5 Apr 2023 · 54 min
Dr. Thomas Hemingway, an integrative doctor, argues that insulin resistance underlies conditions like PCOS and that most modern calories come from just a few crops. He recommends fasting strategies, adding fermented foods and eggs for variety, and supplements like magnesium and omega-3s to fill nutrient gaps from depleted soil.
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Thank you for tuning in to the True Grit and Grace podcast. I'm Amberly Lago, and I'll be sharing inspirational stories of resilience and empowering ideas to elevate your business and your life, ignite your passion, and fuel your purpose. Hey, and thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for tuning in to True Grit and Grace. I have one of my really good friends on today, Dr. Thomas Hemingway. You guys, if you're ready to uplevel your health, if you are ready to feel more alive than ever before, I'm so glad you tuned in because he's got the answers. And the good thing is he breaks it down in like a way that I can understand. It's very easy, simple.
Thank you.
ways to follow so you can really uplevel your health, your life. And so we're gonna get into all things health, even some relationship stuff, maybe some, even some business stuff. Um, but Dr. Thomas Hemingway, he's got a top podcast. He's got a brand new book coming out that we're gonna talk about. He's a surfer. He's like the coolest doctor I've ever met. He's married to one of my best friends, Ms. Brooke Hemingway, who I just adore. And y'all, they have 6 kids and he is a super dad for real. So anyway, I am so happy to see you. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Oh my gosh, what a pleasure, Amberly, and so kind. Thank you for that kind, uh, introduction. You're so sweet and we equally adore you. And I've been looking forward to this for a while to be on your show. So thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Yes. And this has been the best day ever because I got to interview earlier today on Brooke's new podcast. And then I'm like, oh, I get the Hemingway sandwich now. I get to talk to Dr. Hemingway. And you are so helpful. Like, there's been times when I was fighting an infection and you took so much time to talk with me and help guide me and advise me. And so you are seriously what you see online, like in real life. Like even you're just the real deal and so helpful. And I was so happy that I finally got to meet you at Brooke's event that we did. Uh, gosh, was that? How long ago was that?
Just about a year ago, coming up on a year.
Yeah. I can't believe it was like a year ago. Time just flies. And so, yeah, I just, I wanna talk to you about so much of what you do because being an integrative medical doctor, you are really on a, you know, mission to help people really prevent. You're into prevention more than prescription, which I love because I'm like, I don't wanna take any prescription medication. I was actually at one point on 11 different prescription medications for complex regional pain syndrome. I'm down to one. I'm almost off that, but I still haven't quite got a grip on the burning and the pain. And it does help me to be able to do more. I'm on Lyrica. I only share that.
11 to 1. That's incredible. Yeah, no, I'm very familiar with it. But that's actually one of the things I love to help people with is what I call de- prescribing. Because at the end of the day, once you're on 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 medications, then you usually have to be on a 5th, 6th, and 7th to counteract a lot of the side effects from 1 through 4. I mean, it's crazy the amount of what we call polypharmacy or the amount of different medications people are on. And in many cases, not all cases, but in many cases, there are solutions. There are treatments that don't have to involve any prescriptions at all. And so That's such a fun thing to talk about, how we can help people with natural means. And this is something that many Western-trained physicians, medical doctors like myself, are not either willing to talk about, or they're just not trained to really focus on all the powerful things that you and I can do. We have to be our own best health advocate, because oftentimes I think we go to the doctor just expecting that they're gonna hand us some magic pill or some magic treatment. And then it kind of takes a little bit of that sort of, I don't wanna say ownership, but it takes a little bit of that sort of worry, concern about our health off our plate. We sort of just hand it to the doctors. But I really think we need to be our own best advocate with respect to health. If we really want to get healthy, we have to be the ones to make that decision. And the cool thing is you actually have that power. Over 90% of all of your overall health is actually not in your DNA. It's not in your genes. You can't just blame mom or dad for your issues. There's just a couple—
People like to do that though.
Yeah, yeah. People like to do that. It's the easier way. But But the cool news is that now we understand this better. It's this whole phenomenon of epigenetics, which is all of the other things besides just the actual DNA that we get from our parents. All of the other stuff is 90+% of it. And our genes only make up about 10% of whether we have disease or not. So it's actually really powerful, but it can be a little bit overwhelming. But I love to be positive about it because there's so much we can do. We can control this. There's tons that we can do. And I like to help people find out those simple things that they can do. to improve their health and uplevel their life.
Yeah. And I love that you talk about food so much. And y'all gotta check him out, Dr. Thomas Hemingway on Instagram. And he has all these reels that created, and he talks about everything from fasting to weight loss, to metabolism, to hormones. And you talk about food and in particular, you talk about eggs a lot. I love that.
You do. I love all this. I love food, Amberly. I love food. I am, You know, as a kid, and I've always been described as being a good eater, I like to eat everything. I love food. I love to taste every cuisine from every country, from every people. It is one of my favorite things to do in the world. And I don't know if you know this, Amberly, but there are over 300,000 foods that we can eat. And this is actually, those are just different plants, vegetables, fruits, for example, over 300,000 available to us on this planet.
Wow.
And guess what? The average person worldwide, guess how many different plants or vegetables and fruits that they eat? Guess.
11.
Yeah. So that's pretty close actually. So over our lifetimes, we eat usually about 200 different species of food, but there are 300,000 and only 3—
I'm all 11. Ruby could eat a hamburger every day, just a hamburger. That's it.
