#141: How to Regain Balance with Ayurvedic Medicine

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Hi, I'm Dr. Tabatha, the Gutsy Gynecologist. I'm a triple board-certified OB-GYN and functional medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey, and I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. After caring for thousands of women, I've come to realize that your gut health determines your gyn health and your overall And it's a super gutsy thing for me to go against conventional gynecology practice to bring you the truth. No more Band-Aid medicine, ladies. We're talking root cause resolution on this show. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. And I want to be your gutsy gynecologist. So welcome. Hi, ladies.

I'm so excited to be here.

Excited for this week's episode. We're going to be talking about Ayurvedic medicine, and I don't think I've done an episode on this. And so I'm really excited to bring this to you because it's just so intuitive and it makes so much sense, and it can really give you some quick, easy tools to help making a shift in how you're feeling. So I just want to mention, like, if you are struggling With lack of energy, weight gain, um, not feeling like you can exercise, you know, all of that fatigue, brain fog, trouble with work. It's all-encompassing, and it's related to your gut health and your hormone imbalances. And so much of it is diet and lifestyle related, which we're going to talk about today. But I have been running my 8-week group program, The Gutsy Hormone Solution. We're in week 6 right now and the women are just having amazing transformations. And so I just want you to know that it's like so possible for you. They're telling me how free they feel, how much weight they've lost, how they have shifted their energy, and they're excited about life again. And they just have hope and It's like it fills me up. It's so rewarding to me. But for you, like, that's a possibility. You can totally feel better. And I would really encourage you to consider joining our next round. Hopefully it will come out in October if life goes as planned for me. So consider joining the Gutsy Hormone Solution the next round because My women are just having incredible responses and results, and I just—I want that for you. And I know that that shift is possible. So today we're going to talk about Ayurvedic medicine, and so much of what she talks about is what I have incorporated into my eight-week gutsy hormone solution and what I incorporate just in my private one-on-one practice with functional medicine. And it's so interesting to see. see how something from 5 years ago has really, you know, permeated everything that we do in Western medicine. And she's going to talk about how there is so much credence to it and the evidence all really does support this, you know, ancient medicine. And so it's really cool just to have this conversation today. So Hopefully you'll enjoy it. I know you will, and I want you to share it with your friends and check out my guest. So let me just tell you about her really quick. But seriously, join the Gutsy Hormone Solution the next time it comes out. It will shift your life, I promise. Okay, so Dr. Avanti Kumar Singh, she teaches people how to heal themselves by unleashing their innate healing power and educating them on how to support Self-healing through routines, diet, and tools of yoga, which she's going to talk about is not just like downward dog and child's pose. Yoga means something a lot more. So she works with individuals and groups to replenish their mental, physical, and emotional energy so they can live a vibrant life with more joy, meaning, and purpose. Dr. Avanti has shared her expertise with Fortune 500 companies, elite undergraduate and graduate institutions, and at prestigious industry industry and medical conferences. She's been featured in the Huffington Post, Thrive Global, Well+Good, Goop, and MindBodyGreen. She served as the co-lead facilitator of the Faculty Scholars Program in Integrative Healthcare at Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern, and she currently serves as the director of Ayurveda at Bayan Chicago. So She knows what she's talking about. She's pretty amazing, and she's super down to earth. And I just loved having this conversation with her because I want you to feel empowered, and you're going to feel empowered listening to this conversation because really the ability to heal and thrive is within you. It's not the white coat that you go and see. You know, I wish I could take credit. For how amazing my group women are doing or my private practice women are doing. But really, I'm just their guide. It's what they have chosen to step up and do. They have taken back their power and they're doing what I recommend. And that's where the magic happens. Really, the healing is within you. You are in control. So I hope you're feeling that. During this episode, I hope you find one little golden nugget that you can say, oh my gosh, I've really been neglecting that, or that makes so much sense, I totally need to start doing that on a regular basis, because consistency creates change, right? And you— we're not looking for perfection, we're looking for progress. And so I really want you to find something out of this episode that will help move your needle. Toward better health and vitality and joy and all that fabulousness. So here we go. Well, welcome, Dr. Kumar Singh, to the Gutsy Gynecologist Show.

Thank you so much. It's so great to be here with you, Dr. Tabatha. Can I call you Tabatha? I feel it's so funny when we call each other doctor.

