, your temperature should be above 98.2, 97.8 to 98.2 is a gray area. If it’s consistently below 97.8, your thyroid’s too low. So now you have to find out why. So here is what I’ve done in my thyroid programs is I’ve combined the work of three people. One is Dr. Eric Rindt.

whose website you can find. He is the expert on using your body temperature to understand thyroid and adrenal function. The next person is Dr. David L. Watts, who’s the owner of Trace Elements, Inc. His laboratory has been performing hair mineral tests, and they’ve been studying the mineral ratios between different minerals for like the last 35 years. And he has come up with the ratios that are involved with your thyroid hormone receptors. So…

drbiamonte (10:26.442)
Essentially what Dr. Watts has proven is that calcium and copper act as governors or suppressants to your thyroid hormone activity. This has nothing to do with the level of hormone in your blood. When your thyroid hormone goes to your tissues and goes into your cells to work, calcium and copper are there to down regulate it so it doesn’t do an excess, let’s say. Zinc and potassium are there to upregulate it. So the…

the ratios of calcium to potassium and zinc to copper give you how sensitive your thyroid hormone receptors are gonna be. So if you could have excess thyroid hormone in your blood, it doesn’t make any difference because if those receptors are blocking it, you’re gonna be functionally still low thyroid. The other person’s work that I’ve incorporated is Weston Childs, who’s been studying thyroid for years and years and years. And you can find him on social media, very interesting.

the data he’s come up with on blood tests. He looks at things that the average doctor would never think of. For instance, he has equated leptin levels with thyroid hormone, and very importantly also is insulin levels. Excess insulin suppresses your T3 activity. And so he’s put together a blood test that goes through all of these parameters. Like he looks at reverse T3, he looks at T3.

which a lot of doctors don’t do, but he also looks at a lot of other things which can be antagonistic or synergistic to the thyroid hormones and how they work. And it’s not all about the level in your blood. Although I will admit, most labs have, their reference ranges for T3 are incorrect. Your T3 should be more up around 3.5, and a lot of labs don’t go that high on it. But.

that what’s most important is the interrelationship between all of these things in terms of how they work or work against your thyroid hormone the level in your blood is that is only a small part of it you can have totally normal levels of thyroid hormone per your doctor and yet be totally functionally low thyroid because as i said earlier they don’t understand your temperatures they don’t understand the mineral ratios in your body and how that affects the thyroid hormone and they don’t understand things like insulin

drbiamonte (12:47.998)
If your fasting insulin is high, it depresses your thyroid activity. They certainly don’t look at reverse T3, which is a huge problem. And again, the labs will tolerate much higher levels of reverse T3 than are really correct. Labs will tell you if your reverse T3 is 25, that’s okay. But we have found that’s not true. It needs to be more around 10.

So when you have discrepancies with labs, that makes this even more complicated. That makes the doctor even more right in his wrongness.

Cheryl McColgan (13:24.332)
So how do, knowing all these factors that can be used to determine thyroid function, I think the temperature is a really interesting one because have you heard the same stat that’s something like, just the average body temperature in general through the whole population has gone down over the years. That’s something that I’ve heard recently. Can you corroborate or not on that?

drbiamonte (13:46.067)
How could it not, if you look at how people are living, you look at the food people are eating, you look at all the drugs they’re on, just prescription drugs alone, when you look at the effect of a lot of prescription drugs on thyroid activity, there’s no way it couldn’t be dropping.

Cheryl McColgan (14:03.736)
Okay, so knowing that and knowing that there probably is a level of undiagnosed thyroid issues out there, how can people go about finding a doctor that...

In this episode, Dane Johnson shares his personal journey with a mysterious gut issue that caused his health to rapidly decline. He shares the challenges he faced, the various treatments he tried, the eventual diagnosis and the impact it had on his life. He discovered a colitis new treatment and a way to approach Crohn’s that is helping people all over the world.

He learned a lot on his journey to return to health and emphasizes the importance of mindset, positive energy and helping others. He also introduces the SHIELD program, which focuses on building a customized lifestyle for healing and offers a supportive community for individuals with a variety of gut health issues.

Find Dane and more about the SHIELD program at the Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle website.

Takeaways

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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Dane’s Story
17:14 Lessons Learned
23:19 The Importance of Mindset and Positive Energy
32:42 The SHIELD Program, Colitis New Treatment and Community Support

35:40 Emotional Intelligence in Relationships
38:51 Conclusion and Call to Action

Cheryl McColgan (00:00.958)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the HealNourishGrow podcast. Today I have Dane Johnson and he has a really both heartbreaking but of a it ends up well kind of story. And so I’m excited to share him and his knowledge with you today. We’re going to talk about a lot of things related to gut health, but specifically IBD and Crohn’s and colitis. So Dane, welcome. If you could just start by telling people.

How in the world you got into this because it was kind of a sad story the way that it started out.

Dane Johnson (00:35.493)
Yes, it was. And Cheryl, thank you so much for having me and bringing me on and sharing this story and what we do with your community. And everyone out there who’s listening, who might be dealing with chronic gut health issues, IBD, I dedicate this talk to you. This talk is for you. And I hope we can get some life-changing results and get some big aha moments today. And so yeah, it was a very sad story for me. And some of the reasons I’m so passionate about this and I’m here today is because I was diagnosed with

ulcerative colitis, then Crohn’s, then ulcerative colitis. The doctors couldn’t make up their mind. I got my first symptoms at 19 years old. It nearly killed me on my 27th birthday. So I turned my birthday’s November 24th. So December 11th, 2014, I nearly passed away in the hospital two weeks after my birthday. I was in the hospital for a month or six weeks straight at that time. I suffered for a lot of my 20s and I…

You know, I would drop down to 120 pounds from 185. I, you know, had 25 bloody bad mood today, extreme cystic acne. I’d been on all the medications the doctors told me to. I never wanted this. My parents didn’t know what to do with this. I never dealt with any major health issues. My family never dealt with any Crohn’s, colitis or IBD growing up. We didn’t know anything about chronic disease. And, you know, it just hit me like a ton of bricks and we didn’t know what to do about it.

So we went to every different holiday. We flew around the country into different Mayo Clinic in UCLA and Cedars-Sinai and saw different naturopath doctors and tried different diets and read all the big books, the SED diet, the low FODMAP diet, the fruitarian diet, and paleocarnivore style. And I just kept getting more sick and more sick and more sick. And my mom was trying to take care of me. I mean, a lot of us can, you know, mothers out there and people out there know what your mom’s gonna try to do for you.

And she, you know, at one point lost her job trying to take care of me. So I wouldn’t lose my career. Cause I was so lucky at 23 years old. I right after getting, you know, uh, my, my final diagnosis of KUF IBD before they weren’t really sure I moved out to, to Los Angeles to pursue a dream and acting and bottling and doing commercials and all that. And I was a kid from the sticks. I, it was from the woods. I was in from Virginia and all of a sudden it happened. I was a nobody. No one found me. And I.