Every day. So there are 3 major plant species, if you will, that make up over 50% of our diet. If we throw in a 4th, were over 60% of our diet worldwide. And we can think about what these might be. They're corn, they're wheat, they're soy, and rice. So those 4 crops make up over 60% of all of the calories that humans eat today. And guess what? None of those are very nutritious. They are what I call calorically dense. They give us a lot of calories, but they're nutritionally very poor. And that's one of the reasons we're in the biggest epidemic as humans we've ever been in. And pun intended here, biggest because we're the most obese people that have ever walked the face of this earth. For that reason, our diets are so dang limited and they are primarily composed of those 4 things: corn, wheat, soy, and rice worldwide. And we can change that. So my philosophy always, Amberly, is adding rather than subtracting because there's so many foods, right? How, how could we ever get up to 300,000 different foods? I mean, did you know that even just when you think about fermented foods, you know, we think about Sauerkraut or miso, or in Hawaii we eat a lot of kimchi. Like, those are a couple examples. Kefir, you know, yogurts, things like that. There's actually almost 100,000 different fermented foods that we can eat. Every culture on this planet has their own version. There's so many to try. So I like to focus on adding rather than subtracting because there's so many new things that we can try. It doesn't have to be boring. You don't have to eat the same 3 things all the time. You can add things because food can be The biggest lever to improve your life. It can be the best medicine ever, or food could also be a slow poison, and you get to pick each and every day. You have that choice. And so it's so powerful, it's so easy, it's so simple, and the variety piece is so important. Try to just add one thing a week. Go to a farmer's market and pick out one fruit or one vegetable you've never tried before. Find a recipe online, incorporate that. It's fun too. It's actually a lot of fun to try new foods. Do you agree? Do you like trying new things?
Oh, well, I love to eat. Yeah. And my husband gets onto me. Well, I remember when we went out on our first date, he was like, wow, you're gonna eat all that? And I'm like, yep, I sure am. And then, um, I love to try other people's food too, like my daughter's food, my husband's. I'm especially— I don't know why his food always looks so Delicious. I'm like, he goes, go ahead, take a bite. But I told him my nickname in school was Scraps because I would eat my food and then everybody would just pass their food down to me, whatever food they didn't finish, and I would finish off their food. So yes, I love food. I love trying new things. And I wonder, do you do most of the cooking?
Yeah. So it's interesting. At this point in time, I do a lot of it. So in the early days, Brooke and I have been married coming up on 25 years. And for the better part of the first almost 2 decades, she always cooked. And in the last, say, 5 years or so, I've done a lot more of that. She's been super busy with all the different things she's been pursuing. And I mean, she'll tell you, she doesn't really love cooking. I mean, she knows how to do it. She's a great cook and she makes some amazing food. But lately, I've had the privilege and the opportunity to be able to cook more often. I'm home more now and I love to experiment. I actually really enjoy cooking. And I think it's fun. I like to add different things, try new things. And I'll be honest, you're right though about the eggs. I eat eggs almost every morning. That part some people might view as a little bit boring, but eggs are one of the original superfoods. Like if you want a natural protein and natural fat source that's good for your body, there are a few other places that you can go simply, quickly, easily than just some pasture-raised organic eggs in the morning. I have that almost 6 or 7 days a week and I never get tired of it. But the cool thing is you can add stuff to it, right?
Mm-hmm.
Last night we barbecued. And so I literally emptied out all of our leftover vegetables, all of the things that we didn't finish. We had some filet mignon. I barbecued last night and I cooked filet mignon, which is Brooke's favorite cut of steak. It's about the only kind of steak she'll eat. She's just been spoiled, I guess. But I made this filet and it was great yesterday. I sliced it up in some thin pieces and mixed it in with my eggs today, as well as with all the leftover vegetables. And it was amazing. I made myself this kind of bowl. It's kind of like an egg-based bowl with lots of Vegetables, lots of protein in there besides the eggs itself. It also had leftover filet mignon. So it was amazing, you know, steak and eggs, why not? Right. It's actually real protein your body recognizes and it tastes delicious.
Well, we just bought a house and have like an acre of land. I want to, in the spring, put in our own garden and I want chickens. My husband is like, we're not getting chickens. And I'm like, I look, I keep looking at Ruby going, we're getting chickens. We're gonna get chickens.
Do it.
Yeah, I want— I— yeah, I'd love to get— so we could have our own eggs. Um, and I think there was just something about, you know, being in LA when we got so locked down, and I was like, I want the ability to have our own farm. I mean, it would be small to start, but, you know, have our own chickens, have our own vegetables, have our own little oasis. And yeah, my husband thinks I'm kind of crazy when it comes to that, but I think it'd be cool. I mean, I love to garden. I used to love to cook. I admit I don't do it as much anymore because of my schedule, but I love that you cook. Maybe I can get my husband to cook. And speaking of like kind of this, at the same time you and Brooke kind of switched some roles is the same time my husband and I did a little bit too, because you were working full-time, like, I don't know what, 80, 100 hours?
100 hours a week. Yeah. week, 80 to 100. 80 was a light week. 100 was, was a heavier week. And yeah, I was gone most days. I was home about 1 day a week for a few hours. And the rest of the time I was gone, I was working like crazy and I missed a lot of things. And one thing I missed, the opportunity to not only cook, but to eat with my family. And that's one of— food should be enjoyed. Food should be something that we cherish, that we enjoy, and the company that we eat it with, that's part of the experience as well.
Mm-hmm.
And if you do what you just alluded to, if you can even be involved in the process of growing the food, even better. If you're connected to your food in that way, it's amazing because you, you will know a few things about it, right? It's important to know where your food comes from, the quality.
And it just tastes so much better. Once you've had homegrown tomatoes, it's like store-bought are just not the same anymore. Was that a hard transition for you, or was it an easier transition for you? Because my husband retired and I'm always like, I think for a while everywhere we went, he still identified as Lieutenant Commander and my daughter and I'd be like, you're not a Lieutenant Commander anymore. You're retired. Like, was that different for you to transition from going to, you know, from 100 hours a week to being home? Now you're cooking. You seem so relaxed and healthy and joyful. Was that hard? Like, was there a sort of identity shift for you in that process?