I know, I know. But I just want women to realize, like, you were a conventional doctor. You were an ER doctor, right? And you jumped ship. Kind of like I did. And I would love for you to just explain to women, why did you make that journey? What was going on in your head and how did you end up here?

Yeah. So it is a common story, I think, for many of us health professionals, and especially in allopathic Western medicine. We go looking for answers for ourselves, and the next thing we know, We are going down a different career path. That's really what happened to me during my medical training. I started getting pretty sick and couldn't find the answers I was looking for within the Western medicine that I was training in, which is funny, right?

Right.

And it's not that the answers weren't there. I'm a big believer in Western medicine. I absolutely believe that there's a place for it. I just don't know that it has all the answers. It's not the full story. Right. And so really what happened for me is that I grew up with Ayurveda. I am first generation. My parents immigrated from India and I went back to what I knew, really, you know, for the first 25 years of my life when I lived at home, we lived a really Ayurvedic lifestyle without even knowing it. You know, it was just the way that my parents did things. You know, we ate a certain way. We, we had routines throughout the day that were a certain way. My mom would change all the colors and the cushions and sort of the environment that we lived in according to the seasons. And it was just the way I grew up. And so I didn't know any better. When I went off to college, I still was sort of eating the way that I did when I was growing up. And then it was when I got into my medical training that, of course, everything went upside down. As you know, you've been through the training and how crazy it can be.

Yeah.

And I found that as the years went by, I was more and more out of balance, and these symptoms started showing up. And I started saying to myself, okay, what's going on here? I'm looking for the answers in this medicine that I am training in. I'm asking my peers, my colleagues, my teachers. I'm getting labs drawn. I'm having images done. And everything looks normal, of course. Right. And then the answer is always, well, Avanti, you have so many roles and responsibilities. You are a physician in training. You are a mother. I have both my kids in medical I was married. I had, you know, a set of in-laws. You know, I'm married to a South Asian man and all the, the rule, the roles and responsibilities and pressures of that. And so, you know, the answer was, you're stressed out, you have a lot of stress. And I did, obviously, that was definitely part of what was going on for me. But it was so much more than that. And I think that's when I started to really think about what was I doing the first part of my life? in which I had no symptoms, and now I have symptoms. And it was so clear that it was really this way of living that was keeping me healthy for the most part. And I had gone so far from that that I needed to return to what I grew up with. And as I started to study more and read more and sort of inquire more with elders in my family, I realized how much power there was in that medicine that I had grown up with and how profound it was. And I started to see that everything that I was learning in Western medicine, a lot of the studies that were starting to come out were proving what we knew for 5,000 years in Ayurveda. Right. And so sort of the light bulbs started going off for me and the connections were there. And I said, oh, Okay, I get it. And as I did more research and more study, I was like, well, Ayurveda is the mother of all healing. Every other healing system comes from Ayurveda. It's the oldest system of healing that there is. It's over 5,000 years old. And so when you start thinking about it from that perspective, you're like, oh, well, of course, so many things that we do in Western medicine, I see the roots in Ayurveda because those are the same principles that we would teach in Ayurveda. are coming up in Western medicine, right? So long story short, I just started making all these connections because I went looking for answers for myself.

Oh my gosh, I love that so much. And as you're talking, I'm just thinking of how many women are living stressful lives like that, trying to juggle their families and their careers and their personal lives and all of these things. Because we're all doing it, it feels like it must be normal and we should be able to handle it. And I get a lot of women who are like, I can handle it mentally, but I try to explain, like, that doesn't mean your physiology handles it or responds appropriately. It pushes you out of balance. So I would love for you to talk about how do you know you're getting out of balance? Is it the symptoms that are screaming at you?

