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171: Are Trapped Emotions Affecting Your Health?

Transcript of Episode 171: Are Emotions Affecting Your Health?

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Dr. Bradley Nelson

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is episode number 171. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa on the line, of course, and today we welcome very special guest, Dr. Bradley Nelson. Have a very exciting topic for you guys today. We’re going to dig into emotional health, and emotional detox, and his book, The Emotion Code. Some really, really exciting things to bring to you guys today.

Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Bradley. Dr. Bradley Nelson is a holistic chiropractic physician, a medical intuitive, and one of the world’s foremost experts in the emerging field of bioenergentic medicine and energy psychology. His bestselling book, The Emotion Code, is helping people all over the world to improve their lives easily and quickly.

Users of The Emotion Code have found freedom from emotional problems such as depression and anxiety as well as physical problems including fatigue, pain, and disease. A key element of The Emotion Code is removing emotional energies that have clustered around the heart interfering with one’s ability to find love and success. Dr. Nelson has coined this cluster of emotions the Heart-Wall, and it has been called the most important discovery in the history of energy medicine.

He’s trained thousands of practitioners worldwide to help people overcome unresolved anger, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and other negative emotions and the physical symptoms associated with them. Download a free copy of The Emotion Code in both audio and PDF versions including step-by-step instructions for working with the body’s healing power at EmotionCodeGift.com. This is an amazing free offer. Welcome, Dr. Nelson, to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you on the show.

Dr. Nelson:
Thank you both so much for having me on. I’m excited to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, Doc, I’m going to start with a confession right upfront because my viewers and listeners know that I can be brutally honest and always am, to the point of embarrassment is what I’m saying. My son told me, “You’ve got to read this book, The Emotion Code.” I looked at it, and I was interested, but I was very, very skeptical. Now, you have to understand, I have a very scientific way that my mind works, and I’m a guy that – prove it to me, and then I’ll believe it. That works for me in life and against me.

Anyways, I really went into it skeptical. As I read the book, I became more and more intrigued. My 18-year-old son who’s sitting right here, he’s going to jumping in on this interview, trust me. He started literally learning the stuff and doing it. He came with some things with me that did, in fact, make a lot of sense. One was the feeling of worthlessness. That’s a trapped emotion. I would be like, “Well, I don’t feel that way.” However, it was trapped. I’m going to let you explain that more.

Bottom line is I had dyslexia, many watching this know, and I couldn’t literally read until I was in sixth grade. I said, “That must be it,” because he tested me, and you’ll explain that, too. He found it was from that time. Matter of fact, even further back, he found that it was from my mother, and this trapped emotion was in the first trimester. I said, “Well, then it couldn’t have been the dyslexia,” learning later that dyslexia can be a triggered gene that gets turned on in the first trimester, and it was from my mother.

I say all that to say that two other people did this on me and found the exact same thing. Needless to say, although I am skeptic at heart in how the testing, how this works – I’m going to have you explain it. I’m going to be honest with you, and it seems a little hokey. Even from a distance, you’re testing people and going, “Oh, you have this trapped emotion.” Then we release these emotions, and all of a sudden, physical ailments go away. There lied my skepticism; however there also enlied something that kept me intrigued to keep going.

Doc, first off, answer this: What the heck is this Emotion Code and trapped emotions? I’m a believer that trapped chemicals and emotions do the exact same thing in the body. I know that for certain. I know that a lot of my clients who are very, very sick have trapped emotions, and I know that will keep them from getting well. This is a very important show because I know so many listening have problems, suffering for a long time, and it could be, in fact, a trapped emotion. What is it, and how do you get involved in this?

Dr. Nelson:
Okay, absolutely. First of all, let me back up just a little bit. Actually, let me back up a long way. I was seven years old, and I was really sick with the measles. I was miraculously healed within just an instant as my father was praying for me. I remember every detail about that day and every detail about that event. What that taught me is that – at that young age – there’s a higher power that we don’t see that we draw upon. We can ask for help, and it’s there.

About seven years later – things run in seven-year cycles, I guess – I ended up with kidney disease, and there was no cure medically for me. My parents took me to see some old-time holistic doctors who actually healed me. That’s when I decided I wanted to go into the healing arts myself. I got distracted from that as years went by. I became a computer programmer.

Then something brought me back to it. It was really a direct answer to prayer for me to go back into the healing arts. When I went into practice, I got into this habit of asking for help from up above with each person that I saw. It was a totally private, really personal thing. Nobody ever knew that I was doing that.

Dr. Pompa:
I do the same thing with every one. I do the exact same thing.

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah, beautiful thing. It’s a great habit. As time went on, I learned more and more about what was really going on with people. What I found was really astonishing to me, that no matter what people were suffering from, whether it was physical pain, or infertility, or asthma, or digestive disorders, or depression, or anxiety, or phobias, or panic attacks, or PTSD, whatever it was, no matter how old or young a person was, what they had in common was they had emotional baggage.

During the last 10 years that I was in practice, I was primarily seeing people that had been told there was no cure for them at all in western medicine, and the vast majority of them were able to get well. What I found was, again, their emotional baggage was a huge component. What we have found, believe it or not, is that 90% of all the physical pain that people have is actually being caused by emotional baggage.

The way that I look at it now is that the human body – if you think of your car – if your Check Engine light comes on, it means something’s wrong. We have a lot of different kinds of Check Engine lights in our body. One of the very common ones is pain that can occur anywhere. It’s an amazing thing. It’s also amazing how it can also be done at a distance. We’ve certified about 3,200 people now in 64 countries, and most of them do this work at a distance and get immediate, amazing results with other people. It’s an incredible thing.

To understand it for your listeners, it helps to first of all think about the body itself. What is the body? If you look at your hand, it looks solid, but, of course, if you magnify it a million times, you’re looking face-to-face with a single, individual atom. If you look inside the atom, you see there’s really nothing in there but empty space and some little, infinitesimally tiny energies that are zipping around at the speed of light. Really, that’s what we are. Everything is energy. Chemicals, ultimately, they’re energy. Emotions are energy, as well.

When you’re feeling an intense emotion, what we believe is that every emotion has its own specific frequency and vibration. If you’re feeling an emotion of anger, that’s a different emotion and a different frequency than frustration, and that’s different from grief. They’re all different. If you’re feeling an emotion powerfully enough, your whole being can take on this vibrational energy.

In those circumstances sometimes, when that event is over, when the bully moves away, or the divorce is over, or the funeral’s over, whatever it is, sometimes some of that energy stays behind in the form of what we call a trapped emotion, which is really just another name for emotional baggage. We say things like, “Oh, that Meredith, she’s got a lot of emotional baggage,” right, Meredith?

Meredith:
Oh, yeah, tons.

Dr. Nelson:
We say things like that about other people, not realizing that there’s a profound truth there. The reality of it is we all have emotional baggage. What we’re finding is that the emotional baggage that we’re dragging through our lives is diminishing our lives, and it’s distorting our futures from where we really would like to go.

The interesting thing about it is it’s not just the emotional baggage that we’ve picked up in our own lifetimes; sometimes it’s something we picked up in the womb, like in your case, first trimester. Sometimes it’s inherited emotional energy that we pick up at conception from mom or dad that might go back 10 or 20 generations. We’re being affected by all those energies. The Emotion Code is just this simple way to find these and get rid of these. That’s it.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s remarkable. I deal with very, very sick and challenged people. I learned to kind of ask questions because if I feel like their traumas emotionally are too much, I feel like those are the people that are very difficult to help because I’m not proficient in your process. Point being, if I was, I’d be able to even make headway there. I take on the ones who are more chemically – had chemical traumas in their life. The chemicals are driving inflammation of their cells, dysfunction, etcetera. You remove that stressor, and the body does the healing.

This is barely the same thing. The cells, the DNA, it turns on genes. The cells hold this in the DNA. Your method is getting rid of – okay, I have to ask the obvious question. How did you discover this method? I think that most people watching would really agree that trapped emotions can cause sickness and disease, but how did you figure this out, this way of relieving the trapped emotions? Describe it.

Dr. Nelson:
When I first went into practice, there – of course, the understanding that there are – that the body produces emotions was an ancient understanding that the Chinese came up with that the organs in the body produce the emotional energies and those frequencies. This is something, I think, that’s been known and understood for a long time.

When I first went into practice, the doctor that I worked with did kind of a primitive form of emotional releasing. As time went on, I had lots of people to work on because I had this practice. You’re familiar with that, how it’s – they call it practice for a reason. You have lots of people to practice on. As time went on, there was just more information. Little understandings would come. It wasn’t all of a sudden. It took many years to figure all of this stuff out.

I think that there’s really nothing new under the sun. I think that all of this understanding has been built on what the ancients discovered about the emotions and so on. It was a matter of gradually putting it all together. The chart, for example, that we use is really easy. There’s two columns, and six rows, and sixty emotions. The chart I used to use, maybe 20 years ago, was twice that big, but as time went on, I’ve been able to kind of condense this down into this really simple method.

This method relies, by the way, completely on the intelligence of the subconscious mind, you see. Consciously, if you’re sick or you’ve got some kind of malfunction going on in your life or your body, consciously, you don’t know why that’s happening. The conscious mind knows very, very little. It’s like a tiny, little room in this huge mansion of our intelligence. The subconscious mind is the part of us that’s so smart it can take a ham sandwich and can convert that over into new cardiac muscle cells, or nerve cells, or whatever it needs to, which is really, if you think about it, a level of intelligence beyond our ability to really even begin to comprehend.

Dr. Pompa:
I think this is a really important point, so I don’t want to skip over it. We have a lot of doctors watch this show, but we have – most people are just laypeople. Two parts of the mind: conscious mind is making a conscious decision. “I’m going to pick this up. I’m going to get on my phone.” The subconscious is what’s running your heart. You don’t have to think about it. Your subconscious or unconscious mind is doing all these amazing things, killing bad cells, making new cells.

It goes even beyond that. I’ve heard, and I’ve read, and studied that the unconscious mind is recording everything that happens. Every memory from the time in utero until now is actually recorded in the subconscious mind. Is that true?

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah. They’ve actually done studies that have proven that. What we believe is that everything you’ve ever done, every face you’ve ever seen in a crowd, everything you’ve ever eaten, or tasted, or touched, or smelled, the whole history of your health or disease, it’s all in there in the subconscious mind. It is this ultimate holographic computer, really. Being an old computer programmer, it helped me to conceptualize that the subconscious is a computer, and we can ask questions, and we can get answers. That’s how the Emotion Code works.

We use different methods of muscle testing, which are just forms of biofeedback to ask questions and get answers. The subconscious mind will give you those answers. The beautiful thing about that is we can find things known only to the subconscious. For example, if you have an emotion that was inherited at conception, you have no idea about that consciously. Your subconscious mind will know everything about that, how many generations back that goes, if it was from your mother’s father’s father’s mother. It’s incredible.

We totally rely on the subconscious computer system to get the answers. The beautiful thing about that, you know, is that it’s so simple. Let me tell you a story. Years ago, there was a woman who came to see me. She thought she was having a heart attack. She had crushing chest pain, difficulty breathing. The left side of her face was numb. Her left arm was totally numb. I told my staff, “We might need an ambulance, but hang on a second.” I did some quick testing on her and found she had a trapped emotion that was creating these symptoms. Using muscle testing, I was able to find out very quickly that this had occurred three years before.

The emotion was grief three years before. She burst into tears, and she said, “I can’t believe that’s affecting me now. I thought I’d dealt with all that.” I said, “What happened to you?” She said three years before, her husband had an affair, and it destroyed her marriage, destroyed her life for a while. She had spent a year in therapy. She’d even recently gotten remarried. As far as she was concerned, that ex-husband was just a jerk, and he was ancient history, but as far as her body was concerned, it was like it had just happened.

I released that emotional baggage, that trapped emotion, and the feeling came back into her arm and her face within about three seconds, just whoosh, and the pain was gone, the difficulty breathing. I’m still in touch with her. That was probably 27 or 28 years ago. I think she would have been one of these people who probably would have died of a broken heart that we talk about. The medical profession talks about that. The baggage that we have, we often -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow. -inaudible- and I just think of this story. I told you this off air despite my skepticism. My son Isaac’s a lot like me. He’s my 16-year-old. He was doing the – he literally learned on his brothers and me. He’d gotten better and better [00:16:56] He was having trouble with his knee [00:16:59] ski racer. Daniel said, “That might be a trapped emotion,” so he started working on him. Isaac’s making fun of him, honestly. “Everything’s a trapped emotion.” It goes on.

He says, “Okay. Here was the emotions. I released it. Your knee’s going to be fine.” In no time, the knee has been fine. He hasn’t had any pain, so now he’s a believer. He’s like, “Okay, I have to believe it, Dad, because my knee” – we tried everything. We had him going to the best chiropractors, therapists. We did it all. Releasing trapped emotions took away Isaac’s knee pain. I think it’s just amazing. Daniel did something on me about Heart-Walls. He said, “Dad, I think you might have basically a trapped emotion or a Heart-Wall that’s keeping things in.” Explain that because that’s a big deal. I learned more, I think, from Daniel, but your book talks about it, as well.

Dr. Nelson:
It is a really big deal. What it really has to do with, if you think about the human heart, what we’re taught in school in the west is that the heart is just a pump. It’s just a muscle. That’s all it is. Anciently, they believe the heart was the seat of the soul, and the source of love and creativity, and really, the core of our being.

Back in the sixties, when doctors started doing heart transplants, it didn’t take long before people were coming back from the doctor’s saying strange things, like, “My taste in music, or sports, or food has totally changed. My handwriting has totally changed. I’ve got memories of places I know that I’ve never been to in my life.” When they would go back to the family of the donor, in every case, they’d find, “That’s my son’s handwriting that you have now,” or, “Yes, our daughter loved baseball, and now you do,” in every case. There are whole books written about this.

What happened was a number of years ago, my wife had a dream. As I was trying to help her decipher this dream, I suddenly had what I can only describe to you as a waking vision where I saw this beautiful hardwood floor. It lasted for three of four minutes. As I’m seeing this, I have this understanding that my wife’s heart is underneath the floor. I have no idea what this means. It took us a while. We prayed and asked for help. Figured it out eventually that she was born into a very volatile family. At about age two, she started putting a wall around her heart to protect her heart from being totally broken. Her father was a rage-aholic, very dysfunctional.

This is a very common thing. Ninety-three percent of people have this phenomenon going on, this Heart-Wall. What it is essentially is it’s a wall that the subconscious mind puts up. It’s made of layers of your emotional baggage, and some of those layers could be inherited. It’s pretty easy to take down. We teach how to do it in The Emotion Code. It’s amazing what can happen when this wall is taken down. Really, I believe the ancients were totally right. The heart really, truly is the core of our being and the source of love, and creativity, and so on.

They’ve actually done studies where they find that the heart puts out a magnetic field about 12 feet in diameter. If you’re feeling love or affection for another person, your heartbeat is going to appear in their brain waves and become measurable magnetically. There’s this amazing thing going on with the heart that we haven’t really given the heart credit for, but 93% of people, we find, have this wall.

When that wall is taken down, sometimes the most amazing things happen. People fall in love who never, ever thought they would. People start having creative ideas flowing to them because that’s where the best creative ideas are. “Follow your heart” is great advice. If you’ve got a Heart-Wall, it’s much, much more difficult. It’s all in The Emotion Code book how to find out if you’ve got a Heart-Wall, how to get rid of it. It can really just transform your whole life. It really can.

So many of the practitioners that – or people that become practitioners for us have had an experience with that where that wall’s taken down, and suddenly, they feel like a different person. People have told us that for the first time in their life, when that wall’s taken down, they can actually feel the connection with the higher power. They can feel God’s love for them. They’re able to get over, oftentimes within days, serious, suicidal depression, anxiety, phobias, all those kinds of things.

Daniel:
I have a question.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, he has a question. I want him to share his experience, too.

Daniel:
I have a question more about the spiritual aspects. You can inherit past generations’ emotions, right, trapped emotions?

Dr. Nelson:
Yes.

Daniel:
Can there be blocks to spiritual – like my connection with Jesus. Can that be blocked that I actually cannot be born again until those blocks are removed?

Dr. Nelson:
It can definitely interfere. It can interfere with your connection with the higher power because I think – what we believe and from observing people since 1998 when we discovered this – from observing what happens to people and how it changes their spiritual life and their connection to God, I think that when God is communicating to us and sending – or Great Spirit, Higher Power, Source Energy, whatever you want to call it. I think that that connection is really a heart connection. The brain up here, I think, is just kind of the – it’s the hardware.

I believe the heart truly is the seat of the subconscious mind, and it really, truly is the core of our being. The ancients, I think, were really right about it. Getting rid of baggage that’s surrounding your heart can only help. We’ve seen many cases where it’s just totally transformed people.

Dr. Pompa:
My answer to that question’s – I’m going to say, look, I think Christ is enough. However, I would agree – meaning that I think He can break through anything any time, any Heart-Wall. However, I will agree, in my opinion, that it will – you see people who are believers or believe, but they struggle. That would absolutely still create, just like a chemical would, create problems in that relationship, in growing. I would agree with that.

Tell them your experience with – you broke down Heart-Walls. I want people to understand. Daniel read the book. He’d never muscle tested in his life. He’d never heard of a trapped emotion. He never did anything like this. He’s done a lot of mind work, which transformed his life, but he knew nothing. He’s doing this now. I’m using that to encourage people.

Daniel:
I think I got so many results in particular because I did all of the other health things. My body was very ready to get rid of these trapped emotions because my life was in relative good order. Once I started releasing trapped emotions, all of these physical things – most noticeably were the physical, for instance, my Candida. I had really bad Candida. I couldn’t figure it out. Was doing all the killers. Was doing it constantly for years, not working. -inaudible- good bacteria, not working.

Then as soon as I started releasing the trapped emotion, asking directly, “Do I have trapped emotion related to my Candida?” “Yes.” Okay, and just kept going at it like that. Eventually, my Candida stopped acting up. What else? My scapula and the elongation of my collarbones. I was hunched over like this. All trapped emotions. It was also body code work, which I’m sure you’ll get to, that all went into that. That relates to –

Dr. Pompa:
He also had an injury. He had some other things, right?

Daniel:
Right. I had an injury like Isaac -inaudible- that never went away in my ankles. Found out trapped emotions. It was unfortunately after I quit ski racing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so I want to – and I want you to direct the rest of this. -inaudible- I want to show people because I know what people are thinking right now. I know it. Even Meredith is thinking this. I always can read Meredith. “Okay, what do they mean? What are they actually doing?” I know that’s what people are thinking because we’ve been talking out here. You could do it on me, Daniel, or Meredith. I’m open to it, and there’s no embarrassment for me. Whatever trapped emotion comes out, I’m good with.

Go get the little magnet. I want to show how – I wanted people to see an example of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Then I think that we’ll get people interested in this. Listen, while he’s giving that, I encourage everyone to get the book. Obviously, there was a free download that Meredith – so, Meredith, remind them where to get the download. I’m sure they can buy Emotion Code on Amazon, as well.

Meredith:
The free download is EmotionCodeGift.com.

Dr. Nelson:
Right. The beauty of going to EmotionCodeGift.com is you get the book as a PDF. It’s the full book. You also get, I believe it’s 10 downloads, 10 audio, 10 MP3 downloads so you have the whole book on audio. In fact, let me tell you a story really quickly.

I was talking to a woman not too long ago who was telling me about how she got the book. She went to EmotionCodeGift.com, downloaded the book, started listening to it. Her son started reading it and listening to it, and he started practicing with his friends. She didn’t pay much attention. A couple of weeks later, the phone rang. The woman on the other end of the line identified herself as the mother of one of her son’s friends. She said, “Listen, you son’s been doing this emotion thing. I didn’t pay much attention, but,” she said, “I have to tell you something.”

She said, “My son has had a severe phobia of water all of his life. We’ve tried everything. We’ve taken him to everybody that we can think of. Nothing has ever worked. We’ve given up on this. It’s really altered our life and his life. We thought he’d have this forever.” She said, “Right now, I’m at the community pool. My son is out in the water playing with the other boys.” She said, “This is the first time in his life he’s been able to do this.” She said, “Your son did this to him. How is this even possible? What in the world is he doing?”

Those two boys are only 11 years old, see. That’s how powerful this can be. One of the neat things about it that I can show you right now is how this works remotely. Now, what’s really fun to do is – and it’s easy to demonstrate if somebody – if we have any of you that are in pain at all in any way, and probably none of you are.

Dr. Pompa:
I have this chronic sacrum thing. It comes and goes, and I have to say Daniel did some emotion work on me, and it made a difference. I had an emotional thing when I was in New York. It was a very emotional thing, and then I started feeling it, so I know there’s some more there.

Daniel:
There’s some more there.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, so maybe it’ll come up. I don’t have that pain right now; however it is absolutely attached to emotional things.

Dr. Nelson:
Okay. How about you, Meredith? You got anything hurting?

Meredith:
A few days ago, I think I kind of slept wrong on my neck, so I had a little bit of pain in my neck and back. It’s not dramatic, but it’s slight. Would that work?

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah. Let’s try that. On a zero to ten scale, what’s hurting the most, and what kind of number would you put on it?

Meredith:
I’d say just a little bit in my neck, maybe a three.

Dr. Nelson:
Okay, three, we can go with that. Then, Daniel, maybe we’ll work on you next.

Dr. Pompa:
I have the magnet here, too, if you want Daniel to do anything with that.

Daniel:
-inaudible-.

Dr. Nelson:
No worries. All right. Let’s take a look here. Now, the first thing that we like to do and what we teach people is that before you start doing this work, what you want to do is you want to make a connection with that higher power, whatever you believe that higher power to be, Great Spirit, Source Energy, whatever. Ask for some help because the highest duty of the healer, I believe, is to act as the go-between for that higher power.

Give me just a second here. I’ll ask for some help for us. All right, so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to do some muscle testing. In the book, we teach you a number of different methods. Daniel, this is probably maybe one of the ones that you used, this one. We call this the ring-in-ring method.

Daniel:
I just do this, and then I resist this way. It’s a little different.

Dr. Nelson:
Oh! See, you’ve invented a new one.

Daniel:
A little different.

Dr. Nelson:
That’s great. Okay. First of all, the human body has this amazing ability built right into it to set aside its own needs to act on behalf of someone else. That’s what I’m going to do right now with Meredith, so let’s just ask – that’s probably already happened. I can ask, “Can I act as proxy for you, Meredith? Are we connected energetically?” I get a, “Yes,” answer. In other words, when I’m testing like this, if it’s strong, the fingers will stay together; if it’s weak and the answer is, “No,” the fingers will break apart. That’s what you’ll see. Strong for, “Yes,” stays together; breaks apart for, “No,” and that’s weak.

All right. You ready, Meredith? Let’s ask a question here. Let’s ask, “Do you have a trapped emotion we can release that’s contributing to the pain that you have up there in your neck?” The answer is, “Yes.” That answer is coming from her subconscious mind, but it’s manifesting through my subconscious mind. We’re all connected. What we have here is a chart of emotions. Hopefully this is in English. It is.

We have six columns – or sorry, two columns and six rows of emotions. What I’m going to do here – you see, right now, here’s what’s happening. Her subconscious mind is saying, “Yes, this pain that I have, there is an emotional component to this.” The actual emotion itself is known to her subconscious mind. It’s not known to her conscious mind or my conscious mind, but our subconscious minds are connected. What I’m going to do is I’m going to ask some questions.

Is this trapped emotion listed in our chart here in column A? The answer is weak. That’s a no. That means it’s in column B. Is it in one of the odd rows in column B? That’s row one, or three, or five, and her subconscious mind says, “No.” That means we’ve narrowed it down to 15 emotions. It’s got to be in one of the even rows here. Is it in row two, row four? It’s in row four, column B. If you can see that, the emotions are depression, frustration, indecisiveness, panic, or taken for granted. Those are all really fun emotions, right, Meredith?

Meredith:
Oh, so fun.

Dr. Nelson:
Here we go. Is the emotion depression? No. Is it frustration? No. Indecisiveness? No. Is it panic? No. Is it taken for granted? Actually, no. Now, when we’re doing the Emotion Code, if you’re taken to a certain column in a certain row and the answers are all negative, it means that the emotional energy was inherited at conception. That’s usually how we find these.

Daniel:
-inaudible-.

Dr. Nelson:
I’m -inaudible- piece of paper here, and I’m just going to take some notes because I don’t know how far back this thing goes. Let’s find out. All right, let’s see here. All right. Is this emotion inherited, and the answer is, “Yes.” Okay. Let’s see where we are here. Is it inherited depression? No. Is it inherited frustration or inherited indecisiveness? Is it inherited panic? It’s actually an inherited emotion of panic. Let’s write this down here. You got this either from your mom or dad. There’s no other choices. Did you get it from your mom? No. It came from your dad.

At conception, you got this energy from your dad. Now, did he get this from somebody earlier? Yes. At conception, he got it from who, from his father? Yep. He got it from his father. Your father got it from your grandfather. Did he get it from somebody earlier? Yes. From his father? Yes. There’s three fathers there, your great-grandfather. Now, does this go back any further? Yes, it does. Does it stay in the father’s line? We see this pattern forming, three fathers. Does it stay in the father’s line all the way? It does. How many generations does this go back total? Does it go back 10? Yes. Does it go back 20? No. Fifteen? No. Fourteen? No. Thirteen? Twelve? Eleven? Ten? It goes back 10 generations.

