The Midlife Energy Crisis: Why You're Exhausted and How to Fix It

So what if I told you that the energy problem that you have, the bloating and gut sensations that you have, or maybe your constipation, has a lot more to do with your body's ability to detoxify the function of your body and your powerhouses, called your mitochondria, and that a lot of what you may have read may be wrong about how to fix these things. So today I'm talking with my friend Laura Frontero, and she is an expert in. In helping women and men really restore their energy and help their body become a healthier terrain. And it really boils down to the health of the gut, the health of your powerhouse, your mitochondria, and your central nervous system and your ability to restore these to balance. And part of our conversation today was really important, and it was about how to frame changing your diet and lifestyle and supporting these much needed processes in the body in the right way. And a lot of what you read about online and a lot of what you hear often may be wrong. And in many cases, it's the right things in the wrong order. So join me today on Menopause Mastery, where I dive in with Laura about how to really fix your energy and feel like yourself again. Hormones are a big part of it, but hormones can only do so much, and you have to really come down to the cells and really fix the body. So listen in today. All right, Laura, Gosh, I am so glad to have you on Menopause Mastery today. We're gonna. We're gonna dig in, and I wanna. I want to really dig into you. Love really helping people uncover root cause, right? At the end of the day, everybody likes to look for their. Their silver bullet. What's the thing? The one thing I'm sure that makes you crazy. What's the one thing I should do?

Yeah, for sure. Cause it's never one thing, right, Betty?

It's never, ever one thing. And so I'm so excited to have this conversation because it really is all these other things. But I want to know, because you were in healthcare for two decades working for Kaiser. Right. And working in specifically women's health and osteoporosis, which we both have a love for. And where did you come into this functional medicine movement? How did you get here? Because we all have a story.

It is a story. My story is a story of distraction. I was. I was in a situation in my life where I needed a. I needed a heavy distraction without getting into too much detail about the drama that was going on. But I basically decided one Day, to heck with this. I don't want to work for Big Medicine anymore. There's got to be a better way. I can take my, you know, 20 plus years of experience in healthcare and I can, I can figure something out. In fact, I was at this moment in my career where I was like, you know what, I'm done writing prescriptions, I'm done working for Big Medicine. I just want, I just want to do something that I really love and I'm really good at teaching people. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to teach people how to get better. So I'm going to coach people. Right. So I started out weight loss coaching and I, I did that for about a year and I was really good at it and I hated it. Like, I don't want a weight loss coach. This is not my jam. There's people out there who love it. And even though I was good at it, it didn't light me up because I'm a bit of an investigator. And there's. No, there wasn't investigative opportunities with the weight loss piece. For me, a lot of it is mindset and trauma release and less laboratory evaluation. Right. Although that is a component of it as well. So that's about the time that I decided to really dive into the gut microbiome. And what is this thing anyway that everybody's talking about? And once you see, see it, you can't unsee it. And there's a lot of really juicy diagnostic evaluation that can happen for, for people, you know, when you're looking at their gut health. And, and then I went down the mitochondria path and I started studying mitochondria health and there's some juicy diagnostic lab evaluation that you can do there too. And then I went down the toxin route and it just kind of kept snowballing. And so at the, at heart, I really like data. I really like to test to find out what's going wrong with somebody so we can solve that. And so that's how that kind of came to fruition, kind of. It was a, I needed something different in my life. I needed a shift and I, and I knew I didn't want to work in big medicine anymore.

Yeah. And that's, you know, you and I connect on so many different levels, but the inner nerd is, is probably the biggest one because we're both, you know, we both like to dig into the data because the reality is, yes, you can normalize, you know, different conditions across the population, but when you have Somebody sitting in front of you, that's the person. Right? And even if you have 50 to 200 all learning something new, it's their individual route and road. And what is their individual root cause? Because I hate to break it to people, it's never just one thing. It's usually a constellation of somewhere between 5 and 50 or more. Yeah, right. But you got to uncover it. And I always like to call it like peeling back the layer of an onion and really digging in, because it's different for each person. But the framework, and I think that's the important part, the framework of how you go about digging through and becoming your own investigator is the important part. And I think you have really mastered a lot of that framework to help people really become their own investigative detective. So tell me, when you're looking in the gut, what are the big things that you see that a lot of people sort of get wrong when they're looking at the gut? Because there's a bunch of.

Oh, it's so funny. So, I mean, I have so much to say here. So everybody really loves to fixate on the commensal and the opportunistic and the pathogenic bacteria and parasites, right? So, oh my gosh, I have streptococcus, I have staphylococcus, I have Klebsiella, I have, you know, E. Coli. I've got, you know, I've got this or that XYZ parasite. Right. I've got a me, I've got a Entamoeba, I've got. And you know what? That's not my favorite part of the test. The, the bacteria, the organisms that live there, they live there for a reason. And the reason is your terrain is screwed up and your immune system is screwed up. So I like to flip to the part of the test that shows me what's happening in your immune system, what's happening with your digestive markers, what's happening with inflammation. Because those three key things are going to tell me what, what got you here in the first place. To create an environment where all those bacteria can thrive, where those parasites can thrive. And until you solve those things, you can't just take an herb to kill a bunch of bacteria and parasites and expect anything to change. The terrain didn't change. And so those things are just going to come right back. You have an inviting environment for microbes infections to grow. You have to change the environment. And so my favorite parts of the tests are not really what's growing there. It's why are these things growing here?