Yeah. I always say that the symptoms are the body and the mind. The human system uses symptoms as information. It's data. They're showing up to tell you something. The problem is that we have been so conditioned, especially in Western culture, to just ignore it until it gets so bad that we end up in your office or my office, right? When we were practicing Western medicine, people will come in with all these symptoms and you ask them the history and they're like, yeah, Well, I kind of noticed it 2 years ago, right? But I didn't do anything. And so it's that sort of thing. The symptoms are there to give us information, to say, wake up, just become aware. It's not to freak you out and say, oh my gosh, you have to stop everything and deal with this and deal with that. That is not a way to live either, right? But it's this awareness. And I always say, Veda is about awareness. It's about conscious living, having conscious awareness of what's going on within you, right? Why am I having a headache every day for the past week? Right? That doesn't mean I have to go in and see my doctor. It means that let me take some notice on, like, what's going on in my life? You know, what am I eating? How am I sleeping? What are the interactions I'm having with other human beings or not having? What is my environment like? Have I been traveling? All of these things are questions that we need to ask ourselves so that we can take a moment to pause, become aware of what's going on, and then make some changes, right? And it doesn't have to be big, you know, big changes, big sweeping changes. It could be something as simple as saying, I'm going to make sure that I get 8 hours of sleep every night this week, or I'm going to drink more water. I mean, it's really that simple. We want to complicate things so much in Western culture. It's not complicated.

Right, right, right. So, you know, I'm very interested in the fact that you call it Ayurvedic medicine, and it sounds like you're talking mostly about lifestyle and mindfulness and just like how you're living day to day. What exactly is Ayurvedic medicine?

Yeah, so Ayurvedic medicine— and the reason we say medicine is that it is a healing system. It is a medicine.

Like, I think that's the medicine, too. It's just not what we're traditionally trained to think of when we hear that word.

Right. When we think of medicine here in Western culture, we think of getting labs and getting blood drawn and having images and getting medications, actual pills. That's all medicine, too. But what about all these things in the way we live? That is really the medicine, right? Because that's what we do every day. I always say that health is not found in the doctor's office. It's also not lost, you know, in the doctor's office. It's found and lost along the way in the everyday moments of our life. And that's why everything that we do is medicine. It's either health-supporting or health-weakening is the way I look at it. But let me back up to your question. You know, what is Ayurveda? So Ayurveda is the healing system that comes from South Asia, from India specifically. It is over 5,000 years old. It's considered The mother of all healing. It is because many of these other healing systems have their roots in Ayurveda, including traditional Chinese medicine. And when I describe what Ayurveda is, many of your listeners may know a little bit about traditional Chinese medicine, and they're going to feel a lot of similarities. That's because TCM comes from Ayurveda. It has its roots in it. And then it was changed because of cultural differences, language differences, going to another country. Et cetera, et cetera. But really, if I had to boil it down to sort of one main principle, Ayurveda is this idea that when we live in harmony with nature, we will have optimal health and a vibrant life. And the reason that we say this is that everything in the universe, including humans, human beings, are made of the same five elements in Ayurveda. Okay, air. Space, fire, water, and earth. And so if we are all made of the same elements, if we live in harmony with what's outside of us and also have harmony within us, we'll have perfect health. It's when we start to go out of balance, as you were saying, right? Because even you as a Western-trained doctor have that language, right? That, that we go out of balance, whether it's hormonal balance or, you know, our microbiome balance, right? It goes out of balance, when we're out of balance with the elements that are inside of us and outside of us, we will have symptoms. Those symptoms over time, if unchecked, if unbalanced, if we don't bring them back closer to balance, will continue into illness and chronic disease. Right. It's a continuum. It's never that you start with a headache and you end up with a cancer. That's not not usually what happens, right? You may start having headaches, but something else was going on way back before that, right, that we can always pinpoint to connect to a chronic disease of some kind. And so really, this idea in Ayurveda is that when we stay in balance with these different elements that are within us, we will have perfect health, really, is what it comes down to. It sounds really simple. It's not simple. In that way, it's not easy. It is a simple concept to understand, but of course it takes effort and consistency to stay closer to your natural state of balance.

Yeah, I think those are the keys, like effort and consistency, being mindful. And you said like your parents and family growing up were actively doing things every single day to stay in balance. So what does that look like in your day-to-day life?

So the way that I think about Ayurveda is sort of from the perspective of things that we can do every day without having someone else guiding us through. What can we do in our everyday lives? There's 3 areas of remedy that I talk about, and really it's sort of like a triangle almost. The optimal optimizing health pyramid is what I call it. At the base is routines. It's what we do every day, right? Not what we do every now and then. It's what we do every day.

Right.