Ten generations, if we figure 10 times – if we figure roughly 20, maybe 23 years for a generation minus 2017 comes out to about 1787. Around the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, somebody had a bad day there. Who knows?

Meredith:
Wow.

Dr. Nelson:
Give or take maybe 20 or 30 years. Now, watch what happens, okay? By the way, the fascinating thing about this is these ancestors, we believe, also are holding this energy. Now, there’s a principle in quantum physics called nonlocality. Nonlocality says that one energy can exist in many places at one time, and that’s what this is. This is kind of what we call a shared emotion. This was shared down all those generations until finally it got to you. Do you have any kids, Meredith?

Meredith:
No.

Dr. Nelson:
Okay. Let’s release this before it goes any further. What we find is that these ancestors also will often – every time, they show up for the release of the emotion because they’re having something released from their body, as well. Do we need to know any more about this? We don’t. All right, here we go. Now, to release an inherited emotion like this, we do 10 swipes of the magnet. Now, you can use any kind of a magnet. This is just a refrigerator magnet -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- for a fish tank.

Dr. Nelson:
Any magnet works. In fact, if you don’t have a magnet, don’t fret. You can use your fingertips. They’re also magnetic. You usually have those with you. Let’s go ahead and do this. We do 10 swipes over the governing meridian of the body. The governing meridian is just a channel that enables us to put magnetic energy into the whole acupuncture system. It’s all connected. There we go.

Let’s ask,” Did we release that inherited emotion of panic from you?” Yes. Now, check this out: Did this also release from your father? Yes. From his father? Yes. From all those other fathers all the way back? Yes, it did. Now, think about something. If we go back 10 generations to 1787, give or take, to that grandfather of yours, how many descendents might have sprung and be connected to that man? Maybe quite a few.

When we release this one energy, it releases from everybody wherever they are and however many cousins and distant cousins might have actually gotten this from that man way back when. Now, what I want you to do is just move your neck around a little bit back and forth, and turn it around. Let’s see how it feels now.

Meredith:
Yeah. It feels better. It does.

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah. Can you put a number on it now compared to how it was before?

Meredith:
A one. I actually don’t really notice it much.

Dr. Nelson:
Okay. All right, awesome. That’s basically how this works. It’s pretty simple. We can do another one if you want to.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what? Do one more on Meredith? She probably wouldn’t bring this one up, but I’m going to for her behalf, honestly. Every once in a while, she gets this Raynaud’s type of symptom, which we know is autoimmune. I’m telling you, no one is more diligent than Meredith, and Meredith’s health has transformed, to her credit, because she does everything. However, there’s this little sticking point that I believe is a trapped emotion that has something to do with this Raynaud’s not fully recovering. Could you do that for her?

Dr. Nelson:
It could be. In fact, what we just released may have been a big key for the Raynaud’s because, of course, the nerves travel down the arms and so on. Let’s ask another question. The beauty of the subconscious mind is we can ask it, and it will tell us. The symptoms that you’ve had in the past with the Raynaud’s, is there a trapped emotion that is contributing to those symptoms that we can release? The subconscious mind says, “Yes, absolutely, there’s an emotion.” What’s the emotion?

We go to our chart. Right away, we know that the subconscious mind, her subconscious mind, has an emotion in mind. Now we have to play charades with her subconscious to figure out what it is. It’s got to be one of these. Is this emotion in column A? No, that’s weak. It’s in column B. We just got rid of half the list. We have 30 emotions left out of 60. Is it in one of the odd rows in column B? No, so it’s in an even row in column B. Is it in row two in column B? Row four in column B? That leaves row six in column B. Is that where it is? Yes.

Is the emotion pride? No. Is it shame? No. Shock? No. Is it unworthy? No. There’s one left, worthless, is that it? No. Once again, what we’re finding here, the subconscious has taken us to a column and a row. The answers are all negative which means it’s inherited, but the body won’t give us – her subconscious won’t give us the emotion until we use that word inherited because it’s a little different than a regular trapped emotion.

Is this an inherited emotion of pride? Is this an inherited emotion? Yes. Is it an inherited emotion of pride? Actually, that’s what it is. Is it shame inherited? Inherited shock, unworthy, worthless? No. It’s an inherited emotion of pride. Now, pride is – you typically might call this false pride. It’s kind of a sense of hubris, feeling better than somebody else. This is inherited, so this is not your fault, Meredith.

Meredith:
Okay.

Dr. Nelson:
Let’s see where this came from. This emotion of pride, did you get this from your mom at conception? No. This came, also, from your dad. Did your dad get this from somebody earlier? Yes. From his dad? No. He got it from his mom, so father’s mother. Did she get it from somebody earlier? Yes. Her mother? Yep. There’s father’s mother’s mother. Did she get it from somebody earlier? Yes. From mother? No, from father. This one’s kind of jumping around a little bit.

Did he get it from somebody earlier? No. This one goes back four generations, your father’s mother’s mother’s father, so your second great-grandfather. Now, do we need to know any more about this emotion? No, we don’t. It wouldn’t surprise me if when we release this that the rest of your neck discomfort might disappear, although I don’t know.

One of the things that we can do, though, see, is we can ask where this energy is in your body. Remember, a trapped emotion’s a ball of energy from about the size of a baseball to about the size of a cantaloupe that lodge in the body, and they’ll usually stay where they land, but we can ask where this thing is. Let’s ask. Is this in your neck, this trapped emotion? No. Is it in your head, in the skull area? No. If we draw a line down the middle of the body, we can ask, “Is this on the right side of your body, Meredith?” No. Is it on the left side? Yes. It’s actually on the left side.

Is it in the left chest area? Yes. Okay. Interesting. Anything can cause anything. Is it more on the back of the body? More on the front of the body? Is it affecting the lung? Is it affecting the left breast? It’s affecting the lung and the left breast. Let’s ask, “Do we need to know more about this?” I don’t think so.

Now, understand that when you have – first of all, what we believe is that anything – and what we’ve observed, literally, is that anything can cause anything. That’s another nice thing about using this work is that we don’t have to have preconceived ideas about what’s going to cause what. Whatever shows up, we fix. This is affecting the left breast and the left lung. Now, the connection with the Raynaud’s, I don’t know, but your body says, “This is part of that.” Let’s go ahead and release this. You ready? We do 10 swipes.

Daniel:
Yeah, it’s ten swipes for generational and three for –

Dr. Nelson:
Exactly. Yep. If it’s just a regular trapped emotion that you picked up during your lifetime, even if it’s in the womb or something like that, it’s just three swipes. If you’re working on somebody else, usually what we’ll do is we’ll have them – I’ll have them stand with their back to me, and I’ll do down their spine. The governing meridian goes all the way down to the tailbone. If you’re just working on yourself, you can just go over like so.

All right, so let’s ask, “Did we release that emotion of pride – that inherited emotion of pride from you?” Yes. Did it release from your father? Yes. His mother? Yes. Her mother? Yes. Her father? Cleared from everybody. Now what I want you to do is – I don’t know. Maybe stand up and move around a little bit.

Daniel:
You release – for people that may not understand – emotion in her by wiping the magnet down your head.

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah because I’m acting as proxy for her, so my subconscious has set aside its own needs, and I’m acting totally on her behalf. I can ask questions, get answers on myself, clear things on myself, no problem. That’s what our practitioners do. Meredith, how’s your neck, by the way? I’m just curious. You moved that around; it was about a one. Did that change that at all?

Meredith:
No, it didn’t.

Dr. Nelson:
That’s about a one, still.

Meredith:
It’s better, but it’s about the same as the original release.

Dr. Nelson:
Okay. Now, there may be more underlying reasons for the Raynaud’s, but your subconscious mind said that was definitely one of the reasons. That emotion was affecting the left breast and the left lung, but it also was one of the reasons behind the Raynaud’s. Exactly why, we don’t always know. Sometimes it’s really obvious, and the connection’s plain as day. Sometimes it’s not, but that’s okay. We just fix whatever shows up.

Meredith:
Does it typically take a few times sometimes if you don’t have an initial dramatic reaction to get a result?

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah, it can. Sure. Oftentimes, for example, we got you from a three to a one with your neck. Sometimes reactions are instantly. They’re instantaneous, and that’s always really exciting, but it can take some time. It’s kind of like archeology. To find the treasure, you might have to go back a few layers. Oh, now we’re in the 1800s. Now we’re in the 1700s. Keep digging. Ah, there’s the treasure. It’s like you’re releasing layers of things. The old expression is that the body’s like an onion, and it’s true. You peel off layers.

The beautiful thing about it is as we get rid of our layers of emotional baggage, as we cut ourselves loose from this stuff, we become closer and closer to the person that we’re really intended to be in this world. We become much better instruments for the higher power. We become more capable of love. It’s just a wonderful thing. Life gets better as you start to get rid of all this junk. You can think of everybody that you know as dragging these suitcases of rocks consisting of all their emotional baggage. We drag that stuff through our lives, so it misdirects us. Some of those rocks aren’t even ours, like in your case. Both of these were inherited.

Meredith:
How common is that with the inherited issues versus just something more recent?

Dr. Nelson:
I would say probably on average for about every 10 trapped emotions that we’ll find on a person that was picked up in their life, we’ll maybe find one or two that were inherited. It kind of depends on the individual. Some people seem to be what you could call vessels of release for their ancestors.

Let me tell you a story, by the way, in fact. My former executive assistant, Connie Barton, was one of our practitioners, and she still is. She’s one our full-time staff practitioners now. She had a friend from Chicago who had this ability all of her life. She’d grown up with this girl. She always had the ability to see spirits. She came out from Chicago to visit Connie one day, and Connie said, “Look, let’s go downtown later, but I’ve got some sessions I need to do, some people I need to work on remotely. Just sit out here. Read a magazine or something. I’ll be with you in an hour or so.”

Her friend said, “Look, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to sit in your room and just see what you’re doing now,” and so she did. When Connie got done working on these five or six people, her friend said, “Listen, I don’t think you understand what’s going on here.” She said, “Here’s what I saw.” She said, “When you would offer that prayer at the beginning, that silent prayer, have that moment of silence, and you were praying for help for that person you were about to work on,” she said, “I would see spirits come in and stand behind you.”

“Sometimes it was a couple, and one time it was five, but they all seemed to be connected with that person that you were working on, and they were very intently focused on helping you to help that person. Sometimes it was clear to me that they were relatives somehow, or ancestors, or unborn children, or whatever it might be. That happened every single time, see.” That’s one of the reasons why we stop and we ask for help because there’s a whole unseen thing going on here that we aren’t necessarily aware of.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m telling you, it’s like – I know people watching this, we’re going to have two groups: people that are like, “Oh, my God!” They just get it. They get the subconscious. They believe it. Then there’s the other group that’s like me, skeptical until proved otherwise. I’ve had a lot of things to say, “Okay, there’s a lot to this thing.” It’s like just because I don’t understand it necessarily doesn’t mean it’s not true. I encourage everyone watching, be like me. You got to dig deeper. If you say, “Ah, that seems hokey,” dig deeper because I’m telling you there’s a quantum physics that we don’t understand completely.

You were talking about the heart. It’s just in recent science, we’re understanding the connection of the heart and the brain. When we say, “Gosh, I just feel that in my heart,” it’s actually a scientific thing. We’re realizing how that is connected into that subconscious. That’s new stuff. Even the microbiome, this is new stuff. Epigenetics: New stuff, right? I think that science is really realizing that there’s this energy that we don’t realize. Was this your book or another one that I read? They took a gentleman from World War II who was traumatized from kamikazes.

Dr. Nelson:
That was in our book, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Was that your book?

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay. Amazing, right? Tell that story very quickly. Again, that really convinced me. Tell that story.

Dr. Nelson:
Basically what happened was they took this man who survived the kamikaze attacks in World War II in the Pacific on the aircraft carriers. They put him into a room. They drew blood, and spun the blood down, took his white blood cells out, put them in another room in a petri dish. They were still alive. Then what they would do is they would record the electrical activity in his body, but also in the blood cells.

They would show him newsreels of the kamikazes attacking, and they’d observe his activity. His activity matched and paralleled the electrical activity of his white cells in the other room. Then they actually drove the white cells in the truck about 15 miles away. Did the experiment again a number of times, found that the same thing correlated.

There’s so much more going on that we don’t realize. For example, what they’re finding now – and this is medical science is finding that people who went through the Holocaust and survived those horrific emotional experiences are now manifesting in the emotional, and physical, and mental health of their grandchildren.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man!

Dr. Nelson:
It’s all about the genes. It’s all about epigenetics. The trapped emotions, they – trapped emotional energies, as well as chemicals, they have the same kinds of effects. They can turn on genes, turn off genes. It’s really getting right down to the roots of epigenetics and how we can make our genes function better and work better. It’s actually really simple. Just having genes for a certain thing doesn’t mean that’s going to happen to you, but it might. If you get rid of the emotional baggage, and you cleanse, and get rid of all the chemical toxins in the body, you’ve got a really good chance of not manifesting that thing at all.

Dr. Pompa:
Every condition, we look at and work at. It’s a matter of getting the genes to turn off. I [00:49:39] my three-legged stool. Certain genes get turned on; we have to turn them off. The second leg of the stool is there’s certain stressors that turned them on. Emotions is part of that, trapped emotions. The third leg is we know that the microbiome is a very big part of that. All these things work in together. This is how people get sick, but this is also the solution.

Hey, we’ve got to get him in November seminar. I want you to check your schedule. I’m not going to let you off the air. We have my seminar coming up in Atlanta. We have three hundred and some doctors that are coming. The one in San Diego in November, I would love to get you there because emotions is something – this is something that everyone needs to address.

Dr. Nelson:
[00:50:26]

Dr. Pompa:
Meredith, you’re going to make sure you connect with him on the dates. I know it’s November 10, 11, 12. God willing, that works, and we can get you there.

Dr. Nelson:
Absolutely. Let’s do it.

Dr. Pompa:
The best way to spread your work is through doctors because they’re in touch with thousands [00:50:44] the world needs. So do you. Putting this together is really exciting.

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah. I’ll touch base with you when I’ve got time and I’m up in Salt Lake area, and we’ll go get lunch or something. Meredith, you ever get out to Park City?

Meredith:
I do, but not as often as I’d like, but I do get out there often. I love Utah, so that would be really fun to connect. I’ll definitely send you information on the seminar. Thank you so much. In closing, Dr. Brad, anything else you’d like to share with our audience or a final take-home message for anybody watching?

Dr. Nelson:
Yeah. I would just say that I just work here. This work came about because I was just asking constantly for help with my patients, and I was obsessed with really getting to the roots of what was really going on with them.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s how everything I’ve come [00:51:40] is the same throughout, no doubt. It all comes down through me. I always say, “How many ask, Lord? I am asking.” [00:51:49]

Dr. Nelson:
Exactly. It’s such a beautiful thing, really. I tell people, “Look” – you probably tell people the same thing. “I just work here.” Go to EmotionCodeGift.com. Download the book. Listen to it. Start reading it, and try this out because it really does work. It can seem so simple. I’ve done seminars all over the world, and about every other seminar that I’ve taught, somebody will come up to me, and they’ll say, “This just seems to be too simple.” My response is always, “Well, I can make it more difficult for you if you’d like.” They just laugh.

Dr. Popma:
We appreciate you. Off air, I want you to check in my low back and see if there’s any trapped emotion, but I [00:52:31] do that. You showed these folks what this is, and I appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Dr. Nelson:
Thank you both. Thank you, Daniel, also.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, he’s here.

Meredith:
Awesome.

Daniel:
Thank you.

Dr. Nelson:
Okay, great. Let’s do it again. We’ll talk soon.

Meredith:
All right. We’ll be in touch. Thanks, everybody, for being here, for sharing. Thank you, Dr. Nelson, for working on me, too. I really appreciate that. I’ll keep you posted on what happens. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Let us know what you think if you’re doing the Emotion Code and how it’s worked for you. We will talk soon. Have a great weekend, everybody, and we’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.

170: From Death to Life

Transcript of Episode 170: From Death to Life

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Jeff Macioci

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode #170. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course, and today we welcome a very special guest, Jeff, one of Dr. Pompa’s clients who is going to be sharing with us today his really amazing story and testimonial of how he has been on this healing journey. Dr. Pompa’s been walking him through it, and he has a lot to offer, a lot to share, and a lot of hope to bring to all of you who are out there and who are seeking that. Before we get started, let me share a little bit about what Jeff wrote with his story when I asked him just to share a little bit about himself so before we get started, this is from Jeff.

Jeff’s story begins when he was 13 years old and already had a mouth full of amalgam fillings whose heavy metal mercury toxicity caught up with him when he was 33 years old and in peak physical health. Jeff was very active and was following what he thought to be a healthy vegan diet in attempt to correct digestive issues and an underlying feeling of unhealthiness. Instead, he developed a “mysterious illness” that included a strange long list of symptoms. Jeff had extreme fatigue and muscular weakness, numbness in his arms and legs, ringing in his ears, sensitivity to chemicals, sound, light, and temperature, irritability, insomnia, intense anxiety and panic attacks, social phobia, and a buzzing on the left side of his head.

The final stressor that brought Jeff to his tipping point occurred after he donated blood and was completely unable to recover. Jeff visited the emergency room multiple times, but each time he was told he had anxiety and was prescribed psychotropic drugs. The medications did not alleviate Jeff’s symptoms, which only seemed to worsen and began to negatively affect his relationships and work life. Jeff was also no longer to train or even walk around a local park without feeling an onslaught of symptoms. During the toughest times, Jeff felt like he could no longer live in his current physical state. All he could do was pray and ask God to help him figure out what was wrong.

While desperately looking for answers, Jeff stumbled upon a YouTube video that stood out, Dr. Pompa’s personal story. All of the symptoms Dr. Pompa described matched Jeff’s. He finally found an answer. The root of all his problems was in his mouth, particularly the unsafe partial removal of an amalgam filling that had a crown placed over it in addition to 13 other mercury fillings. Jeff knew what he had to do: contact Dr. Pompa and Dr. Grieco, who’s our dentist here in Pittsburgh, to properly detox and remove the fillings.

Jeff is currently 1 ½ years into his detox and is following Dr. Pompa’s Cellular Healing Diet, which dramatically improved his health. Jeff is a testimonial of how a proactive approach to health and wellness is necessary since traditional methods don’t address the real problem. Jeff hopes to spread information and educate others who can learn from his experience and start his own channel to reach more people. Welcome, Jeff, to Cellular Healing TV.

Jeff:
Thank you so much, yes. Thanks for having me. I thank you guys, Dr. Pompa, all that you’ve done for me. You know I’ve been through some very tough times, and there was a moment there where I didn’t have much but I had a few things and you were one of them, so I thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I appreciate that. Before, we were just reflecting. I remember talking to you in hospitals, many hospital visits, but my gosh, just hearing your symptoms, that was exactly me. It was just remarkable just hearing that. It’s hard for me to believe where you were even just a year ago. I have to say, I remember my own story. After a year of doing brain phases, my life started coming back as the mercury came out. I did brain phases consistently for two years and more inconsistent really for four years. Even to this day I do brain phases, right? No doubt. I can’t even believe—I think you made more progress your first year than even I did; I’m going to be honest with you, because how severe you were.

I think we know more today. We have better methods today. We didn’t have Cellular Detox. We didn’t have Restore. I look back on the shelf there. There’s a lot of things we didn’t have, so I think the methods got better.

One of the things that I hope our viewers heard in your story is the dental work, how that went in, bioaccumulated obviously in the brain over the years, and you had a crown over a filling. I always say this: when that happens, it’s called galvanism. You have two metals, and so many people have crowns out there where they are put over top of a filling and they don’t know it. It happens all the time, and those people get very, very sick. That’s awesome. That was it, huh?

Jeff:
Yeah, that was the big crown. They let me keep it, and she said there was so much I could even melt it down and try to sell it. I’m like no, let me just keep it, but yeah, that crown was a lot of opposing metals working with other things.

Dr. Pompa:
When you went through the process, of course we went through a prep phase. We prepared you to make sure it was done right, because when it’s done wrong both of us got more sick, but when it’s done right both of us got better. Obviously as it comes out of our brain, we got better. When you got that stuff out, kind of bring us back to that point. Did you feel any better? Were certain symptoms better, worse? I mean, how did you feel?

Jeff:
Yeah, I feel like the—that process, that whole protocol that Dr. Grieco does, it’s so very, very important to do these things correctly. I had all the precautions taken. I had the rubber dams covering so I wasn’t getting re-exposed. The whole protocol was done correctly, but I would have to say that right after everything was done one of the symptoms that I said that there was a—I would always say buzzing.

Before he went out to figure out which quadrant he was going to take out first, he actually checked the charges and I was positive, way negative, so he started with the highest negative charge first, which was up here, and that—getting that done, that seemed to be that left side of my face, but the ringing in the ears and the buzzing, that just like some type of communication going on where I was just getting disrupted, I felt better almost immediately. It’s hard to describe, and no one else probably can understand it but someone who just is going through it, like with some many things, but that immediately, immediately was gone.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what’s funny is I remember—and it’s hard for me to remember exactly what happened but as certain things came out, like he took gold out which was causing galvanism. For our new viewers, when you have two different metals, silver fillings, which contain 50% mercury, by the way, and I had gold in my case, it creates an electrical current. It’s a battery effect. When that came out, a lot of my anxiety I would say went from here to here. I can’t say that it was all gone, but it was like something changed, like you said, and then when I had this root canal, something changed.

As these things started coming out, things changed. It wasn’t like I was better because -inaudible- thing got better, but it was as the mercury—we got through the brain phase and I started getting it out of the brain, then things permanently changed. Like you, I had some breakthroughs. I knew I was on the right track. Put it that way.

Jeff:
That’s right, yeah, and I think even just for me—I remember asking you how long until I could get this done. You were like, you have to prep, but I just wanted it. I knew what was wrong with me as soon as I heard your story. I wanted to get it started -inaudible- removing the source, get that done, but I think when it all came out not—for me psychologically, just that that interference was done put me at ease a little bit.

Dr. Pompa:
Did you have any root canals, infection, cavitation? No?

Jeff:
Yeah, so I was there for four days with him in one shot. We did all the fillings first. Second day, he worked on replacing the crown. Again, not only a holistic dentist but biological dentist, so I did the blood work to see what these things were going to work best with my body. Everybody is an individual so—

Dr. Pompa:
Clifford’s test is what it’s called.

Jeff:
Okay, yeah, and he was putting in the right materials, so then the crown was the second day. The third day, yes, we did work on all four of my teeth pulled, my cavitations, so those—

Dr. Pompa:
Where your wisdom teeth were pulled?

Jeff:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
He went in there and he made sure there was no cavitations. Did he find some cavitations?

Jeff:
Yes, all four.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, and so tell them what he did.

Jeff:
Just cutting up and reopening and just doing a cleaning. As far as what his process is, I’m not even really sure, but I just—

Dr. Pompa:
You said it right. He goes in, and opens it up, and basically re-cleans out the infections. By the way, many people, autoimmune people, people that just aren’t getting well, they find those dang infections. I had them. Found one recently. Meredith had one. I’m telling you, it keeps people in a state of their immune system attacking itself and just hyper immunity.

The point I want to make to people listening, because you’re giving people hope and I want you to go back and revisit some of the symptoms you had here in a second, but the key to us getting well was getting upstream, removing the course. You’ll never get well with the perfect diet, although we wouldn’t have got well without the perfect diet, right? I mean we have to control inflammation. We’ll talk about that too. You have the remove the sources, get the stuff out. Then the body can do the healing, and that’s why we got these infections out. That’s why we got the fillings out, and then we go for it with the Cellular Detox, get to the brain phase.

That stuff loads into the brain and, man, it’s like that’s what drives your adrenals crazy. That’s why we had, both of us, thyroid and adrenal issues, right? Anxiety, couldn’t sleep, the whole thing, fatigue, no cellular energy, I mean, all of it because our brain was being poisoned. Revisit for our viewers some of the symptoms that you went through, kind of where it started when you knew something wasn’t right and how that affected your digestion, etc. Describe it.

Jeff:
Yeah, sure, so I’ve had those in for quite a long time, 20 years. I was at least 13 because I remember being in middle school and my friend coming to—before we went in everybody meeting outside and he was upset because the day before he just got braces on, and he said he’s so upset. He opened up his mouth. I’ve got a mouth full of metal, and here I was. It had to be at least 8th grade so 13, 14, and I said don’t worry, don’t feel so bad. I have a mouth full of metal too, and I opened up and I had already had a tremendous amount of fillings in, so this is talking 20 years. I just grew up with someone working for Hostess across the street bringing me all—I was just very sugar addicted as a kid, always having those snacks, Rice Krispie treats, Twinkies, everything in the pantry, so yeah, that’s what started it all.

I noticed things very early on in my life. In my early 20s, I was starting with what you talked about as just not being able to really—just feeling like you’re just stepping away from everybody else, feeling like everybody is in on this inside joke and you don’t know what’s going on, really having a hard time just looking people in the eye and always feeling like everybody’s looking at me and watching me.

Dr. Pompa:
Stop right there. That’s a symptom that is known as mercurialism. Your personality just kind of turns this way, not being able to look people in the eye, the oddest thing, this odd shyness that wasn’t me. Obviously, it wasn’t you. We’re both—that’s not who we are. That’s called mercurialism. Go ahead. Go ahead from there.