Oh, I'm so glad you said that, because I, I have people, you know, because my research was looking at the microbiome and people would fixate on. I think I have H. Pylori. I'm like, why is it there? You know, it's like, you know, you know. Yeah, you can't. You can buy the best organic seed on the planet and if you put it in a garden that has been napalmed and it is not going to do well. Right. It doesn't matter how fancy the seed is. And I think, I think that's the challenge. And again, even like, people, oh, I need to take this. What Probiotic? What? This, what that? Like, it doesn't matter if it's an environment that it cannot grow in and cannot support other ones of the same nature to grow in, it's still not going to help.

Yeah. It's like you really have to go and look at the environment and solve it. The biggest one that everybody seems to be really excited about right now is Akkermansia mucinophilia. Right. This is like, it's like the bacteria of the year. Right. It's like, which bacteria is getting the most research? And so people get really obsessed about it. And so we see a lot of, of less than detectable limit or very low Akkermansia. And they want to go get an Akkermansia probiotic because, you know, there's a few brands out there that are known for their Akkermansia or one brand in particular that I can think of.

Yeah.

And of course they go and spend all this money on a probiotic and they take this Akkermansia hoping that they can get this one singular bacteria to work better. And. And it doesn't work. We retest and it's not there. And it's not there because you didn't give it what it needs to thrive. You didn't change the environment. So really, taking Akkermansia without the polyphenols that it needs to thrive, or without, you know, solving the digestive issue or solving for inflammation, you're just throwing seed into dead soil. Right. It's not going to take.

Yeah, yeah. And those are the grannies of the neighborhood. Like, they're going to move on when the drug gangs move in. Right. So when you got the wrong ones in there, they're not surviving. Right. That's the reality. Right. And so you said polyphenols. So let's go down this road because we got to go down this road because there is a huge push lately for A carnivore diet.

Yeah. So a very famous functional medicine doctor. Well, actually, I'm not. Yeah, I think she's a doctor. Anne Louise Gittleman. Was Ann Louise Gittleman a PhD or a medical doctor? I don't.

PhD. She's a Ph.D. yeah.

Dr. Anne Louise Gittleman. So I had the fortune to interview her early on, like when I first started producing my first summits. She was. She was a speaker, and I interviewed her a couple of times, and she said to me one time, she said, laura. And I would call her, like, the grandmother of American functional medicine. I mean, she is so important to.

Yeah.

She made it possible for you and me to do what we're doing. People thought she was crazy.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, she was one of the first books I picked up decades ago.

She's a pioneer. She's a pioneer. And she said to me, Laura, she said, the diet that heals you is not the diet that will sustain you. And this is what people get wrong. And so what she means by that is, so you went carnivore and you felt better, so now you think you should be on it forever, or you went vegan and. And you felt better, so now you think you should be on it forever. When the reality is we were not built or meant to eat a singularly focused diet. We were meant to eat by the seasons, by what's available. And that includes all kinds of different foods, animal and plant derived. And you don't get polyphenols from animals. You get polyphenols from plants. Plants. And so it's so funny. You can put a bunch of experts in a room and everybody can argue until they're, you know, red in the face about the diet. That's right. And. And I just say, you know, what's right for you, what works for you, what do you feel better on? Based on where you're at right now, in your health, what needs to be focused on, and your genetics, which is a big piece. And I, you know, learned this later on in my functional medicine journey, that not all of us are really built to digest and assimilate the nutrients out of every single food on the planet. So I'll just use, like, there's members of my family, we all did our DNA, and there's members of my family who would literally die. Well, die is a little bit extreme, but would become very ill if they were a vegan because they can't actually extract the nutrients from. From plants as effectively as they can from animal products. It's not that they can't at all, but if they were relying on that for protein, they would become ill. And so the plant, the, the diet that heals you, that makes you feel better in the moment, like. Yeah, a carnivore diet totally simmers down the gut. You're not putting any fiber in there. You're not having to, your bacteria aren't having to ferment anything. It totally rests the gut. It allows you to, you know, a lot of shifts to occur in that terrain. But carnivore forever, I think is, could be a problem for people because what are you going to do for polyphenols and vitamins and nutrients that only come from plants that aren't part of animal foods?

Yeah, I mean, you know, if you look at the data and the research, you know, if you do a carnivore diet for a long period of time, you will have radical shifts in that microbiome over time. And they produce like, a bunch of nasty things. Putresine. Cadaverine. Yeah, cadaver. Right, they do, right. There's, there's colitis models of those, you know, those things. And so I think it's a, you know, it's the idea of a therapeutic diet to fix a particular underlying pathology. And then there's maintenance diet, which is going to be broader and wider, I think, and it's that. Miss. You know, but, but it's a great marketing tool to, to drive everybody to a very extreme diet, you know, Know.

