Your Skin Tells the Truth in Ways You Never Expected Dr. Vali, Dr. Sturm, & Danica Patrick TUH #285

Hey guys, welcome back to The Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka. Let me ask you something. If your skin is breaking out, aging faster than it should, losing elasticity overnight, or just not glowing the way it used to, what's the first thing you reach for? A new cleanser, a new serum, maybe a laser appointment. What if I told you that the skin is not the problem? What if the skin is just the messenger? Every dermatologist I've ever respected has told me the same thing. True skin health starts from the inside out. It starts with your hormones, your gut, your stress load, and the toxic inputs you might not even be aware of. The serum on your bathroom counter is the last 5% of the equation. The first 95% is what's going on internally. Today I have 3 people who prove that. Dr. Siwan Nivali is a double board certified cosmetic dermatologist who will not touch your skin unless she's asked you about your sleep, your hormones, and your gut. She's seen adrenal fatigue show up as wrinkles. She's even reversed skin aging by fixing the inside first. Dr. Barbara Sturm built one of the world's most respected skincare brands on a foundation of anti-inflammatory science because her background wasn't dermatology. It was orthopedics. And she's gonna tell you why some of the most popular products in the world are borrowing from your future. And Danica Patrick is going to tell you something that stopped me cold. Within hours of removing her breast implants, her face started producing oil again. Her scalp woke up. Her body started to function again. That's not a skincare story. That's a detoxification story. Skin is your largest organ.

It talks.

And today, we learn how to listen. Let's get into it.

The vast majority of your talk, um, and obviously as a double board-certified cosmetic dermatologist, you know skincare and you know the skin, you know what makes it youthful, what makes it healthy, how it grows, how it ages, and from a medical perspective. But the vast majority of what you talked about was healing the skin from the inside out, youthifying the skin from the inside out. So can we back up a little bit for the people that didn't have the benefit like I did of, of attending your talk, which I really found fascinating. And it's, it's so incredible how much of what you do I not only do with my private clients, but I also deeply identify with.

I just never really correlated it to all of these positive skincare outcomes.

Yeah.

So I, I'd love to unpack, you know, what a typical consult with you is like and where you start with somebody's skincare journey.

While we have the privilege of meeting all different types of people and different types of ethnicities, different types of personalities. So I think as practicing physicians, you need to be aware of everything and experiencing everything. I specialize in cosmetic dermatology, medical wellness, regenerative medicine, longevity. So we've always looked at everything inside out. We've never been like, oh, you've got some acne or you've got some rosacea. We've always been, what's the root cause?

Whole person.

Whole person. Where's the inflammation coming from? So we've always looked at you. It's easy for us to give you thick hair. Perfect skin, contour your body to suit your gender, ethnicity, your silhouette. But on the inside, we're actually coming first with mood, concentration, performance, sleep, libido, gut health, fertility, immune system, musculoskeletal. We're all looking at you on the inside out rather than the outside in. Because the problem I've got is if you've got an inflammatory skin condition and I'm just doing some laser and resurfacing you with some exosomes and some fun stuff on the outside, or topically like you mentioned, I'm not fixing the root cause. It's going to come back. You're going to be unhappy. And you're like, she's not a very good doctor, right?

What are the major things, in your opinion, that cause skin to accelerate?

I want to get specific.

Yeah.

You know, conditions of skin like acne, wrinkles, what have you. But what are some of the just the major offenders of healthy skin that we do to our bodies from the inside out?

I think it's just general lifestyle things, right? So right now we're all living multihyphenate lives. We've got multiple roles. Our bodies weren't designed in that manner. So you're a man, you're supposed to be a hunter-gatherer. I'm a woman, I'm supposed to be a protector-provider. But yet we're both entrepreneurs, we're both burning the candle at both ends. We've both got multiple businesses and multiple roles, right? We're pushing our body to a limit that we've never pushed it, i.e., the ultimate human, right? Right. So if our body hasn't caught up, with what we're supposed to be doing, then physiologically we have to look at you on the inside and optimize that. And that's why I always say, when I take a consultation, the first thing I do is diagnosing your skin is easy for me. Diagnosing what's happening on the outside is easy. And the first 3 questions I always ask is, who referred you? Because for me it's like, what kind of aesthetic are you looking for?