Jeff:
Yeah, so I started becoming and noticing some weird things, and then also in my early 20s I started having digestive issues. I could never really figure it out, get things right, but it just only just truly worsened. I was trying to address things that I knew what was wrong with me, and I started to just— I just adopted this incredible healthy, which I thought was an incredible healthy lifestyle, right? You hear of gluten, so I got rid of gluten, yet I was still eating so much. Everything was still very carby, brown rice, syrup, potatoes, starch, tapioca, so I didn’t have it right but I was trying to address something.

I started working out heavily. I fell in love with boxing my early—23, 24. I start training big time. I started running marathons and half marathons and doing mud races, so everybody knew me in my mid-20s as being Mister Organic and trying to eat well, but really everything just kept going for me. Everything just kept getting worse. In relationships, it’s a crazy thing when you know something’s good, when you’re good inside and you just—you have something stopping you.

When things would get tough, I wouldn’t want to talk about situations. I was always wanting to be by myself. My mom would always say you think too much. She would always tell me no man is an island because I always just wanted to be by myself, be alone, and I didn’t every want to—I used to be a people person. What’s going on with me?

Dr. Pompa:
When did the anxiety start? Your digestion kind of went. When did the anxiety, and the sleep problems, and fatigue kind of start?

Jeff:
Those picked up around my mid to late 20s where the anxiety was coming in all of a sudden when I was working out extremely hard, and that’s also part of being toxic, right? I wouldn’t just go to the gym and work out. I would go in. I wouldn’t talk to anybody, headphones in, just being very disgruntled all the time, and I would just go into the gym and my brother would work out. I went to three gyms at the time. I would train in boxing, I would go to another gym to lift, and then I’d always run.

I would start with a 20-minute sauna, then I’d hit the weights and work out, then I’d run 10 miles on the treadmill, then I’d go into the back room and hit the punching bag for 12 rounds. I just worked out extremely hard. That’s why that stress that it caused on my body, I believe that’s what really started me to—

Dr. Pompa:
You know what’s funny about that is you’re right because the physical stress of working out becomes a stress you don’t adapt to. I was cycling at the time, right? I always say it’s a perfect storm. We have chemical stress that was accumulating in your brain from the time you were 13, probably from the time you were in your mother’s womb; you got her lead, etc. The fillings, other toxins accumulate, and now you bring in this exercise component, which you’re now not adapting to the stress, and instead of backing off you go harder because you want results, and then we add just one more stressor and the bottom falls out.

Kind of talk about that. When did the bottom finally fall out? Like me, I couldn’t work out anymore. All of a sudden it was like these things happened. Talk about that.

Jeff:
I would absolutely love to get to that. It was coming into the spring of 2015, and I started like when I’d work out and do extreme like New York Spartan Race, the ultimate where it’s 14 miles up and down a mountain. It’d take me 7 hours and 15 minutes. Took my friend 10 hours and 45 minutes. I was waiting for him. I was doing things. I ran another marathon, and after these incredibly long strenuous things for my body I was getting tingling in the arm, weirdness like my body was almost going through a very high anxiety, just a weird sensation going on. I’d think maybe oh, I’m just hungry; I’d just try to eat and just an onslaught of symptoms going on.

April, I ran—I had done one in the fall. I did another Spartan Race, ran a half marathon. I started working out and ramping it up because it’s getting nice out. I’m running outside, and all of a sudden I’d go down the shore and I’d run and it was just hitting me after a couple miles my body was wiped and all of a sudden anxiety hit, and then I turned around and went back to the house and okay, I’m over-training or my body’s just not repairing -inaudible- enough. Give it a couple days.

Okay, I go into the gym now. I sit in the sauna room. I’m usually able to sit there 20 minutes. Wait a minute. Three minutes in, I’ve got to get out. Things are just going on. My body’s just kind of going haywire on me, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Not adapting to any stress. I couldn’t even adapt to sound at a certain point.

Jeff:
Well, that came later. That sure came later sounds, temperature, and any type of exertion soon after. Yeah, so then I try again, jump on the treadmill. Getting very upsetting; I didn’t know what was going on. I tried multiple times. Went to a park, started running, shadowboxing, had to stop. Jump in my car. Okay, what’s going on? Something is tremendously going wrong. This was July. The last week of July, I had the day off and I don’t know what made me, but I went and called and figured out where one was, but I just feel like it was just God telling me just here, just do this and He wanted the bottom to fall out because it was coming. It happened after I gave blood and donated blood.

Dr. Pompa:
This wasn’t the past July. This was the July before.

Jeff:
Yep, 2015, and I gave blood last couple days in July and within a couple minutes of that being taken from me, I just—kind of like the same thing when I do a strenuous workout, right? A block just hit me.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I remember your conversation because you were like well, what did this do to me? What did this do to me? I was explaining Jeff, it’s just a stressor. You just didn’t adapt to one more stressor. If it wasn’t the blood, it would have been an emotional thing. It would have been—it could have been a girlfriend breaking up. It could have been the extra thing you did physically. It doesn’t matter. A stressor is a stressor, and you were waiting for the straw that broke the camel’s back; that was it.

Jeff:
Yeah, it’s funny you said that too because you say it’s a perfect storm. It’s chemical, emotional, and physical, and actually a girlfriend that we were on and off for the longest time, for eight years, she actually just came back into my life again after three years and we were trying to make everything new and starting fresh, and yet still same things were happening. Long story short, I started getting that emotional stress again from that relationship and the fights happening again. The going over to her place, fighting, and then leaving was happening, and that was just adding to it as well.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, people don’t understand what’s going on. You don’t understand what’s going on. I became extremely irritable, moody. I mean life as I knew it came to a screeching halt. Now, something else that happened to you and I that was parallel. I hid what was happening to me from my parents, my sisters, those that were—my wife of course I couldn’t hide it from, you know what I’m saying, but I was trying to hide it from someone. Number one, I was embarrassed. Number two, I didn’t want that one more stressor of them dealing with it.

Finally, when I was forced to sit my parents down and tell them what happened, they didn’t get it, right? I mean it was like—it was kind of the thing that—it did add in more stress. It was like this horrible thing of like they just didn’t get it, nobody got it, and that became even worse. You went through the same problem.

Jeff:
Absolutely did. After July, going into August, yeah, again after that started happening nothing was—I was literally on the brink of losing my job. I couldn’t even make it through work. That’s when the hospital visits—the next two months after July where all I wanted—I had actually this page open here when I started just figuring out what everything was and learning about you and realizing what I had to do and starting to do some research, I just randomly had written in the corner no place safe, just want to sleep, almost can’t handle driving or anything. God, please help me. That was just randomly sitting there that I just went through some stuff and found.

Yeah, I was just failing at everything. I couldn’t barely just handle anything. After the blood being taken from me is when just driving around sound—couldn’t even listen to the radio or any music in the car. Everything was too much. If someone was excited talking to me, I couldn’t process the information. I couldn’t handle anything, so work became incredibly tough. Now, I had made those hospital visits a couple times and each time told I had anxiety, and I actually had some issues with some doctors where they were pushing those types of psychotropic drugs on me and almost with a smirk like oh, your tests are fine. You’re just –

Dr. Pompa:
I had the same thing. It’s basically all in your head, man, and here’s a drug. I heard the same thing.

Jeff:
Yeah, so I was upset but actually it’s truly—Xanax is the only thing that helped me through a day of work. I mean I was taking—and then the next time I got the refill I was upping this but ultimately, I was like where is this going? Where is this going? How are we fixing this? I didn’t know what was going on. I could just tell you countless stories of just trying to go to the park and just walking.

Verona Park here, I would just drive there by myself and I would just try—there’s a nice little organic café, Positivity, just have some organic food, walk across the street, go to Verona Park, not a big lake, but I would just try and walk. I would get to the back of that lake and I remember getting struck with panic. Which side is closer to run back? Am I closer this way? How do I get to my car fastest? It was like mortified terror just hitting me, and my body—I can’t even describe it, can’t even describe it. I was at the end of what I could handle. -inaudible- incredibly hard.

I remember—and I actually haven’t really told anybody this, but I wanted this show to say something—that when I was having those nights where I couldn’t handle anything and I was just holding onto the car keys about to make another hospital trip and not knowing what was going on and having just so many symptoms it wasn’t even funny, I remember just wanting to just end it and just praying to God. I would just say the same things over. I would say God help me, I’m sorry, and thank you. I couldn’t even get more out than that, and I think it’s beautiful that I still say that to this day because that’s all you need. I was just begging for something, begging for help. There were some nights that were so hard.

Everybody wonders why I love my nephew so much and why he’s got two other uncles that don’t see him half as much as I do and I’m there all the time. Because my sister was due in November and so at the time she was a couple months away, one or two months away, from giving birth, and we are very close, me and my sister, and I could justify losing just about everybody. It’s like okay, they’ll be fine without me. I justified everybody, but I couldn’t justify not meeting my sister’s first child, so I had to hold on. I didn’t know what I was hanging onto, but I was going to church with my hood up in the back just crying, just bawling, crying, just begging for help, begging for help, and I stumbled across—I was looking up anxiety relief. Some woman constantly had these videos up and she was all on the suggested videos all on the one side, and then yours just popped up in the middle of all that, like why would that be there?

Sure enough, I just watched your video and as soon as I saw you explain what was happening, I think I just cried for the next two days straight because I knew it. It’s funny; every time I’d brush my teeth, every time I’d—I was looking at it and I didn’t know anything about mercury. I didn’t know anything about fillings. I didn’t hear any videos. It just didn’t come up ever, but you think you go to the dentist they’re going to put in biologically safe things in your mouth, but I knew it. I just knew that was it. I knew that and I just didn’t know how to—but I was like yeah, that was it.

Yeah, watching your video and it was just from there I called Merily the next day and I was like just do whatever it takes. You called me the day after that, and you guys helped me through some really tough times. You remember our first few phone conversations. Everyone ended in tears. I thank you so much for those prayers that you would say to me, that God isn’t punishing you; He’s allowing you to go through this. Now I realize that. Now I realize that he allowed me to go through that because you don’t go through something like this and just go back to your everyday life. I’m going big. Going to CalJam and just getting opened up, and there’s people like me. There’s people that understand it, people that get it that there’s weird stuff going on, food industry, medical industry, weird stuff, and it’s not right. People are getting sick and there’s obviously a problem, and I’m here to help.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, and just see, look what God did, right? I remember those early conversations and telling you look, God has a purpose for you in this, just like He did me. I know you don’t hear it at the time. Now look at you, man. You’re coming to my seminar next week, right? God has such a clear purpose in this, dude, because you’re so talented and I saw that from the day we met.

I remember. I remember the tears and you crying. I remember just saying let me pray for you, and that’s what we did, man. I’m humbled. I am because I just think about going through—hearing you say this, it brought me again—I started remembering nights that just popped into my mind and days, right, then hearing your journey. For our viewers’ sake, tell them where you are now, man, because like me—I did brain phases for four years. I mean, you’ve done it for a year here, but you’re already transformed. I mean, I would argue that you still have a ways to go; I think you would too, but tell them where you’re at.

Jeff:
I know I do have a little ways to go, but yeah, it’s funny how you talk about the things where you couldn’t look people in the eye and you felt like everybody was looking at you. Kind of amazing going through detox here and I’m actually seeing my personality come through. That’s amazing, right? I’ll have conversations with people now and I want to be there. I want to talk—I walk away from people now, and I started noticing that actually pretty early on when I was on cycle—and walk away from having a conversation with people and just genuinely laughing and it’s just like wow, this is what it’s supposed to be like. I knew that person was hiding underneath a lot of that.

For me, the anxiety just—that has gone away, and I’ve addressed so many issues with my adrenals. I mean, look, I did just a 2800 – after going to CalJam, flying out with a buddy, going to CalJam and getting that experience in and meeting you and how wonderful that was, you and your wife—hitting the road and 12 days all over Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. I mean, I used to love to travel, and for that year and a half that that happened to me I wasn’t—we actually had something—I had the bottom fall out from underneath me at the end of July. I had actually something at the end of August planned with my friend, and I remember going to him and just crying. We were supposed to drive all around Lake Michigan, go to Michigan and Wisconsin, do a little loop and come back. I remember oh, can we meet at a restaurant? Let’s go.

I remember meeting him in the parking lot before we even went in and just—again, I was emotionally shot; I cried about everything, but I just remember saying to him listen, I can’t do this. I can’t go. There’s no way. He’s like what’s wrong? What’s going on? I just couldn’t tell—at that time I didn’t even see your video yet. I didn’t know what was going on with me, so I was like I don’t know; something’s wrong.

To answer your question, things are coming back to me. I’m getting my life back. I had issues with my stomach forever, and actually the last three years—and have you ever heard of this, Dr. Pompa? I actually in my 30s kind of felt like the bottom was going to fall out from underneath me kind of like it was coming like at the end of July, but I bounced back and it didn’t happen and then I was fine. That almost happened to me when I was 30; again in a toxic relationship, again not getting enough sleep and just working out really hard, and things were going on. That’s a time in my life when I was 30, and I just remember that a specific apartment that I was living in at that time—I just felt like something was going to happen to me, and then it just went away and got –

Dr. Pompa:
I can look at those points in my life where the bottom almost fell out but it didn’t. The body kind of recovered, and it’s just an accident waiting to happen. So many people out there listening, they’re right there. The bottom’s kind of falling out, but they recover a bunch of that. It’s like man, don’t wait. Just like you, we kind of address things. We address our adrenals, this and that. Oh, that helped a little bit, but this is—no, man, look, you have to get upstream and find the stressors and remove them.

If you have silver fillings in your mouth and these infections, it’s going to happen; it’s a matter of when. It’s going to happen. Just waiting for the next straw that breaks the camel’s back, right? One more storm, boom and then you’ll end up where Jeff and I were.

Yeah, I mean right now you are a different person. I mean you have the energy to travel. You’re sleeping through the nights. Your digestion is—I mean, oh, my gosh, you couldn’t digest anything; now it’s like spot on. You fast. You do all the good stuff. I mean talk a little bit about that because you do it all, man. Everything in a multitherapeutic approach, Meredith, he does and, Meredith, I’ll let you ask him some questions as well.

Jeff:
Yeah, I had no problem jumping into doing—you called me a three-percenter right from the start. I was willing to do whatever it took to get me well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you did.

Jeff:
I switched my diet. I was vegan and I demonized fat. I demonized salt. I thought I was hitting a healthy lifestyle. I thought that that’s what—you were telling me otherwise, and I gravitated towards that. Immediately what helped when I was in my worst times when we had the first few conversations was the sea salt, the minerals and getting some of that to kind of help the adrenals, but yeah, I would have to say the fasting truly helped.

I had really big issues with, of course, heavy metal destroying my microbiome so the candida was a big issue and I just knew—I mean, the assimilation was not just happening for me. Like I said, the bottom was going to fall out for me when I was about 30 so it happened when I was 33. That lasted three years. Actually, my stomach was horrible. I mean I wasn’t having solid bowel movements. It was bad. It was just like dust. Now, I’m so much better. I mean everything’s regular. Like I said, I’ve just taken towards the high fat.

The other thing, too, like I was starting to say, was that I thought I was eating well and I still was actually very sugar dependent. I was looking at all these organic bars and everything, 27 grams of sugar.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, you were eating healthy sugar—that organic junk food is what I call it.

Jeff:
It’s crazy. Here I was getting bad information just saying that I had a fast metabolism, right? I couldn’t make it from meal to meal. I was eating six to eight times a day. That was good, right? I was just glucose spike, glucose—now, I eat at night 9 o'clock, I go to bed, wake up in the morning. The fasting comes so easy. I’m just burning fat, cleaner energy.

Dr. Pompa:
What time’s your first meal?

Jeff:
That’ll vary, but I mean—

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- vary.

Jeff:
Yeah, absolutely, but for the most part I’ll just skip breakfast and I won’t eat until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. I like to mix it up, and have fun with it, and keep my body guessing. I’ll do vegan for a few days, and then I’ll go back and introduce some other things.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome. That diet variation, man, I taught him that. He knows that.

Jeff:
One week just eating once a day for three days and then not eating the next day and then having a day where I just would remind the body it’s not starving and eat a lot. Actually these past few weeks, I’ve just been cutting out the breakfast thing and just playing with it, but I’m definitely feeling it and I can’t wait. Real soon I’m going to be—maybe after I come home from a little vacation from the seminar. Me and my girlfriend are going down; you might be able to meet her. We come back the 9th. I think we’re taking some more days after that to just cruise around, and I’m going to definitely be doing a five-day fast and I just can’t wait because I feel great.

Dr. Pompa:
After the seminar, you’re going to be driven and motivated. Meredith, I’m going to turn it over to you for the sake of time here. Jeff, I just personally want to thank you so much for coming on because I know it’s a big deal for you because you’re like many people going okay, I just don’t want people to know my story yet, for whatever reason. You know what, man, you’re going to give a lot of people a lot of hope because you came from a severe case of neurotoxic illness and look at you now, man, so I’m just so proud of you. You are a three-percenter. You’re a one-percenter, dude. That’s why you got well, no doubt.

Jeff:
Yeah, thank you so much.

Meredith:
Yeah, one-percenter for sure. Jeff, I’m just kind of curious. Before we got on the call, we kind of talked about the importance of sharing our story but also not just sharing our story in general but sharing our story even when we’re not where we want to be. I’m just wondering why now? Why did you want to share now, especially, although you’re a year and a half into it, that you’re not fully where you want to be yet?

Jeff:
Well, because I’m well enough that I get it and that I can tell this part of my story. Then if things do change for me later down the road, that can be an addition to it. This wasn’t even really, like I said, my decision. Meeting Dr. Pompa at CalJam, he pushed me for this, so I probably wouldn’t have went a little longer. I don’t think I would have said I was ready yet, but he’s right, just like he’s always been. I haven’t caught him being wrong about anything once, so I went with that and I did contact you as soon as I got back. That was all him, but he’s right. I’m ready, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome.

Meredith:
Wow. Well, thank you so much, Jeff, for sharing your story. I know you’ve inspired so many people with what you’ve shared, and I know so many are going to relate to this so I know you’ve changed a lot of lives from everything you spoke today, so thank you so much.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Jeff, thanks for being on. Meredith, we’ll stay on and just give a final few words, but Jeff, man, you’re going to make a difference. You’re going to change the world, dude. I’m telling you. You’re coming to the seminar. God has purpose in this for you, and a lot of lives are going to change because of you, man. Thanks for telling your story. I promise you we’ll get emails of how your story changed lives already, and that I guarantee.

Jeff:
Yeah, anybody’s welcome to contact me, absolutely. I look forward to just seeing what I can do, doing what I can, making video footage, the things that got me well. I would love for my loved ones, families, friends, anybody to just kind of adapt that, and if I’m that motivation for somebody, if I can just spark something in somebody, that’s fantastic. It doesn’t have to be someone does this because the bottom falls out from underneath them or they’re hanging on by one inch of their life. It doesn’t have to be that. There’s obviously things that we’ve got to protect ourselves from, right? There’s a lot that’s interrupting the way we’re supposed to be, our natural biological functions, so let’s talk about it, let’s have an open conversation always, and let’s do something about it, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Appreciate you, man.

Jeff:
So much. Have a good one.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Jeff:
Thanks, guys.

Meredith:
Well, Dr. Pompa, I do have to say just kind of while listening to this whole interview that what I keep going back to, too, is the importance of story because so many people contact us because they’ve heard your story, and it personally has resonated with them, and they’ve experienced what you’ve been through. When we are able to share our story, I think there’s a lot of healing in that too, and so if you’d just kind of speak on that and what it took for you to share your story.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s something magical. We know just from a scientific standpoint, when we speak about our past hurts, it’s healing. When we speak about our future, what we’re going to do, and what God has us do, that’s healing, so it literally is—telling our story is actually part of the healing and it’s scientific. The subconscious hears our words. Our subconscious knows. As we even speak about things in the past, that’s part of the healing. Emotional traumas, Meredith, which I’ve talked about, it’s stored in the DNA. Really the only way to uproot those is we have to refrain the way we think about it.

You can see Jeff, he has refrained how he has thought about those symptoms now. He knows now that it’s part of who he needed to be. God has a purpose for him, so telling a story like this, I’m telling you it’s part of the healing so, Meredith, the fact that you even picked up on that, it’s huge. Because I’ve always said that the moment I started telling my story, it took me to another level in my healing.

Those out there struggling, start telling. You might say to yourself, like I’m sure all of us do, well, I’m not where I want to be yet. No, no, you tell your story about where you were. You give glory to the victory God gave you already, and that is going to be the thing that gets you to the next level. Give God the glory. The testimony is what changes lives, so that’s it.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm, amen, wow. Physical, chemical, and emotional detox, right? It takes all three.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, it takes all three. When you see people get better, it is a perfect storm, and when we uproot those causes, those stressors—because when you hear the stories of how people got sick, it’s always the same, right? You’re looking at certain stressors. The key is removing them, whether it’s physical, chemical, or emotional. My criticism of alternative medicine now is what we’ve criticized Western medicine for for many years, is that hey, you’re just throwing drugs at the symptoms. Well, I see that alternative medicine’s really doing a lot of the same things. Jeff and I, we addressed our adrenals. We addressed our thyroids. We did a lot of things, but the key is getting upstream, removing the stressors, and so few practitioners are willing to really do that today. That’s why my passion is obviously training doctors to give back to that, so that’s the key. I have another call here that I have to get on, but that’s the story.

Meredith:
Awesome. -inaudible- Well, thank you again, Jeff. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. The power of sharing your story, for you listening. Don’t be afraid to share it. You don’t know whose life you can change. Thanks everybody for watching. Have an amazing weekend and we’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

169: Why You Need to Start Squatting

Transcript of Episode 169: Why You Need to Start Squatting

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Mike Bledsoe

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host Meredith Dykstra and this is Episode Number 169. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line of course, and today we welcome special guest, Mike Bledsoe.

Before we get into today’s topic, let me tell you guys a little bit more about Mike. Mike Bledsoe is a host of Barbell Shrugged, Barbell Business and The Bledsoe Show. Mike has been coaching and honing his own health and performance for over 20 years with a goal of creating the biggest impact possible. He uses video shows, podcasts, software, and entrepreneurship to reach as many people as possible.

As an athlete he has competed and coached many sports, primarily weightlifting and CrossFit in the last decade. As an entrepreneur he’s successfully cofounded Faction Strength & Conditioning, home of CrossFit Memphis, and Barbell Shrugged, and Barbell Business. He has a passion for helping others grow, define, and achieve success. Amazing bio, so excited to have you on Cellular Healing TV, Mike. Welcome to the show.

Mike:
Thanks for having me. I'm super excited.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Look, we were talking before we got on, and your philosophy with exercise just transcends into our philosophy with diet, diet variation, and we will no doubt move into that comparison. I always love to ask this. First of all, I thought you were in the mountains, right? To me, folks, doesn’t he look like a mountain guy? I'm in the mountains. He's at the beach. I look like a beach guy. He looks like a mountain guy over there in San Diego.

I tell you what, though, man, our viewers and listeners are going to love your podcast. I’ve heard nothing but amazing things. You have a really huge listening and viewing audience, so right up front, man, tell them how to jump onto that stuff. Then after you do that, I want you to tell us how you got into this.

Mike:
Excellent. Yeah, if you want to check out what we got going on, just go to barbellshrugged.com or hop on YouTube or iTunes and put in Barbell Shrugged, and we have a lot of fun. We make strength and conditioning, nutrition, all that, we make it as fun as possible. Most of the stuff we cover is functional fitness oriented, so we’re not really into the physique stuff, bodybuilding stuff. We’re more into how do you move and how do you exercise in order to enhance the life you want to live.

I got into doing video shows—well shit, I got into fitness when I was 15 because I was always drawn to movement and sport, and I always wanted to learn more. Then went to college, got exercise science, saw that there was no gym like I wanted, a nice functional gym. I was introduced to CrossFit which back in ’07 was and regard to functional fitness. Before that, most gyms were designed for bodybuilding. It was really cool to have something come along and really changed it up for us.

Opened up a gym in ’07 and then in 2012, we had done really well with our clients, we had done really well with our business so in 2012, I started podcasting and doing video shows, and we really just—a lot of people asked how we've had so much success with that and to be honest, it has to do with just being consistent, always showing up. I'm super fortunate that I started the show when I just went—I just kept going and plugging away, week after week, and that really exposed me to the best coaches and scientists all around the world because I travel around and do it in person. The majority of my education—I’ve been pursuing educations from the age of 15 to 30, but when I started doing the show, I started learning at an accelerated rate, because I was getting to spend time with some of the people, some of the best in the world so it's been a really fun journey.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s so true. I’ve interviewed experts on every topic that I can find that I feel knows the most and gosh, you just learn so much even preparing for the interviews, right? It’s like it’s fantastic. I was just traveling and I had time and we were down with Zach Bush who created a product called Restore. It helps fix leaky gut. I sat in a room with four scientists, myself and Jim [Recola] and I think we would both echo that we learned more in that hour and a half than we had in probably months. It was like condensed learning, so you're right. We’re blessed to be around some of the greatest minds, and we’re blessed to be able to share it with so many people, honestly. I just feel so fortunate.

Well, listen, we both agree movement is needed for the sick that want to be well. Without movement they become worse. However, we have a lot of people who can't—they don't have enough energy to do the exercises that this person would do but they still need to move. Then we have this group of our followers who wants to lose weight, struggles to lose weight, wants hormone optimization and anti-aging Both sides need movement. So how can we please both sides? Let's talk about some movements that you've discovered because you've got a lot of tricks and gadgets, man, but anyway, so let's try to talk about both of those groups and how—because movement is healing. Without movement you die, no movement, death; movement, life, so talk about it. You're the expert.