I mean, you can sell a lot of books, you can sell a lot of food, you know, supplements and, and gadgets to measure what's happening in your body. I mean. Yeah, it's a great, it's a great model.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the reality is it's different. You know, it's. Yeah. So I agree, but I think, you know, the, the most important thing, like you've already said, is that we have to lay the groundwork for the environment, for the microbiome to normalize itself. And now you mentioned a little bit about toxins and other things. I'd like for you to just sort of back up a little bit and talk about, like, parasites and fungus and what things do they like to harbor and hang on to that, that probably drive your toxicity and other stuff, because lots of people love doing this kind of stuff, too, and they can't figure out why they can't get better.

I know. While we talk about, like, diets for a moment, you know, there's so many people who know they have fungus in the body or they Might have. They might have been, they might have been one of the lucky ones who actually saw Candida on their gut test, which is rare to see because it's unstable in the lab environment. It's degraded in the test tube with the preservative, and it's really sticky like Spider Man. I always say it sticks to the inside of the intestinal walls. And if you don't excrete any of that Candida DNA on the day that you do a stool test, you're not going to see it. And we generally don't. But how many people here listening right now are on a low sugar diet to solve their Candida? And they're on this hamster wheel of never getting. Because that's not the reason Candida is in there. It's not the sugar you, you're eating. That's not why it's there. So your question is, how do infections link to toxins? And there are several infections in the body that are linked to toxins, H. Pylori being one of them. You, you mentioned that earlier. Why can't I get rid of my H. Pylori? So I guess, you know, the concept to introduce here is the concept of pleomorphism, which is when a bacteria changes from a harmless version of itself to a more virulent, potent, harmful version of itself, pleomorphism. The question is, why does that happen? And in the presence of certain toxins, microbes like Candida, microbes like H. Pylori, and then of course, parasites in their own category of just being toxin sponges anyway, I mean, they like a toxic environment. These bacteria and fungus actually change into a more difficult, problematic version of themselves as they soak up toxins. So Candida being a great example, they love to live in a heavy metal and mold toxic environment. The terrain inside the body, it actually promotes the growth of Candida. Now the fascinating thing and, and I, when I learned this, my mind was blown, Betty, is that your immune system actually turns a blind eye. You know, your immune system is overwhelmed with the amount of toxins that are coming at us every day. The human body was never meant to handle the amount of toxins that we are exposed to on a daily basis. And, and that we were even born with, right? And so the immune system, it can only handle so much. And so I always explain it like this. I always say, okay, so here, so here's your immune system here, and here's the Candida over here. And immune system says, hey, yo, you, Candida. I have this really problematic heavy metal situation over here. We've had a mercury exposure. It's going to my brain. It's damaging my brain cells. What I really need you to do is I need you to mop up that mercury. And here's the deal. You're totally annoying, you're symptomatic, you're problematic. But in exchange for not killing you, I'll let you be here to solve this mercury problem for me. So the candida says, sure, I can handle that. Pleomorphs into a more virulent version of itself. Mops up mercury. Immune system is happy because mercury is solved. Immune system has made a deal with the candida, saying, again, I said I'd let you be here. I won't kill you because I need you to solve this mercury problem because it's too much for me. This is just an example of kind of. And I know I'm being silly and pretending like it's a scary get, but this is truly what's happening. Your immune system allows some of these microbes to be there to solve the toxin problems. So you must. You must detoxify in order to get rid of infections. And this is where people stop, Betty. I mean, all the time we run these, you know, gut healing programs in my community. We bring in hundreds of hundreds of people will participate all at once. We teach them how to understand their gut tests, we teach them how to build their protocols. We. We give them all these tools because we know. We know that a gut test is not a one and done right. This should become part of your regular evaluation yearly. You would never just get your thyroid checked once in your lifetime or your blood sugar checked once in your lifetime, or your cholesterol checked once in your lifetime. Right. Or your hormones checked once in your lifetime. You do this typically annually. Why wouldn't a gut test be part of your annual evaluation? So we want to empower people so that next time they do a gut test, they can go back to their training and knowledge. Say, oh, yeah, Laura said, when this is on my gut test, it means this. We want to empower people with this knowledge. Anyway, my whole point is we'll get to the end of a gut restoring program. And I've taught them all along, you're not going to solve all your chronic health issues unless you detox. You've just started. You've started the process. Now we have to get the metals out, we have to get the molds out, mycotoxins. We have to get the environmental toxins out. Otherwise the candida has something to thrive on. The h Pylori has something to thrive on. The parasites have something to thrive on. We can knock them down over here, but you better do step two of detoxifying, or you're going to be stuck back in the murky mire of all the symptoms that you came into me with in the first place. If you don't finish the process, It's a thing people stop all the time. I'm sure there's examples of this in your practice where you need them to do something to help their hormones, and they only go halfway, they start feeling a little better, and they're like, okay, I'm done.