It's those routines. And when we're talking about that, the way that it lines up with Western medicine and modern science and the data that we have is really, this is the idea of syncing your circadian rhythm on a daily basis, right? We know the power of circadian medicine and how that influences our hormones. You're an expert in this, right? That is a basic sort of starting point, is that when you start to sync With the path of the sun through the sky, you will start to regulate your hormones. It's that simple, right? So routines is sort of right at the bottom. It's at the base. It's really the place that we always start in Ayurveda. What are you doing every day? How can we make some small changes to help you start syncing your circadian rhythm with the path of the sun? Again, that's being in harmony with nature on a daily basis. The second area in the middle of the triangle or the pyramid is diet. Now, in Ayurveda, diet is much more than just the food that we're eating, right? And the idea here is that everything that we take in through all of our senses, right, all 5 of our senses, is going to affect our microbiome or our digestion. Our digestive fire is what we called it in Ayurveda 5,000 years ago. We knew 5,000 years ago That the digestion is the seat of health, which we've now proven in Western medical science. Again, it lines up there that your digestion and the gut microbiome controls everything. It affects every system in the body, right? And so we talk about diet in the perspective of how strong is your digestive fire? Is it healthy? Is it strong? Is it able to take in all of these inputs through our senses and keep what it needs and get rid of the rest. If it can't do that, the toxic load is going to build up, right? And that's where the problems start. That's where the symptoms go to illness, go to chronic disease. And so diet is the second area. And again, when we're talking about diet, we're talking about where are the toxic load, what are the sources of toxic load? And in Ayurveda, everything is diet. Right. It's not just the food. It is the food. It's important. But we're very focused on that in Western culture. Not that we shouldn't be, but it's not the only thing. Right. We're talking about in Ayurveda, we're talking about sources of toxins that can be coming from our relationships, from our career and our passions and our interests, from our environment, the space that we live, work, and play in. And then also from our lifestyle and routines, the things that we're doing every day. Or not doing every day. Right. And so those are all nourishment. That's all part of our diet. It's social media, it's media, it's music. It's all of these things that come in through all 5 of our senses. And then at the top of the pyramid, the other area of remedy, the 3rd area of remedy is what I call the tools of yoga. I'm very specific saying tools of yoga because in Western culture, yoga has been sort of reduced to asana or the posture, which is not what it is. Yoga is so much more than that. And so when we talk about the tools of yoga, we're talking about the postures, but we're also talking about the breath. We're talking about meditation. We're talking about chanting or mantra. We're talking about gesture, visualization. All of these are tools of yoga. And the idea here, again, how it lines up with Western medicine, is that What we're trying to do is we're trying to shift ourselves from that sympathetic state activation, hyper-stressed, aroused state into the parasympathetic relaxed state. Right. It's about vagal stimulation. And really, the data here is very clear. It's probably the most well studied of all of these areas I've talked about. The data is clear what meditation does, what breathwork does. work does. And we know that from a physiological standpoint, too, right, that the breath is directly related to the nervous system and our activation or relaxation of that autonomic nervous system. And so those are the 3 areas of remedy that we can use. And so once you start to understand how this basic principle of Ayurveda, which is what I call the golden principle, Like increases like and opposites reduce. And I'll explain that in a minute. You can go in and you can start to think about what can I do with my lifestyle and routines, my daily routines? What can I do in my diet? What can I do with tools of yoga? And these will have a profound effect on your health in an everyday scenario and help bring you back to balance. So it is lifestyle medicine. Very much, very much so.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. That just makes so much sense because that's literally everything that I teach women who come to see me for functional medicine. It's all based on those principles.

Right.

And, you know, I think of just how dysfunctional we are in this country. It's like we try to cram food down in, in like 10 minutes flat, and we don't actually cook our food beforehand. So we're not smelling it, we're not feeling it, we're not preparing it. Our digestive system doesn't even have a chance To make enzymes and acid and do its job.

Exactly.

And it's like those are 2 out of the 3 that you're talking about. And it's like so much dysfunction just from that one little segment that we're doing. And I just see that in every aspect of our lives in this country. And I like that you just are making it so simple. And I think that That makes it more tangible or doable. Like, oh, if I just think about it in these 3 blocks, like, oh, I can tackle that. I can do that a little bit. Right?