Mike:
Yeah. I think as Westerners, we’ve really—one of the reasons movement is so challenging is because our attention is on the outcome of movement, and so we’re always concerned with—we are looking at oh, what are my hormones doing, what are all these numbers look like, and if I do this what do I get out of it? For me, the very philosophical approach is I'm a human being. I was made with to two legs, two arms, and I'm supposed to be moving. I think that—was it Thomas Edison said that the purpose of the body is to carry the brain around, and he was dead wrong and that was—

Dr. Pompa:
He did say that.

Mike:
It’s that type of mentality that gets people completely jacked up. I think it was Dick Clark who said back I think it was 14 or 1500s and he was this scientist, and he started talking about the mind and the body as separate things. Now what we end up having is we walk around talking about the mind and we start—and we’re talking about the body as if these are two different things, and they’re not. These are nice little labels that we put on things so that we can divide ourselves against ourselves. The fact that we’re even dividing ourselves against ourselves makes movement challenging.

My first challenge to anybody who wants to live a better life—and the thing is I don't think of myself as a noun. I think of myself as a verb. I am a process. I am something that's happening all the time, and so that means that I'm in constant—I’m a kinetic being. I'm always in movement. Sitting still is not good. I know that I learn much more quickly when I'm in movement. I might have to go to conferences and sit still for a long time. Do you know how I process that information? I get out and move creatively. I dance. I do animal flow. I get out in the ocean.

Movement is part of the human experience, and I think that so many people are looking at I want this outcome. I want to be healthy. I want to lose this weight. I want to do all this stuff, and they're missing the boat because what they're doing is saying I want to be different and in order to get there, I have to do all this stuff that I don't want to do. They think about I got to do step one, and step two, and step three, and it’s like you are a human experience right now.

You are human being or we could say I like to think of myself as a spiritual being having a human experience. Is my human experience meant to be sitting at a desk all day? Is that what the human experience is supposed to be? Am I supposed to sit in a classroom from the age of 5 years old until the age of 22, 8 hours a day, and just sitting there and absorbing information so I can regurgitate it so I can hopefully get a job where I sit in a cubicle all day? This is from the very basis—if we’re thinking about movement as I got to go to the gym one hour day, we already have a problem.

For me, I really want people to think about themselves as having a human experience at all times in which case I think they start making different decisions. For the person who doesn't move hardly at all, I mean, add up the amount of physical activity that you do. If you are going to the gym 1 hour, that’s 1 out of every 23 hours. I may be resting eight hours in bed. We go from bed to the kitchen to sitting at a table to walking ten feet to their car to sitting to walking to their cubicle, sitting. They're basically sitting and laying down all day.

Then when they go to exercise, they get hurt. Oh, yeah, you're totally jacked up. You can't move. You can't go from—I don't take my car out. I don't take a Ferrari, start it, and then gun it down the road immediately and then wonder why I threw a rod. I think a lot of times, we'd be in a lot better metabolic condition if they just moved throughout the day and just it was something that happened.

For the person who does not move a lot, go for a ten-minute walk first thing in the morning. That's it, no expectations. I think for a lot of people, a lot of people who are out of shape, or overweight, or not happy with their bodies that don't go to the gym, I imagine that they're intimidated by the gym environment. There's a lot going on there. We may have had experiences with personal trainers who expected way too much of us too soon. This happened in CrossFit all the time. This was the world in which I've lived for a while, and we've had to really—a lot of what I've had to do is help those coaches dial it back for the average person. They want people to squat below parallel on day one. I'm like, somebody who's not walking for ten minutes a day, let's just go for a ten-minute walk and drink some water. Let's keep it simple.

For the person who doesn't move a lot, let's work up to 30 minutes of walking. I want you to walk ten minuets every other day this week. Then work up to 30 minutes. Then you might want to find somebody who is a personal trainer who is a really dialed in to looking to how you move and making assessments, not just throwing some general program at you.

Dr. Pompa:
Even the interest of what you want to do. We've interviewed a guy from here, Park City, and he helped my wife. Cycling was what she wanted to get better at. He said okay, this is your interest, and he developed movements around that, transformed her cycling without pains. Perfect point.

Mike:
It's got to be fun. It's got to be engaging. For the most advanced person, someone who does move a lot, I really encourage you to think about being present in your movement practice, connecting your movement to your breath. If you're thinking about what happened before after your movement practice, that session, then you're not present in what's happening right now. I think that for the longest time, I trained for the purpose of reaching a goal. Now when I move, it's about really enjoying the movement that I'm doing. Yeah, doing things that I enjoy is important.

Then another thing to consider for someone who's more advanced is most people do gravitate really far to one thing. I think in the beginning we should just do the things that we enjoy. Over time, I mean, you can get a taste for things and develop a taste for something A lot of what I did was very masculine in nature. What I mean by that is a lot of my movement practice and my training was accomplishment-based. I want to put so much weight on a barbell, or I want to run this thing in this amount of time. It's very accomplishment and measurement-based. I can measure my progress whereas there's more feminine-oriented movement practices where there's not a lot of measuring going on. There's not this big accomplishment thing. This would be something like yoga or certain types of yoga, especially yin yoga, and then dance. Hardly ever is anyone going to a dance class—we may be comparing ourselves to other people, but it would be subjective in nature.

I would really encourage people who do have movement practices, if they're really in a masculine movement practice like CrossFit, or weightlifting, or being a triathlete, or something like that, is play around with something more feminine, whether you're a man or a woman. Dance, yoga, and then vice-versa. If somebody's only done yoga and dance and things like that, they can really benefit from having a more masculine nature.

Dr. Pompa:
You're challenging me right now because I gravitate what I grew up with. I love weights. I just love lifting weights, just love it, can't get it out of me. I love cycling. I love hiking. I love being in the woods. However, put me in a room with people standing on one leg stretching, I would rather die. It's like stretching anything. It's not like getting on—why are we doing this? I'm looking around. Mike, don't take this the wrong way, man. You don't look like a dancer. You just don't look like a dancer. I'm going to make you back up.

Mike:
You didn't see this -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to see it. Dancing, I like myself. I do like it, but I'm not going to—I look at that as more fun. I get your point. You don't have to defend it. It's absolutely exercise, but point being is—this is what I'm trying to say. I'm not going to be like oh, you know what? I'm going to exercise. Oh, yeah, here, I got my iTunes, yeah. I'm not going to just start dancing. Maybe I should. That's me.

Mike:
There's a difference between creative movement. Creativity is a feminine trait, and it's having creative moment and play. If you watch a five year old at a playground, they are just playing. You throw a 25 year old, or a 35, or a 45 year old on the playground, they just stand there and look around. If they did start playing, they'd be so worried about someone judging them.

One of the things that I really been working on with myself and with other adults is teaching them how to play again. There's a difference between—you go in a gym, that's in a box. You are literally walking into a box and doing box things. I'm going to do this movement, up and down, up and down, left and right. When you get into creative movement, that's extremely important because that—if you want to talk about processing or thinking about creativity in your mind, you create creativity in your body first.

There's a theory which I subscribe to which is your memories are stored in your fascia If your fascia is not getting the type of movement it could be getting, then your creativity is being hindered tremendously. For somebody who's a professional, if they went and—what's that called? They polled the top 500 CEOs for Inc., 500 and look at all the top CEOs, and they polled them and asked them what was the most important trait for being a cutting-edge CEO in business right now, and they said creativity is number one. Because we have robots and people in third-world countries managing a lot of left-brain activities, if you're not practicing creativity physically, you're going to be hindered mentally, as well. I think a lot of times, going back to your body's not just here to carry your brain around. It's all one integrated system, and we need to be treating it as such.

Going back, I think it's really sad that we have put the mind—we separated the mind and the body, and then we say sit at a desk for eight hours a day. If your grades are bad, then we cut recess, we cut sports, and then what we do is we're saying the mind is more important than the body. Then the body is where our emotions and feelings come from. Now we're saying your feelings and emotions are not important. The mind is important. Now we've created an entire society of people who don't think that the body is—it's just not important. They may intellectually say that, but they don't really believe it. If someone can't believe that their body's important and they don't really love it, they're doomed for failure, really.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. Okay, so it's such an important part. I hear my echo. There's that echo again. Anyways, show us some of these unique movements. Show us something. Give us—I think you already handled some of these people who are very sick and challenged. I thought that was great advice, just walking ten minutes a day. I think we'd go aw, what's that going to do? No, that's transformative for moving lymph, all these things. You said something else, and I want to get into this. You're moving and trapped emotia in the fascia, in the tissue, without movement, that only accelerates. Movement can at least start that process. We need movement to move toxins out of the body.

Obviously, we can go on and on, but that even little bit, ten minutes, is a big deal. On this side of things, people that have enough energy to exercise, want to take their fitness to the next level, their functional movements, their health, their anti-aging, what are some movements here? You might have some other suggestions that were on this side too. I don’t know.

Mike:
It all comes down—it’s hard to say because everyone is fairly individualized when it comes to this. I think everybody should be able to sit in a bottom of a squat for ten minutes. If you can’t sit at a bottom of a squat for ten minutes, then—most athletes have a hard time doing this.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.

Mike:
If you can’t sit in a bottom of a squat we’ll just say for two minutes, I would say that you’re dysfunctional.

Dr. Pompa:
I can do two minutes. I may even be able to do five, but I know when I’m there because I’ve done it, right? Just like in a stretching position, by five minutes I’m burning. I am burning.

Mike:
I know Olympic athletes that can’t do it, and they’re dysfunctional. What that means is they’re most likely going—that tells me they’re at risk of injury. Sitting at the bottom of a squat can really help you reset your body. It resets your breath, and so I get really big in the breath. If you sit at a bottom of a squat, try to chest breathe. You automatically start breathing from your diaphragm.

Most people walk around chest breathing, breathing into the ribs, but they’re not really breathing. They’re doing a lot of shoulder—people who have neck pain and things like that, they’re not really breathing into their belly. They’re not really expanding their diaphragm. They’re not expanding their ribs, and so if you’re in a bottom of a squat and you’re hanging out there for five or ten minutes total in a day, then what you’re going to do is you’re actually going to start repairing your breath at the same time. All movement -inaudible- breath. That’s your core. If your core is not strong—and it’s not even about strength. It’s about is it—are the motor patterns built in the order in which they are supposed to?

What ends up happening a lot of times is we get into a situation where we start chest breathing. What’s really happening is our breathing—the mechanics of our breathing is—the muscles are firing in the wrong order. That greases a groove over time, and now we forget how to breathe deeply. Any time we’re not breathing deep, we are throwing the sympathetic nervous system up, so that creates stress hormones like cortisol and things like that. If we try to fix people biochemically and we’re not addressing breath, we’re just doomed to go back. We’re just doomed to go back to higher cortisol levels. You know that throws everything off.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, this is great advice for the person over here challenged and the person over here, this squat thing. I’m the person over here. I was over here going I can’t do that, and then the sick person is going I need to do that because they need to get their breath right. They need to get that firing, that parasympathetic and sympathetic working right. That was just unbelievable right there that this is a simple way to do it. You could start with ten seconds, right? I mean, work up every day.

Mike:
My first thing is accumulate. I like to use my iPhone. I just hit the Start/Stop button on my timer, and I accumulate ten minutes of squatting every day sitting in the bottom of a squat. I’ll do 30 seconds here, a minute there, and things like that. I know that if I accumulate ten minutes at the bottom of my squat every day, it’s going to keep my hips nice and flexible. My hamstring is going to be healthy. People think about all this stretching that needs to happen. If you just sit in the bottom of a squat for ten minutes total a day, everything will be just fine.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m doing it.

Mike:
I’m not saying you’re not going to need…

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to do it.

Mike:
I’m not saying you’re not going to need additional work.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it, but people may not understand exactly what you’re talking about. Pull your camera back and just show them. I mean, I understand it. I mean, believe me when I tell you. Look at the legs on that guy.

Mike:
I’m just sitting in the bottom squat a little bit like here.

Dr. Pompa:
Are you going all the way down in the relaxed position, or are you holding yourself?

Mike:
I’m making sure that my back stays pretty straight. I don’t want to be like this with my back. I’m going to rock back a little bit. I’m going to make sure my toes are really engaging with the floor. I can sit right here. I like holding myself up. I like trying to keep my back pretty flat and straight. You’re not going to hurt your back if you don’t.

Dr. Pompa:
No. I mean, most people, though, aren’t going to be able to—they’re not strong enough in their quads to hold themselves up. They can just sit straight down, right?

Mike:
Yeah. I’ll show you again. You just sit. You can just get all the way to the bottom, and just hang out down here. I like to just put my elbows right here, and just hang out. I usually have my iPhone in my hand, and I’m texting. I’m working from there. I’m texting from there. I don’t sit at a desk at all. I stand at a desk, or if I’m on my laptop, a lot of times on my belly on the floor.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m standing. There are certain times where I’ll pop down. You know what I’m saying? Whatever, I’m doing something. Nine times out of ten I’m standing. Now, do you nose breath or mouth breath when you’re doing that?

Mike:
I try to nose breath most of the time, even when I’m exercising, a lot of nose breathing. I notice that I’m more likely to shoulder breath if I’m breathing through my mouth. If I’m breathing through my nose, it adds a little bit of resistance, and it forces me to take a deeper breath in. It also slows me down, so I can take fewer breaths per minute, which forces me to have to get a fuller breath each time. My general rule is I should be breathing out my mouth when I’m talking, and that’s about it. There are training sessions where I’m breathing out my mouth. It’s grueling. I’m just like, oh, I’m out of breath, but I wait to get there. Because the moment you start breathing real heavy in and out of your mouth, that means your sympathetic nervous system is kicked into gear, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You just want to time it well when you’re there.

I would say, whether someone’s advanced or not, test yourself. What’s it like to accumulate ten minutes of sitting in a bottom of a squat in a day? You don’t even have to go the gym. I would say step one is, if that’s a challenge for you, if two minutes straight is just impossible, then accumulate ten minutes a day in a bottom squat. That’s ten minutes. You don’t have to go a gym. You don’t have to do anything else. If you do that, you’re going to get massive health benefits from that by itself.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s great. Do you have another trick? That’s a great trick. I want another one.

Mike:
Yeah. This is actually similar is I like to accumulate seven minutes a day hanging from something. This challenge is good, and it also is good for the shoulders. Your shoulders should be strong enough just to hold you so just hanging up here from my rafter, and I accumulate. There’s workouts where what I do is I just switch between—the first thing in the morning, I’ll just switch between hanging from my rafters and sitting in the bottom of a squat.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. There’s no way you can…

Mike:
I’ll just sit in the bottom of the squat for a minute.

Dr. Pompa:
You can’t hang there for a full seven minutes can you?

Mike:
No. No.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to say—yeah.

Mike:
I have some friends that can. I have some friends that can. They’ll just walk up to a tree, seven minutes. It’s incredible.

Dr. Pompa:
I was setting up my—I was setting my high school pull-up record, right? I realized my greatest challenge was my grip. It wasn’t my ability to pull myself up. I was failing in my grip, which was weakening my ability to pull up, so I had to start doing one-handed hangs, right? I was realizing that my grip is absolutely failing. I remember getting to myself doing a three minute one-arm hang. It took training, and I was younger, right? I mean, it took a lot of training to get to a three minute one-arm hang, man. Try one minute, folks. You think three’s short. It’s eternity.

Mike:
It’s a big deal. Oh, yeah, hanging from one arm, nuts.

Dr. Pompa:
Even now, one minute and I…

Mike:
It takes a lot of shoulder strength to.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It is. It is.

Mike:
A lot of shoulder strength. Yeah. There’s a lot of benefits, especially as people get older, doing the static holds. When we were younger, doing the explosive stuff where we’re jumping on top of things and running as fast as we can and just going nuts was okay. What I’ve noticed is I’ve got—as I’ve gotten older, the joints don’t feel so hot. There’s many reasons for that, and there’s many reasons why this would help that out. I won’t get into the nasty details of it, but static holds are really nice.

Ninety percent of my training I am either doing a static hold, sitting at the bottom. Static means just being still and having some resistance. I’m hanging from a rafter. I might be hanging with my chin over the bar is static holds or doing planks for your core. Things like that. A Superman hold on the floor.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I do those.

Mike:
Then when I’m at the gym, I’m doing a lot of eccentrics. That means I’m going really slow on the way down with pauses, and I’m still coming up—say I’m bench pressing. I’m still coming up with some speed. On the way down, I might be five or six seconds on the way down. That really saves the joints. It really helps with more muscular recruitment. It allows you to maintain muscle mass. As we get older, our muscle mass is decreasing every year. On average, the studies say, after the age of 35, you’re losing about a pound of muscle a year.

Dr. Pompa:
Crap.

Mike:
Muscle is really important.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I don’t like that statistic. I’m 52 this year, man. My goal is to be bigger this year. Come on. No. I don’t think I’ll be bigger, but I want to hold on to what I have.

Mike:
If you’re training, you don’t have to do that. Yeah. A lot of people lose muscle mass because they stop moving. Movement is the stimulus necessary for muscles to grow. We need muscles, and we need good motor pattern recruitment. I’m 35, and I’m already thinking about this. I don’t want someone having to wipe my butt when I’m 85. You know?

Dr. Pompa:
I do. I do. I want -inaudible-. I just don’t want to have to do that anymore. I’m just thinking about that. Matter of fact, I’m going to work on this now. I’m going to call my wife in, and see if we can arrange this. No. You’re right. You don’t want to have to do that.

Mike:
What that is is people can’t wipe their butt when they get older because they lack T-spine rotation. That means their upper back can’t rotate, right? I got something, a funny idea, which is I have a Squatty Potty. Are you familiar?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Mike:
I use a Squatty Potty. This might be too much for some people, but I’m going to say anyway. When I wipe my butt, I actually—I stay down in a squatting position, and I alternate between hands. That’s how I do my T-spine rotation work is when I go to the bathroom.

Dr. Pompa:
You and Ben Greenfield must know each other.

Mike:
Oh, we’re buddies.

Dr. Pompa:
I know, exactly. Okay. I’m out to dinner with Ben, right? I’m with some of my good friends. I introduce him to Jeff [Hays] and some really close friends. He went to the bathroom twice during the dinner, and he came back huffing each time. Of course, the question was asked. Dude, what are you doing, right? You come back from the bathroom huffing. He says, oh, I do what he calls piss squats. Every time, before he would go to the bathroom, he would squat 40 times up and down, up and down.

Ben’s the guy who runs down to get the mail, sprints back, does push-ups. I’ve got to ask Ben if he’s doing the Potty Squatty what do you call it, rotations? The answer is probably going to…

Mike:
T-spine rotation.

Dr. Pompa:
If the answer is no, I’m going to start now. You know what I’m saying? That’s what Ben does.

Mike:
Absolutely. I will have started something before Ben. I’ll rub it in.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, literally. Anyway, we were just on a call with Ben, ironically enough. Yeah, dude, you have a Ben Greenfield edge to you, for sure. No doubt.

Listen, though. I will tell you that we can laugh about that, but that is something more transformative. I mean, that really is. That’s a basic movement, and if you lose, your life is different. Your life is not good, literally. Not just wiping your butt, but turning around in a chair and picking something up and throwing your back out, for goodness sakes, I mean, there’s a lot of consequences to not being able to do that.

Mike:
Going back to movement and movement being a stimulus for the human body to regenerate and this is especially so for—light-weight, white women tend to have more osteoporosis. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they haven’t done as much weight-bearing exercise. What ends up happening is, when people get older and they break a hip, statistically, they don’t live beyond another year. You break a hip. It’s a sign of osteoporosis. It’s a sign that you’re not moving.

It’s not the broken hip that’s causing a problem. It’s just that, when you break the hip, it’s probably you weren’t moving already. Your bones are weak. The fact that you fell means that your muscles don’t move too well. Afterwards, it’s real easy—and I’ve got friends who’ve had parents that have gone through this. I’ve heard it’s like they throw in the towel. It’s already gotten to that point. It’s already gotten to a point where there’s—they just don’t have the will to break back through.

For me, that’s another thing. If I look at situations like that, I don’t think I’m ever going to be in danger of osteoporosis, but there’s always something that you might need to stave off. For me, it’s about, okay, I’m going to regularly introduce stimulus that’s going to cause my muscles, my skin, my bones, my eyesight, all this stuff to be challenged, so it’ll grow stronger and be stronger over time. I don’t want to ever have to be at the risk of breaking my hip, and end up being a burden on anybody else and on myself. Again, going back to what I was saying in the beginning, I’m a verb. I am not a noun. I am having a human experience, and I want to enjoy this human experience. That involves movement and getting really connected to my body.

Dr. Pompa:
Dude, I have to go back to the squatting thing here. I’m really excited about this. I got to lecture in Africa, right? I was talking about posture, etc., and I talked about the importance of the squat. The gentleman that ran this whole conference literally comes out, jumps up on stage, and says, okay, wait a minute. He’s been telling the people of Zimbabwe because he’s a big important leader the importance of getting back to squatting. He says, look, we used to squat. Everyone used to squat. He was talking about it preventing hip fractures and bones in the hip problems, arthritis, opens up the knees. He went off on this whole education about why us Africans have to get back to squatting. Chairs, they’re killing us, etc.

I mean, he had everyone doing the squat, right? Barely anyone could do it. Anyways, just preventing hip fractures, squatting, right? You talked about the breath. I didn’t know that. I mean, that’s another bad—the sympathetic [nervous system], I mean, come on. I didn’t know any of that. The knees, I mean, squatting and what it does for the knees, that’s another big huge problem. How many people are having knee surgery and meniscus problems when squatting is showing to improve the knees, the hips, and the low back?

Not to mention the neck. When you’re in a squatting position, it forces the head back. This is what America looks like, even kids. Here’s what they do. This is what they look like. When you’re squatting, you’re in the exact opposite position. It literally forces the spine and the head back over some.

Anyway, we have one more thing because we’re running out of time, and you and I could go off on that. By the way, I think you just gave amazing advice. I really do. It was funny. I started the show by saying how can you please these people and these people? Holy cow, we did it. I’m going I can’t squat, right? I’m like I can’t squat like that. I mean, it’s like—and these people are going, okay, I can do that, but I’m going to go up here with it. I’m going to do ten minutes.

All right, you mentioned trapped emotions, and I’m a big believer that trapped emotions are a massive, massive stressor that can keep people from getting well. Keep the person here that wants to be better from being better. Trapped emotions is no different than trapped toxins. We talk a lot about bioaccumulated toxins at the cellular level. You talked about emotions being trapped in your fascia, one of your theories. I absolutely see that because I believe trapped emotions can be in the DNA.

Now, you talked about—we talked about ayahuasca. I think this is just a really cool thing. It’s an herb from South America that actually releases trapped emotions, and just talk a little bit about that. I know we can’t get this in the United States, but I still think it’s a really cool thing when we’re talking about trapped emotions.

Mike:
Yeah. I think a lot of times, especially for a lot of men in America, they think about emotions. They’re like nah. I don’t need to worry about that. That’s a really big sign of suppression of emotion, and those are usually the people who could use it the most. Yeah. What usually happens, a lot of these emotional trauma that’s stored in the body impacts your posture. I’ve witnessed people releasing emotional trauma, and then walking differently afterwards. Squatting differently afterwards. It’s really incredible.

I’ve gone down to Peru. I’ve sat with ayahuasqueros and done ayahuasca and gotten the benefits of it myself. What’s interesting about the trapped emotional trauma, a lot of that was put in there—we could say it was installed or whatever pre-seven years old so when people were really young. When we’re that young, we think everything is true. Not only do we have emotional trauma that’s stored in the body; it created a belief around this or that. Having these subconscious beliefs that are running in the background keep us from achieving the things we want to achieve. I think a lot of times people who need to lose—they want to lose weight, right? They’re carrying around more weight. The physical weight is indicative of the emotional weight that they’re carrying. It being in the subconscious means that you’re not—you can’t really become aware of it.

What I’ll share is just a really quick summary of what I’ve experienced with ayahuasca and how it works. Now, ayahuasca is a tea. They brew this tea over a 24-hour period. The tea is made from two ingredients. It’s made from an ayahuasca vine and another leaf. I don’t quite recall the name of the leaf. They take this vine, and they take this leaf. They chop the vine up, and they put it in water with this leaf. They, basically, boil it over a fire for I think a day or two, constantly stirring it, and then they bottle it. If anyone starts thinking about what is this thing, it’s from the Amazon. It’s a vine and leaf.

Now, what you do is you sit down with an ayahuasquero. This is somebody who works with the medicine. You drink the tea. About between 10 and 45 minutes after drinking the tea, you—I’ll say I. I go into, basically, a different state of consciousness. I am pulled into drawing—closing my eyes. I go into somewhat of a dream state full of visions, and the world that we know that we’re touching right now completely seized to exist. Then I go into a dream state, and I’m being shown all these things in my life. I’ve gone to memories, and it starts basically giving me a—I start seeing scenes of my life as memories, and I’ve gone as far back as when I was nursing at my mother’s breast.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I want people to understand. This is not a hallucinogenic herb. It’s not. People, of course, get these trips on LSD. This is different. I know enough about it. Yeah.

Mike:
Technically, it is hallucinogenic. That’s not the primary—it’s not a recreational thing. Anyone who’s ever done this would not do this at a party. This is not something to be done recreationally. In fact, I would never do this without being under the care of someone who works with it.

