#95: Blood Type Diet: The Key to Peak Performance?

Ultimately, pain is intended to elicit change. Take advantage of what that pain is trying to tell us, right? And so if you have inner knee pain, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, those are signs you're overtraining. So learn from it, right? Or if you have digestive-related symptoms— low back pain, IT band pain, thumb pain, whole head headaches— those are signs that digestion's awry. So learn to listen to the body. It's yelling at you, right? And unfortunately, most of what's out in, in, call it, allopathic medicine is to suppress, right? So the conundrum of have IT band low back pain, it's a digestive problem. Typical GP is going to say take anti-inflammatories. That's going to crash the digestive system even further. Whereas if we could journal, we pay attention to what we're eating or doing that's causing that pain, then we can flourish and be our best.

In this episode of the Extra Mileage Show, Dr. Verzoll, a holistic chiropractor and author of the book The Headache Advantage, he shares how pain, whether it's headaches, knee pain, or running injuries, can really be our body's way of pointing at a deeper imbalance. This is a really fascinating conversation. There's like a lot going on here. It might feel like it's somewhat all over the place, but I promise you there's something very fascinating going on. We explore the connection between nutrition, blood type, and performance, along with actionable tips for runners looking to improve. And the whole combination between nutrition and blood type. That is something that was quite new to me, but I've been experimenting with it in recent months and weeks, and there's something very fascinating going on there. Meaning, if you find out what your blood type is and what nutrition actually works well for your specific blood type, it is very eye-opening. Had a conversation with Laurens van Lingen about the blood type diet, and even he brought up an example of an athlete who actually had their best running after they started following this type of approach. So there's a lot to unpack in this conversation. It's something that I'm excited about, something that I'm going to explore further, and I thought some of you might enjoy this as well. Dr. Fazal has people flying in from all over the US to come visit him at his practice over here, like somewhere local here, Laguna Hills it is. Even to make an appointment with him, it takes like 3 months. Like, he's a very popular holistic doctor to work with. But yeah, I was very thankful for him to come down here to my office in Irvine and to record this conversation, and I you enjoy this conversation as well. This episode was brought to you by LMNT. This is a delicious electrolyte drink mix that I drink every day. I've been using LMNT daily, and what makes it different? Zero sugar, no artificial ingredients, and the perfect electrolyte ratio that your body actually needs. What I love about LMNT is how versatile it is. Whether you're crushing a workout, practicing intermittent fasting, or just want optimal hydration throughout your day, LMNT delivers exactly what your body needs when it needs it. You can enjoy Element as a hot beverage as well. The Chocolate Madly is only available for a limited time when the temperatures drop. You can enjoy them on their own, you can mix them in with your coffee, or you can get creative with other recipes. Each box includes 10 chocolate raspberry, 10 chocolate chai, and 10 chocolate mint. For a limited time only, you can get a free sample pack with 8 different flavors when you go to drinkelementtea.com /flow. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Verzoll.

Welcome to the Extra Mileage Show, Dr. Verzoll.

Let's go some extra miles.

Let's do this.

I'm really looking forward to this conversation because you and I were talking before we started recording here and the body is connected in many different ways. So many of these like symptoms from our body sometimes express ourselves and are warning signs, right? You recently came out with a book and speak about this in much, much detail. So I'm really looking forward to covering that.

Great.

Maybe we can start out for a little bit of runners listening to this podcast are looking to improve their overall health, looking to improve their running. Some of the things that you have said is, for example, when you have a headache, this might be a warning signal, a sign from the body telling you something much different that's going on in the body than just a headache.

Very true.

Can you, can you zoom out here a little bit and explain to the audience about the connection with everything here and how it also relates to runners?

So yeah, great lead-in. And the reason the book is called The Headache Advantage is because for me clinically, the location of the head pain tells me the priority, really the advantage, the best place for a person to start with biological change. And as you alluded to, I'm a fitness junkie. I got into this try to go the extra mile. I mean, every car I have has to be a little faster than the last, and every bike has to be a little more efficient. You know, every— everything I do is to enhance my own personal performance. And I got into healthcare because of the headaches that I was dealing with. And at that time, they were full-head headaches. They came on— I was a natural bodybuilder at the time, and every time I'd bench press, I'd get a pounding, throbbing headache. And so naturally, as I became a chiropractor, holistic health doctor, I started asking everybody that came in with a headache, where does it hurt? You know, tell me about it. And so I was able to use those locations, and through acupuncture, understanding of acupuncture meridians and muscle-organ correlations, whittled down to 7 individual patterns. And so each of those patterns has an organ association with it. And the reason the headache is an advantage is because that will tell us, you know, the gallbladder is the problem causing your right side headaches. And so then we can talk about all the different other ways that the gallbladder is going to manifest as pain. Maybe it's a knee pain, maybe it's foot pain by that 4th and 5th toe, maybe it's sluggish digestion or anxiety or high cholesterol. Those are all potential signs also of, of a gallbladder issue. So if somebody comes in with that list of problems and they say I have a right side headache, I know that's where we need to start. That's where the big money is going to come from, if you will.

So let's, let's dive into that a bit more.

Okay.

Because some people experience headaches, some people don't experience headaches.

Sure.

But, but let's say someone has that right side headache and you're saying like it's directly tied into the gallbladder, right? What sort of running-related challenges are you seeing sometimes connected with that too?