Oh, sure. I think there's always some, you know, any change can be hard. I think it's just how you look at it. Like, if you look at it as an opportunity for growth, I mean, I never really, the last time I honestly cooked was when Brooke and I dated. And that was, you know, whatever, 26 years ago. We actually, she'll tell you, we actually cooked a lot together and we enjoyed it a lot. We did what I just explained. We basically emptied the fridge and whatever we could find, we'd make something of it. And we would be creative. We'd make different things and we'd cook together. And that was actually really, really fun. On the night that I proposed to Brooke, I made a homemade meal that I put in a basket and we went to the beach and I had a nice little dinner prepared. And then for the next 20 years, I didn't cook. And so part of it, I actually enjoyed being able to do that again. And I think just making up for lost time a little bit was kind of fun with my kids to be able to be around for dinner and to help prepare it and that. But there was a transition for sure. I mean, it's always a little unnatural when you do something that you're not used to for the first week, month, maybe few months. You know, it's always like, oh, this is— maybe I'm not that good at this. This feels a little weird. I'm not standing in the middle of the ER, you know, with a team of people around me. You know, I'm still working as a physician, but I'm not in the same presence, you know, like I was, you know, 60 hours in the ER every week, plus all the administrative things. I was medical director of my ER. I was chief of my ER.
Yeah.
I mean, I held a lot of management roles and It was actually really nice to kind of step away from all those managerial roles and to really focus on my family and to focus on helping people get healthy from the inside out and not just throwing a prescription at them, which is sort of how we were trained in medical school. So, yeah, the transition is always a little bit challenging, but I like to roll with it. I am kind of a roll with the punches kind of guy.
Yeah. I mean, now you get to really help people, like you said, from the inside out in the way that you know is gonna be the most beneficial. So I have a few questions that I know my listeners will really love to know. Like, you talk a lot about hormones and I wanna know from you, what is the most important hormone? And I'm sure all the guys out there are gonna say testosterone. And the girls might say estrogen, but what do you think is the most beneficial hormone in the body?
So this is, according to me, my view of it is that the most important hormone that's sort of the linchpin if you will, the regulator of all hormones, the so-called master hormone. In my mind, that hormone is insulin. A close second is thyroid hormone. That interacts with almost all the other hormones as well. But insulin is really the linchpin of all hormones. What insulin is doing will have effects on every other hormone in your body, even the testosterone for dudes and the estrogen and progesterone for women and testosterone for them too. Testosterone is really important in women too. And I think finally we're talking about that. because we didn't talk about it for years. But I think now there's a little bit of an upsurge in interest in why women should care about their testosterone, because it's important. It helps them build strong bones, right?
Yeah.
Libido is primarily related to testosterone, for example. And so getting your level checked as a man or a woman is really important. You got to know what's under the hood, but the master hormone is insulin. And the reason for that is it literally affects every other hormone. And a lot of conditions that are out there, many women suffer from PCOS, for example, polycystic ovarian. syndrome. And that primarily is related to an insulin problem, one that's called insulin resistance. So if you actually fix the insulin problem, most cases of PCOS actually go away. They actually resolve very commonly when you address insulin. And so—
So why do people become insulin resistant?
Yeah, so great question. So insulin, just simply put, Every time you eat anything that has carbs in it at all, and most of us eat 100 or more grams of carbohydrates a day, and they can be in vegetables, they can be in fruits, they can be in anything that comes in a bag or a box or with a barcode, anything processed is primarily full of carbohydrates. But anytime you eat anything that has carbohydrates, what happens? That's broken down into glucose or blood sugar. So the sugar, blood sugar goes up and the insulin's job is to keep the blood sugar levels at a good level so they don't get too high. When they get too high, that can be medically very dangerous. You've heard of people with really severe diabetes, either type 1, which they go into a problem called diabetic ketoacidosis, or type 2. They can just get really, really high blood sugar levels called hyperglycemia, and they can also get acidosis as well. But the insulin's job is to take the glucose out of the bloodstream, get it into the cell, and then to store it. So the problem is most people don't have any idea, but when you store that blood sugar, that, that glucose, your body doesn't have very many places it can store it. So it can store it in the liver, it can store it in the muscle, right? But there really isn't a lot of storage areas. So what it does most of the time, it converts that into adipose or fat. So actually most of the sugar, most of the carbohydrates that we eat, in fact, the data shows 96, 96% of all the carbs we eat ultimately ends up as fat in our body because fat is the better storage vehicle. We just don't have a lot of locations to store that sugar. Glycogen is what it's called. You have liver glycogen, you have muscle glycogen. But, but you don't have very much in your body at any given time. So those stores fill up very quickly. So that's 4% of all of your stored energy.
Wow.
96% of it is in the fat. So you may have— I know my grandmother used to teach me it wasn't the fat that made me fat, it's actually the carbs that make you fat. And she was actually right. It's all those sugary things, all of the bland— you can think of it as a color spectrum, right? Anything you eat that's white or light colored, white, light brown, you know, the rices, the, the flours, the processed grains, whether it be, you know, gluten or oats or any of the processed grains tend to be very high in carbohydrates. And what those do is they raise the insulin and insulin's main job is to store that as energy and to get the blood sugar level down to a reasonable place. So it's not dangerous for your body. And so it does that by putting it into the fat cells. And so it's the carbohydrates primarily that make you fat. And so anytime insulin goes up, you are storing fat. In fact, you cannot, it is impossible metabolically to burn fat, if you want to lose weight and burn some of the fat, you can't do it if your insulin level is up. So if you're eating too many carbohydrates and you're eating them too often, you can literally never burn your stored fat. You can burn that stuff that you just ate because it's available immediately and it hasn't been stored yet. And maybe once you store it, you can still burn that, but that usually gets consumed over the course of a couple of hours. And if you eat again, the process starts over. You can't get into your fat cells. So you have to literally be fasting for 8 or more hours to ever even get in to break down your own body fat and burn that as fuel. You might've heard of that book by Joseph Mercola called Fat for Fuel. That's a great explanation of how this process all works, but you can't burn that stubborn fat if you're always eating carbohydrates and if you eat them often. So. Snacking, although we were told, right?