Right?

And you could tell that from their friends. Yeah.

But also, what kind of journeys have you had? Did your friend refer you to me because you're perimenopausal? And so she We fix the inside first before we came on the outside. Wow. Right. Then I ask, how old are you? If you're in your 20s, you've got social media pressure, you've got lifestyle pressures going on. You're trying to establish yourself. If you're in your 30s, you might have had just your babies and you want to return back your body. Or you might be starting a new role in the C-suite in your late 30s. If you're in your 40s and 50s, you might start your next phase of life. You might have come out of a divorce. You might have, you know, early empty nest survivors.

Right.

Something else is happening. So I need to know what stage of life you're in. And the third thing I always say is, what do you do? Like, what kind of psychosocial pressures are on you? Explain to me what role do you have in society? What do you do? Are you a mother of 4 at home and you're running a small business as well? Are you a CEO of a hedge fund that you have to like stay up 18 hours a day all the time? And then the key thing is we don't move to let's look at your skin, Gary. The next thing we move to is let's talk about your mood, sleep, energy, immune system, gut health, libido. We go to the inside immediately.

Love that.

Before we even look on the outside.

Now, are these—

do you do that by So first you obviously do the consult, you get a profile of what the person is like, what stage of life they're in. But after that, what kinds of testing? Because you can't just say mood, mood, hormones, libido.

I mean, we need data, right? So where do you get that data?

What kind of lab tests are you running? And what do you think are key markers to be looking at that might be markers that would indicate that you have accelerated skin aging?

Yeah. So my patients are seeking me out aesthetically on the outside because they might have fine lines and wrinkles, folds in their face that they don't suddenly like, loss of definition. They might find that their hair is thinning, they've got receding hairline. They might find that they've got mid-abdominal weight gain, which they didn't normally have. So the metabolism's changed, right? They might find, you know, aesthetically they've got some cellulite, some stretch marks. They're unhappy in certain places. They're not always taut and tight as they used to be, right? So their body has changed aesthetically on the outside, right? But they haven't identified why it's changed from the inside out. So in terms of markers, we do subjective screening first.

Now, how big of a role does stress play in this?

Because you're getting to people's lifestyle choices, and a lot of us live very stressful lives. We're constantly on the go, but we're also constantly engaged and entertained.

We're also always immersed in something, and that puts a lot of stress on us, right?

Not just to perform, but to look the way that everyone looks on Instagram, to perform at what everyone expects us, the level they expect us to perform. And we talk about, you know, stress being so detrimental. But what is it about stress? What is the link between stress and the skin?

Right.

Okay.

So we can generically call it stress. But what stress does is it causes something called oxidative stress. So free radical damage, it causes breakdown of collagen. Okay. So glycation, breakdown of collagen, turns around and gives you fine lines, wrinkles, open pores, oiliness. It can inflame your acne, rosacea, pigmentation. But if we go back to cellular cause, pathophysiologically on a cellular level, You've got the beauty layer of the skin, which is the epidermis. You've got the medical layer of the skin, which is the reticulodermis. The reticulodermis, you've got these great things called building blocks called fibroblasts. They produce collagen, elastin, hyaluronic acid, GAGs, all the good stuff stays in the medical layer of the skin. Right. By the age of 21, this is degrading. This is already going down with a gift from God. You're already aging.

It's a gift that we don't ever want to open.

It's a gift that we don't want.

Right.