Yeah, because it takes work. I mean, you know, the reality is, is, you know, I was explaining this to a conventional doctor. I was like, you know, functional medicine and integrative services and things like that require participation in a back and forth between the providers and the. And the patient. You know, and the reality is, is, you know, if. If somebody's sort of like, okay, I think I'm just going to do this thing, and then I'm going to be done. They're only going to get so far, right? And often they go, in human nature is that they do something for a while and then they don't just fall back to their previous norm right after they did the improvement, they fall backwards down, you know, further down than where they were before. That's Prochaska's law, right? We kind of cycle up and down between that. And so we have to understand that if we detox, we retox as soon as we walk outside or as soon as we do anything. So we. We might do a big sort of gut healing and detoxification. But the. The general rules of the game are once you start this, you continue to support it. It just may not be at the same level. And I think, you know, you probably see it. I know I've seen it over 20 years. Is. Is, you know, we forget how bad we felt after we've been feeling good for a while.

We do. And, you know, Betty, what we call it is maintenance, right? So we go through the biggest protocols to clean up the decades of kind of abuse to the body, right? The infections, the toxins, the nutrient deficiencies, the stressors, the upstream root causes for why we're not doing well. So you go through a big process to clean that up, then is maintenance is next, because you don't want to end up where you started. And so people always ask me, like, what do you do for your health? I say, well, you bet you. I take a binder every day of my life. This is a toxic planet and I'm not escaping the toxins. So I want to assist them out of my body. You bet you. I take a mitochondria support every single day of my life because I know just the aging process alone, I'm going to have a decline in my mitochondrial populations. And I want to support mitochondria biogenesis and growth. I want to support energy production because that's at the root of everything we desire. You've got to be able to make enough energy in your body to, to build the tissues, to repair the tissues, to sustain the tissues. I mean, want to talk about anti aging. If you're not working on mitochondrial health to prevent the progression and speed of aging, you're missing a huge piece. So I will be on a mitochondria support the rest of my life. I will be on a binder the rest of my life. And then because I know my genetics, like from a hormone perspective, I know I'm a terrible hormone metabolism metabolizer. So I know I need support to get hormones out of my body. I know your listeners hear you talk about this all the time. I know that I am terrible at making vitamin D. So I know I need to take that the rest of my life. I'm not going to, I'm not going to make enough from my skin, from the sun, and quite frankly, I'm not out in the sun enough. I'm indoors in front of a camera and a computer working and helping people heal their bodies. So I'm not getting out as much as I should. So I mean there's things that are non negotiable for me and maintenance for me.

Yeah, yeah. And maintenance is going to look different for everybody. But there's going to be, there's going to be the frameworks that must be there, like you said, the mitochondria and the support for detoxification. So you mentioned mitochondrial function. And I think you know, most of my listeners, you know kind of what mitochondria is, but I think the average layperson probably is like might have what I know, right?

Yeah. Well, that I want to bring everybody back right now to biology class because I promise if you went to high school in the United States and probably anywhere in the world, you actually learned about mitochondria in either life science or biology class. So I took biology and you know, it was really fun when we were dissecting frogs and using Bunsen burners and having all this fun in biology class until the week that we had to learn the Krebs cycle. And that was the hardest week of biology for me. And that's when I probably decided in that moment, oh, I'm not going to have a career in biology or microbiology or anything like this. Like, it was all fun until we had to learn about mitochondria because there is nothing more boring than the, the biochemistry of how your body produces energy and memorizing that to regurgitate it on a test. So I'm going to bring everybody back to high school biology right now and say, you've learned this, you just have to remember it. But, but really the, the non boring way to talk about this is that pretty much every cell in your body, minus red blood cells, have mitochondria. Mitochondria are teeny, teeny tiny little organisms that actually have their own DNA and their own genetics. They're not even human and they live inside of our cells. And the nutrients that we eat, that our gut digests, goes into those cells. And those mitochondria grab those nutrients, mainly carbohydrates and fats, and spin them into energy and spit it out to the body. And that's basically what's happening in a nutshell. There's a lot of hiccups that can happen along the way and a lot of reasons why. You can have poor energy production, poor energy, or poor, poor mitochondrial health, and you can actually lose your populations of mitochondria from toxins, from stress, from all kinds of things. So that's basically the crux of mitochondria. Now what do we need them for? So this is the part that I think people don't really wrap their mind around and get Betty. It's because we only are aware of what is in our consciousness. In our consciousness, we feel however we feel. When we wake up in the morning, we feel energy or not. When we get out of bed, we feel energy or not as we go through our day, working, taking care of our families, living life. And maybe we have an energy crash in the afternoon, or maybe we don't. Maybe we keep going into the evening. And maybe you have an energy crash at the end of the day, or maybe you never feel a crash at all. Maybe you have sustained energy all day long and then you go to bed and you're like, there's nothing wrong with my energy. I don't feel feel it. That's just the energy we feel. There's this whole other kind of intrinsic energy that we don't feel. We don't know it's happening. But it's the energy that's required for every single function in your body, whether it's signals being sent from your brain to your foot, or whether it's the production of hormones or the production of neurotransmitters or the production of enzymes or any of the thousands of processes that are occurring in your body simultaneously. Every beat that your heart takes, every breath that you unconsciously take, every. Every time your lungs take a breath of air, this is all unconscious. And this is driven by mitochondrial energy. And so you're not going to necessarily feel it or know it when those storage, when those energy stores are depleted. Now, if you're advanced in your progression of disease or, you know, decline in health, then your body's gonna rob Peter to pay Paul. So you may start to notice dips of energy in the middle of the day, dips of energy even when you wake up, dips of energy. So I want you to think of it like, oh, my body's actually taking energy to make all those systems inside work. Because if those systems aren't working, life ceases, right? So that's the number one thing that needs to happen, is all the cellular processes in the body, some of us are walking around and don't feel it yet. It's kind of. We're in the pre phase, right? So if you actually have symptoms that is a smoke signal going up from your body that you are starting to get mitochondrial decline. And here's the crazy thing. Under every chronic disease that we have, whether it's heart disease, cancer, dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, any chronic deathly disease, underneath that, at the very root of it is mitochondria no longer working. You're not making them, and they're not putting out energy. Every chronic disease is characterized by this, every single one. And so it's the number one thing, along with your gut, that you've got to focus on restoring and helping. And I'm really glad that people are understanding this. Now. I feel like lots of people are talking about mitochondria, right? It's everywhere.