Oh, well, yeah, being in the fitness industry too. Like, back in the day when I first started training in the fitness industry, it was all about eating 6 to 7, 8 times a day. And I mean, I was so active back then, a lot more active than I am now. I mean, I'm active, but back then when I was training 12 to 14 clients a day, I was like on my feet nonstop.
Yeah.
But still, I, I mean, I don't— you don't— I don't feel like you need to eat that many times. And so my next question, moving into fasting since you brought that up, let's talk about the benefits of fasting, what that does for you. Um, if you can give us some tips like what it does for you as far as your, your insulin, your hormones, your metabolism. All of that. Can you give us a little breakdown? And do you fast every day? And how many hours do you recommend fasting?
Okay, that's, that's a lot of questions. I'll get to all of them.
I know.
First, just as a segue, I will say that there are some people— there's not very many of them, much less than 5% of people— that benefit from eating every 2 to 3 hours like you and I were trained. Like, that teaching that You have to eat when you first wake up in the morning to get your metabolism started, and you have to eat all throughout the day to keep your metabolism going. Completely flawed. It's actually based on no good evidence, no good data. So for most of us—
That's what I was taught.
It doesn't work. But for somebody who was like you, that was being super, super, super active, the reason that you didn't gain weight was because you were so active and you were literally burning those calories as you consumed them. But for the average person, you guys have all heard the saying, right? Sitting is the new smoking. Most of us sit down most of the day. That's what we do most, right? And so the more we sit, there's a graph, you know, from on the X and the Y axis. So the more you sit, the more your chances of all disease go up, whether it be heart disease, whether it be diabetes, especially type 2, or even type 3 diabetes, they call Alzheimer's nowadays. All of these conditions go up with the more hours that we sit in a day. So number one, we're not as active as we used to be. And with respect to metabolism, I'll just answer this part of the question now. We were taught, right, that our metabolism slows down as we age. Well, spoiler alert, that actually doesn't happen until at least least we're 60 years old. So Amberly, you're not there yet. I'm not there yet. You know, between the adult ages of 20 to 60, our metabolism does not slow down to any significant degree. It just does not. The data does not show that. This was a very important study that just came out a year ago in the journal Science, which is one of the most reputable journals out there, that basically explained this once and for all. Our metabolism doesn't slow down in our adult years. We slow down, right? And anybody who's ever seen my daughter, and you've probably seen lots of video of her, she runs around all day long. She never sits still. She's moving constantly. She's 5 years old and she never stops moving. And if we all did that and we were moving all day long, we wouldn't have the huge obesity epidemic that we do. So fasting is so critical for so many ways. For first, we'll just address what you were talking about is what, what are the sort of main benefits? Well, almost every condition that you can think of, from heart disease to cancer to autoimmune conditions, from Hashimoto's thyroiditis to all of the bowel trouble that people have, all of these things, every inflammatory condition out there, which basically all health conditions have some inflammation at the root, they will all improve with fasting. So here's the thing. Last, I think it was 2012, This was finally discovered. So only 10 years ago, it was pretty recent news, but when we fast, our body has a chance to take a break, take a break from the highly metabolically active process of digestion, food assimilation. Every time we eat, it's a tremendous amount of effort and energy that gets, gets expended to be able to break down that food into usable stuff that we can use in our body, right? Metabolism is basically the sum total of all the reactions in our body that keep us alive. that keep us breathing, that keep us moving, that make us living beings. Everything that composes that is called our metabolism. So when we eat, our metabolism is working overtime. We're trying to break down the food. We're trying to break it down into its smallest component, whether it be a sugar or a protein into its smaller components called amino acids, to be able to form all the stuff that we need. When we don't eat, we give our body a break. And you know what it can do? Our body can refresh. It can rejuvenate. It can rebuild During that downtime. It otherwise can't heal itself. It never has a chance to catch up. And so when we fast, we provide our bodies the opportunity to have this miraculous process called autophagy. This has kind of become in the last decade something that people have heard. Autophagy is the process that happens when we're fasting for cellular repair. It's how we fix ourselves. It's how we rebuild ourselves. It's how we rejuvenate ourselves. It's how we get rid of the trash as well. I got 6 kids, and if I don't take the trash out every single day, it will build up. Like, I literally take out our kitchen trash once or twice a day, every day. Imagine if I never took that out for a week or a month. That's what's happening in our body if we never fast, if we never give our bodies a chance to catch up and take out the trash. So that trash in our bodies doesn't get eliminated very well when we are continually consuming food of any kind. So that's why fasting is so critical. Because it allows our body to heal itself. And when we heal, our body can reduce the inflammation, reduce all of the issues that cause trouble later on down the road, like causing obesity, diabetes, heart disease. All of that is inflammation-based. So when we fast, that's when our body heals itself. So it's magical, it's beautiful, and it can actually be super, super simple. So here's an example. Let's say you eat dinner tonight, Amberly, at 6:00 PM. And, you know, after dinner, you don't consume any more calories. If you want to have a cup of tea or a glass of water or whatever before you go to bed, that's totally fine because there's no calories in that. Then when you wake up in the morning, let's say you wake up at 6 in the morning. So when you wake up at 6, you've already done a 12-hour overnight fast because you got 8 hours for free while you were sleeping, right? And if you add to that 1 or 2 hours in the morning, let's say you first wake up, you drink a full glass of water like I have here, and Then you're not even thinking about eating for 1 to 2 hours more. You've already fasted 13, maybe 14 hours, and you've hardly even noticed it. That is where the magic happens. So that kind of fast is just this simple overnight fast. I call that a circadian fast that we can do just about every day without any issues. I would say a 12-hour fast once we get used to it. Now, if you've never done it before, 8 hours might seem like a long time, and that's fine. Guess what? Just start right there. Maybe tomorrow try for 8.5 hours. And the next day, try for 8 hours and 40 minutes. Go up by 10 minutes a day. Before you know it, you'll be up to 12 hours, no problem. The most critical is don't eat late at night. Eating late at night—
Which is hard for people.