Right. So for the runner, gallbladders, for any endurance athlete, the gallbladder's fat metabolism, and we need those good fats to metabolize, to sustain that stamina, especially zone 2 type training, right? Because that's basically the aerobic zone where we're burning fat for energy in a perfect world. And so if that gallbladder is not working properly, then we're not going to digest those fats well. It could also set up a hiatal hernia that— or like if you take too much caffeine or eat too much fat before you go run, that's that stitch. That's the gallbladder yelling, saying, you abused me, right? Or if we eat glyphosate, if we eat breads with that Roundup, the glyphosate's a toxin in there that inhibits bile production. So And that person, that runner, that athlete that is not going to digest fats well after eating a sandwich, you know, that has been— the bread has been tainted by glyphosate, they're not going to digest those fats well, meaning poor gallbladder function might manifest as a headache, might manifest as gallbladder pain when they run, might manifest as, as hiatal hernia, that the, you know, gnawing in the epigastric and this underneath the sternum there could manifest as a knee pain because the— it's called the popliteus muscle, a little muscle but behind the knee that will weak and compromised when the gallbladder is not functioning. So it could be simply, ouch, my, you know, rotational motion on the, the knee doesn't feel right. And they may not necessarily have a headache, but that's still going to be a gallbladder problem. So as a doctor, I want to look at, you know, is it something they're eating? Is it, is it a negative emotion? Every organ has associated emotions as well. So the gallbladder could be, you know, ever since they had an angry incident, and, you know, there's anger, frustration, resentment, I think alcoholic type emotions, those affect the liver and the gallbladder as well. So it could be, you know, ever since you found out, you know, situation X, or found out about some, you know, bad news about your spouse or something, then that's manifest there. So we want to clear— we want to understand those triggers, whether it's dietary, whether it's need for a supplement like, uh, you know, nitric oxide balancing supplements. Those are going to help the gallbladder because bile is a precursor to acetylcholine, which is memory and again, fat metabolism and dilating the vessels, I think nitric oxide. So it all comes together and makes it super fun as a clinician.

It is fascinating though, how a lot of this ties back to nutrition. And I've noticed that as well. You speak about it here, you like when you and I, I've visited your office several times and a lot of this ties into nutrition and also ties into blood type.

Yes, it does. Right.

And this is something that was very eye-opening to me. Probably the first time we met was about 2 years ago at your office. And you didn't even ask me what blood type I was. You just started working on me. And based on that, you already told me what my blood type was, which I thought was eye-opening.

Okay.

So I want to back up here a little bit because some people might not even be that familiar with blood types.

Yes.

How can people find out what their blood types are? What are the blood types? How— common other different types of blood types.

Okay, so the 30,000-foot view is there's 4 blood types: A, B, AB, and O blood type. So we talked about the, the O blood type needs beef, and so if you know that you do well on beef, most likely— excuse me— an O blood type. Um, conversely, that O blood type is also not going to do very well on coffee, unfortunately. Sorry, O bloods, you do better with a green tea or something along those lines. Uh, conversely, the A blood type's really the opposite from that perspective, where beef is really going to trash the A blood type, and that will cause them to have literally mono. It sets— it opens the door for viruses, and especially mono causes intestinal spasms. So if the intestine's spasming, we're going to get spasms in the quadratus lumborum, that low back, the flank pain. That's often a sign that the intestine is unhappy. Beef will set that up. So if you have— if a person has chronic low back pain, you know, stiff getting out of bed in the morning, and they're, they're eating beef, they're likely going to be an O blood— excuse me, an A blood type., right? And so the food— we talked about beef being really lousy for the A blood type. Tomatoes are also going to be very hard on the A blood type, and that will affect the gallbladder. And so that's going to be the right side of headaches, the right knee pain, back of the knee potentially, knee pain, um, higher cholesterol, higher triglycerides, eventually memory concerns. Those would all be symptoms of long-term consequences, if you will, of the A blood type eating tomatoes. So if you know that one of those foods directly affects you, then, then that helps lean in that direction that that would be the blood type. Um, from there, I'm a B blood type. So for me, and that's a lot of really confirmed for me, or really gave me confidence in this whole blood type manifestation, is chicken trashes me. Chicken will make me hypoglycemic, makes me crave sugar. Um, so I could eat it, you know, at one point when I first got in, it's like, oh, I'm gonna eat chicken so I can fall asleep, you know. And I realized I'd wake up and it just messed me up pretty good. Tomatoes.

And that is the case for you individually, or you have noticed that across the board with other patients you've worked with?

100% across the board. If a person is a, uh, a B blood type, chicken is one of the hardest things they could, could eat. Turkey works fine. And we should probably back up and really, the blood type was originally noted on the, the blood, um, but really it should be called the immune type. 'Cause ultimately they eventually realized that that is what the system recognizes as self versus non-self. So the O blood type eats beef and the body, the immune system recognizes that as self, whereas the A blood type eats that beef and the body says, this is not us. And it goes into alarm, goes into attack.

I want to go back a little bit though. Okay. People who don't know their blood type, how do you go about finding it out?

Right. So, oh, so if you know those foods, that's going to lean in that direction. Um, but there are kits for probably under $10 on Amazon. You can do a finger prick. If you're going to do a finger prick, you want to use the side of the finger because there's less pain receptors there.

When you're talking about You decide what side is that?

And decide if— and those— if you do the finger prick on the tab on the pad of the finger, there's more pain receptors there. So really, it just— it literally takes 4 little drops of blood that you smear on this card, and it'll coagulate or agglutinate in, in either the A or the— or if it doesn't coagulate at all, that's— then you're an O blood type. Very— it's a home test kit designed to do that.

Okay. And then out of these 4 blood types, yes. Do you roughly know what the percentages are of like, could you share some more data?

So O blood type is 44%. That's the most common. A blood type is about 42%, second most common. B blood type's 14%, and then AB is the least, and that's about 4%. That's pretty close to 100% right there.

Right on. So I want to just mention a few examples here. Yes. Because I know my blood type and I know the blood type of a friend. Yes. Like I'm a blood type A. My friend is a blood type O. Right. My friend doesn't deal with avocados that well. Yes. Can you share some more thoughts over there?

For sure. So avocado for me as a B blood type, or for your friend that's an O blood type, it crashes the immune system. My throat will literally close if I eat avocado. In other words, if I order sushi and forget to say no avocado on a roll or something, my throat will close up and basically my body, that's my body rejecting, saying you don't want to eat this. I was on another podcast, an endurance podcast, where the host had been taken out because of Achilles tendonitis, and he was an O blood type eating avocados. Avocados will suppress the immune system enough that then that the calf, the posterior gait mechanism, the toe-off, does not function properly, and that creates an irritation and inflammation of the Achilles tendon. So in his case, it was an O blood type eating avocado, trying to get those good fats. For the A blood type, it's a miracle food. It's the Holy Grail of omega-3s for the, the A blood type. But for the O, it will crash their immune system.