So you've already got that. On top of it, you've got a pigment called melanin., which some of us will get pinky purpley and some of us will get brown pigmentation on face. So that comes up with sun trigger, hormonal trigger, environmental trigger. So all these things, when you've got oxidative stress and free radical damage going on, this gets enlightened and inflamed because this is in the deep layers of the skin. Deep layer. So then if you've got fibroblasts, the building blocks breaking down, that means you're going to get the collagen breaking down. You're going to get the good stuff, the robust, architecture of the skin breaking down. So you're going to get the laxity, you're going to get the fold, you're going to get the fine lines and wrinkles. You're going to look dull. Your skin is not going to be glowy.

Right.

Things aren't going to be as tight and taut as they used to be.

Right.

But then also on the beauty layer, there's something called epidermal cellular turnover. God's given us the best organ. Like, the human body is the best organ. We both say it openly.

Right.

No doubt.

But the skin is one of the biggest organs. And what it does every day, it renews and turns over. It repairs itself. Right. But when the beauty layer is a bit broken, then that doesn't happen either. So then suddenly you're exposed to environmental toxins coming in, causing more inflammation. I think the first thing you said about me was the inside. Yeah. So for me, I mean, I don't diagnose collagen degradation because it doesn't present like that. You're presenting with adrenal fatigue or you're presenting with other features. Right. And then it's a byproduct of the stress that you're going through.

Yeah.

So I'm not focused on collagen, collagen, collagen. I'm focused on getting inside correct first.

I love that.

So if we've got adrenal fatigue, then I'm working on that. Is it NAD? Is it peptide program? Can I move the needle?

What do you find some ways that, that people recover from adrenal fatigue?

Because we do see women whose cortisol is floored out.

Yeah, they're just not producing cortisol.

Twice in my career.

Have you really?

Yeah, I've had significant burnout twice in my career.

So how did you get your cortisol back?

Yeah, so I've been completely floored. I was estrogen dominant with adrenal fatigue.

I had to—

oh dude, Yeah, the worst.

I had to go through, I had to go through rewiring myself. I had to do my routine NAD. I had to turn around. I went on peptide programs. I didn't just go on ACTH-139 and your adrenal fatigue ones. I went on Semaglutide as well to optimize my mood and cognitive ability.

Oh, Semaglutide.

Yeah, yeah.

So I went on those.

An anti-anxiolytic.

That's a peptide.

Yeah. So I went on those and then I went on and I microdose on estrogen as well. Wow.

Okay.

But now I'm coming to perimenopause, so I'm now changing that up a little bit. So we work on the inside first before I'd work on the outside of your collagen degradation. On the outside, like I've said before, it's always virgin or non-virgin tools. What are you happy with? In my industry, everything is inflammation-based. It's me causing microtrauma, right, to upregulate the cells, to wake them up. So it's either that, but there's a new area of medicine which we spoke about in the Saudi conference called regenerative aesthetics. And what happens? Do you remember the days when I don't— you must do intermittent fasting. You must be a pro. You did 24-hour fasting from what I remember.

Yeah, I do 24 or 72 sometimes.

You're like a legend in fasting. And you notice that your skin just glows.

Oh, it's unbelievable. The whites of your eyes, bing, they're bright. Yeah. And your skin changes in 3 days.

Yeah.

You know, which is fascinating to me.

And that's why sometimes I say to patients, you know, you can't get access to me, but you can get access to my knowledge. You can go on intermittent fasting, you can go into autophagy, your body can start repairing itself, it can start reducing the inflammation on the inside. Your skin will start glowing and repairing itself.

Yes.

You can do a detoxification, remove all these creams that you're putting in for the next 7 days, and you'll notice that your skin barrier function will start waking up again.

Wow.

And your skin will start repairing itself. If you remove all the things that you use for your acne and stuff that, leave it alone for a few weeks, your skin will wake up.

Yeah.

And you won't break out as much regardless of gender. And I always do this regardless of gender, heritage, age, regardless if there were like, you know, there's a 21-year-old sitting in the room, there's 16-year-olds in the room, then there's me, there's you, right? 30s, 40s, 50s, whatever it is. Regardless of gender and ethnicity, there's something going on in our skin for all of us, the same thing. There's only two things that are happening that we're synonymously feeling the same. We all have fibroblast degradation from the age of 20s, early 20s. Okay. Collagen, elastin, your hyaluronic acid, your GAGs are all going down.