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. But it will improve your sleep. You'll feel so much better, much better rested. Because like I was mentioning earlier, when we eat something, it's very metabolically taxing. It takes a lot of energy. And so if we eat And then we lie down right afterwards, we're going to have a restless sleep. But it's hard because most of us, you know, we, we work late hours and then we're like finally getting around to dinner. It's like 9 o'clock at night. So if that's, if that's your thing, try to just make a slight accommodation for it. And instead of eating like a big dinner, just eat something really light for dinner. If it's already after 8 or 9 o'clock at night, just eat something really light. And then the next morning, try to, you know, make that window about 12 hours if you can. Don't eat breakfast till 8 or 9 in the morning. And so you're done That simple overnight, what I call circadian fast, that you can work up to. And you can do that just about every day. You've heard of intermittent fasting, which most people would consider a longer variation of that. And that's what's called time-restricted feeding. So you might extend that window to 14 hours, maybe 16 hours, you know, in your, in your scenario where I said you ate dinner at 6 and you got up at 6 in the morning, if you just waited until let's say 10:00 AM and you ate your first meal, you broke your fast with some kind of version of breakfast. Hopefully it's with some real food, a healthy protein of some kind. Doesn't have to be eggs. It can be Greek yogurt. It can be whatever, as long as it's real food. So you would have fasted 16 hours in that window from 6:00 PM until 10:00 AM. And that's a pretty good intermittent fast. If you wanted to go a little bit longer, up to 18 hours and eat at noon, some people do that. I would say that's fine too. Just don't do it every single day. You don't want to push your body by fasting 16, 18, or more hours like some people do the OMAD approach, which is the one meal a day. You don't want to do that every day. You can do it once in a while. You can do it once a week. You might even do it twice a week. There's people that will do that one meal a day twice a week, but you don't want to do it every single day. The reason for that, it's a little bit counterintuitive, but your body's really smart. It's resilient. So when the body says, hey, this is kind of interesting, you're not feeding me anything for 16, 18, 20 hours, I need to hold on to my calories really tightly because you're not giving me anything. I got to hold on to what I've got. So it actually makes it harder for you to lose weight if you're trying to lose weight, if that's one of your goals. You'll notice if you never take a break from fasting, whatever, whatever type you're doing— I'm speaking to the intermittent fasting of the time-restricted feeding variety. There's lots of different kinds of fasting. There's 24-hour fasts, there's a 36, a 48, multiple-day fasts. There's all different types, but You shouldn't do them all the time. You got to mix it up. Your body actually craves variety. It craves having that change-up. And so you don't want to do it every single day. And so a lot of people are like you and I, Amberly. They're so like Type A that once they grasp onto a new concept, they just want to do it every single day and never want to change it up. You know, we're just so driven to, okay, I'm going to do 16 hours every day. I'm never going to stop. I don't recommend that because after maybe a month, Maybe it's 2 months. If you're trying to lose weight, you'll notice the weight will stop falling off. It'll stall. And the reason for that is because your body adapts. It's actually called metabolic adaptation and it's saying, hey, I got to hold on to those calories.
