Mike Koenigs Show Interview feat. Dr. Donielle Wilson

Americans are inviting deadly diseases into their body every single day and many don't even know it. Extreme stress, an epidemic of the 21st century, is actually killing executives, CEOs, high performers, professional athletes and celebrities. And is directly linked to Alzheimer's, depression, diabetes and countless other diseases. Stress is no longer simply exacerbating health problems, it's causing them. Dr. Donnie Wilson, stress expert, number one best selling author, international speaker, naturopathic doctor, and the creator of nature empowered nutritionals. Dr. Donnie has been recognized as physician of the Year and served as the president and executive director of the New York association of Naturopathic Physicians for more than 10 years. She helps her patients reverse engineer their health by understanding their genetic tendencies and recovering from stress exposure. That means you can feel like you're in your 30s, return to having peak performance energy, sleep peacefully through the night, lose those extra pounds, significantly increasing your chances of getting pregnant and preventing disease. Here's Dr. Donnie.

Well, hi Dr. Donny. It's nice to have you here.

Thank you so much.

Alright, so you grew up in a pharmacy family. How did that shape what you're doing right now?

Well, you might be surprised to find out that actually growing up with a father who's a pharmacist, I learned more about how to prevent than need for medications. So that was pretty interesting way to grow up.

All right, and what ended up happening when you went to college?

Well, I was originally in a pre med program and so was studying science. And I realized that I really didn't want to be practicing medicine the way we think of it. Instead, I really wanted to be able to use food and lifestyle and nutrients as medicine for patients. And so that's about the time that I discovered naturopathic medicine. And I was accepted to Bastyr University, which is a naturopathic medical school in Seattle. And I graduated from Bastyr with a doctorate in naturopathic medicine. I also trained as a midwife. And so when I was studying midwifery, I became really interested in how stress affects women in labor. And what I learned is that it turns out that when women experience an optimal amount of stress, that labor goes smoothly. But if women have too much or too little stress, labor stops. So I then decided I want to find out more about how stress affects us even when not in labor. And I discovered some really interesting and disturbing facts. One is that stress isn't just an emotional stress. We get exposed to stress in the form of foods and toxins and even something called oxidative stress. And the other thing is that stress affects our digestion, our immune system, our hormones and our nervous system. So stress has a huge effect on our bodies.

All right, so at some point, you also had some stress issues in your life, which you used all your principles. And I think it's safe to say what's important is the people you work with, the executives, especially a lot of female executives who bring you in to work with them either personally or in the organizations. You help them optimize their lives so they're able to be peak performers. But how did you implement this in your own life?

Well, that's the thing. I spent over a decade as an naturopathic medical student. And then. And as a new doctor, I moved across the country to New York, where I then was a leader in the naturopathic community, running a legislative effort, which was all new to me. I became a mom, I had my daughter, and then I went through a divorce, all within a small time period. And so it really affected me. I was tired all the time. I was getting migraines and mood fluctuations. I was feeling awful. So I had to figure out how to get myself feeling better. And so I helped myself to recover from stress and become rich, resilient to stress. And the way that I did that is by healing leaky gut, something called leaky gut, healing my digestion, getting my stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline and neurotransmitters and hormones all back on track, we can resolve those things, those effects of stress. And it changed my life. So now what I do and have been doing all these years is helping other people get that same benefit and change their lives.

All right. And I know you've had great success working with high profile, high performing CEOs and executives. So why don't you share the story about how you worked with the CEO.

Of Aetna, Mark Bertolini. And he came to me because he operates in a very high, demanding schedule. Traveling and a lot of responsibility. And he was experiencing lower energy than he needed and some weight gain. So he came to me saying, what is going on? What can I do to improve my performance? And for him, a lot of the stress, besides the stress of his position was stress from his diet. So I helped him to figure out which foods that we could remove from his diet so that his body could heal. And then we worked on rebalancing his cortisol, got him back to sleeping better. He lost about 30 pounds and improved his energy, and it made a huge difference in his life. He's been able to maintain his schedule and not feel depleted. And since then, he now, when his team members or other colleagues approach him with what did he do for his health? He tells them and sends them to me so that they can get the same thing that he did.