Exactly. Exactly. I think that's really sort of when I set out to teach about Ayurveda, I never actually planned on doing this, obviously. That's what I love. I was in medical school. I was going to be an ER doc. And even when I started diving into Ayurveda for my own self, I don't know. I didn't really know how this was going to work, how I was going to teach it. But I started to see this. I started to make these connections of like, oh my gosh, that's what's happening when these Ayurvedic doctors, these vajras, are saying, really think about your routines. Let's start there. Okay, well, I was like, that's circadian medicine. That's what we've learned in Western medicine. Now I'm making some connections. Since I started in this field 15 years ago, we've had more and more data and studies. And the Nobel Prize in 2017 was for circadian medicine, right, of proving the circadian clock. And so we're proving all these things that we've known for so many years, and it's like, okay, well, there you go. There's the proof, right? Because I think a lot of people also want to discount a lot of these traditional healing systems And say, oh, you know, whatever, that kind of works, or it's woo woo or whatever. No, it actually lines up with the data that we have. It shows it's been proven. It may not say that it's Ayurveda, but we know that this is what's happening.

Right. You can say it's evidence-based.

It is absolutely 100 years old. Yeah. Yes, yes. It's absolutely evidence-based.

So So where would you say is the most important place to step in and start this when you are so far out of balance, like chronic issues, autoimmune conditions? Is it always just that foundational piece?

Yeah, the routines. And it's always to start with the awareness, right? To become aware, what are the triggers? What's causing me to have certain symptoms? And I know that this is not always easy. For many people, they're like, I don't know. I can't figure out what's triggering it. I have no Okay, but just become aware that I'm having these symptoms. That awareness in itself will start to change things, right? I think really the base place to start is with routines. But let me back up so you guys can all understand sort of how to apply this, right? There's something called the golden principle in Ayurveda, which I call the golden principle of like increases like and opposites reduce. Now, this is based on the idea of Qualities. Ayurveda is a qualitative science. It is not quantitative like Western medicine. Right. So that there, right there is a perspective shift that we have to sort of wrap our brains around. And the idea here is that there are 20 qualities in Ayurveda in pairs of opposites, 10 pairs of opposites. Let's just use hot and cold as a simple one. Start there. If you have a symptom, so it's, it's a process that I call the counterbalance solution is 3 steps that you can use. Really to apply the golden principle, the principles of Ayurveda, and really start to move yourself back into balance, which is what I think you're asking, Tabatha, right?

Yeah.

And so let's say you have a symptom, you have a headache. Headache's an easy one to think about. You can describe the qualities of a headache. It's like fire. Which element is it like? Some people like to think about it that way. They can describe it better. It's like fire. It's Sharp. It can sometimes be moving, right? It's like stabbing, that kind of a feeling, right? So let's use the quality of hot. Hot is like fire. So the first step is you identify the qualities of your symptom. The second step in the counterbalance solution is apply the golden principle: like increases, like opposites reduce. So if you put more hot on that, it's going to get hotter and your symptom will increase. You want to do the opposite. So you're going to add some things that are Cooling, right, to that headache to make it come down. Then you go to the 3rd step of the counterbalance solution, which is to pick a remedy from these 3 areas of remedy I just talked about. The routines, right? The diet or the tools of yoga. And you are going to pick something that's going to increase the qualities you need to cultivate. So you want to pick foods. Let's say we're looking at diet. This is the easiest to understand sometimes. If you're going to pick diet, you need to pick foods that have cooling properties, not that have more heating properties or hot properties, right? So if you think about it, in Western medicine, we often will tell people who have chronic headaches to avoid spicy, greasy foods, caffeine, alcohol, because all of those foods have qualities of hot, which is hot upon hot. It's going to make your headache go up.

Right.

Instead, we say, let's reduce those foods and pick things that are less hot, that are cooling, right? So maybe we're picking more, you know, just warm cooked foods, things that don't have a lot of spices in them or heating spices, a little bit cooling spices, whether it's mint or coriander or cilantro, right? Cooling spices in there. You're trying to have A lot more fruits and vegetables that have a higher water content so that it's a little bit cooling. You get the idea here, right? And I always say that once you see Ayurveda, you can't not see it. It shows up everywhere, which is what happened to me. Because when I started thinking about things like this, I was like, oh my God, Ayurveda, what I grew up with, is in the Western medicine that I am training in. Every rotation that I've gone through in every specialty, whether it's neurology or pediatrics, The suggestions that the attendings give, I can trace it back to Ayurveda. Like, I can trace it back to these and see how the basic principles of Ayurveda apply. It's fascinating. I'm always blown away.