Yeah, I think that's why years ago when I first got into the fitness industry, that's what I was taught from a dietitian who was like, no, you want to eat more often because if you don't, your body will start holding on to calories. You won't be able to lose weight. So that's But I was kind of taught. Yeah. And just the other day, I can't remember who I was talking to, and they, they were doing a water fast. So they were on like the 4th or 5th day of nothing but water. And I'm like, I think I wouldn't be able to function. Like, I really don't. I mean, I'm all about the fasting, and for me, I've gotten used to now not eating when I first wake up and eating a little later. But have you ever heard, like, what do you think about this water fast? Like where you don't do—
I don't do that very— never done 5 days. I think my max was 3 days. And those are okay to do like once a year kind of a thing. Like if you have an annual ritual, you want to do a multiple day, say 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, 5 days. Number one, I would have some way to kind of almost medically supervise it, make sure that you're healthy enough to do that. That's, that's quite a long time to not have anything other than water. And I would say, if you do multiple days, do more than water. Do water plus electrolytes. Don't starve your body of electrolytes for 5 days. It may not end well. But it is okay to do that once in a while if you've worked up to it. I would say start with a 24-hour fast. I do that once a month. So it's not even a lot. I do it once a month and it's a chance for me not only to kind of test my body to see if my body can handle it, but it's actually a cool opportunity to take a break from all of that time that you spend planning the meal, preparing the meal, cleaning up after that meal. I mean, with kids, it's not exactly the same because you still got to make sure your kids are eating and stuff like that. I don't have my kids fast, but it is actually beneficial to do these longer fasts, but very infrequently. You don't want to do it regularly. I would say if you're doing a multiple-day, 2, 3, 4, 5-day, that probably not more than once a year. And when you do, make sure you're hydrating and not just water. I would actually say you should add some electrolytes to that as well. So there are benefits. But it's not something you want to do super regularly. And I would say you should work up to it, like try the 16, the 18, and try 24 hours and see how you do with 1 day of not eating. And then if you want to slowly, you know, work up to a 2 or 3-day fast, that's fine, but don't do it super often because that's true what your trainer said about the body holding onto calories more tightly. It will do that if you do too much fasting, it gets into starvation mode and that's not where you want to be either. So You just want to mix it up. You want to give your body a chance to rebuild, to refresh, to rejuvenate. And that can happen in as little as the 12 hours in the overnight fast. So I feel like that's something we should all work up to. And if we can do that pretty much almost every day, the 12-hour overnight, and then if we want a couple of days a week, we want to extend that to 16 hours or 18 hours, that's fine too. Women should be especially careful if they're still ovulating and still menstruating because their hormonal cycle will be such that there's certain times of the month where they'll have an easier time fasting, which would be like right after the period starts. So in the beginning of your menstrual cycle, right after your period, that's the first phase, right? Those are the easier days to have your fasting. When you come up to about mid-month, mid-cycle, about the ovulation time, day 14, 15, 16, you might want to back it off a little bit. And then at the end of the month, that last week, you know, the so-called premenstrual week, That week you don't want to push yourself. That, that's the week your body tends to naturally not want to fast so much. And so when you push it that last week, you're going to not enjoy it, number one. And your body won't, your body won't like it either. So, so if you're a woman that's still ovulating, menstruating, you want to gauge it based on what time of the month it is, because there are better times to fast than others. And the best time by the data I've looked at and the many women I've worked with is that first week of your cycle. So right after Your period. Day 1 is the day that you first have your period. And that first week is probably the best week if you want to push for those 16 hours, those 18 hours, or even try the OMAD thing, the one meal a day, it would be probably during that week. And then you kind of ease off towards the end of the month, especially the last week of the month. You don't really want to be pushing your fast, but about a, you know, 12-hour overnight should be doable almost any point during, during the month, but don't, don't be pushing it. That's really helpful.
Okay. Supplements, fad or legit?
So supplements, I've come full circle on this. My view, if you would've asked me 2 decades ago, I would've said you're wasting your money. And that's before I realized that our soil, even that we're growing our organic crops in, is much more depleted of essential nutrients like magnesium, for example, than ever before. There was a Senate paper in 1936 That first articulated how we were having soil depletion issues and not getting the same amount of nutrients in our food that we used to. And that was 1936. Sadly, it fell on deaf ears. Nothing's really been done about it. We have some of the worst techniques for our farming. The monocrop agriculture that feeds the millions is actually really bad for nutrition. We strip the soil of its nutrients. So supplements are necessary. They are 100%. In the year 2022, 2023, and beyond, we need supplements. We don't need every single thing under the sun. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars on them, but there are a couple of key supplements that I really think everybody could benefit from. And I have a pretty short list. My first one I recommend—
What do you recommend?
Magnesium. Almost everyone can benefit from. 70% of us have a functionally low level of magnesium. Magnesium is required in over 600 different reactions in the body, including the one that makes energy. You've heard of ATP, adenosine triphosphate? That's what makes energy. You can't even do that without magnesium.
Wow.
Magnesium is critical. Everybody, nearly everybody in my experience can benefit from adding magnesium.
Okay, well, I take that. They say it's good to help sleep through the night.
Helps you sleep too. It helps you sleep. It helps with migraines. For me, it was a game changer once I started really boosting my magnesium. I used to suffer a lot from really horrible migraines. And I rarely get them anymore from the magnesium I take. So magnesium glycinate and threonate are 2 of my favorites. Beyond magnesium, the omega-3 fish oils, if you will, the omega-3 fatty acids are really essential. And nowadays in our diet, we don't get very much of it. And in fact, we have the wrong kind of fatty acids, which are the omega-6s. They tend to be the prominent ones that most people consume.
Mm-hmm.
And we hardly eat any omega-3s. Omega-3s are only found in a couple of places, fish, and fish eggs and seafood are about the only place you can really find it. Sadly for our plant-based friends, there's not really any good form of omega-3s. You can get some from algae. So you'll see people are marketing, you know, vegan-friendly algae supplements for omega-3s, but the process in your body to convert that into a usable form is very difficult and it doesn't happen to any significant degree. So most people that are strictly vegan will have a lot of trouble with omega-3 deficiency as well as vitamin B12 deficiency, because vitamin B12 is essentially just found in animal products. All the different meats, whether it be pasture-raised chicken, wild-caught fish, well-raised beef, you know, hopefully grass-fed and finished beef, all of that will have plenty of vitamin B12. But if you're strictly plant-based, it's pretty hard to get that. So you may need to have periodic vitamin B12 treatments because that's just something you can't get And this has been from my 20 years of experience. This has nothing against if you are a vegetarian or vegan, that's totally cool. And if you're thriving, I am happy for that. I love, love, love so many different thousands of different vegetables and fruits, but I also incorporate meat into my diet. And this is one of the reasons why, because it's hard to get B12. It's hard to get the omega-3s without that.
And tell us, tell the listeners what omega-3 and what B12 is responsible for.