Dane Johnson (02:52.645)
went out there and made this thing happen at a young age and with no money in my pocket, tons of debt, no experience, didn’t know a soul in California. And at the same time, current’s class became life threatening. So it was a very ironic moment in my life where I remember just thinking, how could God be so giving in one hand and so taking on the other? It was the biggest irony of my life. Being meeting different clients and working all around LA and Miami and New York and…

I had all these agencies interested in me in Europe. And then all of a sudden, you know, I can’t control my bowel movements. I’m losing blood left and right. I’m anemic, I’m low on electrolytes, I’m fainting. And if you can see that little scar if you’ve seen the video right there, I was losing control of my vision and fainting. I was just hanging out with a buddy and cracked my head open on the side of a table. I mean, all these horrific experiences. I was massive shame, losing control of my bowel movements, scared to be, leave the house.

I could hardly walk, just stuck on a toilet. And I was 23. I mean, it was just, it was torture. And so in one moment I was building this amazing life I never thought I’d have. I was raised in Haymarket, Virginia, in the middle of the woods. We had, we were just good old boys out there. And I just always had these dreams and I went after them.

I just went after them and then it was taken from me and one fell swoop and my mom did everything to try to take help me and she would travel with me when I was living in Miami or New York and she’d get me my own apartment and she actually lost her job trying to help me keep mine. And she ended up starting a 501C nonprofit based on that experience. I mean, it poured every dollar she had and all this. And I didn’t come from a wealthy family. So when we were spending $2,000 on functional lab work and $5,000 for

round trip flights and hotel rooms plus consultations with different doctors and different professors who wrote books on IBD and gut health and still not getting results. It just seemed like there was nowhere to go and I became so angry because my parents couldn’t give me an answer. These GI doctors with all these degrees and a hundred different alphabets behind, letters behind their name couldn’t give me answers. I had already been on Remicade. I’d been on Tivio. I’d been on TPN feeding to…

Dane Johnson (05:17.817)
I’ve been on prednisone on and off like Skittles, 60 milligrams, drop down, back up to 60, drop down, back up to 60. I’ve been on obviously mesalazine. I’d been on 6-MP, which gave me drug-induced hepatitis. My liver started shutting down. I did methotrexate, that didn’t work. So I was a young man who was willing to do everything. I just wanted my life back. I said, well, God just gave me this great gift, and now I can’t even walk. Doc, give me whatever you gotta give me.

I was not this against the grain guy who was gonna go out and heal myself with gluten free AIP style diet. I was no sir give me what you have let me get back to this life I’m only 24 once. I’ve got this one shot now I’ve got a I got a casting for a new movie who would have thought little old me might be in some movies oh wait I can’t walk I can’t be away from a bathroom I just lost 40 pounds.

Cheryl McColgan (05:51.24)
Ah!

Cheryl McColgan (05:55.822)
All right.

Dane Johnson (06:12.833)
Now I’m hiding from my agents, I’m hiding from my family, I’m hiding from friends, and I’m supposed to be the cool guy online. This is right when social media started hitting. So what does my agent want me to post? What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to be the cool guy, the hot guy, the hip guy, the influencer. Behind closed doors, covered in cystic acne, throwing up, 20 to 25 bound moments a day at least. I didn’t sleep through a night without using the restroom for about eight months straight.

My clothes don’t fit. I can’t work out. I can’t leave the house. I’m in severe pain. Pooping sometimes felt like I was trying to poop class. And it was just, and everyone out there who can relate to this, it’s like, we all know it’s like, well, you’re just supposed to go to the doctor’s, right? If you get sick, you go to the doctor’s. You get really sick, you check yourself into the hospital. Been there, done that, still sick. So I start looking at this like, is this it? Is this what I was…

meant to do? Is there nothing else I can do? Mom, dad, what else? They write a check. Don’t get anywhere. What do I eat? Mom’s researching day and night. Okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to eat that. We’re going to take this random supplement. Let’s go to Whole Foods. Drop by everything we can find that Google says at Whole Foods. Just take everything in the supplement side and every organic food. Get it. That’s not 800 bucks. I’m still just as sick. I couldn’t figure out what is was and if Chron’s disease cause.

Dane Johnson (07:39.641)
It was the most painful thing I’ve ever been through my life. And it was a prison I didn’t know how to get out of, and no one knew how to get out of. And I wanna share the keys to what helped me get out today. And I wanna share the keys to success because eventually I did. And December 14th, right around there, 2014, I nearly died in the hospital. And I was on two or three different antibiotics. I was on…

Infused I was on 200 milligrams of infused prednisone, which is about a little over three times the dose They’d ever give you orally I was on a TPN feeding tube and then it was a doctor in Florida who had an idea that there was an active Virus in my body, which is why I was crying I was dying and I wasn’t getting better from the not eating being on antibiotics being on massive dose of steroids It wasn’t working. No one could figure out why the doctors were scratching their head. Why is this kid so sick?

And I had lost consciousness at this point. I was, I was in dream land. They had me on three grams of Dilaudid as well, which is basically legalized heroin. So I was floating on a cloud talking to the wall, right? And, and so when this one doctor suggested I needed to be on a chemotherapy antiviral, that’s what’s actually saved my life. It was about 24 hours later, I snapped out of it, right? Became conscious. Oh, my, my markers started calming down. I started being able to eat.

And then about a week later, I checked myself out of the hospital. And then I was housebound for a year. So I was bed rested from there for three months. It took me about a month to get off the couch and start being aware. So I just sat on a couch. My mom and sister took turns living with me. So my mom had to get back to work. I mean, we were a middle-class family. She couldn’t just stay out there. And cause I wanted to live in California. My whole family was from East coast. I didn’t want to leave my life in California. That to me was the ultimate failure that I would to go on disability, live back with my mom. And, and, and to me, I just.

because I had so much going for me in California at that time that I felt like I built this life. I was very happy with it. And she didn’t want to see me lose that either because it was like that hope that you’re going to be able to get past this. Don’t give up on your dreams. And so her and my big sister took turns living with me. And I was actually grateful for that because I got so close with my sister. And just, you’re on a couch all day long. I mean, we were watching anything we could watch. I was watching space exploration.

Cheryl McColgan (09:56.321)
and

Dane Johnson (09:57.845)
I learned everything there is learned about the Antarctica and about the planets. I don’t remember much because I was so hip up, but it took me about two to three months to be able to start walking again. And then during that time, I got myself off methotrexate. I still was on the antivial. I got myself off the chemo therapy. I got myself off the antibiotics. I got myself off. I was trying to figure out the Chron’s disease cause.