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Well, you got to go deeper. Right? So the. The thyroid, the adrenal, the hormones, the blood sugar, the. All of these measurable, fixable problems have something underneath it. What caused that to go haywire to begin with. Right. And, I mean, you can see. Speak into this. We naturally decline in hormones as we age. Right. Especially as women. So there's a piece of that that is not mitochondrial kind. There's a piece of that that's just. This is how we're wired. We live a really long time now, and so we need that hormone support. But if your hormones are dipping far lower than they should for your age, there's something underneath it.

Yeah, no, I. I definitely agree with you with that. And, you know, because so many women seek out our services and. And yes, hormones are definitely important, and we need to restore those. And. And I. I definitely am not of the mindset that, you know, you need to earn your hormones. I had someone tell me that one day. Well, my doctor told me I need to earn my hormones.

What does that mean?

Yeah, well, like, they needed to do all these other things perfectly, and then they could have hormones. And I was like, well, if you're not sleeping and your brain's not working and you're angry and irritable and emotional and you got a dry vagina and everything else, it's gonna be really hard for you to eat right, get exercise, and not kill your family. Right.

So let's. Let's, like, definitely talk about this right now.

Yeah.

So I think it's really important that you get your hormones working for you early on in your healing process, even if you haven't addressed all the root causes yet. Because if you're not sleeping and all the things you just listed miserable, you're not going to be motivated to do any of the things I'm asking you to do. So what would it be like if you get your hormones started now and as you progress through fixing your gut, detoxing, supporting your mitochondria, just adjust your hormone levels as you go? You may need less hormones six months down the road, 12 months down the road if you do these things. But wouldn't it be beautiful just to get that hormone support now and then adjust later?

Yeah, yeah. I always tell people it's like Katrina. When Katrina hit and it destroyed, you know, half, half of the, you know, Gulf shores of the United States, particularly, you know, particularly New Orleans. The first thing they put in was communications. Right. Like the body needs to be able to communicate and hormones are your communication things. But you can't really clean up all of the back water and the sewage that blew out everywhere without talking to each other. Absolutely. So I think it's important. So I think it's, it's two pronged. It's making sure that you have the right things on board for your communications, your hormones. Because again, we weren't designed to live to 85. We were supposed to bite the dust around 55, 57.

But I know we're, we're, we're fighting that for sure, Betty. You and I, we're making it.

I'm like, hell, no.

I'm going into my 90s for sure.

Oh, for sure, for sure. But the reality is, is, is we have to, we have to take that extra effort and clean up our terrain. Clean up the gut, you know, clean up the toxins and, and really work on that, but continue to work on it in a maintenance mechanism because you can't, you can't just do it once and get over it.

And I also, I just want to say real quick, a lot of people feel like terrain is gut. So terrain is everywhere. Everywhere in your body, everyone. So your terrain is inside of your fascia, your lymph, all of the extracellular spaces. The terrain is around every cell. Your cell is swimming. All your cells are swimming in a matrix. And that matrix is the terrain. So the toxins go to all those places. It's not just the guts. So, yes, the gut, the gut is almost like, I would say the gut is just a really easy place to measure what's going on. It's a really easy place to see diagnostically, but whatever I see going in the gut, it's happening everywhere. Right. We don't just have inflammation in the gut. We just don't just have infections in the gut. We don't just have dysregulated immune system in the gut. It's everywhere. If it's there, it's everywhere.

Right, Right. Well, you know, I, I haven't said this in a long time, but really, your gut, like if you think of the gut from nose to tail, it is inside the body but yet outside the body. Right. So it is designed to keep all, everything in there until it's at the last minute to then get it inside the body. Right. So it's truly outside and inside at the same time.