Another example, caffeine. Yeah, so talk through that a little bit more based on blood type.

Right, right. So the villain really is coffee in this case, um, and it's not always villain. For the A blood type, they'll do fine, they can drink a cup of coffee and go for a— go around a marathon. Whereas the O blood type, that's going to set up a lot of big problems. Unfortunately for the O female, it literally sets the stage for ovarian cancer. I mean, it is, it There's a direct correlation. Had a patient that had already had an ovary removed because there was a tumor there. They said, sorry, you know, coffee's the trigger. She was an O blood type, got her off of coffee and she was good. All her symptoms went away, her ankle swelling and signs of cancer that she'd had. 6 months later, she came back, she was back on her coffee and all the same problems, and her right ovary was loaded with cancer. So, I mean, that's my frustration as a clinician. It's like, hey, we showed you what the trigger was. Now the ball's in your court.

And so sometimes you're And because once again, going back to my friend who is a blood type O, is indeed much more sensitive to caffeine than I am. Right. And so they're seeing that direct correlation. It's with different foods, it's with different things that you drink. What about when we're going to like lay that correlation to running injuries or inflammation? Is there anything you can share there?

Yeah. So, um, green tea is, is the alternative. So for the O blood type, they can do green tea that has theanine, the amino acid in there that combats some of those negative effects. So then they can still get a little bit of the, the kick, a little bit of that, that boost, that energy. And they seem to do okay if they were doing, you know, gels or some of that stuff with caffeine. Um, but coffee's going to trash them. Typically it's gonna manifest as a gallbladder problem, which would be some of those symptoms we talked about with the, hyatal hernia, the stitch, when they're trying to run. Weakness in the outside of the ankle on, on this, the toe-off oblique kind of part of the toe-off is going to be compromised in that case. Hip pain with the females, or for the males it's testicles, for the female it's ovaries. That causes the glute medius muscle, the, the just below the belt, that muscle will get weak and spastic when the ovary or the testicles are not functioning. So in men that means testosterone, and the females that means estrogen. And so coffee will compromise estrogen metabolism metabolism in the female, and they may be coming to me or, you know, having hip pain that's taking them out, and that, that could have been because of the coffee that they were consuming.

You mentioned a while back to me that there was an app. Yes, it's a blood type diet. Blood type diet, it's called, right? It's a few bucks, right? And within that, you can actually fill out, all right, this is the blood type that I Yes, these are the foods that this blood type typically responds well to. Yes, these are some of the foods you should limit or avoid. And then there's like, these are real trigger foods and like, try really not to eat these, right?

And so the blood type, it's $3.99. I have no correlations there. Yeah, maybe it's $2.99. Anyway, it's cheap. Yeah, um, I have no association with it, but it's a great reference to— I mean, I've been doing the blood type diet 25 years, and I still periodically pull it out if I see a, you know, fish, you know, special that, you know, I'm going out or something. I can pull it out and see, you know, whether— where that is on my list. So it breaks it up as highly beneficial, neutral, or avoid. And so, yeah, highly beneficial, think of those as medicine. That's going to be foods that are going to have you bring in your A-game, you know. Eat those when you have your A-race, you know. The neutrals, think of those as food. My typical rule of thumb for the neutral foods is not more than 2 days in a row. So like turkey's neutral for most blood types, it's beneficial for the AB blood type, but for all the rest, it's neutral. So if, if I eat turkey 3 days in a row, day 3, I'm typically going to be looking kind of sluggish bowels. Not the end of the world, but if I eat it every day, there would be consequences. So those are the neutrals. Think of those as food avoids pretty much anything on list is going to give you— give a person symptoms one way or another.

Let's link it back to the runner. Yeah, because previously you briefly mentioned some athletes respond better to speed work, some athletes respond better to low intensity, right? Can handle it more. Yes. And even once again, things tied back into blood work or blood type. Yes. What was that correlation over there?

Right. So in general, the, the A blood type tends to be a higher cortisol producing person. And so that's why I think of High-intensity HIIT training is, or, or interval in this, for this audience, speed work, you know, interval work is higher intensity. That's cortisol-inducing. So the A blood type already dances on the high cortisol spectrum. Headache-wise, the chronic cortisol is going to be a frontal headache, causes that frontal headache type, um, pain because that chronic cortisol inhibits the stomach. And so think ulcer, it sets up the pattern for an ulcer, which is kind of what that frontal headache would, would tell a person. So if an A blood type person is doing too much intensity, that could manifest as a frontal headache. It could manifest as low back pain right in the center, that L5 kind of disc-type low back pain, especially when you sit too long. Those are signs, potentially ankle weakness, acute— not Achilles— plantar fasciitis, shin splints. Those are all signs of chronic cortisol or high— too much intensity, if you will. And so the A blood type has to be more careful, careful with that. So it doesn't mean that you can't do it. It just means that you want to be careful to balance it. So, you know, patients, people always ask me, you know, what's the ratio? You know, should I do 2 hours of, you know, zone 2 to, you know, an hour? It depends on the stress in your life, right?

Well, and I think that that's such an important part there, like how much training volume we can handle, training volume, training intensity, right? The running component is just one component and the entire stress in daily life. When it's busy at work, when it's busy in daily life, we can only handle so much training, right? Our bucket is going to be full at some point, or we're just not going to absorb it or overtrain.

Right, right. And so, and that bucket though, I mean, think of, yes, volume as a whole, but how much of that is intensity? You know, so if you got a massive deadline and, you know, poop hits the fan at home and all that sort of stuff, that's going to be your zone that you'd be better off as an A blood type, especially to do more of a zone 2 day, for example, when things are chilled. Like, you know, I just had 9 days off, I did triple my normal volume because I was— I'd take a nap in the afternoon, you know, life was good. I was, you know, hanging out, you know, in the evening, all was well. And I did more intensity. I'd show up for, for group events where the, you know, the local fast people, and it's like, well, I got no legs, and I'd show up and I'd still have plenty, you know, and I could still compete with the best, you know. Whereas during a normal work week, I don't have that much in the tank to and that, so for me personally, I've, my, my set point is 2 days typically of, of intensity. I'm a B blood type, so I'm kind of midway between that A blood type, high cortisol person, and the O blood type that's gonna do better with a little bit more high intensity. They're gonna get de-stressed and they're gonna handle it a little bit better. Uh, they tend to be the, the, the short burst more, the interval probably. They're probably gonna find themselves competing better in the, the, you know, half marathon and, and lower type events, whereas the A's probably gonna find their happy place more in the marathon. Kind of training, if you will.