Okay.

That gives you fine lines, wrinkles, open pores, oiliness.

Okay.

Then all of us, regardless of ethnicity, have some form of pigmentation. So in me it's going to be brown, in you it's going to be pinky purpley or vascular. So fair hair, fair skin, pinky purpley vascular. Brown hair, darker skin types, brown. So if I'm only just treating those two things, I'm going to— together with that, I'm going to give you the perfect canvas. So that's just 2 creams. Okay. Obviously they're my creams, but they're just 2 creams, right? With my patented formulation. But if I was going to say to you that you're not going to bother with my skincare and you're going to go and use just 2, 3 products, the only thing I would say to you is use an SPF, use a beta glucan-based serum.

Beta glucan-based.

Beta glucan-based. And I'd actually say to you, wash your face with water. Yeah, that's what I would say to you. Really? And if you can tolerate a retin-A or retinol or something vitamin A derivative-based, because that's the strongest ingredient, has, has the massive amount of studies. There isn't anything that's been studied more in our industry.

In retin—

yeah, retinol, retinal, whichever one you can tolerate, right? Once a week, twice a week, just to upregulate the fibroblast. Ah, and that's it. That's all I would start with.

Dr. Valli just gave you the framework. Your skin is not a surface problem, it's a system problem. Adrenal fatigue, hormone imbalance, cortisol dysfunction— these are not abstract wellness terms. They are showing up in your face. And when you fix the internal environment, your skin follows. Here's the question Dr. Vali left us with: while you're fixing the inside, what are you doing to the outside? Because some of the most widely used products in the world are not helping, they're just actively making things worse. Dr. Starm did not come from a dermatology background. She came from orthopedics, from 25 years of anti-inflammatory science. And when she looked at the skincare industry through that lens, she saw something that nobody wanted to talk about. Products that trigger the inflammatory cycle, destroy the microbiome, and leave your skin weaker every time you use them. Dr. Sturm created the Vampire Facial. She pioneered the use of exosomes in orthopedic medicine 15 years before it was a trend. Her brand is in every major city in the world, and she will tell you that the foundation of beautiful skin is not a product. It's the elimination of the thing that destroys it.

What exactly is inflammation, and why is it so critical to understanding inflammation in skin health?

So inflammation is immune response we need. So when something enters the body, virus or bacteria, we need inflammation to appear to fight those things that come into our body. So we need it. But if inflammation becomes chronic and on a high level, then inflammation can be quite dangerous for us because it degrades our tissue. It starts chronic diseases, autoimmune diseases. So inflammation goes together with all the things we don't want. It can cause cancer. And regarding our skin, everything we don't like about our skin, redness, impurities like cystic acne, wrinkles, whatever we don't like about our skin goes together with inflammation. So it's very important to bring inflammation under control.

Yeah, I like to talk about inflammation as a necessary balance to survival. You know, not all inflammation is bad. If you were walking down the street one day and you stepped off a curb and you twisted your right ankle, how does the, how does the body know to heal the right ligament and leave the left ligament alone? Well, the way that it knows the tissue is injured is if that ligament received a small tear, you broke a cell in that ligament called a fibroblast, and what that cell will do is it will start signaling into the bloodstream to to say, "Hey, I'm hurt, I'm hurt, I'm hurt." That signal is inflammation. These are interleukins and cytokines. And what happens is, is that as that signal enters the bloodstream, a very special cell in your bloodstream called a platelet is listening for that signal. And as it cruises by in the bloodstream, a platelet bursts and it drops off growth factors. So think of a platelet as a piñata and the confetti inside the platelet has growth factors. These are the healing power of the human body.

How many of you heard of, uh, platelet-rich plasma, PRP injections?