Yeah, that's amazing. So in your book, do you go over what types of foods are hot versus cold?

Okay. Yes, I do. I give lists in there, but it's also my first book that I wrote is really a primer, and it was really designed as a way for people to really understand the basics of Ayurveda. Because I do believe that when you understand the why, when you understand how to apply this, it becomes second nature after a while. You're not looking for a list then, right? Because so much of what we do in Western culture is we have a list and then we try to live our lives according to this list, and then it becomes really overwhelming.

Yeah.

And stressful, and we're like, forget it, right? When it's more intuitive, which you will find that Ayurveda is very intuitive because it's so old, it's part of human nature. We understand this just internally. It's like these light bulbs go off for so many people when I'm talking to them about Ayurveda. They're like, that just makes sense. Yeah, it does. And it's very simple. And so In the book, it was really— it's a short book. It's very much a primer. There are lists in there, but it's really designed to help you understand how to apply this on a daily basis so that you don't have to look at a list. Really is my goal.

Oh, I love that. I think you hit on some key things. Like, we just aren't mindful. We are focused on, like, give me the quickest way that I'm going to have my results and not really get in tune and think about why and What is the response, the reaction from the body? I think we've lost our intuition as women in this country, and it's very sad. So I love the idea of really nourishing that and helping your intuition grow and just having it be a part of you so that you don't have to always run to the doctor. Because I keep telling women, like, I can't heal you. Doctors cannot heal you. The health is not in the office, like you mentioned. And so I would love for women to just take back control of how they're feeling. And this is so empowering. I love this. So thank you.

Yeah. No, absolutely. Thank you. No, it is very empowering. And that's really my goal with this work, is really for people to realize that the healer is within. I have never said, with the amount of knowledge that you and I have, going through Western medical training, functional medicine, Ayurveda, all these different things, I have a lot of knowledge, but I'm not a healer. The healer is every human being. You have that power. Our bodies, our minds, our human systems are magnificent machines. They can do this on their own. We just need to help them a little bit. And so I always say, I am not a magician. I'm not a healer. That is another source, right? I'm an instrument. And so all I'm doing is reawakening, helping you remember. Remember that you have this wisdom within you, and I'm giving you some guidance based on my years and years and years of study, the amount of school that we've gone through, and just really sharing that knowledge with you to help you reawaken this. And so, again, when you understand why and you understand some basic principles, you can take this power back into your own hands, right? You can say, oh, I woke up with a headache. Okay, not going to freak out, but I'm going to notice, and I'm going to notice what's going on in my life. And maybe I'm going to make some changes, some small changes. I'm going to sleep a little longer. I'm going to, oh, yeah, I've been having headaches the last couple of days, and I have this big presentation coming up next week in work. Oh, maybe it's related to that. Right?

Mm-hmm.

And if it doesn't go away after that, then maybe I need to start looking at some other things. But it's this, you take this power back into your own hands and you can start to make changes that can actually really, really be powerful and move the dial quite a bit. We don't think that having more sleep or drinking more water or, you know, having those meditative breaks, you know, taking a, a mindful pause at A few times a day will do anything. But it's actually quite profound if we go into all the physiology of what's really happening. Right. We could talk about that forever, but it's so powerful. So powerful.

Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, that's how I healed myself, is I started sleeping. I started prioritizing sleep. I had to give up delivering babies, but I also had to stop eating before bed and actually prioritize good sleep hygiene and not look at my phone and till 1 in the morning and do all of these simple little things, but they had a profound effect on my health, like enormous. And I just, I love that you're hitting on the fact I call it innate intelligence. Our cells know what to do.

Yes.

Our bodies know what to do, but we keep interfering. And what I've seen is our monkey minds get in the way of our own Health. You know, we sabotage ourselves on the daily basis, on the regular, with our negative thought patterns. And so I would love for you to give my women a few tools of how to take those mindful pauses during the day, because I think that's where the magic actually does happen, is like stopping and realizing your mind is just controlling you in such an unhealthy way.