Took about four or five months to get completely off prednisone. So I got down to about 10, 12 grams of prednisone that I had to just slowly be on. Coming off too quickly really caused problems. And then I was dealing with extreme depression. I mean, when you have that much toxicity, to this day, I think that one of the reasons I got so bad mentally, I mean, obviously you get that bad when you go something like that, that you just get into a depression, but I felt so sickly. You ever been not so nauseous, but imagine like a spiritual, like a nauseous feeling spiritually, like you just.

Everything just lost its color, lost its taste, lost its hope. It was just a very bleak energy everywhere. Every cell in my body was bleak. And I remember just feeling like I just hated waking up and being conscious because I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t want to feel anymore. It felt so bad. And I think that had a lot to do with coming off the painkillers and coming off the drugs. I mean, my body was so toxic, so overwhelmed that I had to start releasing.

And I remember I was actually after my first Epsom salt bath, I did a lot. I started doing skin brushing and then the bottom of my feet were actually all the skin was falling off my feet. And I think that was because my body trying to drain those toxins. I also had no fat where your body stores toxins because I’d lost 60 pounds. So it was being stored in my muscles. And so I had such muscle cramping. So I was doing, I started doing Epsom salt baths about six weeks into being home. And then a lot of skin brushing, a lot of breath meditation.

very specific about what I was eating. A lot of broths and just a little bit of light meats. It couldn’t handle fats. My pancreatic enzymes weren’t working. Just a host of problems. I mean, it was a tight bundle of problems. And it was about nine months, 10 months in that I started being able to go on long walks and ride a bicycle and get to the grocery store and get my own groceries.

Dane Johnson (12:14.493)
I got back up to like 150 pounds. I’m 6’2″, so it was a light still. I would usually walk around at 180, 185. Today I’m like 188. And started going back to the gym. And I remember my mom said this, she goes, you’re crazy, what are you doing at the gym? You almost died. I said, ma, just the act of going to the gym every day, I went to the gym 27 days in a row, 140 pounds, and I could barely walk with a cane.

It wasn’t because I was working out. It was the act of getting out of the house and getting in a routine and being around that good energy. See, one of the brilliant things of being...

In this conversation, Dr. Jessie Hehmeyer discusses her background in chiropractic medicine and nutrition. She emphasizes the importance of finding one’s why when it comes to weight loss and shares tips for taking action and making sustainable changes.

Dr. Hehmeyer explains the role of nutrition and movement in weight loss, debunking the myth that weight is purely genetic. She shares a success story of a client who was able to shift to a healthier diet and improve her overall health. She also introduces her upcoming group program for weight loss and encourages listeners to have compassion for themselves and seek support in their weight loss journey.

Connect with Dr. Hehmeyer at Well Empowered

Takeaways

Finding your why is crucial for making sustainable changes in weight loss.
Nutrition plays a significant role in weight loss, accounting for about 80% of progress.
Movement, particularly strength training, is important for preserving muscle mass and increasing metabolism.
Weight loss is not solely determined by genetics; the environment and lifestyle choices have a significant impact.
Working with a functional medicine practitioner or joining a group program can provide support and guidance in the weight loss journey.

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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Personal Interests
01:59 Professional Background and Training
04:10 Approach to Weight Loss
06:02 Finding Your Why
07:39 Taking Action and Making Changes
10:36 The Role of Nutrition and Movement in Weight Loss
17:22 Genetics vs. Environment in Weight Loss
21:34 Success Story: Shifting to a Healthier Diet
27:33 Group Program for Weight Loss
29:07 Final Thoughts and Encouragement
30:47 Where to Find Dr. Heymeyer Online

Cheryl McColgan (00:00.974)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Heymeyer. And before we get into all the wonderful knowledge that she has to share with us, I kind of just wanted to touch a little bit on her bio and her background because she has some amazing trainings but then she also has some personal interests that mimic mine of like hiking and yoga and all that fun outdoor stuff. So Dr. Heymeyer, can you just…

Maybe first share with people kind of what, like what you like to do in your spare time when you’re not working and sharing knowledge about weight loss, what do you like to do?

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (00:35.31)
Yeah, I well, yes, as you said, I love hiking, love hiking and love yoga, love strength training, love, of course, being with loved ones. And I love traveling and I love cooking beautiful, delicious, healthy meals for both myself and others.

Cheryl McColgan (00:39.28)
I’m sorry.

Cheryl McColgan (00:59.198)
And where do you hike mostly? What part of the country are you in?

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (01:02.41)
Well, funny you should ask. I actually work remotely, remotely from Switzerland. So most often I hike in Switzerland. In the States, when I’m here, I do like to get, I do like to get to Arizona. So I love hiking. I love desert hiking. I really never thought that I would find desert hiking as compelling as I do, but I just, I really adore desert hiking. But really I’ve never met a mountain I didn’t like.

Cheryl McColgan (01:09.724)
Oh wow!

Cheryl McColgan (01:29.846)
Yeah, well, I just named off two of my favorite places there. So maybe we can talk offline a little bit about some of our favorites. But I’d love to just start to get into some more of your professional background now that we’ve talked about what you like to do for fun. But you have chiropractic training, you have nutritional training. What was kind of your progression of you started in one place and then what propelled you to kind of do these other trainings as you started working with people or just things that you learned along the way?

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (01:34.403)
Ah!

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (02:00.546)
Fundamentally speaking, I would say the answer to that question is a deep devotion to evolving, evolving personally and evolving professionally and expanding my ability to contribute. So how I made my way here is I like to say straight lines are boring. And out of undergrad, I went to UCLA undergrad, and it really should have been a tip for me where to focus my attention. Because I say that I…

chose my classes around what worked well for my workout schedule, which actually is quite true. So after graduating from there, I made my way back to the suburbs of Chicago, which is downtown Chicago at that time, which is where I grew up in the suburbs and moved downtown Chicago after college. And shortly after returning to Chicago, opened up the first boutique strength training facility in Chicago in the Lincoln Park area, for those of you who are familiar with.

Cheryl McColgan (02:32.011)
I’m sorry.

Cheryl McColgan (02:52.588)
Oh, wow.

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (02:55.318)
with Chicago and it’s still here to this day. So 21, 22, 21 and a half years later, it is still there and some of the first trainers are still there and I ultimately after about four years sold my half knowing that I wanted to continue to learn more and expand my capacity to contribute. Made my way back to graduate school as you mentioned, got first a degree in chiropractic medicine and then went.

immediately into a master’s in nutrition and functional medicine. So it’s always been my focus, even though, you know, the word chiropractor, people often think about aches and pains. I’ve actually never focused in that area. I’ve really practiced functional medicine since the day I got my license.

Cheryl McColgan (03:41.67)
That’s so exciting and I love that progression. It has a, again, somewhat similar track to my own interest and how things progress, but I don’t like straight lines either, apparently. So, so I think what attracted me when your team reached out about having you come on the show is obviously Heal Nurse Show is, and just by the name you can tell, it’s everything health and wellness related, but in particular, I really love your focus on functional medicine. And when this episode comes out, it’s a time of year,

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (03:51.426)
So boring. Who likes that straight line?