The vast majority of you. So all PRP injections are doing is taking the vast healing power of the human body and concentrating it in a single location. You draw your blood, you spin it down, you remove the platelets, you know, and the plasma, and you reinject that into your knee, your hip, your shoulder, your rotator cuff, and it, and it actually accelerates healing. You can do the same thing with things like peptides. How many of you have heard of BPC-157? Well, this is a pretty woke audience. I hate that word woke, but I don't mean woke, but I mean aware of health. But so BPC-157 is a peptide, and what this peptide does is it amplifies the signal of inflammation. So that torn ankle that I was talking about, maybe it was sending an inflammatory signal signal into the bloodstream at a level 2. So it was whispering into the blood that it was injured. If you could make it scream into the blood, then as the platelets are cruising by, more platelets will migrate to that region and they will drop off growth factors and accelerate the wound healing process. One of the reasons why I'm so fascinated by peptides is they capture the body's innate ability to perform its own function. You You can rewind your pituitary to a more youthful level of growth hormone secretion. You can lengthen your telomeres with telomerase-lengthening peptides like anepetalon. You can actually reduce inflammation by putting peptides like BPC-157 into the bloodstream, TB-500 into the bloodstream, and actually accelerating wound healing.

Gary, this is amazing for any acute injury. So, I want to bring it back to the skin. We're doing on purpose a lot of injuries to our skin. For example, retinol. Who's using retinol? So with retinol, we cause a lot of inflammation on a daily or 3 times a week basis. So what's happening with the inflammatory response here? Because you basically start this inflammatory response on a constant basis. What happens our healing factors? What happens to all the emergency help? Do they exhaust? But what's happening if you use retinol on a constant basis?

If you use retinol on a constant basis, you're borrowing from your future. You're using an inflammatory response to call blood flow and to call tissue regeneration to that site, but you're dismantling the long-term capacity for the skin to repair itself.

So, if you do it in an acute phase and you use all these peptides and everything your body has to offer, then it's amazing to use that inflammatory response. But if you do it on a regular basis, you kind of run out of your healing factors. You kind of exhaust your system. You always call inflammation back to the site. And that is a little bit of a dangerous situation besides that you constantly destruct your skin barrier, constantly disbalance your microbiome. Yes, we have a microbiome on our skin. So the organ skin is getting harmed every day by skincare ingredients. And this is what we have to think about. Look, we're all sitting here and we're listening to Gary and we love him.

We're listening to you, actually.

But we want to know—

they're here to see you.

But we want to know what actually can we learn to stay healthy, to stay young, to stay in good shape. And when we want to hear that, we talk about our organs like heart, liver, kidneys, whatever. Who thinks about the skin? The skin, oh, well, whatever. It's a playground for marketing. Whatever marketing gives us, we just put it on our skin and let's scrub it off and let's make it red. Or have you heard of this machine? And whatever makes your skin red and inflamed, it's what we shouldn't be doing. Harvard did a study which says that anti-inflammatory foods is mostly green leafy vegetables. Salmon, mackerel, walnuts, almonds, berries, oranges, cherries, olives— super anti-inflammatory. You know, everybody knows that omega-3 fatty acids are highly anti-inflammatory. So if any type of fatty fish, um, it's really good. Um, you should stay away from fried food, processed meat, sugars. I mean, you're so educated, you know all this, but it really makes sense to follow through on an anti-inflammatory diet. And, you know, when I say it needs to be balanced, you know, it's not like you should never eat dessert or should never do this, or— but I would stay away from any fast food, any fried, anything that makes you— I've been eating healthy since I'm 16, and I only like healthy food. I really don't like anything else anymore. Anymore. I feel like it's a habit. If you never eat it, you never crave it. I raised both my children on still water and healthy food. My kid asked for lunch for a salad. She's 11. She doesn't eat fries. She doesn't eat all this because she doesn't get it from me. And she could. I took her once to McDonald's just so she sees it from the inside. And we bought some fries and a burger. She took one fry and then she said, "Mama, thank you for never giving me toxic food." That's good parenting.