Yeah, I mean, I have an exercise that I do myself, but it's really simple. And I think the best way that you can do again, that you can remind yourself to do this is set an alarm on your phone. We all have these phones that we walk around with, right? Set an alarm on your phone 3 times a day, mindful pause, right? And it'll just be a reminder to take that 30 seconds. And really what a mindful pause from my perspective is, is that you basically Stop doing whatever you're doing. Close your eyes, check in with yourself, check in with your breath, and start to just notice your inhales and exhales, right? For 5 seconds, 10 seconds, whatever. Just notice, take a couple breaths, and then you can come back out of it and go back to whatever you're doing, right? It's that simple. And what you've done physiologically is you've reset your nervous system, right? It's like that touchpoint. That is when we have our foot on the pedal all day long, right? That's the kind of world we live in. You just took your foot off the gas and you're like, okay, let me just slow down for a second. And you've reset to that parasympathetic nervous system. You've done some vagal stimulation to bring your hormones a little more into balance. And as you practice this more, and then also with things like sleep hygiene and thinking about what time you're waking up and all of these different things that you start to do, you start to slowly reset your hormones and the control of your hormones, and that starts to have a profound cascade effect on the rest of your health. We both know that, right? Yes. And it feels like it's something so silly and so simple, but it can have a profound effect. Profound effect.

Without a doubt. And I love thinking of it as a reset. Like, you're just hitting the reset button because, I mean, my daughter just said this weekend, Oh my gosh, Mom, you always tell me to just like turn it off and turn it back on. And she was talking about her phone, but I say that about a lot of different things in life because literally you just need to hit the reset button. You need to turn something off and then turn it back on, and it usually stops, you know, being dysfunctional. And that is so true with our own physiology, yet we don't take the time to do that, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because again, we've become indoctrinated with this idea that to get better, it has to be this complicated sequence of events. Even meditation. I mean, that's what we were talking about is meditation. It's a micro meditation that we've done, right? Is checking in with ourselves, taking a deep breath, and then coming back to whatever we're doing. Even something like meditation has become very stressful for people. They think that they have to be sitting in a lotus position on the floor in a certain way, in a certain space to be able to meditate. And we're getting so far away from what it actually is. We can do meditation while walking. You can be sitting in a chair. I mean, I usually meditate in a chair. I hardly ever sit on the floor. So I think it's also having that reset of our mind mindset of what is wellness and what are these wellness practices. They don't need to be complicated to have a really profound effect on our health. So it's resetting that idea, too.

I love that. Oh, my gosh. So you have a quiz. What's it called?

It's called the Energy Fix Quiz. And so if you just go to my website, avantikumarsingh.com/quiz, you'll be able to access that. And it's a really fun quiz. It'll just give you some ideas of maybe where you're out of balance and why your energy may not be where you want it to be. And it'll give you some ideas of things that you can start to do. Very simple things. I have tons of resources, whether it's my podcast or all the things I've written. There's so many things that I have put out there for people to look at and to read and to start down this journey. So this is a really good place to start. And then, of course, I have my book. So those are all good resources.

Thank you. No, I think everybody needs to check in on their energy level because this is the new pattern I'm seeing, is women go to their doctor and they complain they're tired. I'm tired. I have no energy. I'm fatigued. All the new words.

Right.

And literally they're being told, well, you're just getting old. And that is driving me crazy. I'm hearing it more and more because I see women all over the country. And so it's not just Michigan. It's like Yeah, literally, that is the answer that we have as conventional doctors is, oh, you're just getting old. And that is just not true, is it?

No, not at all. Not at all. It's usually— it's what happened to me when I was in my training, right? I mean, I was much younger at that time, so they couldn't say I was old, but it was, oh, you have so many things going on. Yes, that is true. And what else is going on in my body that is causing these problems? Right. It wasn't anything that any lab value was going to be wildly out of balance, right? Or show up as out of range, the normal range, as they call it in Western medicine. Right. But there was a combination of my hormones being completely out of whack. Right. My circadian rhythm was upside down. I was working in the ER. Right. I was not in harmony with nature. I wasn't even in harmony with my life. Right. And so I think I think, you know, again, realizing that it's nothing, it's no one's fault. You know, you haven't done anything wrong. It's just part of modern living and this culture that we live in that is all about go, go, go all the time. And oh yeah, you should be able to handle 100 different responsibilities, right? Especially as women and coming out of this pandemic, right? It's a difficult place to be. And I think, again, to also defend our colleagues, it is also a really difficult thing to figure out how to help somebody, right? Because it's—

They're in a broken system, right? They have 15 minutes to take care of you. They can't possibly find out why you're having the issues you're having. There's no time to get to the root cause. And so until that changes, we always will just be a pill for an ill, a surgery for Symptom, that kind of mentality. So the work you're doing is so important because women need to realize that they need to step out of that broken system and take control. And that's where the magic happens.