Cheryl McColgan (04:11.31)
where people tend to focus on weight loss, kind of the New Year’s resolution, sort of probably the number one New Year’s resolution is to lose weight and or get in shape, two of your things that you’re very focused on. So when you start to work with someone that comes to you saying they’d like to lose weight, can you just share how you approach that and how sort of the functional piece comes into that work relationship?

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (04:35.406)
Yeah, absolutely. So I approach that with equal parts are heart and science. So the functional part is very much the science based. However, I have learned that information does not produce action outcomes rather information by itself doesn’t produce outcomes. What produces outcomes or new outcomes is new actions.

Right. And so it really is marrying both heart and science in guiding people in authoring a whole new relationship with their body, a whole new relationship with themselves, a whole new relationship with food and beverages and using science to make effective changes. And by effective, I mean, changes that are going to produce outcomes, the outcomes you want. Right. So it really is this.

journey of taking both of these essential components of heart and science and, you know, determining what the path forward co creating the path forward.

Cheryl McColgan (05:44.526)
Yeah, and I love that you mentioned the science of it in creating, you didn’t say the word habits, but that’s the way I always like to think of it and the way that I really focus on when I’m trying to help people or help myself with things that I wanna change. So from the sort of heart part of it, what kinds of things are you talking to your clients about when it comes to weight loss?

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (06:03.694)
So fundamentally speaking, one of the most powerful questions I’ve seen that shapes people’s journey is people getting very clear on their why. And in particular, what I like to say is their what and how it’s connected to their why. So we don’t buy what we do, we buy why we do it. And the what part might be reducing alcohol consumption.

or shifting nutritional habits, right? That might be the what. And those in and of themselves may or may not be compelling to people. Some things might be more compelling than others, whatever the case may be, it’s when people get very clear on their why that not only are they able to make changes, but they’re able to sustain them over time. So I work with people through a process that I call authoring your vision of vitality.

otherwise known as authoring your intention for your health in your life. Right. And through this process, people get very clear on what their why is. And that begins to shift the experience itself. Right. It begins to shift this area from an experience of self-aggression to one of self-love. Right. It changes it from…

stick on the back, people beating themselves up over and over again to ultimately that experience of carrot dangling and going towards something that’s really compelling and exciting.

Cheryl McColgan (07:41.054)
And without giving away your secret sauce, because we’re gonna talk about something a little later in the program, about how people can work with you, of course, because that’s always part of this. But if somebody is just starting to think about this, what are some of the, maybe your two or three top tips on how to dig into your why, how to figure out what that really is?

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (08:00.714)
Yeah, so one tip would be to envision yourself in five years from now. So actually, like, you know, listeners, how old are you right now? Got that? Okay, how old will you be in five years from now? Got that? Okay, now, I’d like you to tell the story of you in five years from now thriving, like,

What is it like to be you? What’s it like to get dressed in the morning? And what’s it like to engage in your life? Whether it’s going to work or caring for loved ones or your children or just out there in the world. What is it like to be you with your health as you intend and desire it occur? And I actually invite you to do this exercise. Like you might even pause this conversation for a moment.

and take out a pen and paper, I know that’s super old school, or, you know, a laptop, whatever your, you know, your preferred way of writing is, but actually tell that story and tell it in first person present tense, right. So for me, that would be I’m 52 in five years from now. And, you know, my body is resilient, it’s strong, you know, whatever it is there, there for you to say, like you want to say those things in this

five-year future in first-person present tense. So that’s one exercise.

Cheryl McColgan (09:29.91)
I love that. And just as an aside, I would like to encourage people personally to use old school pen and paper because there is some psychological like brain evidence as far as like pen to paper that’s very different than typing. And I find this when I write as well. It’s a totally different process.

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (09:44.694)
I love that you say that, Cheryl. I feel so, like sometimes I feel like so old school saying that, but you’re exactly right. Like there is science behind using pen and paper. And so for those of you who that seems like a foreign concept, you know, just try it on. Like try it on and see what you notice when you do it. Right? So yes, you’re totally right. Pen and paper does allow for neurological connections to be made in ways that fingers on a keypad does not.

Cheryl McColgan (10:14.606)
I know it’s so crazy, but it’s true. And I’ve definitely tested it for myself. So after they’ve gone through the process of kind of envisioning where they wanna be in five years, and I love this because I have one that’s kind of like 10-5-1 that I do backwards, but after they’ve envisioned that, what would be like their very first step to figure out how are they gonna move forward from where they are now, how to get to where they wanna be in five years?

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (10:16.671)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (10:36.334)
Uh huh. Well, one thing is they might need more information, right? They might. And that’s when, you know, like this data and science really comes in. So maybe they really don’t understand what is going on with their body. Maybe they’re, they’re struggling to figure out, you know, why am I not losing weight? Oftentimes people come to me and they say, listen, this used to work for me, what I’m doing. It’s not working for me now. Or, you know, I feel like no matter what I do.

the needle on the skill is not moving at all. So in that case, we’re gonna get some information to understand what the physiological barriers are to their weight loss. And there are a few that are pretty common that are often overlooked, like just not looked at in a more traditional approach. So when someone walks into my virtual front door, these are all things that we’re gonna be touching on and looking at.

in assessing what’s at the source of their weight loss challenges and also guiding their next steps ahead. Now for other people, maybe it’s clear. Maybe they do know one or two things they could do that they’re not currently doing that would make a difference. And if that rings true for you, your listeners out here, my encouragement would be to just start with one thing, just one foot in front of the other.

You know, one of the problems with the inherited all or nothing approach is that it really is based on a myth that we can make tremendous, drastic, huge changes and maintain them, you know, rapidly, right? It’s just so far not true for 99.9% of the population, right? So let’s honor that and look at, okay, what’s the next step you could take? You know, just to share in an area of my life.

Cheryl McColgan (12:17.449)
Hahaha

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (12:27.666)
right with writing and sitting down and writing it’s like okay I started with creating a habit of just 15 minutes a day you know electronics off focus for 15 minutes a day that seemed for me like I could do that I could do that right it’s like the equivalent of like getting up and walking around the block when you’re interested in doing a couch to 5k or something like that right so you know just look for yourself at okay if your goal is to reduce drinking maybe you just start by counting the number of drinks you’re having in a week

Cheryl McColgan (12:47.727)
Right.

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (12:57.738)
Right, if you know it would make a difference for you to bring some more vegetables into your life, maybe you’d start with just actually recording how many vegetables you’re currently getting, the amount of vegetables you’re currently getting as a gateway to the next step.

Cheryl McColgan (13:16.422)
That’s such good advice and something that people have heard me bang a pot about is starting slow because my background is in psychology and so I kind of approach it from a mindset place usually rather than a totally physical place with weight loss and stuff. I think you got to get your head right. So those are some amazing tips and I love to hear somebody else echo that so it’s not just me. You can believe it. Dr. Jessie says it.

