The Living Experiment: Rethink Your Choices. Reclaim Your Life.

Life continues to be weird. So we are just rolling with it. This week on The Living Experiment, Pilar offers some updates and options for folks who want to stay connected and who are eager keep experimenting through the rest of 2020.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/mini-update/

This week on The Living Experiment, Pilar interviews a special guest, hunter-gatherer and rewilding enthusiast Daniel Vitalis. Daniel is a well-recognized advocate for what's known as rewilding, a term that he points out means very different things to different people. To Daniel, and also to Pilar, it means reclaiming and reconnecting with aspects of our own wild-creature origins, and for getting into a closer, more intimate connection with our natural world. Daniel visited Pilar's family farm in Wisconsin in summer 2019 to film an episode for his forthcoming TV series, called "WildFed." In the process, he collaborated with Pilar's partner, Forager Chef Alan Bergo, to put on an amazing dinner of pigeon and wild-harvested plants. But Daniel wasn't always the hunter-gatherer type. In fact, for a long time he was a hard-core raw food vegan — a way of life he has happily left behind. So here, we talk about the evolution of Daniel's viewpoints, including some of the mistakes he says have taught him a lot of what he knows today. Along the way, we offer up some reflections on the history of humans, both ancient and modern. And as always we leave you with some experiments to help you re-connect with nature and your own natural self, right here and now.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/rewilding/

This week on The Living Experiment we're talking about Moving Forward in this unusual time in history. Thanks to COVID-19, we're still recording from a distance. Since we were last in the studio though, and even since the last time we did one of our COVID-edition Facebook Live episodes, so much has happened. We've seen new waves of conflict around the pandemic, as well as the murder of George Floyd and the historic calls for social and racial justice via the Black Lives Matter movement. Meanwhile, we've been witnessing divisions widening, not just within our country, but within our circles of family and friends. So here, we talk about how we've been coping with the present moment, and also about how we are moving forward, from managing our media choices and navigating difficult conversations to finding our own points of view in what can seem like a very disorienting world. Finally, we leave you with some experiments that encourage you to explore your own capacity for making sense of what's happening now, and for building discernment into your own next steps.

Full show notes and resources at: https://livingexperiment.com/moving-forward/

This week our guest is Terry Wahls, MD, a physician and scientific researcher best known for her groundbreaking work reversing autoimmune diseases — including her own disabling case of multiple sclerosis, which for a time had her confined to a wheelchair with very little hope of recovery. But recover she did, and what produced her recovery was an experimental, systems-based approach that Dr. Wahls developed for herself. It combined a specialized paleo-inspired nutrition program with other functional medicine and lifestyle interventions — all aimed at healing her brain and nervous system, nourishing her mitochondria and rebuilding her physical resilience. Today that approach is known as the Wahls Protocol, and it's being used to reverse a wide variety of autoimmune diseases, as well as a number of other supposedly incurable chronic health conditions. Here, Pilar talks with Dr. Wahls about the early life experiences that prepared her to deviate from conventional medical practice, even when that deviation invited criticism, ridicule and rebuke.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/autoimmunity/

This week on The Living Experiment, our guest is Dr. Frank Lipman, one of the world's leading integrative physicians, a thought leader and innovator in the realm of disease reversal, and the author of a bunch of books, including his most recent, How to Be Well: The 6 Keys to a Happy and Healthy Life. Frank Lipman, MD, is best known for helping high-profile celebrity clients — like Gwyneth Paltrow — reverse stubborn and mysterious health problems. But his real passion is educating regular people about what they can do to intervene in their own health conditions, and helping them upgrade their day-to-day self-care so that they can lead healthier, happier, more balanced lives. Pilar first encountered Dr. Lipman when she was editing Experience Life magazine, and he became one of their favorite expert resources. He's also a regular contributor at Goop and a variety of other leading health media sites. Plus, he hosts his own podcast, Tune into Wellness. A practitioner of functional medicine and eastern healing methodologies, Frank seamlessly blends both into what he calls "good medicine" at his beautiful clinic, Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York City, which is where Pilar interviewed him for this episode in Fall of 2019. We talk about the nature of health transformation, the essentials required for recovery from complex chronic conditions, and of course we offer you some experiments to help you upgrade your own body-mind health in ways that work for you.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/health-transformation/