You made a comment probably last year when I was at your office and you said something about if you look at Olympic medalists or people who podium, sometimes that's even a correlation there with, with what works well for them distance-wise. Yes. Works well for them cortisol-wise or cortisol stress hormone. Yes. Share a little bit more thoughts there.

Yeah. Yeah, so 30 years ago when the Blood Type Diet book was written, he, he, I was quoting him basically, he said there had never been an A blood type in the Olympics. And, and the, the paradigm, the conundrum there is that A blood type's gonna train hard, hard, and hard, but with all that cortisol, they're gonna crash and burn, either get sick or get injured before they can get to the final event is a very common phenomenon. So we want, we wanna learn from that and learn to modulate and, and balance appropriately. Again, spend, maybe it means spending more time in zone 2, um, maybe you're going to want to look at herbs like, um, like ashwagandha is a nice way to— it's a nice herb to modulate that high cortisol. Ashwagandha is a massively popular herb right now. Um, schizandra is another herb that helps modulate that. Eleuthero is another one. Astragalus is the herb I typically use during my, my A-race seasons when I'm, when I'm pushing. I mean, training is basically training as hard as we can without jumping off the edge of the cliff, you know. It's like I want to be at, you know, push everything I have before I crash and burn. And so I, I will use an herb like astragalus, tends to help me train a little bit harder without getting sick. I found when I first went offline, I was telling you, I spent literally 10 years building base, if you will, when I first shifted from, from bodybuilder to aerobic athlete. And when I started increasing, adding intensity, if I added initially, if I did more than one day of intensity, I'd get sick within a week., and then, then I could got to where I could get 2 days in before I would get sick. If I had something like a Stragless, then I could get 3 good intensity days in and, and still not get sick. So I can kind of push the envelope a little bit better that way.

Yeah. Throughout a running journey, people start to get a better understanding of their body. Yes. And, and there's quite a few listeners to the podcast who use a heart rate monitor or they're using other tracking devices. Right. And they start to get a sense of where they're at intensity-wise. And they sometimes start to look at resting heart rate. They might start looking at heart rate variability, but also just in general through running more or training more, you get a better understanding of how the body responds to things. Right. Yet there's quite a few people who also don't necessarily know what those signs or signals of overtraining are, or they might not even know what it's like to feel really good.

Right.

Because they're so by default in that zone where they might not, not even training zone, but in a in a health state where they might not realize that avocados might be triggering certain things in the body. So how do you know things are clicking and how do you, how can you gauge kind of if things are not correct and there's room for improvement?

Right. So much in there. You have 3 big old subjects that just, you just cracked open the door on. So let's talk about B vitamins. We have to talk about that from a heart rate perspective. Um, and then I should open, if I didn't already, pain is intended to elicit change. If you have pain, that is your body saying something is, is not working right. Learn, listen to it, and figure out what it is, whether that means maybe journaling or something along those lines to figure out, okay, every time I eat pizza, then I have, you know, shin splints. You know, wheat is a very common cause for shin splints for this audience, especially for the O blood type, because of what that does cortisol into the, the posterior tibialis muscle that supports the, the arch and will pull on that, that shin. That muscle gets weak when the adrenals are fried. So that's a sign of overtraining. That L5 low back, central low back pain I was talking about, that's a sign of overtraining. The measurement— yes, heart rate variability is new. It looks like there's, there's now easy measurements for HRV, heart rate variability, um, resting heart rate. Your resting Heart rate is going to go up potentially 10 in, in the morning if a person's overtrained. That's a day when you wanna do a little bit less, you know, potentially either take the day off or do, do an aerobic day that day. Uh, so those are signs of overtraining. If we're talking about heart rate, we really need to talk about vitamin B2 and vitamin B1. Those are the two polarities, opposites, if you will. Uh, vitamin B2 helps with fat metabolism so that in the early days when before power meters, um, that was my favorite thing to do is I was taking this B2 supplement and I'd always ride along, what's your heart rate? You know, mine's only 1. 120 when you— why are you 140? You're 10 years younger, you know. So it helps us train at a higher heart rate, in other words, be more efficient, train at a higher intensity at a lower heart rate. B2 helps with aerobic metabolism, if you will, whereas B1 helps with anaerobic metabolism, which is going to be more your interval training. So that also comes into diet, right? And so if we're training for an aerobic event and we're doing more cardio, we want to be more on the keto, keto type of higher fat type of diet. If we're doing higher intensity We're burning more carbs for, for energy. So B1, thiamine, is the supplement for the anaerobic training. B2 and good fats is the food and supplement we want to look at for more of the aerobic training. So my diet shifts based on what I'm doing, what I'm— how I'm training that day, what I'm training for, based on all that.

It's interesting you're saying that because obviously, like, more of a low-carb, high-fat ketogenic approach, much different than some of the higher carb intake. Even when speaking to some endurance athlete like Zach Bitter, he was like previously the 100-mile world record holder.

Okay.

He has set multiple endurance records. He was even saying like generally he was eating a pretty low-carb, high-fat diet. It worked really well for what he was doing. Yes. But then when he was doing more high-intensity or bigger days, he absolutely increased the carbohydrate intake because he just felt that missing gear. And I've personally experienced that as well. And I think once again, there's not one kind of nutritional approach that works for everyone, but even the whole experimenting what your body resonates with well, right? But I think now you do have another layer of input by actually looking at your blood type. Yes. And actually just playing around with it, just experimenting with it. Yes. And just opening your eyes, I think, to it.