Yeah. So omega-3s are one of the most important for our brain. Our brain needs them. These are the DHA and the EPA that you've heard about in the latest decade. I think there's been lots of interest in supplementing in these areas because most people don't get enough from the diet, but it's really good for brain health. It's good for eye health. It's good as an anti-inflammatory. One of the biggest problems we have right now today is inflammation. Inflammation is at the root of every disease from heart disease to diabetes to cancer. And one of the best sources of an anti-inflammatory is actually the omega-3 fatty acids, which are primarily DHA and EPA. So great for the brain, great for decreasing inflammation. Sadly, most of us don't get enough. So that's number 2. Magnesium was my number 1. Number 2 is the omega-3s, which are DHA and EPA. My 3rd, it just depends on which, which day of the month you ask me. There's a couple of other ones that are important. Out there. And it just, you know, a really good multivitamin that has, like, for example, the B12 that I mentioned, I would include as my number 3, because most people don't get enough B12. And when you look for B12, you need to have it in a form that your body recognizes, which is called the methylated B12. So a lot of them will just say B12, or they'll say cobalamin, which is kind of the chemical word. You want to see something that says methyl, methylcobalamin. And that's the same thing for folate. Folate, you've heard of, because especially women that are trying to conceive and have children, they should make sure their folate levels are appropriate. And this comes from if you eat enough dark green leafy vegetables. And if you're eating tons of different dark green colored vegetables and fruits, that's going to help with your folate. But if you're not, many people, especially childbearing age women, will need folate. And sadly, most doctors just say, hey, just run to the, uh, whatever health food store and get folic acid. Well, folic acid is not actually bioavailable. Your body doesn't recognize it and it has to go through an enzymatic process to convert it into a usable form. So you've heard of people with what are called MTHFR deficiencies. It's super common. It's one of the most common genetic inherited deficiencies out there is in the MTHFR process, which is the methylation of the folate, you know, to keep it really simple. So those people especially will need methylated folate. Yeah.
I just had a test and—
oh, okay.
And it's to check if you have one of the MTHFR. Yeah, I should probably send this to you and have you look at it because I'm like, I don't understand this. But they're like telling me that they check MTHFR, which stands for the—
Methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase. You don't have to remember that, but yeah, it's basically the enzymatic process that helps your body metabolize folate and use it in, in your body and do this process called methylation, which is the way that you make folate into a form that your body knows how to use. So methylation is super important. Yeah.
And what's so crazy about that is if you have that gene or something, if you have it, you don't process actually alcohol the same way someone else would. Isn't that right?
Yeah. There's a, there's a couple different enzymatic, uh, things that, that play into how you can break down alcohol and metabolize it in the body. That's true. That's my short list of supplements. I have many more favorites. If you looked in my If you look in my cabinet, you would see I probably take 20 or 30, and they come from a couple different manufacturers. Some I can get really great gut health ones, and some I can get like the magnesium I was talking about. I use what's called magnesium threonate because it actually gets into the brain. It crosses what's called the blood-brain barrier. So it helps me even more with my sleep. It helps me prevent migraines. That's called magnesium threonate. And so I make sure to get that. But there are a few that most of us need, and those are the ones: magnesium, the omega-3s, vitamin B12.
Yeah.
Super important. Those would be sort of top of the list. And then we can talk later a little bit about gut health because gut health is so important. You know, I think Hippocrates even said that. He said 2,000, 3,000 years ago, all disease begins in the gut. Well, I say, Dr. Hemingway says all health begins in the gut. If you have a healthy gut, your body in almost every way will be healthier for it. So you gotta, you gotta pay attention to what you eat, what you do, because that Informs the bacteria that live in you. We have trillions, Amberly. Did you know that we actually are outnumbered by the bacteria that live in our intestinal tract? There are actually more of them than there are human cells. And there's probably 10 times more DNA from these gut bugs, these bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and others that live in us than our own human DNA. So do you think it'd be important if we paid attention to these little guys? I mean, they outnumber us. There's 10 times more DNA.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So you work on your gut health and do you take supplements to boost that? Your gut?
I, I do. I do. I take several different ones. They range in different categories. So you have prebiotics, which are what feeds. It's like the food for those good bacteria. If you feed them the things that they like, then they will not only survive, but they will thrive and they will give you many benefits. So many people don't know this, but Gut bacteria, they actually make vitamins, for example. They can make vitamins for you. They can also help you digest food. They can— there's so many things that they help with. Most people have no idea, but 95% of all the serotonin in your body is made in your gut. 95% of it. Only 5% in other places like the brain, for example. And we know that serotonin is a happy hormone. It's good. It's something that we want to have. We don't want to be deficient in it. 95% of it is manufactured in the gut by what are called the enterochromaffin cells. And the relationship that they have with the gut bacteria will keep those hormone levels in check. It's amazing. Like, who knew, right?
It is amazing.
There's also this fascinating thing I love to share with people that most don't know about is that the gut-brain connection, there's literally a whole nervous system that connects what's happening in our gut to our brain. And so many of us will think, gosh, why am I craving a certain thing? Maybe it's an Oreo. Maybe it's, for me, it used to be ice cream. And the reason I was craving this all the time is because I had an increased number of gut bacteria that wasn't the really healthy kind that, that wanted me to eat that. Because when I ate those processed carbohydrates or processed, whether it be grains, glutens, milk, like the ice cream or whatever, they, they survived. They thrived when I would eat that stuff. Now that I've changed my gut flora by eating way more vegetables than I ever used to, I also take probiotics. I don't ever crave ice cream. Do I still like ice cream? I actually still like it, but I actually never crave it. I can literally buy a half gallon of ice cream. It can sit in my refrigerator for a week, 2 weeks, even a month, and I never crave it anymore.
Yeah. Do you know, I used to do the same thing. I used to crave frozen yogurt, like sugary frozen yogurt every single night. And when I started working on my gut health, I don't crave it. I don't ever crave it. It's like I just don't want it anymore.