And I know one of the things that you're able to do is you are an international speaker. So organizations that want to reach out to you and have you speak again, either on their stages or inside corporations to again reinforce what can be done without drugs, surgery, and conventional methods. Talk a little bit about your availability to speak.

I love it. I really feel like it's, in some ways it seems so simple. I mean, when we think about how our health is really determined both by our genetics, our genetic tendencies, and our stress exposure. So all we need to do is start understanding our genetics and then look at our stress exposure and help our bodies recover. And so that's what I do when I'm training practitioners throughout the country and internationally, as well as anyone who just wants to learn a bit more about what they can start to do on a daily basis to improve their health.

Right now, I know you've worked with another CEO of a company. There's a woman named Summer. Why don't you share her story? What was going on in her life and what did you help her with?

Well, she's an example also of a practitioner. I also help a lot of practitioners. She's a health coach who specializes in gut health. So she was already paying attention to her diet, but she was under extreme amount of stress as a woman entrepreneur running her business. And she came to me because she had caught a cold and a cough that would not go away. As I mentioned, stress affects our immune system. And she was exhausted and not able to keep up with her schedule. So I helped her to improve her immune system and to get her cortisol levels back on track. And we did end up finding that there were some imbalanced bacteria in her digestion we needed to address. So to me, it's just reversing those effects of stress. And so Summer was able to improve step by step over time. Now she's back at her business, but she's doing it in a way where she can do her self care while she's running her business and she's back to doing hobbies she loved that she couldn't do when she wasn't feeling well.

Now, one of the other things that I know you're very well known for, you mentioned this earlier, is helping executives get pregnant because again, when they're under stress, they're struggling and Trying to manage and maintain work life balance. So this question of work life balance is one topic. The one is pregnancy. Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. And this is an example of a patient named Jennifer who came to me when she was in her 30s and she wanted to have a baby. She'd been trying, but she had experienced miscarriages and she was really thinking that she was going to have to go to ivf. So she came to me first and said, is there anything else that I can do? And what we end up finding is that she has a genetic variation called MTHFR which affects how our bodies, what amount of folate our bodies need. And that folate is really important for pregnancy. So by understanding her genetics and understanding her stress exposure, I could then help her address it. We could address the leaky gut and the hormones and address the MTHFR and the folate levels. And she was able to conceive naturally, save money by not doing ivf, but also able to learn how to help her body become resilient to stress and have a healthy baby.

Fantastic. So you've got a lot that you're able to serve again, you can work on a corporate level optimizing executives. You've been brought in to either speak and you've also worked with practitioners and then you're optimizing women, helping them with their self care, their personal optimization, even all the way to pregnancy. So how can someone learn more about your best selling book? And I think we should talk a little bit about that. You've got your book, you're giving it away today. Talk a little bit about stress warrior.

Well, this concept of being able to optimize our health based on our genetics and our stress exposure, I call that being a stress warrior. So these people we've been talking about, to me, they're stress warriors. And that's what I want to teach everyone how to do. Because sometimes it can feel like we can't do anything about stress. Like it's just part, you know, just there's nothing you can do or you have to power through. But actually there's another way. The other way is becoming a stress warrior and learning how to do self care while doing what you love. And so yes, I'd love for you to be able to come and get a copy of the Stress Warrior and start putting into place those steps to help you recover from stress and become resilient to stress.

All right, so where does someone learn more about you? Get a copy your book and find out if they're a right fit to.

Work with you, they can go straight to stresswarriorbook.com alright, so fantastic.

So your next step is really easy. Just head over to stresswarriorbook.com you'll get a copy of Dr. Donnie's book. You'll also find out more about how you can work with her and how she can bring optimization either into your life or into your organization as well. Thanks for watching.