Yeah, you know, it's really fascinating too, is we think that we damage our skin very often from the outside in, but it gets damaged more often from the inside, from the inside out. Um, but what's interesting about the study, and I'm happy to put it up on my Instagram if you want to read it, they found the same pro-inflammatory cytokines in all of these skin cancer conditions, and most of these cytokines were coming from the diet. They were highly linked to seed oils, rancid seed oils. And I get a lot of flak for attacking seed oils and saying we shouldn't be eating seed oils, but the truth is I'm not attacking the plant. But when you take a canola plant, which is also called a rapeseed, but sounds much better to say canola than rapeseed, but when you take a canola plant and and you put it in a commercial press and it comes out gummy, and, and you degum that with hexane— that's a very powerful neurotoxin— and then you take that degummed oil that you've degummed with hexane and you heat it to 405 degrees, that turns it rancid. So now you have a putrefied oil and it smells. And so they deodorize it with sodium hydroxide, which is a very, very powerful carcinogen. So you degum it with a neurotoxin You deodorize it with a carcinogen, and then generally we will bleach it and then bottle it and then put it on this, on the shelf. Now, if you're in the United States, the American Heart Association will come along and put a heart-healthy label on there to help suck you into the shelf. You know, you ever, you ever walk down the aisle of, of, of seed oils, Western oil and canola oils and vegetable oils, and they all have that exact same beautiful, perfect yellow hue. They're all the same color. Just know that's not how it occurs in nature. It's been bleached to look that way. And so I'm not attacking the plant. I'm not attacking the sunflower, the safflower, the soybean, or the rapeseed. I'm attacking the distance from the plant to the table. So highly processed seed oils are one of the worst things you can put in your bodies.

What's important for the skin to balance your skin? Anti-inflammation. We just know this now. But what's really important also is hydration. So if you have dry skin or dehydrated skin, we have to fix that. That is what causes all your problems. Broken skin barrier, water leaves the skin, transepidermal water loss. Then you get wrinkles. We don't want that. So hydration is the key to healthy, dewy, beautiful, glowy skin. And then something like nutrition for our cells, for our skin cells. But also what I took as the active ingredient in my skincare product is telomerase activation. Gary just talked about telomerase length, and this is really the life-limiting factor of a cell. When the telomeres shorten, the little caps of the chromosomes, until our cell mutates or dies. And humans have 40 to 60 cell divisions. A turtle, for example, has 110. The turtle gets to live 220 years or 200 whatever years. But 200 or— Yeah, 200.

I don't know. I don't know how long a turtle lives.

Yeah, a turtle gets super, super old.

I'm a human biologist.

No, but absolutely, the cell division, the number of cell division is the absolute proven anti-aging or aging theory. So that's the proof of aging. And the telomeres is so important to keep long. And that's why we added our telomeres activators into the skincare and then all these nutrition. And when it comes to skin cells, we want— I always compare grapes and raisins. So raisins are the dehydrated skin cells. The grapes are the hydrated skin cells. Two things. The raisins don't really look so great on our skin. You want the plump raisins, but also the raisins have these beautiful osmosis channels to take on active ingredients to go through all their cell divisions. So this is important that we keep the cells in our skin extremely hydrated. So for a skincare routine, I always would recommend a cleanser that is hydrating. So our foam cleanser, for example, is extremely hydrating. It's aloe vera, urea, beautiful pH, because it also matters. If you would wash your face with soap, which is very alkaline, you mess up the pH of your skin, which is slightly acidic. And then the microbiome is messed up, then your skin barrier is messed up. So the pH of the product really matters. That's why skincare brands should really point out what their pH is. So our cleanser has this beautiful pH. Then twice a week you use the enzyme cleanser. It's the most gentle form of exfoliation. It's done with enzymes. They get activated as a powder, get activated with water, and then you mix it in your hands. You wash your face. I have it in the shower. You can use it also. They call it T-Arms, Caratosis. Pilar, super, super good. And you do this twice a week. And then have a hyaluronic serum. That's the grape maker. The hyaluronic serum is non-negotiable. It's the white t-shirt of your skincare routine. Everybody has to have it morning and night. Grape maker. And then if you have a beautiful face cream that locks everything in and gives the right lipids for your skin barrier, because we always have to support and strengthen our skin barrier. If you have like these 4 products, you are golden. You have glowy, beautiful skin. You have balanced skin. I promise you, your skin will change. It will transform. It's very important that you don't mess with like these crazy ingredients, that you just give the skin what it needs. If you would go on these 4 products, and you can complain to me if it doesn't work, but I can swear to you and promise that this this routine will change your skin because it's always easy. You know, it's like you go in a store and you like this brand and this color and then, you know, this marketing, and you create your own little routine in the bathroom and it looks so cute. And but, you know, you should decide for one brand you trust and then go with it because if you curate it, you don't know how they interact, these ingredients, and what the one does and the other jeopardizes. So stick to one brand and give it a try or chance. And also, Sturm looks so good in the bathroom. You don't want all these other colors.