It's a continuous tube. Right. So it's technically outside the body. Yes.

Right, yeah. And then it is selectively permeable when it's healthy to get the right things in the right place. And, you know, I think, you know, there's so much research now showing at leaky gut, leaky brain, and, and, you know, the impact on like Alzheimer's and dementia and neurological disorders and just every possible part of our body. So this has to be something that people put, you know, time, effort and resources to, you know.

Oh, for sure. And, you know, we. Time, effort and resources. So everybody's out of time. Everybody wants a quick fix. And we've been taught in our culture that health is covered by insurance. So everybody wants the resource to come from this imaginary, you know, health system. I mean, imaginary meaning it's real, but it's also.

Not a health system, a bunch of fraud.

Right. So, yeah, unfortunately, the health system doesn't cover the things that you need to get better. It's getting, it's coming around. But the deep work to do to, you know, detoxify your body is not ever going to be covered by your, by your blue shield.

No, it's. It's an economic. That. Now that's an economic problem because it's completely constructed around getting people sick but not dying. Right. So what they want is that you have a continuous issue where you take multiple medications, you need multiple doctor visits, you have a couple hospital visits every year. So you can contribute to their bottom line, but they keep you just about sustained because there is no financial model for helping somebody not get disease. Right. Like in order for an insurance company to cover a lab that you technically already have to have the disease. And while we're doing, is doing confirmatory laboratory data, you know, which is why so many things don't get covered. Which is just to me, like, you know, it's, it's. Most people don't understand the nuances of how broken that system really is. They recognize it's broken, but they don't understand why. And it's true economics, you know, it absolutely is. Well, and you were entertained? You know, I did.

I came for that. There's absolutely no money to be made when people are solve their problems healthy and don't need you anymore. And really, that's exactly like I tell my community, like, work me out of a job, get better. So that. But the thing is, there's a million people behind you that need my help because the system is so broken. So in my lifetime will never see this solved. And there aren't enough practitioners on the planet who do what I do to help the volume of people who need help. So in a system of supply and demand, you and I will stay in business because there's endless people who need our help. But my goal is when I work with somebody that they work me out of a job, that they learn so much and they get so much better and they learn how to maintain that I don't need to be teaching them any longer or holding their hand any longer. I mean, they hang around because they like my jokes and we have fun in my communities, and they like, they like the community aspect. But truth be told, most of them, they don't need me anymore. They've got this.

Yeah, no, I mean, I love that. I mean, that's definitely how we operate. I mean, our challenge is we have to continue hormones. But the reality is, all the baseline support is like, you got to have that stuff dialed in too, you know, for sure. So if, you know, my listeners are like, oh, my gosh, okay, she's speaking my language. I think I'm energetically, you know, not doing well. I, I, you know, if you're tired, ladies, you got mitochondrial problem. That's the answer to that question. You know, your gut is a problem, whether you feel it or not. You know, where would you tell them to start? Obviously the gut, but where would you tell them to start? Like, there's a, there's an order of things, which I think is also really.

Important is the order of things. And when I very first started, you know, dabbling and learning in functional medicine, I didn't always have the order right. And I actually made people feel worse before they felt better because I didn't have the order right. So in my world, because what we do is Solve the root cause of what's going on. So we're working on solving infections, toxins, nutrient deficiencies, and nervous system dysregulation. Like, those are the four buckets that I live in. And so in the beginning, I used to start going right for killing infections. Like, we'd see the gut tests and I'd see the parasites, I'd see the bacteria. I'd be like, let's get you some killing agents on board. Let's. Let's get these moving out of your body. You'll feel so much better, and a bunch of people would feel a lot worse. And so it wasn't until I learned that you've got to support some systems in the body first before you start moving infections out. So, I mean, first and foremost, no matter what you're doing, whether you're working on fixing your hormones, you're working on fixing your gut, you're working on fixing your brain, you're working on just insert name of thing, you got to poop every day. So we start foundationally with pooping. I mean, that is the number one thing. Let's get you pooping. So funny. We surveyed my community after they finished working with me. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people were surveyed. And, you know, the number one thing that they said was better after leaving my community, that they poop normal now. It was such a compliment. It was like, so many problems can be solved if you can just get the waste out every day. So truth be told, when that waste. This is your waste management system, right? When that waste sits there, I want you to imagine in your own home, if the garbage was never emptied, what would happen if the kitchen trash just stayed there and stayed there week after week after week? Just a. Maybe you just came and skimmed a little bit off the top. Maybe you just pulled a little bit out and took it out to the garbage can, but you left a bunch of it in there. That's how most people poop, right? They only poop a tiny bit, but they're not pooping the whole amount that they should. So what happens with that garbage that sits in there? It gets rancid, it putrefies, it ferments. It becomes this disgusting, smelling, gross.

You.