Dr. Pompa:
I thought it doesn’t hit the same receptors as say LSD, right, or mushrooms. It works in a different way. Therefore, they weren’t classifying it as a hallucinogenic, but yet, it does the same, what you were saying, right? They would say, okay, it’s hallucinogenic.

Mike:
It’s more direct.

Dr. Pompa:
Explain it. Am I right on that?

Mike:
It’s more direct. With ayahuasca, what’s happening is you’re drinking—so all plants have this thing called dimethyltryptamine. Dimethyltryptamine is also produced by your pineal gland so that little gland in the middle of your brain. It drips dimethyltryptamine when you sleep and causes dreams. Dimethyltryptamine is also released in a massive dose when you die, and it creates an experience where you see the white light and all that kind of stuff. It does create this dream state.

What happened for me is I was actually able to go into memories that I was not able to recall without the tea, so I was able to go as far back as when I was nursing my mother’s breast. If you talk to any psychologist, they’ll tell that going preverbal, that means before language was adopted, is almost impossible, and the reason it’s impossible is because we use words to create memories, right, and thoughts. What we do is we package these memories as thoughts, and these thoughts are formed by words. Going preverbal can be really clearly for a society full of people who are not in touch with their bodies. If you’re not in touch with your body, that means that you cannot access memories that only are associated with feelings. Because we’re not in touch with our feelings, we’re not in touch with the sensations of our body.

Now, the people I know who are highly in touch with the sensations of their body actually can go preverbal much more easily. If you’re somebody who goes, oh, I don’t really remember anything before 5, 6, 7 years old, that might be a sign that you’re not in touch with the sensations of your body. You get back in touch with that, and all of a sudden, all these memories just start flowing. It’s really incredible. The medicine, for me, really allowed me to access things that were from my youth, and I got to see some things that I was told and things that happened when I was young that created beliefs that I operate now at, say, when I was 30 years old. I’m like, oh, wow. I behaved this way as a 30-year-old because of something that happened when I was 5.

What ended up happening is I—the ayahuasca works in a very physical manner. It’s not enjoyable at all. For me, it feels like it’s pumping my stomach. There’s something inside of me moving around, and then, what ends up happening is, oh, I will focus on one part of my body. I can feel it coming up, and I -inaudible- associating it with a moment in time. Then it comes out, and I’ll throw it up. When I throw it up, there’s this huge release. You still remember. You still have the memory, but it doesn’t hold the same meaning it once held. After having the experience, I feel much lighter, and most people who have the experience walk around the next day seeing the world differently again.

It’s a really beautiful thing that I have had the chance to enjoy. I hope more people get to learn about it. I’m not really sure what the laws are in the US. There’s two things that we know is true is it’s really hard to treat people with plants in the United States because they’re not patentable, and there’s the same reason—there’s many different reasons why the government’s been really opposed to marijuana over the last 50 years. There’s a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is is pharmaceutical companies aren’t pushing for it to be legal because there’s no way to patent it. It does solve some -inaudible-, right? The same thing with ayahuasca, it’s a plant. No one’s really paying for the research to see what the benefits. It should be told things like magic mushrooms…

Dr. Pompa:
Can they go to your site and learn more about it? Hey, people are spending all this money on this psychologist or therapist. I’m willing to fly to South America to get it, I mean, but where would they start? I mean, is there more information on your site?

Mike:
I don’t have more information on my site about that. Actually, if you go—I don’t have information on my site. On my podcast, The Bledsoe Show, on that show, I do address it quite a bit, and I have a few friends I’ve interviewed that have had experiences. The trouble is it’s hard to make a recommendation. Because just like any other practice, there’s a wide variety of how good somebody is, and you’re working in a Third World country. There’s a handful of people that I know down there that I could recommend, but it’s not something that I’m advertising heavily.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, -inaudible-.

Mike:
For a lot of different reasons. I would recommend, if somebody’s interested in trying it out, do the research. There’s documentaries on it. Just make sure that you are—get referred to somebody. If you really want to do it and you ask around enough, you’ll get referred to somebody who’s really good. There are people who do it in the United States. It’s done in a—because it is something that was brought up by the indigenous tribes, it’s considered something like a—like Native Americans can still do things like peyote.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I see that. Oh, I see that.

Mike:
It’s a religious thing. There’s the opportunity for that. I would just urge people, if it sounds interesting—by the way, it was—I’ve done some really challenging things in my life. This was top five most challenging things I’ve ever done, maybe top three. It’s not fun. If you think you’re going to have a good time doing it, then don’t do it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s not the point here. The point is you’re releasing trapped emotions. I don’t think that’s ever fun. Anyways, hey, man, we’re out of time. We so appreciated you coming on. I know it was last minute, but it was a blessing for all of us and our viewers. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.

Mike:
Really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. I’ve been sitting here this whole time. I’m just like I’m going to run around and squat and hang. I’m pumped. Thank you for everything you did and all the awesome take-home advice too. I think all of us who are watching and listening are ready to go move around a lot. Thank you so much. Thanks for watching, everybody, and we’ll catch you next time. Bye-bye.

Dr. Pompa:
You got it. See you, guys. See you, Mike.

Mike:
All right then.

168: The Magic Mirror of Health

Transcript of Episode 168: The Magic Mirror of Health

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Dr. Trevor Cates

Meredith:
Hello everyone and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode #168. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line of course, and today we welcome special guest Dr. Trevor Cates. We have a very exciting topic for you guys today, and we’re going to be delving into the skin. Dr. Cates is an expert on the skin. Before we get into it, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Trevor. Dr. Trevor Cates is a nationally recognized naturopathic doctor. She’s also known as The Spa Doctor and was the first woman recognized as a naturopathic doctor in the state of California, appointed by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to California’s Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine Advisory Council.

She’s worked with world-renowned spas and sees patients in her private practice in Park City, Utah, with a focus on graceful aging and glowing skin. She has been featured on The Doctors, Extra, First for Women, mindbodygreen, and is the host of The Spa Doctor podcast. Dr. Cates believes the key to healthy skin is inner and outer nourishment with nontoxic ingredients. Her new book, Clean Skin From Within, was released in March 2017. Dr. Cates’s The Spa Doctor skin care and supplement lines are formulated with natural and organic ingredients designed to help you achieve the cleanest and natural path to confidence and beautiful skin, and more information is at thespadr.com. Welcome, Dr. Trevor Cates, to Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Cates:
Thank you. It’s so great to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Hello. Listen, for me it’s Trevor because we’ve wake-boarded together. We live here together in Park City, and we have such a close little group of amazing health people in Park City, Utah, right, Meredith? You see that, right? It’s like we could just interview people here from Park City, for goodness sakes. There are such amazing people here, and you are one of them, Trevor, and I’m just so glad you’re here.

I know you have a book that’s out and your product line. I want you to talk about both for sure and where people can get those, but look, I always love to start with this question. How did you get into this? I mean, I love to hear people’s why. You could have done a lot of things. Naturopathic goes one way, but you went skin. How’d you get that interest?

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, well it was kind of an interesting path, and like many people I had my own challenges, like many people that end up doing integrative naturopathic medicine, functional medicine. I struggled with my health when I was a kid and I had a lot of allergies and skin issues, so I had eczema, hives, and these little bumps, and my parents took me to see a lot of different conventional specialists and nothing really helped me. In fact, I just kept feeling worse and I would have adverse reactions or allergic reactions to a lot of the medications I was given, and it was really devastating on a physical level, but also with the skin it’s right on the surface. You can’t hide it. It impacted my self-esteem as a kid and how I showed up, and I was picked on at school and it was a really tough time. I remember that well. Luckily, my parents didn’t give up. They kept searching and they found a holistic practitioner that they took me to, and that’s the one thing that turned my health around.

From an early age of 12, I realized how there’s a different way of looking at health, of looking at treating our bodies, and also about our skin, and I learned so much about that. It’s eventually what led me to be interested in going into naturopathic medical school, because when I found out about naturopathic medicine and the training, I realized it really meshed with my core beliefs about health and wellness and how to take care of the body, and so I went that direction and I’ve been practicing for 17 years.

I wasn’t focusing on skin until about five years ago. I started working in certain world-renowned spas and I ended up seeing a lot of people with skin issues, but also I was doing a two-week program for weight loss and one of the things that people would say in addition to losing weight that their skin would clear up. They looked more youthful. Their skin had a glow to it. To me, that made sense because of my experience, but to so many people this concept that instead of suppressing and covering up skin issues, to realize that our skin is giving us messages about our health.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt, yeah, matter of fact I always say look, there’s five areas that we all look at people and don’t even realize we do it and judge their health. It’s the eyes, the teeth, the hair, the skin, and overall shape. I mean, those five areas your subconscious literally assesses somebody and goes oh wow, you look so healthy, and it’s how good you put all those together no doubt radiates your health or quite the opposite, disease. I’ll tell you what, you’re right. I mean, skin is a reflection, and I know that’s something you talk about in your book. I mean, skin is a reflection of your health. I mean, I know. Listen, if you want to get the ladies’ attention, talk about hair and skin. They don’t like the way they look.

When I look at someone, especially as a practitioner, I immediately assess their hair and skin. I mean, whether it’s thyroid condition—we were watching a show last night and my son said something about a woman on television right now, and he said something like she doesn’t look healthy. I said yeah, she has a thyroid condition. How do you know? I said because she has these dark things under her eyes, and he’s like oh yeah, I see -inaudible-. It’s like immediately boom. It’s like one little thing I could tell no doubt she was struggling, and her hair definitely reflected that as well. Talk about that because I’ve heard you say the exact same thing.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, I do. I call skin our magic mirror that gives us great clues about our overall health. Like I said, the typical approach to dermatology is to just cover it up or suppress it, and so a lot of times women will put on makeup. They’ll just cover their blemishes. They’ll use a different moisturizer. They’ll use different things, or they go and get an over-the-counter treatment or even a prescription medication to calm down the inflammation externally to suppress the signs, but what I’m encouraging people to do is instead of covering up to use your skin as a tool. Don’t be hard on yourself about your skin.

I think that especially woman are particularly hard and they look in the mirror and they get frustrated with what they see, but in looking at skin, because it’s our largest organ and it’s right on the surface of our bodies, we can use it as a tool to give us information, what it really is about or what is the root cause behind the skin issue. If you have dry skin, eczema, psoriasis, acne, premature aging. If you feel like you’re aging fasting than people around you, these are all signs that your skin is giving you that something needs to change. There’s a genetic predisposition. There’s a genetic component to this, but as you know we can change our genetic expression by our lifestyle choices, by what we eat, by how we manage our stress, our sleep, and reducing toxins around us, those sorts of things.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s no doubt. As a matter of fact, I had mentioned the dark circles and adrenal and thyroid conditions. You talk about different patterns of skin and different skin types. Talk a little bit about that because certain things, no doubt skin types, or you’re going to see presentations of certain things, and different things that we can see on our skin that would indicate certain things that were going on perhaps somewhere else in the body, like the gut or somewhere else.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, absolutely, well what I decided to do was to redefine skin types because instead of just categorizing skin as dry, oily, mature, sensitive, the typical skin types, I decided to redefine them and I created five different skin types. They all have human names because I see my patients, I see people as people, not just a skin issue or a skin disease, so they’re Amber, Olivia, Sage, Heath, and Emmett are my skin types. The other thing, in addition to looking at this more holistically, is each of these skin types I categorize them based upon some of the root causes behind them. I believe that there are six root causes behind skin issues, and I talk about all of this in my book, Clean Skin from Within. With each of the skin types, there’s a unique combination of those. This way, people can understand how to address the root causes because when I sit down with my patients one-on-one, it’s like solving a mystery, trying to figure out what are the root causes that are holding them back from having that really clear, clean, glowing skin.

When I was writing my book, I wanted to make it easy for people to figure that out on their own, and so that’s why I created the skin types. I created a skin quiz, and there’s actually an online version of this. It’s free, and it’s just ten questions. People can go to theskinquiz.com or they can just go to my website and they can find it there. It’s super quick and easy, and then they’ll find out which of the five skin types they are. Then in my book I talk about a two-week program to help people have more clear, glowing skin, and in Chapter 6 I talk about how to customize the two-week program based upon their skin type, so they know their skin type then they can make some adjustments that I talk about in Chapter 6. It’s like I figured out a way to reach more people and they don’t have to necessarily come in to see me. It’s a great way to get started.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, that’s perfect because so many people want to start there, no doubt about it. Give your website as well because I’m sure—and can they get your book from your website or can they get it on Amazon?

Dr. Cates:
Yes. They can go to thespadr.com, and doctor is abbreviated D-R, so it’s T-H-E-S-P-A-D-R dot com. Yeah, so you can access the quiz there, you can find out where to get my book, and lots of information.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, so talk about the types. Talk about each type so people can just kind of get an idea, and then maybe as an example take one or two types and then kind of go from there.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, absolutely, so with the five different skin types, we have—Olivia is one of the skin types and—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s my daughter’s name.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah. These names are based upon some of my patients, but they’re not necessarily—

Dr. Pompa:
I’m sure they’re thrilled about it -inaudible-.

Dr. Cates:
-inaudible- Yeah, so Olivia skin types tend to have more oily skin. They can have combination, but they do tend to be prone to acne breakouts or enlarged pores, blackheads, whiteheads, those kinds of things, so that’s Olivia. Then also there’s Emmett skin types. They tend to have more inflammatory skin issues like eczema, so there’s an immune system component underlying a lot of the—with the Emmett skin types. With the Heath skin types, it’s more of an inflammatory skin condition, so rosacea for example. Some people -inaudible- perioral dermatitis. Those kinds of skin conditions would be more of the Heath. Sage is going to be more of the people that are experiencing premature aging, a lot of excess wrinkles, sagging skin, so those are our Sage skin types.

Then Amber, a lot of Amber types have hyperpigmentation or uneven skin tone, and that’s one of their struggles, so one of the big root causes with Amber types is oxidative damage. Sun exposure, also exposure to toxins in the environment can speed up that oxidative damage that’s occurring in the body, and that can show up on our skin as age spots, liver spots, hyperpigmentation, uneven skin tone, lots of freckles, those sorts of things. Those are real briefly the five different skin types. They each have their own combination of root causes, and you talk about their root causes some too. I find that there are six root causes.

I mentioned oxidative damage as one of them and inflammation being another big one. I call it skin-flammation because it’s internal inflammation that shows up on our skin. Other ones are hormonal imbalances. Those can definitely—because you mention thyroid, and a lot of times when they say hormone imbalances people automatically think sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, which certainly can play a role in our skin health. We know that during puberty or big changes in the certain points in our lives when hormones change, people can have flare-ups of acne, for example.

Also thyroid is another hormone where if we get low thyroid function we can be more prone to dry skin. That’s one of the signs as a practitioner we look for when we’re looking for hypothyroidism is dry skin. Then on the reverse side of that, if people are hyperthyroid then their skin can start to be oily, more oily or acne prone. Also cortisol, our adrenal hormone, triggers inflammation and inflammatory skin conditions, so that’s another one of the hormonal imbalances. Definitely hormone imbalances play a big role.

Nutritional deficiencies also—I’m sure you talk about this. When you look at patients as practitioners, one of the things as more functional medicine doctors look at is signs of nutritional deficiencies on the skin, right? That’s another one.

And, of course, the gut health, and the gut microbiome and the importance of our gut health is directly related to our skin health. There’s a lot of talk about the gut microbiome, the balance of the microorganisms in our digestive tract, but there’s less talk about the skin microbiome, the skin microbiota, but the skin has its own different microorganisms that live on the skin and when that gets out of balance is a big contributing factor to skin issues; acne, eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, premature aging. Most of the chronic skin issues, part of what’s going on is the imbalance in the skin microbiota, and so part of that’s related to what you’re doing with your gut and your digestion and then part of it’s also what we do topically on the skin.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s funny. I had to give a talk about the skin and about the microbiome of the skin ironically enough, and I was able to find some studies linking, of course, the gut. We understand that it affects this, but the opposite even. This microbiome, as you just said, affects our gut microbiome, and it was cool. I am going from memory here, but they took mice and they changed their skin temperature so they literally were putting them from hot to cold, cold to hot, but what that did is it forced the microbiome to adapt. Here’s the cool part. They found that the mice were able to break through weight loss resistance, so what they said in the study was changing the microbiome of the skin changed the microbiome of the gut, which ultimately allowed for the mice to actually lose weight where they couldn’t. That was the whole study. It was pretty cool.

There was another one, but point being, I mean to your point this microbiome affects this. Now, we’re talking about microbiome. We’re talking about this bacteria, all types of bacteria, viruses, funguses, this whole ecosystem that lives on our skin. I think it’s one of the big criticisms I’ve always had about every school and daycare thing about taking the -inaudible- hand sanitizers and you’re just crushing the microbiome again and again and again, and I guess, you can speak to it better than I, we’re doing that with a lot of skin cleansers that people, women in particular I would say, use before bed, perhaps daily soap that they’re using, and even makeup. Talk a little bit about how we’re disrupting that microbiome and that it can be triggering those, obviously, skin problems that you were discussing.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, absolutely, and it is certainly a big thing. As I mentioned, part of it comes from internally what’s going on, but then also there’s the part of what are we putting externally on our skin? Like you mentioned, the hand sanitizers—we live in a germophobic society where we feel like anything that’s antimicrobial is good. Antibiotics are good. Antimicrobial soaps are good. We’ve got to kill those germs. When killing the germs, we’re also killing the probiotics, the good bacteria, and our skin really is delicate and that it needs these microorganisms to protect the skin, to keep it healthy, to keep it clear of breaking out, and when we are starting to break out that’s a sign that our skin microbiome is disrupted. What people a lot of times do is then they’ll start putting more products on. Well, a lot of these products contain antimicrobial agents that are designed to either keep the products from growing bacteria in them or to help treat what they think would be helpful to kill off bacteria, but that is all going to disrupt the skin microbiome.

Another big factor that I think a lot of people aren’t aware of is that the skin actually in its healthy state does best in a mildly acidic environment, so it does best with a lower pH, so neutral pH being 7 our skin does best with a pH in the 4-5 or 5.5 range. When using skincare products, they should be in the 4.5 to 5 pH range generally just to help the skin microbiome flourish and be healthy, and there’s actually been studies, too, on the aging effects of our skin and that if our skin pH is out of balance, if it’s too high, then our skin can age rapidly.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I know.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, so a lot of -inaudible- people are using these products on their faces that are also the pH of the products are too high. Like a bar of soap that foams up and suds up like that, that’s a sign that it has a high pH, and even water has a neutral pH of 7, which is too high for our skin, so when we rinse our face with water ideally we should be putting something on afterwards to restore it to a healthier pH, and especially for people who have skin issues, that already have inflamed skin, rosacea, acne, the premature aging, all of that, especially for those people it’s so important. Here we are, and people are doing the opposite of what they should be doing by putting on these toxic ingredients, and I mean we haven’t even touched on the idea of these hormone-disrupting chemicals and carcinogenic ingredients that are in personal care products too.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt, which disrupt the microbiome and the bacteria. You know what? Bacteria like a more acid environment just like in your gut, right? That’s an acid environment, so that’s the same with the skin, no doubt, and when you get that elevation in pH and more alkaline, just like in the gut you disrupt the microbiome. It’s funny. I mean we can go internal now and we can talk about some chemicals in this stuff too because, obviously, you developed a line without chemicals, but I have to say this from an internal perspective. One of the things I always say is if you want to age faster than anybody is elevate your glucose and insulin continually. I mean it just oxidizes the collagen.

No doubt you can tell—you can look at a smoker and know that they’re a smoker because of their skin, right; I mean severe oxidization from a chemical standpoint. No doubt you can tell your carbohydrate addicted people. You can tell people who even are skinny but with bad skin. Just because they don’t get fat this way, that doesn’t mean that they’re not elevating glucose and insulin, probably have a fatty liver, and typically destroy their collagen, so what you put in absolutely matters from that, so you can speak to that.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, and blood sugar is, I think, the one that I didn’t mention on the root causes, the six root causes. That is another one of the big root causes. As you mentioned, it’s a big aging factor because when we get too much sugar and our blood sugar’s elevated, or foods that turns into sugar and our blood sugar’s elevated, it causes glycation problems in the body where glucose will bind to proteins. In the case of skin, that’s our collagen and collagen gives our skin the texture and firmness, and so when glucose binds to it, it makes it break down and so we’ll get more wrinkles and sagging skin like what you’re talking about.

In addition, acne is the most common condition really in the world. Well, I guess it’s the 8th most prevalent disease worldwide, which is amazing that acne is that worldwide spread, but it’s definitely the #1 skin condition in the United States. With sugar, people are eating a lot of sugar and their blood sugar is increasing, and that means insulin will rise and increased insulin will trigger excess sebum production, the oils in our skin, as well as androgen activity, and so that causes people to have acne breakouts. The glycemic index of foods and balancing your blood sugar is really important. I mean, we’ve all had those acne breakouts and sometimes wonder why am I breaking out, and a lot of times it’s related to sugar. Sometimes it’s hormone imbalances, but sugar and gut health definitely play a role in that too.

Dr. Pompa:
We did an interview. Meredith, you were on the call with my daughter, and one of the things she said is what motivated her to change her diet was her acne. She took grains away, and lo and behold her acne cleared up. Of course, she went through that path to realize cause and effect. I watched my boys go through puberty, hormones, acne, but hormones don’t cause acne, right? It was like they all had to realize that it was something causing the imbalance of the hormones that was driving the acne, so they all had to realize their diet is playing a role.

My son Daniel, he talked about when he had to detox actually to get rid of his acne, so his toxic exposure, he had very high lead levels like his mother, really played a role of dysregulating his hormones and he had to go to that source to control his hormones to control his acne. Just giving our viewers and listeners the idea of we want to put the right stuff here but please, it is an internal problem. I mean, it really is, and Trevor is making that point, I think, so perfectly.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, and when we talk about hormone imbalances—I love that you’re pointing that out, because a lot of times I have women that come to see me and say, “I think my hormones are out of balance; I need hormones,” and I’ll say, “Okay, well maybe we can do some bioidentical hormones, but let’s figure out why your hormones are out of balance first.” Yes, there are changes that happen throughout our lives where our hormones will change, but there’s so much we can do with our diet and lifestyle. I’ll talk to people about their diet and their stress management, and they’re like why are you talking to me about this when it’s my hormones that are the issue? This is how you’re going to help balance your hormones. I’m not going to just give you an herb or a bioidentical hormone to make your hormones magically balance.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, people want the simple thing, Trevor. People want the simple thing, right? Here’s the other lunacy, and I’ll let you speak to this while we’re on the subject of acne. My kids did that. They got to the cause. They fixed their problem, right? However, a lot of their friends, oh they fixed their problem with Accutane, right, or Retin-A. Speak to some of those fixes, if you will, only to lead to massive problems later. Speak to that.

Dr Cates:
Right, yeah, a lot of these medications have horrible side effects. I’m not saying that medications should never be used. There is a place for medications, I think, in some cases [crosstalk] . What’s that?

Dr. Pompa:
I said there’s always a time and a place for -inaudible-.

Dr. Cates:
Yes, there is a time and a place for them. As a licensed naturopathic physician, we’re trained to be able to prescribe medications, so we know when to use them but we don’t like to use them—I don’t like to use them as a first resort. The problem is that many of these have side effects, and some of them can be debilitating if they do develop the side effects. I’ve seen it just—

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve seen it.

Dr. Cates:
– ruin people’s lives; depression from some of the acne medications and being suicidal. It’s so disturbing to see that happen. When we go back to some of these root causes, talking about gut health and addressing inflammation, and looking at these things and changing your diet and lifestyle, and there’s so much that can be addressed by doing that. If we skip over that, we’re really missing an opportunity.

It’s so great. When I see people and as I see their skin clearing up and they’re so relieved to see that and I remind them—you also mention the side benefits. Instead of side effects of getting medications if you’ve gone that route, instead you get the side benefits of having more energy, sleeping better at night, losing, getting to your ideal weight. These are the kinds of side effects that we want to have from a treatment.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt, well, Meredith, speak to some of your story because skin played a role in Meredith’s life, and matter of fact she even used some of your products.

Meredith:
Yeah, Dr. Trevor, I’ve really enjoyed a lot of your products, and it really just kind of helped me, helped to decrease some inflammation in my skin. I remember in particular I liked the oil that you had. That was really, really soothing on my skin, so can you talk about how you design those and what was the philosophy behind them?

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, absolutely, as I mentioned, I started to focus a lot on skin when I was working in certain spas. One of the things I told my patients was make sure you’re using nontoxic skincare, natural skincare products because I was aware there are so many toxins in skincare products and I wanted them to reduce that. Then they started asking me where they could get them. The reason why we want to be careful with skincare products is on average we use nine personal care products a day, which exposes us to 126 unique ingredients. I think if you start adding up the number of products you use from shampoos and conditioners to deodorants and men aftershaves, women makeup, all the different products you use, you might use more than nine. It’s a lot of ingredients we’re exposed to and, unfortunately, in the United States the FDA has not regulated personal care product ingredients very well. Where in Europe they’ve banned over a thousand ingredients in personal care products, in the United States, they’ve only banned 11 ingredients, so it’s really left up to the consumer to figure out what’s safe because manufacturers, they want to make cheap products. They want them to last a long time, and they want people to feel shiny and happy. It’s not what’s healthy, what’s best for your skin, unfortunately.