So what's— lots of questions about maintaining your skincare routine while you travel, especially for people that are spending a lot of time on airplanes.

Look, this is easy. It's 4 products. That is easy. I could give you 10 more products, which we don't really want. I would like add the exosomes definitely, but I wanted to give you like a very, very basic, simple, and very effective skincare routine. So cleanser, the cleanser, enzyme cleanser, the hyaluronic serum, face cream.

Do those.

I use the face cream also over my eyes. Obviously, if you're like super into skincare, have your eye serum, your eye cream, you do all this. But I wanted to give you like the simple, and you are on the go and you can travel and you have those, you're golden.

You've now heard from two world-leading experts on what the skin actually needs: an anti-inflammatory diet, hydration from the inside and the outside, products that work with your skin barrier, not against it, and the discipline to strip back the noise. But sometimes the most powerful thing in the world is not a study, it's someone who lived it. Danica Patrick is someone I deeply respect. She was one of the most successful racing drivers of her generation, and she's now one of the most thoughtful voices in the health and wellness space. She gives us something in that conversation that I think about often. She told me that within hours of removing her breast implants, her face started producing oil again. Her scalp woke up. Her body started to function like it used to. Hours, not weeks, not months.

Hours.

That's the body removing a toxic load and immediately beginning to correct itself. That's not a skincare story. That's the most powerful possible argument for getting the inside right before you touch the outside.

So are there any biohacks, um, that you use on a regular basis?

Red light therapy, cold plunging, sauna?

Yeah. Um, I mean, for probably the most normal one I use is red light.

Okay.

And I like—

huge fan.

A huge fan. I did it this morning to a panel at my mom and dad's house, which is where I was. I've got everybody red.

They're here in DC?

They live in Indianapolis. So I flew in this morning, but, um, uh, I— they have two panels, one in front and one in back, and I gave them— so just stand there. And while I'm doing it, because I love to I love to stack, habit stack.

Yeah.

Um, I, uh, Atomic Habits. Um, I love to buy— I love to stack. Um, I gua sha while I'm doing it and do some lymphatic drainage. So I think those are like the two— my two daily favorite things, red light and lymphatic stuff. So, and what is this like where you like, you know, uh, take like a, um, like a crystal of some sort, or it could be stainless, kind of like a face roller. It's like a face roller but it's more of a plate and you drag it and it helps like with drainage of your face. But then I go all the way down the neck to basically to here, because I mean, it kind of started because when I said that I was not always so healthy, I had breast implants and they—

you had them removed—

had them removed, and that's when everything finally got better again. Um, well, it was at least the start of it. But I— so I go literally down below my boobs, and then at the end of doing the gua sha, then I hit the 6 points, the lymphatic points behind the ear, collarbone, under the armpits, stomach, groin, and behind the knees. It's amazing. And so I just sort of rub and tap.

Yeah.

And by the time that's over, 10 minutes is done in front of the red light.

Yeah.