That's what's happening inside your body. Okay. When you don't poop enough every day. So the truth is that we should be. The amount of stool that comes out of our bodies every day should equal about 12 to 18 inches long. If you measure. If you just. If you just kind of added it all up and Measured it together, you would have about 12 to 18 inches of stool that would come out every day if you lined it up. And most people are only going, like, 4 to 5 inches a day. So what's happening with the rest of that? It's sitting inside, packing inside of you. Most people have upwards of 10 to 15 pounds of stool in their body that is just stuck in there. People complain of bloating and heaviness in the bowels. A lot of it is stool that is clogged up in there. So first and foremost, we need to get your plumbing working. And when you get your pooping so you can stop recirculating all of those toxins, I want you to think about your kitchen with the trash that's not emptied now. That smell is in the air now that's circulating all over the house. That's what's happening in your body. That putrefaction and rotting food that's in there is actually circulating in your body. And it's also creating the environment for microbes to live. So it creates this murky, dark, depleted environment where the bad microbes live, like, to thrive. Just kind of like any old, nasty neighborhood where bad things happen in the dark. That's what's happening in your gut. Yeah.

Just think of, like, you know, you go, so a rushing river has clean, clear water. A pond that has no moving water source.

Yes.

Has funky stuff growing in it. Right. The algae and all the other stuff. And, you know, it's like, okay, this stuff's got to move. It's got to get out of the.

And it is a source of life, too. Right. The pond is a source of life. Lots of stuff is growing in there. So stuff that you don't necessarily want to go swimming in or drink. Right?

Right.

But it's full of teeming with life.

Yes.

So is your gut with all that poop. It is teeming with life, the things you don't want. So that's thing number one. And the other thing that I've really focused on over the years and. And everybody who comes into my community, we start supporting their liver right away. We want to get bioflow moving. We want to get their phase one, phase two, liver detoxification justification jump started and working. I don't think there's a person on the planet that can't benefit from that. Truly, Betty, like, there's. Everybody needs it because we're so full of toxins. We're exposed so much every day. And, of course, our liver is a holding tank for emotions as well. And you know, there's a lot of toxic buildup in the liver that's emotion related as well. So we want to get the liver moving. So we definitely use, you know, supplements and herbs and foods to help move the liver and then the lymphatics. So we really focus a lot on lymphatic flow, like all of this before we even start killing microbes in the body. So your lymph is going to. If your lymph is stagnant, then this is going to create that toxic terrain in this environment that doesn't move what's not supposed to be part of you out. And so supporting lymph flow. I mean, how many times do you meet somebody or even watching tv and you're looking at these big bags under people's eyes and. And this is a telltale sign that the lymphatic system is stagnant and not working. Or people who say, I always notice.

It on the neck. Like the neckline, you know?

Yes, neckline. Like, you should be able to see these bones in here, right? You should be able to see them if they're. If your bones are hidden, you probably have some stagnant fluid here. It's. It's likely not fat. It's likely fluid buildup and lymph buildup. Yes. So the neck, underneath the eyes, the ankles, these are places where we can see lymph is stagnant. And then, you know, we more advanced in my programs, we have a lot of fun with fascia and fascia release techniques and all of that to help as well. A little bit more advanced, but yeah, so that's where you should start. You should start with pooping. You should start with lymph flow. You should start with supporting your liver.

Yeah.

Eat bitter foods. That will support your liver right there. So.

Yes. Yeah.

Arugula, dandelion greens. This is going to be really supportive to helping your liver. Coffee.

Thank God for coffee.

My one perfect mold free cup of coffee per day.

That's right. That's right. But I think, I think that's so important. And, you know, like you said, like, you had started out kind of going and killing bacteria. So when I started, you know, it was a little earlier than that. The detox thing was just coming on board. And, you know, I went to training and all these people trained me, like, hit them hard with detox. And like, the first person I got, she's just like, falls apart, right? Like, yeah. I was like, okay, yeah, that's a little too early to be doing that. So it's you can't do one without the other. The gut and the detoxification pathways are so intimately locked together and, and really it's not a one, two, it's a if and at the same time, but it's also doing it in a, in a way that the body can process because. Oh yeah, it's not, it's not like the gym where no pain, no gain. Right. Like you, you shouldn't feel like you're dying while you're doing.

Oh no, you'll drop someone's energy and health so quickly with a inappropriate detox. And people don't have time for this. They're busy, busy with their work, their jobs, their families. They don't have time for down days. Right. People need to be able to keep moving forward as they detoxify.

Yeah, yeah. We have a quite a few IV clinics that do chelation, like out of the gate. They're like day one, like, get some labs, EDTA or DMSA, IVs. I'm like, okay, not appropriate.

But no, we, I. There's so many people, you just end up displacing the toxins. Right. When you, when you take these drugs and to try to push toxins out, they just get moved from a safe place where your body had it kind of stored away out of the way, and then they get moved into the organs. So now these toxins that were in the, you know, outside of the brain and outside of the liver and outside of the heart and outside of the kidneys, now they're getting filtered through all of this through the bloodstream because you've, you've mobilized all this stuff and now it's getting, you know, people always say, well, it won't cross the blood brain barrier. Your blood goes into your brain. It's going in there. I think people think it's like this imaginary, like.

Yeah, it's not a master hefty bag, like stuff is going through it.