Dr Jessie Hehmeyer (13:39.274)
No, you’re totally right, Cheryl. 100%, absolutely.

Cheryl McColgan (13:44.186)
Awesome. So it’s again in the new year, we’re starting we talked about weight loss and one component of that of course you mentioned nutrition and then one component of that traditionally has very much been movement based just eat less move more...

In this episode, I interview David Milburn of HypoAir about indoor air quality solutions and filtering. We discuss the problem of mold in homes, the impact of HVAC systems on air quality, and other air quality issues such as odors and off-gassing. We also talk about the importance of air quality as well as the detection and monitoring of air quality. Finally, we discuss different air purification solutions available and exciting developments in air quality technology.

In this conversation, Milburn also shares the importance of determining the correct size of HVAC filters and the challenges homeowners face in finding this information. He provides tips for requesting allergy-friendly rooms in hotels (I didn’t even know this was a thing!) and addresses air quality issues in malls and commercial spaces.

The conversation concludes with a reminder of the importance of maintaining a positive outlook on indoor air quality and an extension of a sale on Hypoair’s products. Go visit Hypoair with this link to take advantage of these savings!

Takeaways

Mold is a significant air quality problem in homes, especially in modern construction where homes are built tightly and trap mold inside.
HVAC systems can contribute to air quality issues if not properly maintained and equipped with the right filters.
Odors and off-gassing from furniture and other sources can also affect indoor air quality.
It is important to be aware of and monitor air quality in your home, and there are various indoor air quality solutions available, including air purifiers and ventilation systems. Determining the correct size of HVAC filters is crucial for optimal air quality in homes.
The tonnage of an HVAC system plays a significant role in filter selection.
Using incorrect filter ratings can lead to strain on HVAC systems and increased energy costs.
Regular filter changes are essential for maintaining air quality and reducing dust in HVAC systems.
Hypoair plans to expand air purification to other home systems and offers products for healthcare facilities.
Working with hospitals and corporations can be challenging due to their lack of concern for air quality issues.
Requesting allergy-friendly rooms in hotels can help improve air quality during travel.
Malls and commercial spaces often have air quality issues due to cleaning products and fragrances.
Maintaining a positive outlook on air quality and taking proactive steps can help improve overall health and well-being.
Hypoair extends a sale on their products to listeners of the conversation.

Watch on YouTube

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
01:22 The Problem of Mold in Homes
04:09 The Impact of HVAC Systems on Air Quality
06:29 Other Air Quality Issues
08:05 The Importance of Air Quality
09:43 Dealing with Odors
23:24 Detection and Monitoring of Air Quality
30:25 Choosing the Right Air Purification Solution
39:26 Exciting Developments in Air Quality Technology
41:42 Determining HVAC Filter Size
42:32 The Importance of Tonnage in HVAC Systems
43:15 The Impact of Incorrect Filter Ratings
44:19 Expanding Air Purification to Other Home Systems
45:02 Hypoair’s Products for Healthcare Facilities
46:14 Challenges of Working with Hospitals and Corporations
48:25 Applying Hypoair’s Technology to Homes
49:42 Requesting Allergy-Friendly Rooms in Hotels
51:32 Air Quality Issues in Malls and Commercial Spaces
53:14 Maintaining a Positive Outlook on Air Quality
54:11 Closing Remarks and Sale Extension

Cheryl McColgan (00:00.97)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by David Milburn of HypoAir and I’m really excited to share his knowledge with you guys today. I’ve heard him on a few different podcasts and he’s just such a wealth of knowledge on indoor air quality solutions and filtering. And I just thought you have so many interesting things to say that I’d love for you to share it with the Heal and Nourish Grow audience. So welcome David, and if you could just kind of introduce yourself and let us know how you got involved in this space.

Milburn (00:24.294)
Thank you.

Milburn (00:28.742)
Well, that’s very kind of you. I do not like listening to myself speak. Hopefully we can help some people. We’re basically on this journey with you guys. We’ve been doing air quality for about 15 years. And basically every week we hear about a new situation. We’ve never heard it before. So we’re kind of in that same process of just trying to discover solutions and trying to basically unmake how unnatural our homes are.

Cheryl McColgan (00:33.358)
..

Milburn (00:54.83)
and try to bring them into a more natural state. So we’re kind of on that journey with you. We love having these conversations we learn from you. We learn from our customers. We hear the situations they deal with, and then we just try to find solutions to that. But yeah, our guiding principle is basically how can we bring in what’s happening outside? So what are the natural processes outside, bringing them inside to make our homes more natural because they’re very unnatural, and that’s leading to a bunch of unintended consequences. So.

Cheryl McColgan (01:22.538)
Yeah, the indoor air quality solutions conversation, I’m sure we’ll get to that later in the podcast. But I think one of the things that’s topped on my mind today is because I couldn’t sleep very well last night, which is unusual, thankfully. But I ended up listening to yet another podcast because that’s how I keep up to speed on all the latest news and all the latest technology. And they brought up the mold conversation again. And I know this is something that I’ve heard you talk about before. So I think it’s really important for people to know that there are…

Milburn (01:44.059)
Mm-hmm.

Cheryl McColgan (01:52.098)
some ways that they can deal with it, that they can improve their indoor air quality above and beyond what their HVAC system’s doing. So maybe you could start by just kind of sharing with people a little bit about why the way we build houses now can create this situation and the things that you’ve sort of found that can mitigate that.

Milburn (02:09.681)
Yeah.

Absolutely. So the understanding about mold is growing kind of across the board and one of the reasons for that we’re finding is basically Humanity we’re kind of in this experiment of modern construction and then one of the biggest consequences of that is very unnatural concentrations of mold and so Mold you’re gonna find outside you walk outside in a forest you walk outside in a city You’re gonna find mold but the concentration is really small. So with a lot of air quality issues It’s the dose that creates that poison

It’s the concentration that begins to overwhelm the body. And so if our homes are made of materials that mold loves to grow in, dry wall and whatnot, and then we seal them up as tight as we can for energy efficiency, what we’re doing is trapping mold inside, both the living and the dead spores. Both can carry the mycotoxins.

and then it’s able to grow out of control. There’s no natural predator, there’s no natural process that’s suppressing it. And so especially if you’re in a place with humidity, you don’t even have to have leaks in the house to have mold problems. It’s just how the home was built and where it’s built. So, you know, we have clients where new construction, top of the line, really expensive home in Florida within a couple months.

It’s just fully contaminated with black mold. And it’s really sad, because we hear all the horror stories. And so mold is not the end all be all, burn your house down and start over. If you find it, you’re gonna find mold kind of.