One of the things that I do is I try to educate. I’ve been educating my patients and educating with my book and everything, about why we need to reduce our toxins in skincare products. There are ingredients that are hormone-disrupting chemicals, that are carcinogenic that are in many of the personal care products you use, and I want to share a few examples because I know sometimes it’s hard to believe that this would be in our products, that these would be allowed, and I also want to remind people that skin is an organ and it’s permeable, so what you put on your skin doesn’t just stay on the surface; it actually can get absorbed, does get absorbed. That’s why people use hormone creams and hormone patches and nicotine patches on their skin because things can get absorbed.

An example is a group of chemicals that are used in so many products that are called formaldehyde releasers, and you’re not going to see formaldehyde releaser on the label. You’ll see things like DMDM hydantoin and other big long words, and what this group of chemicals has—what happens is when you apply these products to your skin, they release formaldehyde into the air around you. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen, and it’s most toxic when inhaled, so you’re breathing in formaldehyde. It’s also getting absorbed in your skincare. You could walk down the aisles of any department store, drug store, grocery store, and pick up a handful of different products. They’re probably going to have one of these formaldehyde releasers in there, the products that people are using every day. I know that a lot of manufacturers will say well, there’s not enough in there to cause harm.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what they always say.

Dr. Cates:
Yes, and that’s the thing. The problem is that everybody’s saying this, and we live in a very toxic world. We have more toxins in our environment that we’re exposed to than we ever have been because we’ve got all the new fancy chemicals that are being developed and then we have all the chemicals that have been banned that still continue to exist in our water and our soil and that might still be manufactured in China or other countries and they travel over in clouds and then rain down on us. We have more toxins in our environment than ever, and we don’t have control over toxins in certain places. Where we live, we can’t control the air we breathe when we walk outside, but we do have control over certain things like the personal care products we use and what we bring in our home, the foods we eat, so that’s where I tell people to start.

This is what I’ve been educating my patients on for a long time and about the importance of reducing toxin exposure and starting with things that you have control over like your personal care products. When I would tell my patients that, they would say, “Okay, but what products do you recommend?” so I started asking people that I knew, dermatologists and aestheticians, and what they told me really bothered me. They told me well, you have to choose between natural or effective because you can’t have both. I thought well, that’s ridiculous because I know of the healing powers of nature. I think people might just be missing out on something.

That’s when I started really digging into the research on not only nontoxic but what are the natural ingredients and components and formulations that make products effective at helping clear up the skin, help us age gracefully, and that’s when I started finding the research on the pH of the skin and the skin microbiome and also learning which natural actives, which natural ingredients and in what forms are most potent. I couldn’t find anybody that was doing what I wanted, so that’s why I created my own skincare line, The Spa Doctor -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. Grab your book behind you there because there’s a glare and I can’t see it. There you go. All right, there it is. I love the title, by the way.

Dr. Cates:
Clean Skin from Within, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, that’s awesome.

Dr. Cates:
I’m super excited about it, yeah. We’re getting great reviews, number one in a couple of categories on Amazon Bestsellers and other places too.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Dr. Cates:
We’re very excited about it, and also in addition to my two-week program and talking about toxins and how to reduce them and natural alternatives, I also have recipes in the book so lots of delicious recipes for foods to eat as well as do-it-yourself skincare recipes, so it’s lots of fun stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. I mean that’s why you’re getting good reviews. You have a lot to offer, no doubt about it. Yeah, so Meredith, I know you have more questions because this is your love. Look at her. You can just tell.

Meredith:
All these questions. We haven’t quite dug into the food component, and I’m wondering—I know you’ve mentioned there are some great foods for our skin and then some that aren’t so good, so can you kind of explain that a little bit more?

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, well I touched on one. As far as foods that aren’t good for the skin, I kind of touched on the idea of sugar or foods that turn to sugar and how those aren’t good for our skin. Sugar really is one of the biggest trigger foods for skin. If there’s only one thing that you can try to cut out or reduce to help with your skin, I would suggest at least starting there.

Another big trigger food are dairy products, and they tend to really be one of the biggest things, especially for people with acne issues but also other skin issues. For some people, it’s all dairy products, and for some people are able to identify certain types of dairy, skim milk being the worst especially for people with acne. I think that’s probably because you’re also taking out the fat that helps with blood sugar so maybe that’s part of the reason why skim milk is particularly an issue, so I would be careful. Those are two that I would be careful of just because they’re pro-inflammatory foods.

Inflammation is such a big trigger for skin issues. Especially when people are doing my two-week program, I’m trying to reduce, get rid of all of those big trigger foods and those pro-inflammatory foods and instead replace with things that are actually going to really help heal the gut and provide antioxidants and great solutions. Good foods are going to be things like avocados, which have great fats, monounsaturated fats. We need good healthy fats for our skin. Our skin cells really need those good fats and—

Dr. Pompa:
I agree.

Dr. Cates:
Trans fats, hydrogenated oils, we want to get rid of those and using things like avocados, avocado oil is a nice alternative. They also have great antioxidants in there too. People don’t need to overdo it. It’s not that more is better. An avocado a day is plenty. People don’t need to do more than that. In some people half of an avocado a day is plenty as well.

Another one of my favorite foods is wild Alaskan salmon because wild salmon has those beneficial omega-3s that are anti-inflammatory as well as containing astaxanthin. Astaxanthin is a potent antioxidant that protects the skin from the inside out from oxidative damage, and it’s one of the things that gives it that pink color. There are other nutrients in wild salmon that are also great for the skin. I’m saying, of course, wild because you’re not going to get the same benefits from farm-raised salmon, and then also with farm-raised you’re going to be getting more PCBs and other environmental contaminants.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what, here’s a couple—in my talk I found some maybe these foods would shock people, but the burnt on—let’s say you burn something, burn your hamburger on the grill, caution with grilled foods. The HCAs, as they’re called, come off of there and they’re cancer causing, but, interestingly, I found studies showing how oxidative they are to the skin and how they break down collagen, so there’s one maybe some people are surprised about. What was the other one? A lot of the gluten-free products.

Dr. Cates:
That plays into the glycation issues, -inaudible- yeah, certainly. Grilled vegetables don’t have the same effect, though. It’s grilled meats that have those problems, so if you’re going to do something on the grill maybe skewer veggies.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, it’s the proteins where these are forming and then we’re ingesting them. Then the other one was a lot of these gluten-free products, beware. They’re higher glucose drivers than the regular products, if you will, so people reaching for gluten-free just because it’s a hot-selling point today, especially probably for a lot of our viewers and listeners, but be cautious. The potato starches and the corn starches, I mean there are so many super sugars now, as they’re known, that drive glucose and really even more than, say, regular wheat. Yeah, so just some surprises. That’s awesome.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, and gluten can definitely be one of the trigger foods for skin issues but, like you’re saying, you’re not just replacing gluten with gluten-free items. You still have to be careful because they’re still going to play into the glycemic index issues, the increase in the blood sugar and all that comes along with that, as well as just some of them are so heavily processed and there are hidden ingredients. I’ll walk into certain grocery stores and I’ll see big gluten-free section and then I’ll look at the label and just think oh my gosh, there are all these people that are buying these products thinking oh, I’m being good by shopping gluten-free and giving these to my family and not realizing how much processed ingredients are in there.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’re kind of hearing the same thing. Remember back in the day it was well, hey, at least it’s low-fat, right? Then they’re sitting there eating their yogurt, right? It was sugar loaded, which is actually even a bigger problem. We’re hearing the same thing now. Well, at least it’s gluten-free and there they are with their cookie or ice cream, whatever it is, and it’s the same thing. It’s just people use it like justification. At least it’s this and gosh.

Dr. Cates:
Just get back to eating more veggies. That’s the thing that everybody will—we need more vegetables. We need more antioxidants. We need more fresh food.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, people go, oh yeah, I know that, and they’d rather eat their gluten-free bagel, yeah.

Meredith:
I’m curious too, Dr. Trevor, what are your thoughts on fasting? I know Dr. Pompa used that a lot for clients who have skin challenges. Do you appropriate that at all?

Dr. Cates:
Fasting? It’s not something that I recommend for everyone, but I think it can be great for certain people and at certain times. I always am cautious with people because I see a lot of very sick people. People come see me in my practice. They’re not just sort of like hmm, maybe I should do something different; they’re usually like multiple issues including skin issues, and so I usually need to build them up before doing a fast. I do a fast once a year, so yeah; I think it can be great when you’re in the right state of health.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s funny. This particular client I had this morning, we started doing one 24-hour fast a week and it was the only time that, during the fast, she could actually close her hands. Then this was another client. Then we started her on actual partial fasting where we actually do between 500 and 1,000 calories, and we’re doing that once a month, and lo and behold that client yesterday, during the partial fast is the only time that all of her—hers is autoimmune driven, but her skin issues actually clear up, and then she starts introducing food again now they’re coming back but it’s lessening. An interesting—

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, that is interesting.

Dr. Pompa:
A fast doesn’t necessarily mean we have to go just water, although I love water fasting. Don’t get me wrong. However, there’s many different types of fasts because, as you point out, different needs for different reasons.

Dr. Cates:
Right, and certainly a 24-hour fast is very different than a 10-day fast, so a lot of people could do a 24-hour fast that wouldn’t be ready to do a week-long fast.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, every time this gal does one she can literally wake up—her hands, she’s not able to do anything, and her ankles don’t swell, but she’s getting more efficient as we go on.

Dr. Cates:
Right, I think so many people get to a point where everything that they’re eating is inflaming them and it becomes—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s most of my clients.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, they’re becoming more and more limited in what they can eat, and so I would think that fasting could be a good thing to do while you’re healing the gut and addressing some of the issues so that people aren’t reacting to everything they eat because that’s not a normal response. That’s not what we want.

Dr. Pompa:
The clients that, not just myself but my practitioners and doctors see, it’s impossible to heal their gut without fasting them. It’s just you’re never going to heal a gut by just throwing bacteria down there, and fasting, multiple types of fasting in some sort, is the way, number one, to rest, number two, to reach the microbiome, and number three, to down regulate the inflammation without the change of the genome, the epigenetics, so multiple ways we use that. The skin, give our viewers and listeners just some things that they should do. If you had to pick three things they should start doing right now, what is it? I mean boom, boom, boom because people, you know this Trevor, if it’s not simple enough they’ll walk away and say this was great information and they’ll do nothing.

I’ll start with one. Get your book because that’s an action step that puts it in your face every day, and then you have somewhere where you can go and inquire more information. Get her book. There’s my one. Now, go ahead. You give them three action steps for better skin.

Dr. Cates:
Yeah, and the book I’ve put years of research and practice experience into that, so I share everything that I have my patients start with so there’s so much great information there plus the recipes, so definitely it’s very much a—I explain why and how and what they need to be doing, so it’s certainly a great place to start.

Then as far as skincare products, start looking at the ingredients in your skincare products. I have a list of 20 ingredients in my book of the worst ingredients you definitely want to avoid and why, so start looking at those, at your skincare products, and figure out how you can start transitioning at least the ones you use every day to something more natural and nontoxic. Then also looking at things like the pH because just because it’s nontoxic doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good for your skin, which is a big thing that I think a lot of people are learning. I didn’t even know that as a naturopathic doctor. It’s something that—yeah, so I would say that.

We’ve talked about blood sugar and how important that is. I would say that’s one to really think about. What are you eating? How is it impacting your blood sugar? How can you maintain a healthier blood sugar throughout the day? It’s not just eating one thing, but it’s on a day-to-day basis and an ongoing basis what is your blood sugar doing. Go and get your blood sugar tested, your fasting blood sugar, your hemoglobin A1c. See where you are because you should be in an ideal range with your fasting blood sugar, not just a normal range, so like an 80-85 would be the upper end of a healthy number for fasting blood sugar. I would say that, look at blood sugar. Also, do things to help support your gut, if it’s just eating more fiber in your diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, fiber, feed the bacteria out. It’s actually the best way to do it. Well, listen, I want to thank you for coming on. I know that we’re going to get a lot of viewers—every time it’s skin, skin and hair. By the way, ladies, hair—it’s really the same as the skin. I mean it’s an extension so what you do in here for your skin is ultimately going to affect your hair too, so—

Dr. Cates:
Another side benefit.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. Go ahead, Meredith, take over. Thanks, Trevor.

Meredith:
Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Thank you so much, Dr. Trevor, for joining the show. Amazing information and everyone thanks for tuning in. Have a great weekend and we’ll catch you next time. Bye-bye.

167: Why Healthcare Has Failed You

Transcript of Episode 167: Why Healthcare Has Failed You

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Dr. William Davis

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 167. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course, and today we welcome very special guest, Dr. William Davis. Now, you may know Dr. Davis from his book, Wheat Belly, but today we’re going to—we’re really excited to dig into his new book called Undoctored. Before we jump in, we have a lot of exciting things to talk about. Let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Davis.

William Davis, M.D. is a New York Times best-selling author and a cardiologist who advocates unique, insightful, and cutting-edge strategies to help individuals discover the hidden wisdom within them. His blog wheatbelly.com has been visited by millions of people. Dr. Davis also shared his passion for wheat-free living on national television shows, including the Dr. Oz Show and CBS This Morning. His Wheat Belly Total Health program has become a public television special now airing nationwide. He lives in Wisconsin, which you said it’s a little dreary there today, Dr. Davis, but thanks so much for joining us on Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you.

Dr. Davis:
Thank you. Given the weather, this might be the bright point of my day.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, always. Listen, first off, I want to thank you because you did bring the dangers of wheat to the forefront. You really did. I mean, many of us were talking about it, but it was your book, I think, that really got people to understand it. Here’s the one analogy I think that was really, I think, an amazing analogy that got people to understand even the dangers of raising glucose with whole grains. It was the comparing the slice of whole grain toast or wheat bread, whatever it was, to a can of soda and comparing the glucose rise. I think people just got it. I use that analogy to this day, and I still give you credit in the book for that analogy. Thanks for all those things, doc.

Dr. Davis:
Sure. That was an easy argument to make. There is some more complicated arguments, of course. If we did nothing more than fuss about the carbohydrate content, amylopectin content, it’s an easy argument to make.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. I think the other thing you did really well in Wheat Belly was just the history, getting people to understand the history of wheat. Why gluten’s a problem today, and it wasn’t, whatever, before the 1970s, the hybridization that occurred, Norman Borlaug. I think that was just well done. Thank you for that, but with that said, I hope your next book, Undoctored, really stirs the pot even more. I do. This, to me, hits a subject that really needs to get put out there.

You probably already are getting criticized for this book. People are saying why? What do you mean, Dr. Pompa? Tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write a book, Undoctored, and what that even means.

Dr. Davis:
I’ll tell you what I saw through the six years or so of the Wheat Belly experience. The original Wheat Belly book, of course, as you talked about, highlighted what agribusiness did to the wheat plant. It turned it into a high-yield, semi-dwarf strain that became—it amplified its adverse health effects on humans, and if you got rid of it, people enjoyed extraordinary health benefits. It became clear that we had to extend that conversation to all grains, all seeds of grasses. That’s what grains are. They’re all seeds of grass, of course, and you get even further benefits. Then it also became clear that people do even better by addressing all the nutritional deficiencies that were caused by grains but persisted with grain elimination like magnesium and iron and also addressed some common nutritional deficiencies like iodine and omega-3 fatty acids and magnesium.

What I saw, as I further got into this conversation, extended the Wheat Belly conversation, was that hundreds of health conditions were reversing every single day among many, many people. What really got my attention was people would come to me, and say I told my doctor I was going to follow this Wheat Belly lifestyle, and he said it was stupid. He said it was going to kill me and cause heart disease, and I’d get fat. I went back to him, and I was 57 pounds lighter. I was freed of acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, eczema, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, type 2 diabetes, obesity, migraine headaches, etc., and he didn’t know what to make of it. What I saw was that people were becoming healthy in spite of their doctors. I’m talking about the mainstream conventional doctors who like to prescribe things like Lipitor, and send them to the hospital for an MRI, and have to see a cardiologist for a heart catheterization. I’m talking about the large mainstream practice of medicine.

I saw people having spectacular successes in health in spite of their doctors. It became clear to me what we really had was the means to restore health across a huge swath of health conditions without the help of the conventional healthcare system, and so that’s why I’ve called this approach, this what I hope to be an enlightening conversation, Undoctored. How to be healthy without the doctor, without the hospital, without big pharma, without the medical device industry, without all those people who profit from your misfortune or who profit—and this is worse, who profit from giving you misinformation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. With the title and the subtitle being, hey, being smarter than your doctor, I’m sure you’ve taken some hits already. How’s that going?

Dr. Davis:
Not as many as you think. As you know, the chiropractic community, the naturopaths, the functional medicine community pay attention to these things. They have their finger on the pulse of what’s new, what’s exciting, what’s natural. My colleagues, that is the gastroenterologist, the primary care docs, the cardiologists, the thoracic surgeons, the huge community of physicians don’t really pay that much attention to this stuff. I was privy to the hospital board meetings and meetings in my division, and I was on faculty at university for some time. They are not concerned with health, what’s going on in nutrition. They’re concerned with how do we grow our thoracic surgery program 18% this year? We only had 650 bypass procedures last year. We only had 8,000 heart catheterizations, and we only did 4,000 MRIs. How do we grow this? How do we increase our market share?

It has nothing to do with health. It has everything to do with growing revenues from healthcare. That’s why I say the enemy of healthcare is not sickness. It’s healthy people.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, I read that, and I was like, boy, I really agree with that 100%. I love that. Going back to the grain, I think there is—Meredith, help me on this. Who’s the gentleman now—he just wrote a book. Joe interviewed him, and my doctors have asked me about him. What’s the book called? He’s talking about grains, and saying that it’s not as bad as we think. Here’s how to put healthy grains back into your diet.

Do you know who I’m talking about? The brain’s slipping me. I’ll have it within a moment here. What’s your argument to that? I mean, how much grain? Can some people have some grain better? Talk about that.

Dr. Davis:
There’s a lot of issues in there, and there is variation. You’re right. There is variation in the individual experience. I started in this whole journey because of coronary disease. That’s what I did for a living, right? I did heart catheterizations; put stents in, did angioplasty, those kinds of things. I mean, heart disease is life threatening.

I took it another step, though. I started tracking very early levels of coronary disease using a device called a CT heart scan. This is going back 20 some years. What I saw was, if you did the conventional things to prevent heart disease—these are things like statin drugs, cut your fat, everything in moderation, all that stuff. Heart disease progresses, gallops forward at a horrifying rate. Twenty-five to 30% per year if you track it by a heart scan score. We’ve helped publish some of those data.

My colleague said, well, just don’t track it anymore. Just rely on your patients to call when they have chest pain or if they die. I find that so offensive that I started—look for other solutions. It led me down—as you know, when you ask different questions, you often get different answers. The answers I got were things like vitamin D, right, folded vitamin D into the equation. I saw incredible changes in heart scan scores. They started to actually drop, and I mean a lot.

The number one cause for coronary disease, heart attack, sudden cardiac death, need for angioplasty bypass surgery, it’s not high cholesterol. You and I know that. That’s a semi-fiction. That’s a highly profitable semi-fiction, but the most common cause is an excess of small LDL particles. Small LDL particles are unusually long-lasting. They last five to seven days as compared to 24 hours of large LDL particles caused by fat consumption. They’re highly adherent to connective tissue. They are very oxidation prone. They’re very glycation prone.

In other words, small LDLs are very different animal than large LD, and of course, the cholesterol panel doesn’t tell you anything about that. They have to actually measure it. I ask myself what foods—and this was well-grounded in the literature, scientific literature. What foods cause your body to form an excess of small LDL particles (two things, grains and sugars)? They last a week, so it takes 2 slices of whole wheat bread, 1 bagel, a bowl of cereal, of high-fiber cereal, whatever, to have heart disease risk dramatically increased 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. That’s all it takes. Now, that’s just the perspective coronary disease risk.

How about autoimmune disease? You now know that the gliadin protein of wheat, rye, and barley and the zein protein of corn is the initiating factor in many if not most cases of autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes in children and rheumatoid arthritis. Now, that’s a long-lasting durable effect. In other words, it doesn’t take—you don’t have to eat it every day, three times a day. You can have it on occasion, and you can trigger all the domino effect that leads to autoimmune diseases. Dysbiosis, if we disrupt bowel flora through grain consumption, you just have to eat it once in a while, and you start the process of disrupting bowel flora. There are many effects that are not just momentary but long-lasting.

People who say grains are okay in moderation, what the USDA should be saying is we’re not even sure this should be on a human diet at all because it’s responsible for so many health conditions. We’re not even sure. Of course, the USDA that drafts the food pyramid, food plate is not in the business of protecting the consumer. They’re in the business of protecting agribusiness. That is their charge. The SEC regulates the investment industry. They don’t protect investors necessarily. USDA does not protect consumers. They protect agribusiness. Yet, they’re the people telling us what and how to eat.

When people say we can have grains in moderation, that is—if you look at the science, if you look what happened, it is such an ignorant statement, and the opposite is true, of course. Those of us who are grain-free enjoy magnificent health and upon re-exposure to grains after you’ve been grain-free become very ill. It’s very common, for instance, to have diarrhea, bloating, a return of autoimmune joint inflammation, skin rashes, eczema, psoriasis, neurological dysfunction from grain re-exposure. I’ve seen that so many times. People are bombarded with that opposite message, right, everything in moderation. Grains are the best thing. No. Grains have no role in a human diet. Now, that raises some issues about sustainability, etc. That’s a whole other conversation, but from the perspective of individual human health, I know of no strategy that is more powerful than elimination of all grains.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say from a—my doctors and myself, we would agree that you can take sugar out of someone’s diet and get a positive response, but when you take grains out of their diet, you get even a more powerful positive response. That’s true, whether it’s from aches or pains. I’m not just talking wheat. I can even go beyond it because, again, there’s multiple problems with grains beyond gluten, and I wrote an article called “Beyond Gluten.”

John Douillard, he wrote a book. That was it. That was the interview, Meredith, that he did with Joe. It was basically, going through a different history of grains, etc.

Meredith:
-inaudible- practitioner. He’s -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. This book was Eat Wheat. That’s what it was. It’s Dr. John Douillard. Yeah. I mean, I have to say, I mean, it was quite shocking. I know Joe interviewed him. I watched the interview. I haven’t had time to cite some of his sources, and I wanted to do that.

Joe’s title is “How to Safely Bring Wheat Back into Your Diet.” No, that wasn’t Joe’s title. I don’t even know. I’ll be with Joe Mercola next week, and I’m going to ask him his take on it. I know it caused a stir. That’s why I wanted to bring it up here. I’m not saying on the line with that—aligning with that thought process, but I just wanted to tell you that it’s out there. There is someone saying, hey, there’s a way to eat healthy, more ancient wheat. I can tell you that, most people who are already challenged, you take grains away, and no doubt they do better. Meredith, I think you have some questions. Fire away.

Meredith:
Echoing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You’re echoing. You’re echoing a little bit.

Meredith:
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I was just adding to this from personal experience as well. I had followed a macrobiotic diet for years prior to meeting you, Dr. Pompa, where I was eating brown rice porridge for dinner and millet for lunch, buckwheat for dinner or for breakfast, and just lots of different grains in my diet and then removing them. After I me you, I learned about the inflammation they were creating and these different health issues that they could’ve been linked to. I felt amazing.

Then even just more recently, literally, probably in the past month or so, I’ve added in a little bit of organic corn chips. I had some organic popcorn last night and a little bit of millet toast here and there. I haven’t noticed major symptoms at all. Yeah. I’m curious, Dr. Davis, too what your thoughts are in just small amounts for those of us who are healthier. Is that really going to have a negative impact do you think?

Dr. Davis:
Meredith, there’s no question there is a range of effects. At the worst end of the spectrum is modern high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat with the change forms of gliadin enriched in wheat germ agglutinin or rich in phytates that block mineral absorption, desiccated with glyphosate, herbicide. That’s at the very—less harmful, we get into the traditional wheat strains. We get into corn and then oats and millet, sorghum, etc. Do we ever reach a point where grains are completely benign and harmless and perhaps actually beneficial? There’s a mixture of effects.

Rice is probably the most benign. Rice is almost completely starch. It means that you’re going to be overexposed potentially to starch and amylopectin effects, which include such things as small LDL provocation, high blood sugar, and all the problems of glycation, glucose modification of proteins. We have the added issue that some people are very sensitive to the proteins of grains, and even though rice is less than 1% protein, there is wheat germ agglutinin in rice. It’s in rice, but it’s still called wheat germ agglutinin because the structure is identical to that found in wheat. Wheat germ agglutinin, unrelated to gluten, it’s called agglutinin. Because when it contacts red blood, it causes red blood cell clumping or clotting, and so it’s called wheat germ agglutinin.

There’s a little bit of that in rice, and some people are so sensitive. People with celiac disease, for instance, or a lot of intestinal sensitivities like irritable bowel syndrome, they will react to rice. There’s also a lot of allergic phenomenon to rice, to some of the proteins. Of course, allergies only occur to proteins. Even though it’s less than 1% protein, you can still have—and they are life threatening by the way. Not uncommon a response in infants to rice.

Now, we had this also. The most recently raised issue of arsenic in rice that becomes an issue if you consume rice with some regularity. We don’t think we see arsenic toxicity in the U.S., but they do see it in Bangladesh and in India where they consume a lot more rice. They get also some arsenic from their drinking water. Point being, that’s the—those are the problems with the most benign grain of all, rice. What happen to you if you had an occasional little bit of rice? Probably nothing beyond just provocation of small LDL, a little bit of coronary risk for at least a few days and a little bit of glycation and perhaps some dysbiosis, but you’ll survive it.