This week on The Living Experiment we have an extraordinary guest, functional medicine pioneer Dr. Jeffrey Bland. Dr. Bland is something of an international legend in functional medicine circles. A preeminent scientist dedicated to systems thinking, and a thought leader intent on transforming health care as we know it. Dr. Bland is a former biochemistry professor who once served as director of nutritional research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. He worked directly with Pauling, a two-time Nobel laureate, and considers him a mentor. Dr. Bland is also the principal author of more than 120 peer-reviewed research papers on nutritional biochemistry and medicine. So, Jeff is a serious scientist, but he's also a profoundly caring human being, once who's concerned about the health of real people and the fate of medical practitioners. That's just part of what led him to help create the Institute for Functional Medicine, and more recently the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. It's also what led him to write six books for the lay public, including his latest (and one of Pilar's personal favorites) — The Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life. Bland's latest venture is Big Bold Health, and we talk about that project, among others, as we cover everything from new thinking about genomics and personalized medicine to chronic disease reversal and the importance of taking charge of your own health. We wrap up with some experiments to help you begin more boldly owning your own health in ways that work for you. If you want to watch the video of this interview and see Dr. Bland interview Pilar for the Big Bold Health podcast, both videos are linked in the show notes on The Living Experiment website.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/functional-medicine-2/

This week on The Living Experiment, we're talking about Dallas's new book, The 4 Season Solution, which is now available in bookstores everywhere! In addition to recapping the central themes of the book, and hearing about the response it has gotten from early readers, we talk about the relevance of the book's themes to the challenges so many of us are facing now. We explore the overall importance of seasonal living in relation to good health. And we also consider how incorporating season-appropriate adjustments can support the reversal of chronic conditions and diseases — by lowering inflammation, re-regulating our biochemistry, and improving the resilience of our body-mind's integrated systems. As always, we wrap up with some experiments to help you integrate more season-driven wisdom into your own life.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/the-4-season-solution/

This week on The Living Experiment we're talking about chronic disease reversal. Over the past decade there's been an emerging clinical awareness, with increasing research support, that many diseases we've been told are progressive and incurable can in fact often be turned around — or at least significantly ameliorated — through systems-based functional and lifestyle medicine strategies. So here, Dallas and Pilar explore the approaches that are proving most successful in interrupting the chronic inflammatory processes involved in most chronic conditions. We highlight the exciting progress being made by leading practitioners who are disrupting the status quo and moving beyond conventional disease management strategies to address the real root causes of chronic ailments that affect millions. We explore the power of elimination diets and other lifestyle medicine interventions to help identify and remove common disease triggers, and we consider the importance of supporting the body's own healing mechanisms. We explain why chronic disease reversal can no longer be the exclusive domain of doctors, and why it must instead involve us and our daily choices. Finally, we offer you some experiments in re-framing what we've been encouraged to think of as incurable health ailments, and we invite you to re-imagine how a whole bunch of us might begin healing ourselves in ways the conventional medical system might not yet think is possible. This episode also marks the beginning of a series of guest episodes with leading physicians and thinkers who are raising awareness of how numerous chronic diseases can be reversed, while helping regular people recover from ailments they were told they would suffer from for a lifetime.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/chronic-disease-reversal/

This week on The Living Experiment, we're talking about biometric devices — the appeal these fascinating little gadgets hold and the distractions they can present. From Fitbits and Apple Watches to Muse Headbands and Oura Rings, we evaluate the ways knowing more about our own biomarkers and daily patterns can help us become better stewards of our bodies and minds. We explore how increasing use and dependence on these devices is affecting us all, and how their trending adoption is influencing our culture. Finally, we offer you some experiments to help you become more conscious of the signals your body is sending you all of the time — and whether you are more likely to benefit from getting a new biometric device, or just becoming a better calibrated tracker of your own body's readings.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/biometric-devices/

This week on The Living Experiment, we're talking, once again, about trauma - this time with internationally renowned trauma expert Dr. James Gordon. Pilar talks with Dr. Gordon about his new book, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma, about how we tend to get stuck in traumatic experiences of all sorts, and how we can get ourselves out.

Get full show notes and resources at http://livingexperiment.com/trauma-2/