Milburn (03:40.986)
you know, in new furniture, you’re gonna find mold and mold sampler test kits, you know, before you even take a sample. So mold is gonna be all over the place, but it’s the concentration that matters the most to us. And then all of our bodies are gonna interact with mold differently. But you mentioned the HVAC system. A lot of people know no one ever taught them about the HVAC. So maybe you move into a house, you’re renting or maybe when you buy a house, no one ever even told you to change the filters. So we have people that have spin.

Cheryl McColgan (04:06.818)
Yeah.

Milburn (04:09.002)
$100,000 on biohacking equipment, and then they’ve never changed the filter in their HVAC system. Or maybe they’ve spent $5,000 on plugging HEPA air purifiers, and they’ve got the cheapest possible filter in their HVAC system. The problem is that HVAC system is moving exponentially more air.

then thousands of dollars worth of HEPA plug-in products. And then HVAC system is a damp, dark environment that is prone to harbor mold, or at least distribute mold. And then one of the other challenging things that we find is the HVAC system is almost always located in an unfinished part of the house.

Cheryl McColgan (04:45.002)
Yeah.

Milburn (04:45.406)
So you might have this nice new home, and then you’ve got this unfinished attic, and that’s where they put your HVAC system. Or you’ve got an unfinished basement that floods. That’s where the HVAC system is. So a lot of times these HVAC systems are, it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind. You don’t really see what’s happening behind that vent. But a lot of times that’s gonna be the root of your air quality, either benefits or problems.

And with something like mold, a lot of times mold’s gonna be growing in or around the HVAC system. Or if there’s any type of leak, any type of humidity issue, then that mold can take root inside the HVAC and then be distributed through that system. Or in the case of maybe you have a leak in a bathroom.

and sometimes that mold can then get back into the HVAC system. So if you have an unhealthy HVAC system, that’s a hard thing to overcome. So if someone has central layer of any kind, we say start there with the air quality solutions conversation because you can undo that, you can mitigate it, you can take steps to be preventative in the future. And then with our technologies, you can upgrade that into the air purifier. But not everyone has central air. So central air is relatively unique to North America for homes.

And so a lot of places you might have like a window mounted system, maybe you have no AC, maybe open your windows. And in many cases, that’s great, you know, to cool off your house, but maybe you live next to a train station or a steel factory. So we have those clients too, where it’s, um, your unique situation, where a home is, how it was made, what’s going on there is going to kind of dictate.

the steps you need to take to make it a more natural environment. But to us in North America, at least, mold is the single greatest air quality problem that we’re facing right now.

Cheryl McColgan (06:29.174)
Yeah, and a lot of people, I think it’s an interesting thing to just bring more awareness to because I think a lot of people hear, oh, mold. In this one interview that I was just listening to, it’s actually a really high-level, really popular podcast. And he threw out the word, it’s like a conspiracy, really, that there’s that much kind of hiding of what is happening and what you described, like the more efficient the homes we get, the more mold problems we’re seeing. And nobody really wants to take accountability for this. And then-

Milburn (06:53.062)
Mm-hmm.

Cheryl McColgan (06:58.146)
People hear that and they think, well, I don’t have allergies or I’m not sensitive to mold, but some of these health problems, it runs the gamut, right? So I’ve heard, like you were saying, the horror stories where people are just completely debilitated and having all kinds of very, very serious health problems, or it can just go to, you’re really fatigued all the time. And that’s it, and you don’t know why. And it could be something as simple as that your indoor air quality is poor. So I do like to bring that up because

Milburn (07:08.378)
Mm-hmm.

Milburn (07:17.674)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, mm-hmm right

Cheryl McColgan (07:25.022)
if you’ve ever been experiencing a health problem where, you know, your diet’s dialed in, and you do all these things that we talk about on this podcast, right? You’re pretty darn hardcore, while your air might be one of the final things that you just really haven’t addressed yet. And so that’s why when I heard your interview before, I got so excited, because I thought, my gosh, of all the things I’ve addressed, I do have to help with filters and stuff like that, but I didn’t even know that a solution that could work at the HVAC level even existed until I heard your podcast. So that’s why I was really excited to share this.

Milburn (07:35.299)
Yeah.

Milburn (07:52.302)
Yeah, yeah, and air quality typically is kind of maybe the third piece on the journey. Like maybe you start with food and water, and then air quality is this kind of distant nebulous third, but we breathe the equivalent of a swimming pool every day. And the way we try to describe it is that air quality is one piece of the puzzle.

Cheryl McColgan (08:05.314)
and

Milburn (08:13.35)
For some people, it’s gonna be a really big piece. You were sleeping poorly last night, maybe because you were worried about whatever or watching too much news, or maybe because it was air quality. So it just depends. It’s not the silver bullet for everything, but if your air quality’s bad, then there’s a lot of other consequences to that. And air quality takes a lot of different forms. Sometimes it’s chemicals, sometimes it’s…

you’ve got an old throw rug and every time you walk on that rug you’re breaking off little pieces and those particulates get getting into the air and they’re irritating you. Sometimes it’s mold in the HVAC, sometimes it’s a messy smell that’s indicating mold, sometimes you can’t smell that at all. So your air quality is tricky and so that’s why a lot of people it’s kind of further down the list or they wait till they have a problem or they wait till there’s a wildfire or something along those lines but as much as possible we’d want to just be preventative and the majority of

falling in situations that are really unhealthy, so really bad situations, but probably a good 20% of our clients, there’s no problems, and they’re just trying to be proactive, and with something like mold, you set aside all the health issues, it can be really expensive. So just try to get ahead of that so that your house doesn’t get contaminated with something that’s gonna cause you money down the line, but just by introducing natural processes into this,

Cheryl McColgan (09:24.686)
Great.

Milburn (09:36.238)
relatively unnatural indoor environment that can then combat mold continuously. That’s our approach.

Cheryl McColgan (09:43.054)
So one of the things that I’ve heard you say, and it’s interesting because then you brought up the wildfires, which unfortunately we’ve had a lot of in North America this past year. But so for example, one kind of like low level thing could be open your windows more often, right? Just get some circulation. Because one of the issues with the houses are now, they’re built too tight, so they’re just holding all that in. So open your windows more often. What about for people that have allergies or live in an area where there’s a fire going on? Then what’s kind of your next suggestion after that?

Milburn (09:54.832)
Hmm?