And I wanna go back to the breast implant illness because it is now being recognized as one of the underlying causes in so many forms of chronic disease and unknown etiologies that are causing autoimmune conditions. And I think what happens is a lot of young women, especially, get breast implants, and because the symptoms of, you know, breast implant illness don't show up for months to years.

Yeah.

They don't correlate it back to the breast implant. And I'm not saying by any means that they're all bad and they're all causing disease. But as somebody who has a fairly large female audience, it resonates very much with them because I've had hundreds and hundreds of clients that have seen autoimmune and this strange myriad of symptoms, everything from brain fog to hormone imbalance to weight gain and water retention to fatigue to crushing joint pain to a lot of these what I would call blanket diagnoses, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, anything, chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety, are those—

exhaustion, exhaustion, What was the trigger for you when you said—

Yeah, how did I kind of identify? Well, I would say that it probably took about 3 years for me to really start noticing anything. And I had gained like 5 pounds out of nowhere.

Were you highly athletic during this timeframe?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. This is when I like just retired too. And I'm like, hmm, that doesn't really make sense because I've kind of been doing all the same stuff. It's like one thing if you take away like a huge activity every weekend, 40 weeks a year and go, well, maybe that's it. My hair wasn't doing so healthy, my face was starting to get more puffy, and I'm like, this isn't how my face looks. And I thought to myself, maybe my hormones are off. That was like the first thing I thought. But instead I dug deeper and I tried harder and I ate different, ate more vegan, ate less at times, worked out more, like, you know, all of the things that I would normally— the lever I'd pull didn't work anymore. And then it was when I was beginning of 2021 and I lost my cycle. And so, and then when I lost my cycle, I was like, all right, this isn't healthy. So I went to the doctor and they're like, low thyroid. And I was like, that answers everything. That was not the answer to it. It was the tip of the iceberg. And so that kind of started the journey. And I spent about a year and a half. And then I'd say it was probably when I watched enough videos on YouTube and caught these sort of people talking about breast implant illness and what happened, how they felt. And then afterwards, and I was like, the things that they were saying just resonated, right?

You were like, those are my symptoms.

The authenticity coming off of them. And I was like, it resonated with mine. And I was like, uh, it became like a knowing. I was like, okay, that's it, that's it. Um, and so then I got— then, then, then I got them out. But I'd say at 3 years I kind of knew, and then it took about 7 years before I really— before I, before I was like, okay, this is what I need to do. So I had them in for 7 and a half years.

You had them in for 7 and a half years. And how quickly after the removal did things turn?

Like, right as soon as I got home. As soon as I got home, hours, I like, maybe my face is shiny, I'm not sure, but like that never happened. I came home and the first thing, like I remember once I finally came out of my drug haze, from being under anesthesia, I remember just watching TV and I like touched my face and I was like, oh my God, I have oil on my face.

Wow.

And my scalp was another thing that had been so dry and my hair wasn't growing. So anyway, my body started to like function again, like within hours.

Wow.

Then 2 days later, I posted on Instagram about it, which obviously I never told anyone I got 'em in. And I just knew my mom was with me and I was like, "Should I do it, Mom?" And she was like, "You're gonna probably do it anyway." And I'm like, "You're right, Mom." And so I shared it and Good Morning America was at my house at the end of the week, 6 days after I got them out, Good Morning America was at the house with my doctor and I talking about it for morning television. Good for you for being vulnerable about that.

For women that are watching this that maybe are just, starting to clue into this, that this might be— is there anywhere they can go to get guidance or information?

I mean, if you just look up breast implant illness, if you just sort of look, I mean, I have stuff that I've kept on my Instagram page about it, but there's a lot of resources out there now. Just, I'd say, start Googling and YouTubing and you'll see a ton. I shared my story, so you can find that YouTube video. But yeah, all I'd say is that You know, you talked about the list of symptoms. It's anything. It's basically your own body's personal expression of, I'm not happy.

Wow.

Right? And everybody's different because we have different pathways, different detoxification pathways, different diets, different exercise. So like, not everyone's is the same. So my personal expression was just how my body expresses discomfort.

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