Right, exactly. And quite honestly, whatever you're doing with your primary care doc is actually going to work better. So if you are on medication, right, what you're doing is you're empowering that medication to work even better. When you're doing some of these lifestyle types of things, you're resetting your nervous system daily, you're making sure that you turn off the blue light 3 hours before you go to bed, or at least an hour before you get— let's start there, right?

Right.

You're doing these things that are going to help whatever medication you're on work better. That's really also the point here. It's not to say one is better than the other, or you don't need— it's all about integrating these 2 worlds. But I think the point that we're we're both talking about is that that doctor cannot heal you. Only you can heal you. Right. They're going to give you the medication, the recommendations that they can in that 15 minutes, and then it's up to you to do all the other things that are going to help that process along. And these are the types of things that will help that process along.

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. So good. So we'll have the links in the show notes for your website and your book and your quiz, because I think start taking the quiz is a great place to start so you can get an idea of what those results look like for you. And then it sounds like you are going to have a group program coming out that people are going to be able to work with you if that's the next step they need to take.

Yep, exactly. So we're working on revamping an online course that I've had for a few years, and so it's getting revamped a little bit and upgraded. So we'll be putting that out soon, too. But connect with me through my website. You can email me or on Instagram. I'm on Instagram a lot. That's sort of my favorite social media to be on. I try to pick one place and be there, but if you DM me, I'm pretty good about responding as soon as I can.

Awesome. Oh, my gosh. So good. Well, everybody needs to connect with you. I think these are the tools that we need. And you just make it so simple. Like, if we can really get intuitive with thinking of things as opposites and how to get back into that counterbalance, I think it would just make things so much easier. So thank you so much. This is awesome.

Well, thank you so much. I've had so much fun talking to you. We'll have to do it again.

All right. I love Dr. Avanti. She's awesome. I think that we Yeah. Have the same beliefs on a lot of stuff and we see the world in the same way. And I'm excited that she's out there empowering you guys and giving you the tools to help take back your health and your life. And she makes it so straightforward and easy. So I love that. I would say my golden nugget that I took away from that, even though I'm trained to do breathwork and I understand the importance of using your breath To pull you out of the sympathetic state. I don't always do it just for short little stints throughout the day. And so I'm going to start incorporating that. That's what I took away from this episode today is sometimes I wait until, like, I'm super stressed and it's obvious and I need to, like, really bring it down and do some deep breathing techniques. And I'm just gonna start doing it three or four times a day at a set time, just to reset my nervous system and pull myself out of the sympathetic state that I might not even be aware of yet because I'm just climbing the ladder and I haven't hit the top. Right? Like let's get it before we get to the top so that we can just bring it back down. So I was doing that while she was talking. I just. I just took a few deep breaths and I recentered myself. I focused on my inhale and my exhale, and I felt my body calm down and shift. So maybe you'll do that one with me, but I hope you got something out of this episode that you're going to start incorporating. Like, literally just say, oh my gosh, let me try this for a week. And if it literally does nothing for me, okay. I won't keep doing it. But I promise you, you're going to feel something like as soon as you do it. And if you just start to get new habits like that and then they— those behaviors and habits just become part of your life, like overall, you'll have less cortisol production, less inflammatory cytokines being produced so that you'll— Feel less tired. You'll be less inflamed. You'll stop those chronic processes from being fed, and you'll you'll start to make a shift. So please try it for a week. I I please. I'm gonna do it too. So let's do it together. Okay, and let me know what else you want to hear about. You can always message me on Instagram. Definitely share this with. All the women in your life because, remember, it's a sisterhood. We have to lift each other up and support each other. So there's no judgment on ourselves, on other women. We're just all trying to be our best together. So go have an amazing, kick-ass week, and I'll see you soon. Bye, ladies.

Bye.