Milburn (10:11.382)
Yeah, yeah, one of the biggest pieces of this whole puzzle is just connecting air quality with how you’re feeling and just educating yourself on what’s happening inside and around your house, because air quality is not like a green, oh, you have good air quality, and then it’s red, oh, you have bad air quality. Well, the green, but there’s pollen in the air, and now you’re reacting to pollen. Or maybe…

There’s mold, there’s particulates, there’s chemicals. There’s a lot of different pieces to that, and a lot of times we oversimplify it. And so with the outside air, in general, across the board, it’s cleaner than the indoor air, statistically. But, that air quality at rush hour?

in close proximity to a road is 50 times worse than an hour before. So it’s very dynamic. So there could be a part of the year where, yeah, you open the windows and you’re getting a specific type of tree palm that you’re reacting to. Or during a certain time of year, maybe there’s a lot of boats at the port and you’re kind of near the ocean and the wind of flow is pulling that to you. Then the air quality outside could be worse than the indoor air.

especially if you’re taking proactive steps. So part of that is educating yourself. You know, wildfire being an extreme example, maybe it’s a thousand times worse than normal. In that emergency, you’re going to seal up the home as tight as you can.

and try to mitigate it until you can get through that emergency. But in general, fresh air is going to be a good thing. Our ideal scenario is to try to filter that fresh air as it comes in, in some way. So we have nanofiber window screens for clients that maybe the only way they cool their house is to open the windows. But you know they live near a high traffic area, they live in the desert and there’s high particulates, so you can try to trap some of those particulates on the outside.

Milburn (11:56.398)
and still get the fresh makeup air in and vent some of the bad air. Because it’s not just about bringing air in, you have to actually push air out. So you wanna push the bad stuff out, you know, like a kitchen exhaust fan, you wanna exhaust humidity like in the bathrooms. But sometimes air purification is simply exhausting the bad and bringing in better air from outside. But yeah, being aware of what’s happening outside, it’s gonna change throughout the day, throughout the year. It’s very, very much related to proximity.

relatively new, not real new, but newish, where the HVAC is gonna incorporate bringing in outside air in, and that’s commercially required by law in most of America, but homes are gonna have HRV or ERV systems that are pulling air in from outside

In this episode, I interview Chris Burres about his background, the genesis of his book, and his decision to host a longevity summit. We discuss the main takeaways from the summit interviews, including the importance of mindset, sleep, exercise, and diet in longevity. We also delve into the significance of protein consumption for muscle health and longevity.

Chris Burres discusses the importance of mindset. He emphasizes the need to view aging as a disease and the possibility of rejuvenation.

Takeaways

Previous interview with Chris

Register for the summit for FREE

Learn more about MyVitalC and get 10% off your order with HNG

Watch on YouTube

<br />Powered by <a href="https://youtubeembedcode.com">embed youtube video html</a> and <a href="https://beviljaralla.se/">sms lån som beviljar alla utan uc</a>

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 

Avaline Wines, Tested and Clean, Sugar Free

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

The Shoe Fairy Competition Gear

The Complete Beginners Guide to Keto

Getting Started with Keto Podcast Episode

Getting Started with Keto Resource Guide

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
08:02 The Genesis of the Book and Personal Journey
21:01 The Decision to Host a Longevity Summit
30:10 Takeaways from the Longevity Summit Interviews
42:33 Importance of Protein in Longevity
45:11 Protein Consumption and Mindset
46:42 Final Thoughts and Revelations
49:45 Longevity and Medical Advancements
53:46 Aging as a Disease and the Potential for Rejuvenation
54:10 Conclusion

Cheryl McColgan (00:00.564)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heel Nourish Grow podcast. I am back today with somebody that I just thoroughly enjoy, Chris Vergevues on episode, I think it was 45. I looked it up and I didn’t retain it for some reason. But anyway, he’s here again with us today. And my gosh, we’ve been talking about all things geek prior to this and he has such a great new geeky project that I can’t wait to share with you. So Chris, before we get started with all the wonderful new stuff you’ve got going on.

I thought it would be great to just briefly give your background. Obviously I’ve read your bio, but touch on this element that you described that is so awesome for longevity and great for mitochondrial health that we discussed in the first podcast. Maybe just like a little recap for people. Definitely go back and listen to the whole episode, but that way they’ll kind of get where you’re coming from and then why you are now doing the cool summit that you’re doing. So anyway, that was a very long introduction, but thanks for being here, Chris.

Chris Burres (00:55.889)
Yeah, no, I like it. Cheryl, thank you so much for having me back. I’m excited. In some regard, it’s not surprising, not because of me, but because of the stuff that has been accomplished, which in a real way doesn’t feel like it’s because of me. It is, but you know how you just, you wake up on it. I’ll describe it this way, right? So let’s go back. We’ll talk about the molecule, right? And I’m holding up a molecule or a model of a molecule, obviously.

And if you’re listening, just imagine a soccer ball where the lines on the soccer ball represent the bonds between the carbon atoms. So it’s a spherical molecule of 60 carbon atoms. I’ve been manufacturing that it’s a carbon nanomaterial. I’ve been a happy -go -lucky carbon nanomaterial scientist since 1991. That molecule was actually discovered in 85. The scientists who discovered it won the Nobel Prize for that discovery in 96. So short 11 years from discovery to being awarded the Nobel Prize.

Uh, the material is amazing in all sorts of industrial applications. And, and if you would ask me, let’s just say, well, like even back in 2016, Hey Chris, you’re going to be in the longevity space with a health supplement. I would have said, Cheryl, you’re crazy. Like I got it. Like there’s no, in my mind, there’s no route from me for me from here, carbon nanomaterial scientist to there.

Um, and really what kind of changed that. And actually the publication had already happened. My business partner and I just weren’t interested in getting into the supplement market. When you think about delivering commercial quantities of a soccer ball shaped carbon nanomaterial, right? That sounds really complex and really sexy. Well, maybe not, maybe that’s not the right word. Maybe that’s just me. It’s like geeky. We’ll just go with geeky, right? And, uh, and, and then you’re selling them to these research institutions and they have the equipment to make sure that.

what you’re selling them is what you’re selling them or what you’re claiming to sell them is what you’re selling all this stuff. And then you think about the supplement market and like nobody tests anything. Nobody, you know, they just say they take everybody’s word for it. And, you know, when we first got in the industry, there were some challenges in the industry, which were not surprising, which were why we tried not to get into the supplement industry to begin with. So, so again, if you were back in 2016 said, Hey, you’re going to be in the longevity space. You’re going to have a longevity supplement.

Chris Burres (03:18.921)
No way that’s going to happen. And then really at the latter part of 2017, we did have this product on the market and it wasn’t for human consumption. It was not intended for human consumption. But one guy got on with a big YouTube following, started talking about all the benefits he was getting taking this molecule. By the way, we call it ESS 60 taking this molecule on a daily basis, all the benefits he was getting. And then our phone went from raining like two times.

a week with people giving us amazing testimonials about this thing they weren’t even supposed to be consuming. It’s a 10 times a day. We’re getting 10 phone calls a day. And so, you know, my business partner and I were happy go lucky carbon and a material scientists and we’re like, what do we do with this? Right? We’ve tried not to get into the health supplement market. We have a lab. We can do this better than anybody else. It’s actually our material was used in the original study where the test subjects live 90 % longer than the control group.

So we’re like the foundation of this industry. And that was kind of the beginning of 2018. We really started getting into the supplement market with our My Vital C, which is ESS -60 dissolved in olive oil. So that’s kind of beginning of 2018. And one of my first tasks, right, I, you know, Robert ends up doing, that’s my business partner for 34 years now, 33 years. It’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had actually.