I see grains even in the most benign end of the spectrum as, to some degree, some kind of compromise in health. I think we’ve cut so many compromises in health that if you go outside in your own backyard, your neighbor is spraying Roundup on his weeds. You drink the water, and it’s unfiltered at the restaurant. It’s got pharmaceutical drug residues. It’s got chloride, chlorine. It’s got fluoride. In other words, we’re cutting so many— BPA because you didn’t know that the hard plastics they use to serve you water at some function. We’re compromised in so many ways that, whenever we can identify a problem source, we try to minimize it. To me, grains, no matter how you cut it represent some kind of compromise in health. I think most of us, as we learn all these issues, it’s not a compromise you have to make.

Meredith:
Yeah. It’s a great point. I think, however, sometimes too—what about the joy factor of eating some crusty French baguette perhaps that comes from emmer wheat that hasn’t been hybridized. Then, Dr. Pompa, too, I want you to discuss your diet variation concept in theory. How that could tie into not having any grains at all versus the diet variation, adding in some different ingredients to promote the good gut flora. Just have that balance in our bodies of having that variation of different foods.

Dr. Pompa:
Even with diet variation with my clients, they are so sick. What she’s talking about is we do a combination of putting people in ketosis and then a higher healthy carbohydrate diet. The majority if not all of my clients still can’t tolerate grain as they’re raising their carbohydrates. Typically, they do it either with some more berries, or something like sweet potatoes, or something, Meredith, as we discussed. They raise their carbohydrates with different sources. Again, rarely can they use grain because they just can’t tolerate it. I mean, that says something to us healthy people too, at least it does to me.

Dr. Davis:
You guys raise a very important point that becomes a hot button issue for people who are low-carb, or ketotic, or Atkins. That is, if you eliminate or sharply curtail carbohydrate sources in the diet, you’ve also curtailed prebiotic fibers, and I agree with you that there’s something wonderful to be gained by cultivating bowel flora by ingesting a variety of prebiotic fibers. I hate to admit this, but there’s actually something good in grains. That’s the amylose and the arabinoxylan prebiotic fibers. When somebody goes grain-free, they cut out about three or four grams of prebiotic fibers they were getting from grains, and so there actually is a downside. It’s important that we alert people, and if you do go grain-free, get your prebiotic fibers from other sources.

I agree with you. Even further, cultivate bowel flora by using a variety of prebiotic fiber sources like the galacto-oligosaccharides from legumes and the fructooligosaccharides from chicory and the other source of—I think you and I are seeing this wonderful restoration of bowel flora. Thereby, metabolic improvements like drops in triglycerides, drops in blood pressure, drops in insulin, drops in blood sugar, enhanced emotional health, reduced anxiety, deeper dreams, more vivid dreams, kid-like dreams. I agree. Cultivation of bowel floral via prebiotic fiber is a crucial part of this equation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. When you look at the American Indians as an example and that goes into many other ancient cultures, in the wintertime, they were in ketosis, meats and fats, remarkable how low-carb. Then as spring and summer came, they started changing their diets to a lot of the things you just said. Tiger nuts, I mean, they would chew these tiger nuts, these acorns. They would make these flours from these things, and get this fiber in throughout this monthly period, throughout the summer. There you have it. A lot of the foods, some of those root vegetables they were eating more in the summer versus the winter but gave them that fiber that their microbiome actually needed to survive.

Meredith:
Yeah, very interesting to some point. You talked about the—you mentioned the ketogenic diet, Dr. Pompa. I’m wondering, Dr. Davis, what your thoughts are on the ketogenic diet or the Paleo diet, if you ascribe to a certain diet or just what your thoughts are there.

Dr. Davis:
I use ketosis. I’ve been a big fan of ketosis as a means of accelerating weight loss, breaking weight loss plateaus, enhancing physical and emotional performance. Now you have, of course, this notion, exogenous ketones. That’s really interesting. There’s always this caveat. If you become ketotic, you must address bowel flora via prebiotic fiber supplementation. The only prebiotic fiber sources are all carbohydrate sources.

We used to see this, right, in the Atkins people. They said I did great. I lost 73 pounds. I’m no longer diabetic, but then two years into it, they’re constipated. They’re having these vague abdominal pains. Their triglycerides start to go up. Their blood sugar starts to go up. Their blood pressure goes up, and they start to gain weight. Of course, we’d say you’re not sticking to the diet. They’d say, yes, I am. It was our failure to recognize that it was that they had deprived bowel flora and had developed dysbiosis, so part of the entire equation, no matter what we labeled the diet, has to be this effort to address bowel flora.

A lot of the Paleo people are my friends. These are people I have a lot of respect for like Robb Wolf and Loren Cordain. These are great people. There’s a lot of fuzziness at the edges as it becomes more popular, and we have these nice people advocating some really iffy things like unlimited honey and maple syrup consumption, which a very destructive thing by the way. You be careful. You got to be careful about what’s being called Paleo. I think if we go to the people who really know what they’re talking about like Loren Cordain or Robb Wolf. These guys know their stuff, and I respect their opinion.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I agree with you. What’s your feeling on protein and how much? That’s a whole other topic as far as mTOR, a high protein, its effect on the cell, etc.?

Dr. Davis:
As you know, you can overdo protein. It’s easy to do. What I advocate is just unrestricted fat intake, and I’ve never seen any ill effect from that. What I did for about 15 years was I consulted on something called complex hyperlipidemias. These are the people with triglycerides of 1400, HDLs of 10, had uncommon postprandial disorders. They had genetic variance like [echo] E4, echo E2, echo EB variations. You will see the people who have problems with fat consumption, but they are so uncommon as to really not even be a mainstream issue. The vast majority of people have problems with carbohydrate consumption.

The whole issue with protein—I’m not sure anybody’s actually advocating protein overconsumption. I think there might be some debate about what represents an ideal protein consumption for purposes of longevity, of maintaining youthfulness, etc. What I’ve done is I always—here’s my simplistic answer. Whenever in doubt, mimic what nature does. If we go back to the way that Native Americans used to eat, or native Canadians, or the Hudza, or the [Muthzas], or the people who really lived off the land hunting and gathering, how did they manage protein? They didn’t. They killed an animal, ate its liver, ate its brain, shared the heart, shared the thyroid gland, ate the meat, ate the fat, ate some fruit, ate some nuts, dug in the dirt for underground—and to me, that’s how we probably should manage our lives too. That is not be so worried about macronutrient composition, relative composition. I think it’s become a bit of a hot button issue because so many people, even when we tell them don’t worry about eating fat, eat it; they still can’t get beyond that fat phobia. I see that as the common tripping point.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think that’s less of our viewers. It’s funny you said that because I had the opportunity to go into the bush, and meet a tribe that just recently came out of the mountains, I mean, remarkable experience. First thing I said when I got there is where’s all the men? It was in the morning, and there was no men. They were off hunting since 4 or 4:30 in the morning. The women, a portion of them go out gathering. A portion of them watch the children, right, so I experienced this. The other thing I experienced was the men went out all day without eating, and they would just go and go. They said no. They say it slows them down.

Dr. Davis:
You mean no pasta carb-loading?

Dr. Pompa:
No. Then they come back. Then, like you said, if they get an animal, they feast, and it’s three hours. Meredith, I think we lost you. Yeah. I don’t know. I can hear you. Can you hear me? There she is. There you are. You disappeared momentarily, Meredith.

Meredith:
Oh, I’m back.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re back. Anyways, they would come back and eat this meal that is a very social gathering. It probably lasted three hours. The point being, to your point, is that they weren’t monitoring their protein either, right? I mean, they were just eating. I’m sure they consumed far too much protein. What I always say is don’t eat less. Eat less often. Now we’re emulating what, really, these tribes and very healthy cultures did.

Then I think it changes the physics. We don’t have a study showing that if you eat once or twice a day how much protein. The innate intelligence in the body I think can handle more protein if you’re only eating one time a day. Anyways, I think there’s a lot of room for debate here. I’ll get in an argument with Joe Mercola and Ron Rosedale on this. I think that these things change the game, so emulate what ancient cultures did and healthy ones at that. I agree with you, doc. I love it. That’s great.

Listen, what else did this book bring out? I mean, I think it’s going to bring out a lot of new things. Talk about some of the new concepts that you brought out in this new book, Undoctored.

Dr. Davis:
First, I wanted to cultivate this idea that the doctor, meaning the conventional practicing doctor who thinks that you should submit to his paternalistic orders—take this prescription. Shut up. Don’t ask me your stupid questions. Come back in six months. That’s unacceptable. In this day and age where we have access to so much information, social media, collaborative type functions, we should no longer just take the orders from the doctor who is often not really working for you, but is working for his own—I’m in Milwaukee where the vast majority of doctors are employed by hospital systems. Many of these are still my friends, and they tell me we’re told the more revenue we generate for our hospital system, the larger my end of quarter bonus.

What happens is somebody goes to the ER or the hospital, their doctors. Let’s say for a shoulder pain. They’re told, well, we can’t tell. It might be a sign of heart disease. I can’t be responsible for you because first sign of heart disease sometimes is sudden cardiac death and all that stuff they say to scare the hell out of you. You end up with a stress thallium test, $4,000. You end up with a heart catheterization for a total cost of about $25,000. Because you complained of headaches, you see a neurologist who does an extensive evaluation, including an MRI. You leave for a shoulder ache with a 90,000, $140,000 total healthcare bill. I’ve seen this happen countless times.

The healthcare system has become predatory, and it’s after your insurance money. I want to alert people to that. There are, of course, people who are advocates, primarily in the functional medicine community, the chiropractic community, the operative health community. These are the people we turn to. Not to the gastroenterologist. Not to the endocrinologist. Not to the surgeons. Not to my colleagues, the cardiologists. Not to the conventional primary care community because they’re too deeply mired in this profit, health for-profit idea. That’s one.

I’m speaking to the choir, to you two. We now know that real health wisdom is coming from these kinds of conversations. It’s coming from online collaborations, coming from websites that collect data like patientslikeme.com, and CureTogether, and what I hope my website will become over time. It’s not launched yet, undoctored.com. It’s places people can go for real honest information. We’re not selling drugs. We’re not selling procedures. I’m not trying to direct you to the big hospital down the road that does heart transplantation and implantable defibrillators and all that kind of multi-tens of thousands of dollar procedures, so we want to collaborate on health.

I look back. How much smarter are we than we were ten years ago because of collaboration online? I know all of us I think have raised the bar on sophisticated discussions about nutrition and health so much. Think what it’s going to be—what’s going to happen another ten years because we’re collaborating through these kinds of venues, and so I want to encourage people. While my colleagues say I don’t give a damn what Dr. Google says, we say no. The future is crowdsourced wisdom. When you put 1,000, 10,000 people together with varied interest and experiences, you get answers that are superior to the 1 presumed expert who might call himself a gastroenterologist or a cardiologist. You get better answers from the crowd often. Particularly when you ask pointed answers.

Then lastly, what I saw was—I drew from the cumulative Wheat Belly experience. For me, it was only six basic—not to say there’s only six strategies for health and for every issue. For the vast majority of product health conditions—whether we label it rheumatoid arthritis, or lupus, or hypertension, or coronary disease, or migraine headaches, or plantar fasciitis, or polymyalgia rheumatica, no matter what we labeled it the vast majority of chronic conditions that were non-genetic, non-traumatic, and noninfectious but common chronic health conditions, the vast majority respond to these six—and these are things you already know about. No wheat. No grains, a cap on carbohydrate exposure, omega-3 fatty acid supplementation, iodine supplementation, magnesium, cultivation of bowel flora. You do those handful of things, and something happens.

I call it the 2 plus 2 equals 11 effect. You put them together. You get this wonderful, powerful synergy. Most powerful synergy coming from grain elimination coupled with vitamin D , by the way, and then thirdly, cultivation of bowel flora. There’s something absolutely spectacular about that combination. It’s a synergistic combination of basic strategies, which are largely free or minimal cost, and yet, free you from the tyranny of the healthcare system.

Dr. Pompa:
Don’t you think their greatest tool in the healthcare system—because they are looking at bottom line dollars. Fear, fear is their greatest thing. Even our viewers here, most of our viewers and we have many followers would agree with every word we’re saying. They get number one killer in America, medication, right? I mean, we know these things. I mean, they know these things.

However, I have discussions with many of them and receive their emails and so does Meredith. It’s like, well, I went to my doctor. He basically scared the crap out of them, and they ended up one or two medications with the thing of, well, I take this. I have to take this statin because—I mean, that’s the strategy. They’re able to use fear as leverage to fool even educated people.

Dr. Davis:
Absolutely. One of my favorite lines, favorite because I hated it so much, was one I heard repeated to me by patients many, many, many times, and that was he said I was a walking time bomb. You know what? I’ve met walking time bombs before. You know what? They’re not that common, so this is very common.

The cholesterol treatment issue is a very hot button issue because it’s touched so many people. People will come in with a higher cholesterol, and of course, the primary care doctor or cardiologist will say, “John, you’re a walking time bomb.” You can’t make that determination from a cholesterol panel. There’s absolutely nothing on a cholesterol panel that can label a person a walking time bomb, but they will use that over and over and over. It’s their expedient way to twist your arm into taking a statin drug or, even worse now, submitting to the injectable, many thousands of dollars every month cholesterol drugs. What they see is a path to revenues.

Dr. Pompa:
How do doctors get away with that still when there’s really no study that shows that total cholesterol is really the problem? We know that particle size, the particles, that’s a bigger issue. How are they doing this, doc? I mean, they’re flying with this, and still in the face of what real science is showing.

Dr. Davis:
As you know, we can exchange information in milliseconds, but human attitudes and beliefs don’t change in milliseconds. It changes over decades. The statin drug industry has spent over $2 billion in marketing. They call it clinical research, but we call it marketing. That’s what they use, a salesforce. I practiced for 25 years. I can tell you, until I put a stop to it, I’d have beautiful sales reps coming into my office every day, girls and guys, who were very persuasive in their sales pitches. They provided the bulk of education to my colleagues. If you’re a middle-aged guy with a receding hairline, a big gut, and you’re tired, and a beautiful woman walks in in a miniskirt, and says, “Doc, we’re going to pay for a week long, all-expense paid visit to Orlando where we’re going to talk about statin drugs,” guess what you do? That’s human nature, and it works.

We hear about it in the drug industry, but I’ll tell you where it’s worse, in the medical device industry. When I was in the cath lab doing a lot of procedures, as many as ten a day, you’re going through hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment all the time, all the time, and so you became the hot—this focus of attention of the product reps who made a lot of money and sold a lot of very valuable product. It’s even worse now. You don’t hear anything about that part because it’s hidden behind closed doors at the operating room and the cath labs and other procedural rooms. It’s really bad there. That industry hires a very effective, very sexy, very good looking, very persuasive and smart salesforce. That’s how you get at this community of doctors. Now, as more doctors are female, it’s less effective because a female is a little better at blocking that sort of nonsense than the guys are just from human nature, but they’re very effective at it.

What do you do? When an ophthalmologist makes $2.5 million a year by doing lots and lots and lots of unnecessary or questionable procedures, all their injections they do, the vitreous of the eye, a lot of the cataracts removal, what should they do? You and I will say, well, why don’t you educate people to show them how to not have cataracts, how to not have glaucoma? They would say I don’t have time for that. I am too busy generating procedural revenues. He’s got to pay for his fancy car and house. He’s not about to spend time educating people with a dramatic drop in revenue.

We have this deeply entrenched mindset among my colleagues who are hell-bent on preserving it at the status quo. I’m convinced it’s going to take you, and Meredith, and me, and your viewers who have to start talking about these things to expose it. It’s not going to come from the ophthalmologist making $2.5 million a year. It’s not going to come from my cardiologist colleague who makes $1.2 million a year doing lots of heart catheterizations and implanting defibrillators, so we’ve got to undo that by educating people. It’s like taking down Kodak. You couldn’t take Kodak down by making a better Polaroid camera, but you could take Kodak down by inventing digital photography. They went from $40 billion a year to almost zero overnight because somebody undid their entire business model.

I want to see the same thing happen to conventional healthcare. I want you and me and Meredith, people like us to show people that health is actually quite achievable. You don’t need a page-long list of medications. You don’t need statin drugs. You don’t need an annual colonoscopy. You don’t need any of that nonsense. What you need is to be instructed in some benign ways to achieve health, and you can be freed in so many ways, and this nonsense of 17.5% of the GDP being directed towards healthcare is absolute nonsense. It should be a tiny fraction of that.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what’s funny is I overheard a conversation last week, right? It’s this conversation that went on with two strangers, really, and I was the third on the outside. It went something like this. This was a real conversation that actually happened. She went to her doctor, and she got the high cholesterol, the time bomb thing, right? Basically, she was told to walk five miles a day. The gentleman asked her, well, what dietary recommendation? She said, no, my diet really doesn’t have much to do with it all. I just needed to walk five miles a day.

I mean, literally, it’s like—and the conversation, someone came over and—because I was about to enter into the conversation and be like that guy needs to lose his license, but it didn’t happen. The point is is another strategy is that. People, if we can dumb them down into thinking that diet really doesn’t make that much of a difference, then we got it. They’ve got it. Ultimately, that’s the thing is people don’t get. If they realize how much control they have, they still think they’re unlucky, doc. They think they got Hodgkin’s disease because they’re the unlucky one or cancer because they’re the unlucky one.

It’s garbage. It’s crap. It’s our lifestyles that are doing it. You’re right. They have the power to change. Your book brings that out, and I love that.

Dr. Davis:
Hallelujah!

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. How can they get the book?

Dr. Davis:
The Undoctored book isn’t out yet. It comes out May 9, 2017.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. We had some on. You sent us some things that we could read ahead of time. We appreciate that.

Dr. Davis:
Okay. Because the Wheat Belly community remains so large and vigorous, I’ll maintain that it’ll also—because there’s still lots—there’s plenty more to talk about in grains, as you see, with some of the counterattacks, so I’ll maintain the Wheat Belly Blog and the Wheat Belly Facebook page and some of the other properties. There’s so much here to work on. I wish I could say that we’ve tapped into the Walmart set, but we have not. There’s still plenty of work to do. All we have to do is go to the mall, and see that we still have plenty more. We’ve got enough here to undo—if the USDA and the American Heart Association and the Academy of Nutrition of Dietetics, if they got it right, we wouldn’t have to talk. It’s so colossally wrong that we will be busy for the next 30 years.

Dr. Pompa:
If I would say three things that if, if they say do these dietary things, right, it would be low-fat, eat less, and exercise more, right? All three could not be further from the truth of what really matters. Basically, you’re lazy. You’re a glutton, and you eat too much fat because you’re a glutton. I mean, that’s the message. I mean, that’s the message that our government and media has put out day in, day out. We’re preaching something different. We are. Thank you for all the great work you do.

Dr. Davis:
This is terrific, guys. You guys are doing good work. I’m glad to collaborate with people who are on the right track.

Dr. Pompa:
We reach a lot of people. We reach a lot of people, and we’re blessed to do that. We’re blessed to bring people like yourself that are bringing a counterculture method. That’s for sure. Meredith?

Meredith:
Yeah. Thanks, Dr. Pompa, and thank you, Dr. Davis. Thank you for writing these books, for getting this information out. I know a common theme in all of your books is self-empowerment. Do you have any closing words for viewers who are maybe watching for the first time? This is new information. What would you say to those to take the first step?

Dr. Davis:
This is upsetting, as you two well know, to many people. They have a hard time accepting the fact that they’ve been misled, either intentionally or inadvertently for the past 40 years. I think we just have to look around us, and see what’s happened to the landscape of human health and weight over the past. It’s awful. It’s among the worst ever in the history of humans on this planet, so accept that mistakes were made. Maybe we don’t have to point blame, but accept that mistakes were made. It means that these kinds of conversations blaze the path to finding answers. This is an ongoing conversation. It’s going to evolve. I just encourage people to think, talk, learn, collaborate, and we’ll get to the right answers.

Meredith:
Well said. First step, knowledge is power, but we got to do something with it too, awesome. Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Again, thank you, Dr. Davis. Check out Undoctored out May 9th. This episode will air early May. By the time this is out, you guys will be able to go grab a copy of that book, and get the information. Thanks, everybody, for watching. Have a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you next week.

166: How To Get 6 Pack Abs

Transcript of Episode 166: How To Get 6 Pack Abs

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Kevin Rail

Meredith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host, Meredith Dykstra. This is episode number 166. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course. Today we welcome special guest, Kevin Rail. I know you and Dr. Pompa have been friends for awhile, so this is really exciting to have you on the show today. You're a fitness expert and have a lot to share in that realm, so it's going to be a really fun conversation.

Before we get started, let me share with the listeners a little bit more about you, Kevin. Kevin is an internationally known and sought after fitness coach featured in the documentary film, The Motivation Factor, by Doug Orchard Films. He's also the founder of My Six-Pack Challenge and specializes in functional training, core training, three-dimensional movement, motivation, and restorative arts. He has a BS in sports management and fitness and wellness and is a strong first level one kettlebell instructor and is certified through ACSM, NASM, FMS, and ACE. That's a lot of acronyms. Kevin, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. We're so excited to have you on the show.

Kevin:
Thank you, Meredith. It is my pleasure. Any time I have the chance to talk smack with Dr. Pompa, particularly anyone who thinks or talk like him, I jump at the opportunity. We talk smack a lot, believe you me.

Dr. Pompa:
There's a little echo on Kevin's end. Kevin, I don't know if you have earphones, but that would help.

Kevin:
If I had earphones?

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe. Turn your volume down.

Kevin:
Let me see. That might be the missing link right there.

Dr. Pompa:
It's already better, actually. Hey, Meredith, I want you to look up the show that Kevin did. What did we title that show, Kevin? Do you remember?

Kevin:
Yes. I don't remember the exact title, but I do know what we spoke about. It was all about disorder eating. It might have been orthorexia. Was it orthorexia?

Dr. Pompa:
Look for orthorexia in the title. Kevin told a story, and that episode touched a lot of people. If you haven't seen it, go back and watch it. It really affects more people than you think. One of the first questions Kevin and I always ask people is how did you get into this and why? I kind of want you to restart just by retelling some of your story. Like me, my passion runs deep because of the suffer from pain to purpose. I'll tell you what, you have a really amazing story that makes you unique, and it makes you the great trainer and educator that you are. Start there, Kevin.

Kevin:
I appreciate that, first of all. I don't think that everyone is designed to struggle to become stronger and to get further down the road in life, but I am definitely one of those people who have struggled quite a bit to get to where I am. I think you do become stronger from all your struggles, and that often defines you as a person.

Just like the Rocky Balboa said, it's not hard you can hit, it's how hard you can get hit and keep getting up and keep moving forward, and that's how winning is done. Although he's a fictional character, that statement just reverberates through my brain every single day, every single hour, all the way to this present moment when I still struggle with things. I just know just to put that little effort forth, and you're always going to come back out on top.

Ever since I was five years old, I was touched by fitness and exercise. That was one of my things. I grew up in a family where my dad was always worried that me and my brother were going to get fat and out of shape. He was old school, so he would use terms like that. He would say I don't want you guys to have pot bellies. I would always try to do whatever I could to please him and stay in shape.

I also recognized something else, and we talked about this earlier off camera when we were talking about the Sevin Dust and all these other things. I know I'm going to be jumping around like a Quentin Tarantino movie here, so just bear with me. Food has always been something very important in my life for fuel and for recovery and all these other things. Back when I was a young strapping lad, I really didn't care too much about my diet because you feel you're indestructible when you're 15, 16 years old.

I see your son, Daniel, at the gym, and he's just like ripping weights out left and right and all this stuff. I remember when I was his age, and I kind of had the same mindset except I would come home from school and I would have a can of soda and a package of Krimpets. They were cupcakes, and I would run right down stairs and start hammering the weights. I felt like I was going to vomit five minutes into my workouts, and I couldn't understand why.

I'm like I need to get big and strong because I'm going to be a professional wrestler, WWE. I'm going to be a champion. I did whatever I could to get bulk and get bigger, but it just didn't really connect the dots with me. I always felt like I was going to vomit and throw up. My heart was pounding through my chest. I was breathing really heavy, but I didn't really care. I was indestructible.

Lucky for Daniel, he's got you guys as role models and tutelage, and he knows about it. He's got it down. What is he now? Nineteen, twenty, somewhere in that ball park?

Dr. Pompa:
Nineteen.

Kevin:
I was just fended off to figure it out on my own. When I turned 19, my father got colon cancer, and I saw the impact that had on not just him but our family and our close network of people in the neighborhood and our friends and everything. People would come into the house all the time to see him and say hello and pay their last respects so to speak. That really was a huge turning point in my life.

I think everyone who is really serious about fitness and nutrition, there are people who are hacks, and there are people who are genuine. Those who are genuine usually had an instance like this happen where they really did come from nothing, and they went through the learning curves and they went through the hard work and they went through the struggles. They saw people die right in front of their eyes and saw them take their last breath. They didn't want to become just like that. That's one of the things that happened with me.

Even further deeper down in the layers when I was five and six years old, I was always wanting to be in great shape because of what I was telling you before about my dad's attitude. He had a high expectation for us, so I wanted to appease him. One of the things that I noticed was when he was out there in the gardens dusting the plants with Sevin Dust, wearing his yellow uniform from head to toe made out of rubber and a face mask and everything, telling me and my brother we couldn't be outside when he was doing it.