It's amazing. You would have no idea. These, these little guys, I call them, these bacteria, they actually send signals. Like, if you can think of your text messaging, you message your friend, they send text messages to your brain that say, hey, eat more of that frozen yogurt, Amberly, you will feel better. Mm-hmm. You will, you will like it. Please eat more of that. Because when you do, those bacteria, which are not the helpful ones, they survive, but to your own detriment. So you have to work out this relationship with the good bacteria, if you will. You want them to be the ones that are calling the shots, not the other ones that are telling you to eat all of those sugary treats and junk foods and things like that. Because at the end of the day, they're not going to help you. They're not going to be there when you really need them. They're going to be the ones that want you to eat the crappy things, but they won't do anything for you. They're not the ones that are making the vitamins. They're not the ones that are keeping you healthy. So it's really what you feed will breed, not, not, you know, not only in the child's, you know, tale that we tell our kids, but it's what we feed our gut that will actually determine our health. And so food first is what I always start with. You want to start with the prebiotic, which is fiber, fiber-rich foods. Like my favorites are asparagus, Brussels sprouts, my favorite of all times. Every time we barbecue, we make Brussels sprouts and asparagus. And just those fibrous vegetables are really healthy for your gut. The more fiber you eat, the happier your gut is. And also, you probably know this from your nutrition training, but it's not the same with respect to the carbohydrates. So there's something that when you have fiber, the carbs don't really sort of, I hate to use the word count, quote unquote, but the true carbs that your body sees and processes would be less. They would raise your blood sugar less. These, these are what I call the slow, the slow carbs. So really when you eat real food, vegetables, fruits, I tell people they can literally eat however many their body tells 'em to eat. But if it's real food, healthy vegetables and fruit, have as much as you want. Fruit juice, however, Try to stay away from the juice. Eat your fruit. Don't drink the juice because what happens with the juice? Most of the juice has zero fiber in it. They take all that stuff out, right? They take all the fiber out. They just give you the juice, and the juice spikes the blood sugar. The blood sugar spikes. The insulin spikes.
I don't juice anything.
Yeah, I don't do any juicing. I stay away from juice. I eat the whole the whole fruit. I eat the whole thing.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, I could talk to you all day long, and I'm so sorry we went over a little bit, but I just. want people to be able to learn more and more, and you just have so much more wisdom to share. And luckily you have a new book coming out. So could you please tell everyone the name of your book? What's the best place they can get it, whether it's from the website or Amazon or wherever that may be? And then you guys also, he's got tons of courses that you can check out on his website and He offers courses on everything from metabolism to hormones to fasting, all of this. And he's got a podcast. You should go head over and listen to his podcast. But tell us about your book and where they can find it. I can't wait to read it.
Yeah. So the book is called Preventable, Preventable: 5 Powerful Practices to Avoid Disease and Build Unshakeable Health. So, the website you can go to is thepreventablebook.com, and it's going to be available January of 2023. And it will have all of the things we talked about, Amberly, and way more. Those 5 powerful practices we have talked about— are you ready? Literally only one of them. So, there's 4 more that we can really focus on in the book. You just got a little tiny, tiny appetizer here. There's so much more. And the cool thing is it's all stuff that we can largely do for free. It doesn't cost money, but most of it people just don't know. That's amazing. There are things that I've learned over the last couple of decades, but most doctors have no idea. I'm willing to talk about the stuff that most doctors are not and the stuff that will actually move the needle. So if you want to find more of this, not only get the book, but follow me on Instagram @DrThomasHemingway, which is just D-R Thomas Hemingway, my website, super easy, thomashemingway.com. And like Amberly says, all of the courses I have are there. We have nearly a dozen of them and they are all very powerful. They all stand alone and there's a lot there. So there's plenty for you to, to you to reach out to, grab, follow me on Instagram. You'll hear all my latest, my latest health info every day. I post a reel almost every day and it's usually stuff that you've never heard before. It's pretty fascinating stuff and it's kind of entertaining too sometimes.
Yes, and it's entertaining. And you get to see the behind the scenes with the 6 kids and, and bros.
You get to see how we eat too. I mean, I literally will show you. And I'm not one of those like foodies that's going to take a picture of the perfect meal. I'll just show you real time what it looks like with 6 kids making dinner. Like, I'll show you what it actually looks like. I, I'm not a photographer, so I don't take very good pictures, but you can definitely check out all the stuff, Dr. Thomas Hemingway on Insta. And also my podcast is called The Unshakeable Health Podcast with Dr. Thomas Hemingway. Used to be called Modern Medicine Movement. I changed the name because nobody's really looking for medicine, you know, anymore with respect to health.
And I looked at your website and that website's even gone. You've taken that website down.
Yeah, my website is gone for that. So it's all thomashemingway.com and Unshakeable Health.
And I like that you changed your Instagram handle too.
Yeah, it made it easy. Just my name. Simple.
Simple to find. Yeah. And did you see how much your Instagram grew, like, as soon as you changed your name?
Yeah. And just posting every day for you guys, the reels every single day, and just trying to— well, you're doing a phenomenal job.
You're doing a phenomenal job on it. And you know what, if you're, if you're, you know, in the car going for a run or wherever you are listening to this show right now, thank you so much for tuning in, first of all. But all of these links and this information will be in the show notes so you can go back, circle circle back and check out the show notes. And Thomas, thank you so much for being on. You guys take a screenshot and you can tag me @AmberlyLagoMotivation or Dr. Thomas Hemingway on Instagram. Whenever I see that, I always share it in my story. Um, but just let him know that you heard this interview on True Written Grace. And again, thank you so much for being on and sharing your wisdom. I appreciate you so much. And thank you everybody for tuning in.
Thanks to all. Thank you, Amberly, especially. Big aloha to you.
Thank you.
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