100%. And yeah, then listen to your body and, and use— I mean, it's so easy to have metrics now with, you know, heart rate monitors and, and tools that will download, you know, all that so we can see how, you know, our training is affecting us. We've got life, you know, life happens. But metabolic, you know, from a back— circling back to the diet thing, sounds like Zach figured it out, right? Metabolic flexibility, I think, is really kind of the, the buzz term that I like these days because, like Zach, I depending on what my goals are. We're in there, we're recording this at the earlier part of the year. Everybody's resetting goals and that sort of stuff. I've got a couple 8-hour races on my calendar for that I'm going to be training for. During the intensity stuff, I will be doing more cardio. Um, as I'm making sure that I can burn fat for energy for that, for an 8-hour event, I, I'm going to be leaning more towards keto and doing higher protein, higher fat, um, predominantly during those, during that time.

What excites you about this line of work? What, what? No, like, I'm, I'm curious to hear because there's, you, you have helped helped a variety of different patients through your practice. I've heard people flying in from all over the US to come visit you here in Southern California, right? What excites you? What thrives you throughout your work here?

My favorite thing is to see the light turn on, you know. And when I teach doctor seminars often, and, and so influencing the influencers, so then I have a bigger footprint that way. But seeing that, seeing the life change, you know, the helping somebody find their way, you know, or get out of— like the athlete I was just talking about, that was— he was a— he was an endurance coach and wasn't able to train for almost 2 months by that time. And all we had to change was one food in his, in his diet. That's, that's a— I go home feeling like, okay, you know, I have value, I have purpose, I have meaning, you know. So seeing the light change, the life change for people, is just— makes— helps me get up in the morning.

That's good. Earlier we were talking for a little bit about people experiencing high stress levels, high cortisol. I think we live in a society where where in general, it seems the stress levels have gone up quite a bit for a variety of different reasons. We don't have to go into detail there, but what are some strategies that people can implement outside of just the supplementation and like the diet that works well for them? You mentioned journaling earlier. What are some of the other strategies that work well for you with patients?

Right. So listen to your body. And that's why I like to help people understand what the physical manifestations of those consequences are. I mean, talking about the blood type, patients always say, does that mean I should never eat beef again? It's like, eat it whenever you wanna feel like doo-doo, you know? Or just know the consequences. Ultimately, doctor translates to teacher, right? So my goal, my role is to help you as an athlete, as a human, understand what the consequences of your choices are. And so helping people make better choices will get us there, right? So I lost train— where we—

what was the answer? Like, the, the question was about cortisol, different ways to reduce cortisol, basically.

So understanding the physical manifestations of, of, oops, I can hardly get out of bed in the morning. Cortisol is that hormone that it's at its lowest at midnight, at its highest when we get out of bed in the morning. So if, if we're crashed and burned, that, that high is not going to be very high. And so we're going to struggle getting out of bed. That's a sign, oops, I just, I buried myself yesterday and went, and you'll check your heart rate, your resting heart rate is probably gonna be an extra 10 beats higher because the body's in recovery mode. We dug a deep hole and I almost said too big a hole. No such thing, cuz we need to do that, right? We need to tear ourselves down to build, build up stronger, better, faster ultimately. So it's modulating, it's understanding the, the making educated choices, knowing, oops, I've been pushing the envelope too long. I couldn't hardly get outta bed and, and I was ignoring right knee pain, for example, and still had low back pain and kept doing my intensity. And now, now, now you're sick, you know, you're gonna— your body's gonna force you to, you know, tie your hands and, and rest. So learn to listen to what those, those symptoms, those causes are. I mean, it's a running, running group, so we want to talk about IT band syndromes. And, you know, we can kind of pull into that potentially. We've talked about Achilles tendonitis, knee pain, though medial knee pain, the medial meniscus tears and the pain on the inside of the knee, that's a chronic— that's a sign of chronic adrenal fatigue, if you will. Yeah, we talked about frontal headaches. That's, that's the chronic cortisol, high, high stress. Those are physical manifestations of those. So learn to look at, identify what the triggers— if you have a doc, good, lucky you. If you have a doc that can, that understands this and can help you figure that out, the, the branch in medicine is called applied kinesiology. That's— kinesiology is a study of movement, and, and applying that implements the structural needs, the dietary needs, the acupuncture needs, emotional needs, to understand what those weaknesses are caused from. We as humans, performance junkies, need to use that when, when we have pain with our activities. Then that's our body saying, look, something's not working right, we want to figure it out.

So, so many different directions we can go here. One, one part that I found quite fascinating too, when cortisol levels are high, when, when I just feel that stress throughout the body, whether that's a knot in the stomach or shortness of breath or just more antsy. Whenever we're really busy, just being able to actually sit still and meditate. Yes. Like you were talking about journaling earlier, but I think meditation is another super powerful one. Doesn't even have to be long. This weekend, I'm going Friday, Saturday, Sunday to Joe Dispenza up in LA. We have like a 3-day event there. Both my wife and I are going and this is is there's a whole lot of manifestation happening over there, but there's also the part of sitting down and meditating for 20 minutes, for 45 minutes, and through multiple rounds. And the fascinating thing is, even there, they're doing measurements in the room, and they have literally seen people's bodies change throughout a 3-day session. Where they can already measure the telomeres getting longer and the energy in the room just getting lifted. And it is fascinating once you can calm the nervous system, once you can lower those cortisol levels, how that makes an effect in many other different areas of your life too.

Right, right. And cortisol is a backup hormone ultimately, right? It's intended to, you know, goes up to get us through a stressful time. When it goes up, it shuts down digestion, shuts down the immune system. Right? And it shuts down detoxification, we shut down hormones, right? So we don't need to make babies, we don't need to fight a virus, uh, we don't need to digest when we're running from the tiger, right? Or running from the IRS, or trying to make our PR. Um, but then we need to chill out, we need to take a downtime. And just to clarify, when I was referring to journaling, that is more about keeping track of what you're eating or doing that's affecting our physical health. Yeah, then the other type of— or the other journaling is chilling out, taking, taking a Sabbath, you know, taking, meditating. Resting appropriately, right? We need to break ourselves down, but we need to heal appropriately so that we are bigger, stronger, faster. If we just keep breaking ourselves down, then we don't get bigger, stronger, faster, right?