Something clicked inside my head. I was like oh, my God. If you're going to put that stuff on those plants, they're going to grow into vegetables and you're going to harvest them. Then you're going to want me to eat those things at the dinner table. It's not happening. Not on my dime. I would just rebel, and I wouldn't eat my vegetables and all that stuff, and I wouldn't eat the fruits from the trees we had in the yard. That actually started the nutrition thing in my brain, although I used to drink soda and eat all the crap. In the back there was this voice shouting to me don't eat that stuff.

When he finally got cancer, I was actually 15 when he got diagnosed. I was 19 when he died. It then started clicking in my head that perhaps all that stuff that he was using out in the yard and in the gardens was not so good for the body. I looked back on it and wow, thank God I didn't eat the carrots and the rutabagas and the tomatoes and everything else that had been sprayed and dusted. Perhaps that is what caused his illness and his sickness.

The connection points started coming together, and then as I got in my early 20s, I started fusing the connection between eating more healthy and my workouts. I started figuring out that whole dynamic. Then I started getting into fasting before my workouts. We've had many conversations about that, and that's probably a whole other show in itself and the benefits of that. Fasting and working out on an empty stomach is my A number one thing these days.

I went through this long learning curve and all this experimentation. What it boils down to is you always want to feed your body as high octane fuel as you possibly can and try to do that in conjunction with your workouts. Whatever system works best for you is the one that works best for you. That's plain and simple.

Fasting works really good for me, and it may not work good for someone else. They might need to eat a banana before their workout or some organic yogurt and peanut butter. I don't really care. If you can eat something and tolerate it, that's fine. That's your prerogative and it works for you. What works for me is working out on an empty stomach.

All this information that I've accumulated over the years, I try to push forward. I don't want people to go down the same path as my father, including myself. I try to do every single thing I possibly can to avoid cancer, inflammation, disease, brain function problems, dementia, and all these other things that everyone just complains about all the time.

Anything that I can to try to make myself a 100% healthy human being from head to toe inside and out mentally and physically, I will do it. That's where I based all my workouts from going forward, and that's what I do when I train people as well with my program that Meredith mentioned, My Six-Pack Challenge. It's chalk full of all these different movement patterns, complex movement patterns.

Dr. Pompa:
I want you to talk about that is, what that looks like, where our viewers can get the Six-Pack Challenge, and also talking about these primal movements. If people watched you in the gym, you're always doing different things. It's very different from what most trainers or people are doing. I want you to talk about that. Before we leave the chemical conversation, let's bring that to a close. You had a conversation with somebody who is basically defending glyphosate, Monsanto, Roundup. Talk about that because I want you to share that conversation with our viewers.

Kevin:
I posted a video on Facebook this morning. I'm not going to mention names about who I got in a scrap with and all that stuff. I wouldn't even call it a scrap. It was just a conversation. Let's put it that way. When you're in a position like myself or you, we get haters all the time. We always get conflict, and we get people that are acting like they know more than we do. They have more initials past their name, more degrees. They went to this university or that one or they know this person and this expert and that expert. It's like my guru can beat up your guru is what it comes down to in the end.

That's just a big smoke and pile of fluff, in my opinion. You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't beat common sense in the end. That's what it all boils down to all the time. I took a stand. I did a video, and I was talking about baby spinach and the benefits of it. I said always go organic because you don't want to have GMOs and chemicals and pesticides floating through your bloodstream and causing all kinds of problems. I don't want to have to deal with you when you get sick.

Dr. Pompa:
Spinach, by the way, is one of the most sprayed vegetables, if not the most. Spinach, don't ever not eat it 100% organic.

Kevin:
That's one of the top five. That's why I threw that out there. I was showing this clamshell container of baby spinach, organic, I got at Costco for four bucks yesterday. You can't beat that deal. I was going on about 100 calories for the whole thing, then I said be careful of the pesticides, chemicals. You always want to go organic.

This guy decided to challenge me on that. He's like there's no proof that organic is better. Everything has chemicals. GMOs are not bad for the body. It's been proven. You should read up on this guy and read these studies. I'm like whatever.
Everybody's got a study. Everybody's got a journal to read and all these other things. That's just how it works. Everybody has a specialist they think knows it all, but what I found out over the years is there no one size fits all. There is no perfect solution to anything. There is common sense, and there is Mother Nature.

Anytime you alter anything out of its natural state, there's something going on there. There's a process. That's what refined means, and that's why I stay away from that kind of stuff; refined things, GMO products, all these other things. Splicing seeds with species that you don't even know where they're coming from or what they are, that's against Mother Nature 100%. I try to keep away from that stuff. Something tells me that's bad, and we've talked before about there are studies.

We went back and forth a little bit, and he wasn't backing down about there's nothing wrong with GMOs and organic is not better. Yes, I know there's a scant amount of chemicals used in the organic production of crops because the bugs will eat them to death, but there's also different methods they use. They don't use conventional things that are way better and way healthier for the body. Those who believe don't believe, there is no explanation. Those who do believe, don't need an explanation for anything. They just believe, and they go along their way and do their thing.

I think the brain has a magical power of attracting that which it needs. Whatever you think is to be the truth is probably going to be your reality. I'm going to go on believing that organic is good because I feel it is, and I'm going to do my research on the companies that I buy this stuff from, which I also do. I'm going to make sure they're clean and legit. I'm also going to avoid GMOs every chance I get. I truly believe that that's the devil and that's poison and it's garbage.

Dr. Pompa:
Organic is cleaner. Can there be overspray? Of course. All in all organic is far cleaner. I didn't even know people were still making that argument because that's such an old time argument. I read you this study. I did a Facebook Live a few weeks ago. This came out a few weeks ago, Monsanto polluted with EPA, was unable to prove Roundup does not cause cancer.
It says in this newly unsealed court documents released earlier today seemingly revealed a startlingly effort on the part of Monsanto and the EPA to work in concert to kill and discredit independent inconvenient cancer research conducted by the World Health Organization, and they did. When that was happening, I was talking about that. I even did a Facebook Live on my Merily's thing probably eight months ago about how they were working together to cover up the research that showed that this chemical is causing cancer, leak gut, and other problems.

This came out, but did you hear about it in mainstream media? Of course not, but absolutely you can get these court documents. You can look at this cover up yourself. You can look at the research showing by independent studies that glyphosate is linked not just to cancer, but multiple diseases. Look at Stephanie Seneff's work, senior scientist at MIT. It's very hard to refute. She has no axe to grind other than figuring out what's going on and why children are getting sick with autoimmune and other conditions.

There you go, man. That to me ends that argument. You know what? I think you're right. I think this guy wants to believe what he wants to believe, and I don't think you could ever change him, Kevin.

Kevin:
I never try to change anybody. They have their choice to choose what they want.

Dr. Pompa:
Kevin, a lot of it comes from our major premise, our philosophy. You could show me things saying this chemical is absolutely safe. My mind's going it's a chemical. If I ingest this every day, this is a problem. I don't care if you don't have a study yet showing that it causes problems. My major premise comes from it's a chemical and I'm ingesting it daily.

If I ingest it periodically, can my body deal with it? Of course. If I'm doing something daily that's a poison and a chemical and if it's a manmade chemical, your body has to deal with it some way. Our major premise is wrong, and I doubt you're going to change him.

Kevin:
That's true. This really makes sense if you think about. Roundup is used to kill weeds around a plant. It starts out as a seed in the ground, it's sprayed with Roundup, and then it grows. The corn just comes up nice, and this beautiful stalk appears and all these ears come out of it, and all the weeds are dead.

If there's a chemical pounding on that crop that starts as a seed that goes through its whole adult life and kills all the weeds, do you really want to be consuming that? Are you foolish enough to believe that you can wash it off and get fruit wash or whatever? That's the biggest hoax I've ever heard in my life. It's ridiculous. I don't buy that stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
It absorbs. I remember years ago reading a study from Penn State University. They showed how the corn stalks pull in the glyphosate. I saw pictures. I read the study. I can't remember because that was so darn long ago. That's all I needed to know. You're not washing off glyphosate. The fact is if you have any idea how it works, how it binds the minerals that these plants need to survive and thrive, it doesn't take much to go wow, this can't be good.

Kevin, let's talk about some of your unique training strategies, which are very unique. Our viewers always want to say great, but how can it help me now? You can lead them to your website. What about the Six-Pack Challenge? What about these primal movements? Why are they different, why do they work, and why should we do them?

Kevin:
You call them primal movements. I just call them complex movement patterns.

Dr. Pompa:
I call it primal because that's what it looks like. I've heard you say that, actually.

Kevin:
I used to use that word every now and then, but if you do think back to primitive times, we weren't linear creatures. We don't stand up straight and just do things most of the time. It's easy to stand up and drink a glass of water or something like that. If you think of life's situations, take -inaudible-, for example. Nothing that's in a linear pattern is that complicated. That's fine and dandy, but we can stand still and do bicep curls all day long and do overhead presses with dumbbells.

Anybody can get strong in those positions where the body is strong, but what happens when you're in the compromised position? What happens when you're playing a sport and you get hit, and you're on one foot and you've got to rebalance yourself, re-correct your position, and keep on running? What happens when you're out in the grass years and years ago in primal times, and you're crawling through the grass because you're trying to lead an animal to you or something like that to live for the next month, to survive on it?

You're in a compromised position. You're slipping on rocks, you're climbing trees, you're jumping over things, you're rolling, you're rocking. Nothing is linear. In life, we've gotten lazy and we've gotten linear. Linear is dangerous, in my opinion. It causes rounded shoulders, it causes weak shoulders, it causes weak backs, it causes back pain, it causes fat stomachs, it causes weak knees and joints.

Dr. Pompa:
You're saying this is linear. I'm just showing our viewers.

Kevin:
A linear pattern, just think of the word line. You're moving in one line. A bicep curl is like this, it's a line. It's a linear pattern. When you get on the ground on your hands and knees and you're moving in a crawling position, your opposite hand and foot is moving. We'll use Merily for an example. I taught her how to crawl awhile ago, and she struggled mightily at first.

Dr. Pompa:
She just walked in. I'm not kidding, but she was not able to crawl.

Kevin:
Hey, Merily.

Merily:
Hey, you.

Dr. Pompa:
Neurologically she didn't crawl as a kid. She kind of went right to walking.

Merily:
Kevin taught me how to crawl.

Dr. Pompa:
Our children, Daniel and Izik, saw you doing this crawl thing. They were cracking up and making fun of her. Meanwhile, it helped her probably more than anything because her coordination working with you honestly went through the roof. Her mountain biking went through the roof. I throw stuff at her now, she catches it. In the past when I would throw stuff at her, it would hit her in the head. I'm not kidding. She has coordination now because of you.

Merily:
Hey, Kevin. My workout partner is in Hawaii for the next two weeks. I'm on the way to the gym right now. Daniel's in training. He sends me workouts whenever I'm supposed to go to the gym. I'm on my way there now, but man, I miss him. This is a good time to revisit some stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
I'm telling you, he changed you.

Merily:
Kevin really taught me neurological equilibrium or balance or synergy or something that I didn't have. Shame on my kids because I did everything right for them that my mom didn't do for me. Dads are heroes.

Dr. Pompa:
Moms are heroes later, trust me.

Kevin:
See you, Merily.

Dr. Pompa:
My wife when she would mountain bike, she would stop and get off and pick her bike and go over a root or a rock. We were mountain biking just the other day through a massive rocky section, just blowing through it. Her coordination was from the training you did. We saw that difference. She said that helped her the most.

Kevin:
You were saying earlier what you have differently that other trainers don't have, and that's one of the things I specialize in is I want to make people better at the things they do outside the gym predominantly. Like I was saying earlier, when you're doing things standing up with two feet on the ground and you're just doing a movement or whatever, that's easy. Anybody can do that.

What happens when you lift one foot off the ground, you put your hands on the ground, you crawl out into a position, you do a push up, and then you kick your leg under your body, lift your arm up, and spin around in a circle? You've got to think about every single movement you're doing including the hand walk downward. These are the kind of movements that I incorporate into my Six-Pack Challenge that I have been working on for years. I finally feel like I cracked the code on how to build a super body.

I want to make people better at what they do outside just like Merily is a perfect case in point. She came to me awhile ago. She had tight hips, and she had a problem concentrating all this stuff. She was telling me she likes to bike. I know how outdoorsy you guys are, so I took all that information and built a program around that for her specifically.

I said to her, you've got to learn how to crawl. When I first said that to her, she looked at me out of the corner of my eye like what the heck are you talking about? I got down on the floor, and I described it to her. We took it in pieces first. I showed her to do an alternating arm and leg raise from the crawl position with your knees off the ground. You must learn how to crawl first before you do anything else. That's the way that I look at things.

When you crawl, you're doing a complex movement pattern, and you're also doing a cross body pattern. Your opposite arm and leg is moving at the same time. That's going to have way more feedback on the body than a linear pattern like a bicep curl because it's really easy to do this. I could watch YouTube videos all day long and learn how to do this, no problem. You could watch a crawl video, but you may not get it at first unless I'm standing right there talking to you about it.

When you learn how to crawl, that's just the basics, in my opinion. Then you start learning three-dimensional movements where you're spinning around in circles. You've got to memorize two and three movement patterns combined and the reps that you're doing. Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree when you do this.

She said the word neurological, and I'm glad she did because that's called a heightened neurological load. That is the secret science to keeping your brain fresh and preventing Alzheimer's and all these other diseases that occur as we get older. I've seen my grandparents go through it, and it's a horrible thing. It's really sad to watch people in perfectly good physical health get dwindled down to a wheelchair and not even remember their names or the names of their kids or recognize no one because of brain problems. I want to try to reverse that and change it and nip it in the bud right now before it gets any worse.

Dr. Pompa:
What do these patterns look like? Can they go to your website and see some of these movements? Can they see you doing them? Can they get the Six-Pack Challenge there? Do you need to stand up right now and actually show some of these movements? I want to give them something now that they can add in to what they're doing even in their home. These are movements. I've seen you do them. These are things that they can do. How do learn how to do it?

Kevin:
First of all, you can go to my website. It's called RestoreYourFitness.com. On there you'll see a little triangle button. Click on that triangle and there's a trailer that I've made on there where I explain the workout a little bit more. You'll see me doing some of the patterns on there. I'm willing to do a little intro for you all right now, if that's cool. Let me try to get some space here.

Bear with me. I'm going to do an exercise called the rail breaker. This is one of my favorites. I'm going to add a pushup in. I'm going to single leg ham lock rail breaker pushup. That's a lot of words. Just bear with me. This is what I'm talking about.

We're going to step back and stand on one foot. Now I'm going to do a ham lock down like this. I'm going to kick my leg under my body. I'm going to kick all the way around -inaudible-. I'm going to kick it back under, lift this foot back up, walk all the way back up, maintain my balance, and switch sides. Go back down and switch sides. Keep this leg under, push up, take it back, walk back up. There you go. My heart rate just went through the roof.

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to say that. It does. You're in shape. You're huffing. By the way, Kevin made it look easy, but it may take you several times to get it. You'll get it. Don't say I can't do it. If Merily could learn it, you can learn it. It's like riding a bike. You're going wait, what? Let me see that again. That's the whole point.

Kevin:
There's a lot of things going on right there. You've got balance going on, you've got brain function going on, you've got a complex movement pattern, you're working your upper body, you're working your core, and you're improving your flexibility all rolled into one. That's only one exercise I did. I only did one rep to each side, and my heart rate is through the roof.

Dr. Pompa:
Is that part of the Six-Pack Challenge?

Kevin:
Yes. You will see stuff just like that in my Six-Pack Challenge.

Dr. Pompa:
People don't think of that as an ab workout, right? That doesn't look like a sit up to me.

Kevin:
That's another thing. Sit ups and crunches are boring. There's so many other ways to work the abs, it's not even funny. I see people on the crunch machine at the gym all the time, and it's dreadful. It's almost as bad as someone doing American swings with kettlebells. I try to push the edge and make things a lot more fun and a lot more holistic than your average crunch or sit up or plank hold.

You're always moving around, and you do so many other activities with your body that you really don't even focus on your abs until way after the workout's over. All of a sudden your stomach is solid as a rock in a couple weeks. You're like wow, that's actually working. When you walk down with one leg in the air, your core is working right there, but you're also working your posterior -inaudible- suspend your legs. Your hamstring and gluts work. Then you kick your leg under your body, you roll over, and you're working your shoulders.

You're improving your posture. You're improving your brain function. That's one exercise right there, and I built the whole entire program around this premise. I'm not trying to toot my own horn or use this as a cheap plug. I'm just being honest. I've seen it all come and go. I still see it to this day. This program and that one, 20 minute this and 10 minute that, drills and whatever, that's all fine and dandy. What I've devised is a program that's going to improve your balance, your brain function, your lean muscle mass, your core strength, your posture, and it's also going to burn a ton of calories all rolled into one in a nice package deal. You can do it in five to ten feet of space.

Dr. Pompa:
It's fantastic. It's very popular. People think it's amazing. Meredith, I've seen it action. You probably have questions that our viewers and listeners have questions about.

Meredith:
I want to try it too. I'm super motivated because I've found some challenges with eating such a clean diet and taking a lot of supplements that I find it very easy to maintain a lean body mass without really exercising at all. I hate to say it, to be honest I'll go weeks and not exercise at all and not feel like I look any different. Part of it is I get bored with exercise.

I love how all this ties into diet variation, your concept of varying our meals and our food and the timing to optimize our hormones. I think the exercise variation piece of this compliments it so well. With that being said, Kevin, -inaudible- with your diet, with the exercise variation, maybe some supplements you take just to give us an idea of what the implementation looks like in real life for you.

Kevin:
Usually I work out first thing in the morning or the first chance I get to work out. Normally I'm able to get to the gym rather early between 5:30 and 6:00 AM. Oftentimes I'll have a client at 6:00 AM or 5:30 or something, and then I'll have to wait. It's either first thing in the morning or my first available chance to work out. I just feel I get the most brain function spike from working out first thing in the morning. If I workout late in the afternoon, I have to drag myself to workout.

I try to do it as close to first thing as possible, empty stomach always. It's not even a question. Once in awhile I will do a greens powder or a pre-workout formula because people give me samples of things all the time. There's always company reps always trying to get me to promote their stuff. It needs to get through the K. Rail seal of approval. If it's got acesulfame potassium, red lake #40, blue #5, anything artificial in it, I see it in a nano second.

People come to me all the time. Oh, this is clean, this is natural. Try this out. I've just got to read the ingredient label and if it has any of that stuff, -inaudible-. Sometimes I'll try those things just to try them because I have a lot of clients who use pre-workout formulas and all these other things. I try to stay current on what's going on out there just so I can give them a good healthy option to use when they're looking for it. That's really the only reason. I don't need pre-workout formulas, I'm glad to say.
A lot of people ask me if I drink coffee because they're like man, you have more energy than two people put together. I'm high on life, and I'm passionate. That's all there is to it. I don't drink coffee. I'm not against it. I don't throw anyone under the bus. I don't judge people. If you want to drink coffee, that's great. It's the second biggest commodity in the world next to oil, and I'm cool with that.

Usually it's empty stomach, water, workout, train people, come home, write some articles, work on my site, go back to the gym and train more people, then it's off to the races, and then repeat. As far as my diet is concerned, I try to eat as high octane fuel as I can. I try to get as many alkaline foods in my diet as possible, and I try to keep things as clean as I can.

Every now and then I'll do a longer fast. I fast usually 12 to 16 hours. Sometimes I'll do longer ones, 24, 48, and so on. I don't have a lot of body fat, so I have to be careful about doing really long fasts often. I just schedule them in here and there. I also use a good quality protein powder as well. That's pretty much it, supplement wise.

Meredith:
You don't do any other supplements other than a protein powder?

Kevin:
Not really. Creatine I'll us as well, plain creatine, which comes from a good source that I know of. My workouts are usually an hour and a half, and they're pretty high intensity. It's really good for my recoveries. I'll use protein powder, creatine, and every now and then a greens formula or sometimes a pre-workout formula. That's pretty much it.

I don't do B6 in the morning, multi-vitamin here, liquid vitamin there. The only reason why I don't do that is the reason why I don't drink coffee. I know so many who survive on coffee, and that's how they survive. To me it's kind of a crutch. If I'm out camping or something in the woods or if I'm out traveling somewhere and I don't have access to coffee in the morning, I want to be able to function. I don't want to be like I need coffee. What am I going to do? Some people are like don't even talk to me. I haven't had my coffee yet. I'm like seriously?
If you sleep better, get more alkaline, drink more water, and drink some kombucha during the day, you don't have to worry about bloody coffee every single minute of every hour. These people that have to have coffee first thing in the morning to survive, I don't want to be one of those people. I don't want to be a statistic. I don't like the after taste and what I feel it does to your teeth as well. I don't want to walk around with a toothbrush all day long brushing my teeth after drinking coffee in between. Those are some of my deals right there.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt, people should get the Six-Pack Challenge. It's more than just the six pack, trust me. That's just a way to get people's attention. Much of it is about the brain. You can see just by that. Like you said, Meredith, we don't have to work out to stay as lean as we are. Working out for me means a heck of a lot more than staying lean. I stay just as lean whether I work out or not. There's so many more benefits to working out. It's absolutely remarkable.

Kevin:
A lot of people only scratch the surface when they're talking about exercise and workouts. Oh, get in shape in 20 days and do this workout and burn this many calories. They don't really get the big picture. There's not a lot of people I know of that talk about the mental aspects, the real deep mental aspects of fitness like the complex movement patterns. Some people are like you get an endorphin release. It's great. That's only part of it.

It's like what we just talked about. You come into a new trigger and you turn the switch on that you didn't know you had. Doing something like I did there for seconds even, it's that fast. Do any complex movement pattern for two minutes in the middle of the afternoon from your desk cubicle, and your brain is going to be refreshed like that faster than a cup of coffee will give it to you. It's going to be a clean, natural brain freshening that you're getting. It's a whole different ball game.

Dr. Pompa:
That's what I wanted to share with the viewers. You've got to bring my people that challenge and those movements. Go ahead if you were going to say something.

Meredith:
I was just curious too for those of us who just want to try some of these complex movements, when do you incorporate rest days? How often are you suggesting to do these movements?

Kevin:
As far as my program is concerned, how it works is you get a workout sent to you through email, and you follow along with my videos on there. You do that three days a week on alternating days. The reason I built it that way is because I've done the research. I find that it takes the first workout someone does when I do this class live, they're figuring it all out and they're kind of clueless. The second workout they do, they're starting to get it. Oh, yeah. I remember this. By the third workout, they finally have it down.

Then as soon as they get it down, I change the questions again, and I send them a new workout the next week. You get a new workout sent to you every single week that's going to be unique. As the weeks go on, the intensity level goes like this. They get harder each week, which is a lot of fun as well. It usually takes you three workouts just to figure it out and get into the pocket.

On the three other alternating days I suggest you do a minimum of 30 minutes of cardio. It can be as small as brisk walking or it can be high intensity Tabata drills. It can be whatever you want it to be. It can be longer than 30 minutes, but it has to be a minimum of 30. That's the method. On a Sunday, your seventh day, which is your off day, I suggest that you do a minimum of 30 minutes of activity with some friends and family members. I'm big into unity.

That's another thing I talk about in the motivation factor we mentioned earlier is how exercise brings people together, it helps reduce crime, and it helps improve test scores with kids in school. It does all these wonderful, magical things for the brain. It also helps with your personal life as well. I say on your off day, do something with your friends. Go to a park, play Frisbee, play volleyball, go bowling. Do something active, even if it's fishing. It's still active. You're in Mother Nature. You're surrounded with ecotherapy, and that's part of the solution whatever the problem is, the crime, the obesity, corruption, government. It's out there.
I try to shift all my focus to the positive. How can I contribute to make things better? I want people to come together and love each other and hug each other and be with each other. It just helps in so many ways. It's overlooked. I think exercise is panaceia. It can be used as that ingredient to get everyone together and stop the feuding, stop the fighting, the bickering, and the irrelevant childish gibberish that goes on around us all the time that I see every single day. That's how -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Movement is missing and so is that. Listen, Kevin. Not everyone can hire you as their coach, but they can all go get the Six-Pack Challenge. Then you'll be their coach. You're sending them these workouts. Do it. It's all the rage here. The fact is you can do it right in your own home. That's what's so cool. Go to his site. Remind them how to get it again on your website, Kevin.

Kevin:
It's RestoreYourFitness.com. It's called My Six-Pack Challenge. I'm easy to find. I'm on social media, Kevin Rails. Just look for me. I'm on Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
Get it and he can be your coach too. It's all the rage here. It will absolutely change not just your physique, not just your abs, more importantly it's going to change your nervous system. That's where people need the greatest change, no doubt about it. Kevin, thanks for coming on. I wanted you to deliver that, and you did. I appreciate it very much. Thank you.

Kevin:
Thanks, Dr. Pompa. I appreciate it. Meredith, thank you too.

Meredith:
Thank you so much, Dr. Pompa and Kevin. Amazing message and amazing information. I'm really excited to try your workouts myself. Everybody go to RestoreYourFitness.com and check out Kevin's program. Thanks again, Kevin, for sharing your wisdom.

Kevin:
Absolutely. Have a great day, everyone.

Dr. Pompa:
Talk to you. Bye.

Meredith:
Thank you, everybody. Bye.