And we get along and we don’t get along and then we get along and then we just get back to work, right? Like it’s just like, great. I disagree with you. You disagree with me. It actually probably doesn’t really matter. We’re both moving in the same direction. And so it’s been a really great business relationship. And so we’re finally get focused on the supplements. He takes care of operations and I’m kind of responsible for Mark. Hey, Chris, you’re the marketing guy. Okay. I’ll be the marketing guy.

Cheryl McColgan (04:45.49)
So you guys must like each other.

Chris Burres (05:14.313)
And the first thing is like, well, a 90 % extension of life is by the way, all of this is in my book, live longer and better. And I’ll talk a little bit about why I ended up publishing a book here in a second, but all these details are in here. It’s a great book. It’s got great lessons. I think it’s got great business lessons. And it’s an exciting journey about a Nobel prize winning molecule. So I’m responsible for marketing. The first thing is like, okay, a 90 % extension of life. Like you intuitively know that’s a lot.

Right? Like we just know that’s a lot because you don’t hear people talking about things that double the lifespan of living things. Right? You just don’t hear that. But, but how big is it? Like, is it actually big and how big is it? So I’m, I’m starting to dig into that, by the way, the next best way to live longer is calorie restriction. If you reduce your calorie consumption by 30%, you’re it’s well documented that you can extend your life by 30%. And, and I probably said this on the last show.

I call that the starve yourself one third to death diet. Nobody really signs up for the starve yourself one third to death diet. They, they need a marketing guy better than me, obviously, because that’s, that’s what I would have called it. Um, and so it turns out it’s a great, right? It’s a, it’s a great extension of life. And then I’m like, well, what are other things? Like what are other protocols? What are things you can do? What are these biohacker, these wacky biohackers? There’s the ones who, when we weren’t really selling it for human consumption.

Who were calling us and giving us testimonials about, you know, improved. I call it head to toe testimonials, improved hair growth, better, you know, fixing the nails. The one I like is, uh, one of, one of our contacts actually had a crab bite his big toe when he was five years old and split his big toenail. And from five to 65, that toenail was split. After he started our product, that toenail is no longer split. It actually grew together. Right. So literally.

From head to toe, we’ve got these testimonials and, and they’re, they’re pretty, pretty amazing. And, and it’s driven by these wacky biohackers and I can say wacky because I am one now. And so I’m doing wacky biohacking thing. I’m doing cold plunges and, and red light sauna and intermittent fasting and all of this stuff. Uh, and so it’s, it’s been an incredible journey and I, and I’ve been educating myself about this longevity. And I’ve always felt if you’re going to educate yourself about longevity,

Chris Burres (07:39.657)
One of the best ways to cement knowledge in your head is to share it, right? Is to teach. And one is it’s great to teach. It makes you feel really good. Other people are learning. And then two, you’re cementing that information into your head. So that was kind of the genesis of why I thought I wanted to write a book. And then that’s kind of a different story altogether.

Cheryl McColgan (08:02.622)
So Chris, you said the book was mostly about the molecule, but yes, my question was going to be, did you add in, my question was going to be about the book. So you said it was kind of about the molecule, but did you include any of this kind of your personal journey that you’ve started going into with the longevity based on what you learned from this molecule and the people that initially tested it on themselves?

Chris Burres (08:05.033)
I don’t know if you have any questions.

Chris Burres (08:10.217)
Say that again.

Cheryl McColgan (08:30.734)
Is that part of the book? Yeah.

Chris Burres (08:30.761)
Absolutely. So we were fortunate. I mean, the molecule was discovered. Yeah, yeah, we were fortunate. We were just the molecule was discovered here in Houston. That’s where we’re based. That’s where our lab is based. And we had the opportunity to go visit Dr. Smalley’s office and kind of have conversations with his grad students and really kind of incorporate their concepts into our first production equipment way back in 1991. That’s the first time.

we delivered commercial quantities of carbon nanomaterials was back in 1991. So yeah, I talk about that story. I talk about having conversations with his grad students. I talk about going to symposiums, right? Well, first off, so you’re a young college kid, right? And you’ve got access to this crazy molecule. By the way, the reason we got into the business is my business partner, Robert’s idea is that at the time the molecule was selling for $6 ,000 a gram, right? So think,

in terms of a packet of sugar, just to give kind of a reference point, $6 ,000 for that, right? So yes, this is something that we should be doing. But if you think about it today, right, if I had some molecule that had some study, there’s no, it’s a no brainer. You make a website and maybe you start doing social media because it’s super sciencey and geeky and you don’t expect, certainly you’re doing LinkedIn and you have all these kind of marketing strategies that come to mind. But back then there was no winner.

Like there was none. And so we actually had to use, there was a book, we bought it, Guerrilla Marketing Tactics. And, you know, cold calling all of the research institutions around at least the United States that would potentially do research on a carbon nanomaterial. By the way, in the early days, people would ask us, hey, this is really cool. This soccer ball shaped molecule. What do you do with like, what’s it good for? And our kind of running joke was, well, it’s really good for funding, right?

Because at the time, if you wrote a proposal about right about the molecule, about fulleranes, about nanotubes, you tended to get funded. And so that was the kind of the ongoing joke at that time. So I’ve got I got a little. Oh, so I think I got a little lost there.

Cheryl McColgan (10:50.522)
In the book, did you add anything about your personal journey into biohacking based on learning about molecules?

Chris Burres (10:54.313)
Oh, yes.

Chris Burres (11:01.257)
Excellent. So, so I can share with you, um, like in the story, I, I kind of incorporate experiences in my life. So, so I, unfortunately, I was actually present when, when my dad passed and he had a do not resuscitate. And that really is kind of conceptually, uh, associated with longevity, right? Um, you know, that, that situation obviously sucks. It’s just horrific. Um, at the same point, my dad was diagnosed with ALS.

And that’s a, that’s probably even more horrific than having to go through what I went through. Um, and so in some very real sense, fortunate that he didn’t have this long protracted, like horrible experience of a decline. He ended up passing quickly. Um, and, and I think that’s, you know, I think that’s the way most people would like to go. Um, I did this longevity summit and I interviewed 55 experts in longevity. And I think the best example and actually carried it into the, into the summit, no, no particular.

Uh, expert shared it with me, uh, the best example of how people would really like to live and then move on past this earth, whatever you think happens next is like a candle flame, right? So a candle and a candle flame just burns and it burns as bright as it’s going to burn until a very short period of time where then it’s out. And, and I think that’s what a lot of people are, are, are looking for. I also think that’s what people are looking for. And the opposite is not.

It’s not just what people expect. It’s what’s ingrained into our mentality. Right. So, and again, outlined in the book, we talk about sharing this longevity story with people. And when we share that story, a lot of people are like, well, I don’t want...