So we have a running coaching program, the Personal Best program. And so we have quite a few conversations either in the Facebook group, the Strava group, or on Zoom. We meet a few times a week. And sometimes that topic comes up. Hey, I get more than 2 colds or sicknesses a year. It's one thing when you're surrounded by two young kids at home or a cough in your face all day long. Right. Like, yes, I can understand there's a much higher risk then. However, if an athlete comes to you and mentions, hey, I have multiple sicknesses a year, what are some of your thoughts there?

Figure it out. So yeah, I mean, you're circling back to Moffatone, the way he breaks down and figures out, you know, what heart rate we should be training at is if you're sick more than, you know, you know, twice a year, that means you're probably overtraining or overstressing. So you need to back that rate, your training heart rate, down by 5, right? And so same sort of paradigm. Um, yes, if you have— first off, if your kids are sick all the time, figure it out. Probably giving them too much dairy or too much avocado or, you know, food that, that is compromising their immune system. So when we're doing the right things, the immune system works properly and we can— we have the resilience to fight that, that bug, that bacteria, that virus, parasite, you know, that sort of thing. So, so first figure out what you're doing, what the person's doing, that whether it's overtraining, whether it's eating the, you know, too much sugar. Sugar suppresses the immune system. You can see white blood cells, the key part of the immune system, literally goes dormant for 4 hours post-sugar. So that's why the cold flu season starts now earlier. As soon as Halloween candy hits the shelves, people start eating too much sugar, crash the immune system, they get sick. Then they got the stress of, you know, Christmas and New Year's and, you know, Valentine's Day, more sugar. So that's why, you know, cold and flu season used be right, you know, Christmas, New Year's. Now it's beginning of October through the end of February. So people are making these— I'll just call it heinous choices that leave them susceptible to that bacteria, that, that virus or bacteria that compromises the immune system. If we're doing the right things, the body will— the ideal is that you never even knew that you got exposed to it because the immune system did what it should, and we keep doing our training and doing what we should be doing.

So what that I mean, like there's a variety of different ways we can take this, right? Right. Would that mean cutting out all sugar or are you saying like minimize the amount of sugar or in what sort of way do you go about this and with your family and patients?

I realized I didn't feel good on it at 14 and swore it off. I mean, I've probably had pie 4 times in over 30 years.

Yeah, you've gone quite extreme with it.

Yeah, right. So there's me and then there's everybody else. I wish I could bottle that discipline for everybody else. For me, it's like I understand the consequences, so it's not worth it. You know, my, my social friends often ask, don't you cheat when you go on vacation? It's like, I like feeling good on vacation too, you know. I'm not going to go on vacation, eat a bunch of sugar, and then know that I'm coming home sick, right? I love to perform. I want to feel good. I want to be my best. So if I know if I eat chicken, I'm not going to feel good and I'm going to crave sugar and gain weight and be aloof, then, then I don't want to— I don't care what's going on. I still want to be my best. For me, understanding that makes it a whole lot easier. And that's what I try to exude on people, on patients, is like, hey, it's up to you, you know. Here's, here's what, what's causing you to ill, to make your— make the call to come in today. This is what the cause is. Now the ball's in your court. Go make— hopefully make better choices. So cheat when you, when you want to feel like doo-doo, ultimately. Yeah.

Is it that some people are more sensitive to this than other people?

Become more aware, ideally, right? People say, you know, now they're on the blood type, they've— now, now I, I'm more sensitive. It's like, good, your head's out of the sand, right? So if a person's eating the wrong food, and, and unfortunately there's mechanisms with leaky gut and some of that stuff where if we're eating the wrong food, we start craving it, right? Think of the smoker, the, the people that, you know, drink coffee and smoke all all day. That's all they know, you know. And then you get away from that, you realize, oh, now if I eat corn— I— we should talk about that. Corn causes cortisol, causes low back pain, especially for the O blood type. Corn will exaggerate that, that response. So that could be that nutritional trigger that's going to not allow the O blood— anybody really, but especially the O blood type— to train properly. So corn's a big trigger. So understanding those triggers and, and paying attention, then it's, it's up to you, you know. Do you, do you want to weigh 300 pounds with a remote control in your hand, or do you want to, you be a 140-pound PR junkie that nobody can catch.

And then there's the balance in between of the person who just wants to train a few times and have fun in the process. But yeah, I get the overall message.

Right. I was figuring what this audience is going to be like. Yeah. I figure most of these people listening are going to share our fanaticism for being our best.

Yeah. And I think that's a valid point that there's quite a few people who are indeed pedal to the metal or who want to absolutely get the most out of their training and set personal best times and improve in many different areas. And there's also people who just want to find joy and relief from everyday life and just find a balancing way of fun a few times a week running. So I think there's everyone in between there for sure, but it impacts everyone.

Yeah. Personal example of that, again, I've been a performance junkie my whole life, but when I had my second kid, I thought, yeah, it's selfish of me to be out exercising, you know, for 2 hours a day when, when I've got 2 young ones at home, you know. Then I realized, you know, I hadn't hardly exercised for a couple months. I get home from work and I could— all I wanted was a remote control. It's like, yeah, you know, go away, kids, right? Um, so I have to— I try to structure it, especially when my kids were young. I tried to get my training in, you know, when I had the ability to adjust my own schedule. So I try to do it when it's not compromising time with them.

But I realized really quickly that if I didn't do my training, I wasn't there with them Anyway, it's more about the timing of it, I think, and finding creative ways around that and balance. But I've seen the same thing with two young kids. It's not the time for me to be training 10, 12 hours a week for a marathon. It just didn't work at that point. And then I was like backing off a little bit and then the schedule got more creative and I was able to start getting lunch runs in and other types of runs and still, yes, still make that work.