Yeah, it's going right in there. When it gets mobilized into your bloodstream, it's going right into your brain and. Yeah, so exactly. There's a right way and a wrong way to detox and we really prep people to be able to detox. And detox is also not a weekend juice cleanse. Right. Detox is a long process. It's a 6 month, 12 month, 18 month process and then some. Right. And then, and then whatever else gets mobilized and needs to be moved out. We've all accumulated a lifetime of toxins. We're not going to get it out in a weekend.

Yeah. Oh yeah, the juice cleanses make me crazy. I'm like, it's not going to do.

Anything make you feel better because you're pumping yourself with polyphenols and vitamins and you know, it feels great. But it's. Or not. Sometimes it doesn't feel great because it mobilizes some junk. But yeah, I mean, that's not the solution.

No, it's not. It's not. Now you had some, a freebie, a freebie thing that you were offering my listeners because I'm sure now they're like, oh my God, I think I got a mitochondrial problem and I'm toxic and my gut is messed up. And you've got some things that my listeners would love to be able to deep dive into.

Yeah. So actually what I've noticed is that most of our community come to us in midlife. So somewhere between their 40s to 70s is generally who comes to me for help. And they say, Laura, I'm, I've lost my energy, I'm exhausted. And so we really started to focus in on what are the causes of the loss of energy in midlife. And so I actually created a report and this is no small thing. This, this is robust. This is not like a little five page thing that you're going to download. Like this is curl up with a cup of tea, sit down for a few hours and dig into this thing because there's that much content in it. So the midlife energy crisis is what we're looking at. So Midlife EnergyCrisis.com is where you can get this report court and it touches on all of the things we've talked about today, even in greater detail and much, much more. And so this is where your energy's going and why it's being why we're in this era of why don't I feel as good as I did and why did my, why don't I feel even as good as my mom felt at this age? I should be doing more. Well, I'm going to tell you, we've got more toxins in our bodies than our moms did at this age. So yeah, we've got more gut dysregulation, we've got more nervous system dysregulation. So themidlifenergycrisis.com, you can go there, get your download, curl up with a cup of tea and read this through and get these light bulb aha moments. And it's full of solutions as well. It's not just a, oh, this is the problem. This is the problem. This is how you solve it.

Yeah, very important. Very important. And like I said, it's, you know, Laura and I have known each other for quite a while and we have, we have shared patients and clients and it's like, this is a full solution. The reality is you can't just take one, two things or just address one part of the body and expect everything to work well. It's just the world doesn't work that way anymore because it's very, very different than it was 200 years ago.

It was. And I do want to, I always talk about it like we have, like our body is a puzzle. And if anybody's ever put together a 2,000 piece puzzle, you sit there and you get this little piece, this little section of the puzzle going, and you just keep picking up pieces and trying to find the one that fits. And every so often you find one that fits, like, oh, that's it. That's what goes there. This is what fixing your health is. Like. You're going to try something. You try to, you know, pick up this, this, this, like biohack or this or this strategy or something, and you try to put it into the puzzle and it may or may not work. You might have to just let it go and pick up something, something else and try it, and pick up something else and try it. So it's going to take a little while to fill your puzzle in, but once you start to figure it out, it starts to go faster and faster. Right. Just like when you, you get to the. Oh, my gosh, it's coming together. I can actually see the puzzle now. It's, it's like, I can figure this out. So that's how your health is also. I just want to give a huge plug to you, Betty. You know, we bring you into our community. You are our number one hormone program. We bring you in. And we want our people working on gut and detox to be working on their hormones as well, because it's critical for mitochondria, it's critical for brain support, it's critical for gut support as well. So. So we love the way that you formulate your programs and support people all around the United States. It's incredible. And I think the number one question I get is, Laura, when is the appropriate time to start my hormones Right now. It doesn't matter what part of your gut detox mitochondria journey that you're in right now is the time. Because hormones can be adjusted as you go.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You're, you're Absolutely right. You don't have to earn your hormones.

No, I, I'm. That just blows me away that somebody said that.

It happens all the time. I get the question online, on social media. I was told I need to earn my hormones or I can't start them yet.

I'm like, what?

Well, you can sort them yesterday.

Let's go.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, Laura, I have had so much fun talking to you. We could go on for hours.

Like, hours.

We could, we could nerd out for hours. And this has been really, really helpful. I know that everybody on Menopause Mastery is going to be like, oh, my gosh, I got so much rich information. So everybody, don't forget to go and get, you know, your free download. Give them the name again.

Midlife energy crisis. Yeah. Themidlifenergycrisis.com yes, yes.

And for those of you that are actually watching this on YouTube, what I would love for you is, number one, don't forget to subscribe and like the video. But number two, drop us a comment. Like, what things have you noticed about your energy? Like, what parts did you find? Like, okay, this really hit true to me. My energy stinks or even my gut's been a mess for 30 years. Let us know. We'd love to hear what you have to, to say. And thank you. And thank you, Laura, for joining me on Menopause Mastery.

Thank you, Betty.

Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you all next week.