So yeah. Right. Balance. And, and that's why I like to have a race on the calendar too. It gives me, uh, in addition to knowing that I haven't seen an exact study, but I, I would, quote me if you want, um, I suspect efficiency, call it work efficiency, is probably double when we're training, when we're, when we're, you know, have our metabolic diversity and, and, and doing the right things versus the person that's smoking and drinking coffee and eating sugar. You know, they're probably half as productive in, in their workday. You know, so, so bosses, Consider that when you're hiring, right? But really, take us whatever, an hour or two to get our exercise in, but we're probably going to get double in that next 8 hours of work.

One of the things that I've noticed sometimes when I was in my training buildups, I would do typically during the week shorter runs, and then in the weekend, I would do some of the longer runs or some of the tempo runs. Yes. 20-miler or like quite a bit more training volume stacked in the weekends. Yes. And then I would come back and sometimes on Mondays I would have a Monday morning headache. Right. And I started recognizing that pattern that Monday mornings I would sometimes have a headache. Right. And I started playing around with different things. And eventually, once I started taking in quite a bit more electrolytes.

Yes.

It made a big difference and the headaches would go away. Right. Talk to me about what's happening there.

Yeah. So great subject. So a couple things we should cover there. First, minerals help us be more rock-like than sponge-like emotionally. So think of when you have those long days— when I have those long days, my kit is basically white from all the sodium and the magnesium, potassium coming out, you know, sweating out of our system. So we're losing tons of minerals. Those minerals help us be stronger and more resilient when, when poop hits the fan, you know, when the stress happens. We can, you know, water off a duck's feathers, sort of like, hey, okay, that sucked, but we can move on. Whereas when we're eating sugar, which leaches minerals, leaches B1, then we're going to be more susceptible to take that on. And all of a sudden that becomes a more ominous problem instead of being able to just, you know, okay, move, you know, that hurt, move on, right? So we want to learn from our pain, learn from our challenges. Minerals help us learn the lesson and move on, though, if you will. So yeah, they're— and minerals are very calming. So oral pH is a way to— another secondary kind of easy, cheap way to keep an eye on things. Oral pH is going to be more acidic when we're low in minerals or low in good fats. So we want the pH to be at 7.2 is ideal. So we want 7 and above, at least 6.8 and above.

So you buy on Amazon or wherever, you buy these little strips, pharmacy, or— yeah, yes. And then you put on your tongue and it gives you a number, and that's your pH.

Yeah. So it changes color. If it's, you know, very kind of yellow-green, that the person is very acidic. The darker blue it is, the more alkaline they ultimately, and it gives you a little conversion to look at that. And so that's something we do in every new patient visit to, to see how far they are. So the person's eating a lot of sugar, not getting the good organic vegetables. Organic has thousands of times the amount of minerals, so there's your other source of minerals in addition to the electrolytes that we need to be taking for the amount of sweating we're doing. But organic vegetables have those minerals in there, and that will help us be more alkaline so that we can handle the stress of the day.

When you wrote this book, you identified 7 different areas where headaches often occur. Yes. What are some of those key areas and what are, what are some of the most common ones?

Okay. Let's use this as the opportunity to circle back out to the IT band syndrome. Cause a lot of your, you're talking to runners. So a lot of those are going, so let's give, look at the IT band syndrome from a way that most people aren't going to be familiar with. The IT band gets weak and tender when the colon's not functioning right. So, so whether you're a cyclist or a runner and, and you have pain on the outside of the knee or on the outside of the hip, that's that iliotibial band, or, um, it will get weak and tender when the colon is not functioning right. That will also manifest as a whole head headache. I alluded to, I think briefly, that that's the type of headache I had back in my late teens that I would get during bench press. Ended up being a colon problem. C2, the top vertebra in the neck, tends to go out. So when I was bench pressing, you know, smashing my neck against the bench, that kind of irritated that and set up that whole head headache. Sometimes a mineral deficiency can, can affect that because minerals reduce leaky gut problems. They, they are the glue, if you will, to keep the intestinal lining healthy. So if that's not functioning, we get IT band syndrome, get quadratus, the low back flank type low back pain, or a whole head headache. So that's one of the, the headaches, the pattern that originally got me looking into all of this. So whole head headache is a pattern. Right-sided headache is a gallbladder issue. That's, that's the most common of the 7 patterns of headaches. Left-sided headache would be a stomach, low stomach acid problem. Frontal headache is, is stress compromising the stomach, think ulcer type of problem. Lower there, pituitary or cyclops, I call it cyclops in the book, kind of that third eye area. That is a pituitary problem. Pituitary is a little gland neatly tucked into the center of the brain that regulates regulates. Think of air traffic control for the hormones. There's a lot of growth hormone or recovery, uh, that's all pituitary. So that could manifest here. Then bitemporal ladies, that's estrogen metabolism. That's your, you know, mid-cycle or menstrual time that you get a headache here. That's poor estrogen. Estrogen is typically not breaking down well in the liver. Tension headache, commonly called a tension headache, the pain in the back of the head, is a thyroid problem where the thyroid's regulating fuel metabolism properly, and that'll manifest as tension in the back of the head.

So, and that one is very often stress-related too, right?

So stress, like the frontal headache, um, if you have both— I know there's a frontal headache and a back of the head headache— that is cortisol deactivating the thyroid hormone. On labs, that would be a reverse T3 if you're having labs done for the thyroid. And then that reverse T3 goes up. In others, what that means is the thyroid hormone is being spun backwards, is being deactivated. Activated. And so then, yeah, they could have a tension headache and a frontal headache.

It is, it is so fascinating.

I know we could only cover so much.

Um, where can people find this book? It's available on Amazon in 3 different versions, and the, the audiobook is being recorded now. Um, and then my website is headacheadvantage.com. On headacheadvantage.com, you can click on, you know, the pattern of your— if you have one of one or more of those 7 headaches, you can click on that and it'll take you to a link where you can find supplements or food— potential food triggers to hopefully help you find some answers. There's kind of flowcharts there to say, you know, if I have memory issues and right knee pain and right side of headaches, choline might be a good solution for you. So you can potentially order it there. And I'm working on some supplements to go along, you know, for each of the headache patterns as well.

The emotional side was very much connected to this as well, right?

It is.

Yes. Can you high-level share some of your thoughts from how it could potentially involve athletes and overall health? Like once there's the emotional side, let's say there's— here's one example. I was very stressed before my first marathon. Yes. It was purely mental, yet it felt like someone was stabbing a knife in my back purely from nerves. Yes, right.

What's happening in that case? Right, so much in there. Each vertebra has an associated organ with it, and so when it's stressed, T9 is going to be just below the shoulder blades. That is kind of the circuit breaker. And that was exactly the area. Okay, ah, there's something to this. So each vertebra has— so if you're seeing a chiropractor and, and they're having to adjust T9 every time, you know, they say, oh, T9's out out again. That's, that's your sign, hey, I need to get my cortisol, my stress managed, right? And so for the adrenals, that's muddled, instability, frightfully overjoyed, paranoid. I mean, I had a patient that all these stress-related symptoms happened when her husband won a boat race, you know, and she was frightfully overjoyed, and that got stuffed away, if you will, in the adrenals. So she was in this chronic cortisol. PTSD or concussions will do that as well. Part of the manifestation is this glutamate is, is like putting us in a chronic stress cycle from like, think of, you know, military after PTSD, or we get a concussion, fall. I've landed on my head a few times, and, and that puts us in a chronic stress state as well. So where it manifests is there. But yes, there's phys— there's a specific— and I lay out some of the emotions in the book, specific emotions associated with each gland and organ, um, that— so if you know, ever since, you know, my wife left, or, you know, my this happened, or my boss, you know, you know, demoted me, you know, whatever happened, then try to work that out and, and journal, sort of speak in your head as you're doing a run, right? And sort those thoughts, get it handled so that it's not a chronic trigger for you. A good example of this is a kid that I was treating that had been hit by a car. And, um, you know, he's elementary school, uh, kid, and treat him, did all, you know, handled, helped all the, the physical manifestations of that injury. And the mom's like, he's doing great now, he's She's like, he used to be an A, AB child. He's, he's barely getting Ds now. Can you help? And I'm like, well, what do we know? Well, he's colorblind. I'm like, he's colorblind. Now, you know, since he got hit, what's that? You know, he's green-blue colorblind. I mean, how could you be green? That's not true colorblind, right? So I said, you know, Johnny, what do you remember about the accident? He's like, well, I was walking on a green light and a blue minivan hit me. And I still get goosebumps telling this story, you know? So we did the emotional work related to the green light and the blue minivan. And literally that week his grades went back up to A's and B's, and he didn't have this, this mental short circuit every time he saw green or saw blue, right? So those things can be physically stored if we eat sugar, if we eat processed foods, if we're mineral deficient, if we're not getting good fats, we're going to be more susceptible to storing those types of physical emotions as well. So for this audience, for us performance junkies, we want to do the things to be more resilient so we can not be so prone to store it. But was it the Was it the emotional trigger or was it the overtraining that made us more susceptible? You know, that's, that's the fun part.

So much more to, to uncover over there. Two last questions. One, when you're talking about journaling, you talked about, yes, just writing down some of the foods, right? Are there any tools that you use for that? Is it just pen and paper? Do you use, do you use an app for that?

And there's all kinds of tools, you know, potentially there's, there's headache journals. They're pretty prolific. It's kind of like the book that was available, Everything I Know About Women, and it's a bunch of blank pages. There's kind of that. I mean, ultimately, it's whether— use the tool that works for you. If it's a note section in your phone, write down, oops, I had a headache today. What'd I eat or do yesterday or last night, right? Eventually, something's going to rise to the cream of the crop, rise to the top. Stop. That's my job as a clinician to try to identify that through the muscle testing, through the work, you know, questioning that I do. But short of being in my office, right, I'm trying to help empower people with tools that are going to work in their lifestyle.

Any closing thoughts for athletes looking to improve to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete? Awesome.

Yeah, thank you for that. Ultimately, pain is intended to elicit change. So learn from your pain. Take advantage— headache advantage— take advantage of what that pain is trying to tell us, right? And so if you have knee, inner knee pain, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, those are signs that you're— or low back, L5, central low back pain, those are signs you're overtraining. So learn from it, right? Or if you have digestive-related symptoms, low back pain, IT band pain, thumb pain, whole head headaches, those are signs that digestion's awry. So learn to listen to the body. It is trying to— it's yelling at you, right? And unfortunately, most of what's out in, call it, allopathic medicine is to suppress, right? So the conundrum of have IT band low back pain, it's a digestive problem. Typical GP is going to say take anti-inflammatories. That's going to crash the digestive system even further. Whereas if we could journal, we pay attention to what we're eating or doing that's causing that pain, then we can flourish and be our best.

Thank you so much for coming in. Really appreciate it. So theheadacheadvantage.com. .com.

That's your website? No, T-H-I-E.

Okay. So HeadacheAdvantage.com. HeadacheAdvantage.com. Any social media channels that you're active on?

So if you can spell my name, you'll find me. V-R-Z-A-L. V-R-Z-A-L. I'm on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. I'm building the YouTube channel with yours as a model.

You've done a great job. Happy to help. Yeah. Good. Well, thank you so much and look forward to continue the conversation again down the line.

Thanks for the opportunity.

All right, have a good one.

Thanks so much for listening. I know nutrition is always one of those topics that kind of can cause heated debates in the comment section. This was purely sharing some of the things that I found interesting, some of the things that I'm exploring more, like the whole blood type diet. I think it's an interesting one, and some other people might find some benefits from it as well. Well, I would love to hear from you. What were some of your favorite lessons, takeaway, or takeaways, or quotes from this conversation? Please let me know in the comments below on YouTube. Several new podcast guests in the works, lots more to follow in the coming weeks here. If you would like to sign up for my newsletter, extramileast.com/subscribe, that's where I usually announce whenever a new podcast comes out, whenever a new video comes out, but also some of the training updates, racing updates, and different things running related that are happening. In closing, I would just say have fun out there on your runs, enjoy the trails, enjoy the runs. No, that wasn't right. We'll be back soon for more. Have fun out there on your runs.

Bye now.