Perfect Health for Kids with Dr. John Douillard, DC

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun.

Hello, I'm Alexandra Jade Johnson and I have the pleasure to be interviewing Dr. John Douyar. Dr. Dillard has written and produced numerous health and fitness books, CDs and DVDs. He has been teaching and lecturing internationally for 25 years and publishes a free wellness video newsletter filled with the latest studies and research. He was the director of player development for the New Jersey Nets in the NBA and currently directs the Life Spa Ayurvedic Retreat center in Boulder, Colorado, where he lives with his wife and six children.

One.

Welcome, Dr. Dillard.

Thank you. It's good to be here.

Yes. I'm so excited to be talking with you and you have so much information, you have so much knowledge. I love all of your books. You just radiate health. So I'm thrilled.

I'm thrilled about that. Thank you.

I'd love to start off with what inspired you to become a doctor and tell us a little bit about your background and what Ayurveda is.

Well, what inspired me to become a doctor, that's sort of going way, way back probably. I have to blame that on my mother. She was always on my case and I was actually, believe it or not, in stunt school in Santa Monica, California when I was very young, in my early 20s and I was getting beat up doing high falls and doing things, getting beat up. And I started seeing a chiropractor in Los Angeles and just kind of fell in love with the sports injury benefits related to chiropractic. So I ended up going back to college and enrolling in chiropractic school in la and then heard the word Ayurvedic medicine when I was in chiropractic school and just somehow something clicked in my brain. I heard the word and I just knew I needed to know what it was and I started studying it. That was back in 1980, 1986. I went to India for a two week vacation and that turned out to be a year and a half studying there in India. Closed my practice by phone, never came back to my practice and basically moved and stayed in India. And I met Deepak Chopra there as I was finishing my studies there and came back and ran his Ayurvedic center. He was just opening in Massachusetts, this is back in 1986, and ran his center with him for about eight years, and then moved in 1994 to Boulder, Colorado, and opened up my own Ayurvedic center here in Boulder and have been here ever since. So that's kind of the short story of how it all happened.

That's awesome. And you've been doing this work for 25 years?

Well, I've been practicing Ayurveda since 1986. Came back in the end of 1987. Yeah. So whatever that is. Yes.

That's so great. And then for the people that don't know what Ayurveda is, can you just. Obviously, it's a huge system, but can you kind of give us a snapshot of what it is?

Sure, yeah. Ayurveda means the science of life. Ayu means life. And Veda means knowledge or truth. So it's really. It can be looked at in a couple of ways. It's the science of your life, how to live your life in harmony with nature, in sync with the cycles. Birds fly south, whales migrated, leaves turn red, fall off trees. Everything in nature is connected to these beautiful cycles, and that's how nature survives. And we sort of have this ability to go against the grain of nature and plow upstream and feel exhausted at the end of our day and crave stuff to get through the day so we can have enough energy to make it. And, of course, that's an exhausting, depleting experience of life. And so as a result, Ayurveda is a system of teaching us how to eat according to nature, live in harmony with these beautiful cycles, seasonal cycles, daily cycles, monthly cycles even, and begin to feel like you're going downstream every day as opposed to feeling exhausted at the end of your day. But it's more than that. Ayurveda, Veda means truth. And so the truth is from the Ayurvedic perspective, from the Vedic perspective, which is a series of kind of very ancient books from India that really depicts their whole spiritual understanding of life and that everything is evolving and that we. That Ayurveda is the science of letting the truth, the Veda, the truth of your life, out. That's what Ayurveda means. Ayurveda is life, and Veda is truth. So it's the truth of your life. So what is that? Well, it's to let who you really are out. Many of us create mental, emotional patterns of behavior and belief systems to feel safe and secure as young children. And we project that on the screen as children and as adults, maybe to feel safe and secure. We do that for our entire Life. And many of us are still as adults projecting the same childlike behaviors and patterns of behavior on the screen as adults that still sort of work. Maybe some work, some don't work. So many of us are locked into repetitive mental patterns of behavior. Maybe a good example of that is you go on the holidays and you go visit your parents in wherever and you go back to see them and you start acting like a four year old again. And you're acting like a little brat and you're going, oh my God, I can't believe I do this. That we somehow, certain people, certain family members trigger old repetitive patterns. We do the same dumb stuff in the same dumb situations again and again and again. Those are what Ayurveda calls molecules of emotion. And they literally store in our fat cells and they remotely make us repeat the same patterns. Well, Ayurveda is about removing the physical density. So the density, the body breaks down from those repetitive stressors, mental, emotional stressors, traumatic events in our life, they actually impact the function of our physical. And when the body breaks down, it gets dense. And when it gets dense, all you can think about is your heartburn, your bowel movements, your back pain, your arthritis. And then you can't think about what makes you happy or what brings you joy or how to be more loving. All you think about is getting out of the pain or getting rid of the stress or dealing with your taxes. And we become distracted in life and sometimes derailed from experiencing the truth of your life. You understand what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So the goal of Ayurveda is to get rid of the density of the physical. That's why it's a body system, so you can have the clarity to see what your crazy mind has created and conjured up as a young child, even to make you feel safe and secure. And then to take this is the best part to take, to know and have the clarity to take action, to free yourself from those old patterns of behavior. And that allows the strain to be removed from the physical body. And then the body can be more permanently healed and you can experience your true self, the Ayurveda of you, which is your joy, and to be loving and joyful for no reason. And that's sort of it in a nutshell. So it really takes you all the way. It's not just about getting rid of your heartburn.

Right. And so then the physical. Can the physical ailments that people have affect the mental and the mental effects the physical?

Right? Yeah, absolutely. When you have indigestion, we know now that 95% of the serotonin and other neurotransmitters to keep your mood stable, 95% of them are produced inside your gut. So if you have indigestion, constipation, a tummy ache as a kid, or whatever, that is going to affect the ability for you to produce and manufacture and deliver neurotransmitters to your brain. So it's going to make you crazy, it's going to make you unhappy, it's going to make you sad. So absolutely this body will affect the mind. And in fact, of course, the stress of the mind, it's like a runaway repetitive train. It just keeps driving the same stress, same stress, and then eventually breaks the body down. We know that that's something we all know, that stress is the cause of 80% of all disease. So those pathways are well documented. How stress and the chemistry of stress, it degenerates the body. What we're beginning to now understand is how the body can affect your mind. That's the new kind of cutting edge research.

Right. It sounds like from what you're saying, which I love about Ayurveda, is that when we get into the natural rhythms, that we can have joy and peace and health and vitality and that it doesn't have to be hard and challenging and depressing.

Yeah, I think that that's the nature of life. And Ayurveda is about exposing the nature of your life, the truth of your life. That's literally what the word means. It means the truth ved Ayurveda of your life. That's exactly what it's about, unfortunately, is that most of the Ayurveda that's practiced has kind of devolved into a system of medicine for the body. Ayurveda is most of the time considered as just a detox system for the body, a rejuvenation for your arthritis or for your digestion. I wrote an article on my website called the Psychophysiology of Stress. And I wrote it for an Ayurvedic journal to really reintroduce the concept that I'm talking about about now to the Ayurvedic community. Because this is what the Vedic texts talk about. And I quote the Vedic text along the way. It's just that somehow we just got into the body and have gotten obsessed with the body because it's screaming the loudest, really. But once the body is less dense, then you have the clarity to see, hey, wait a minute, there's more here. There's the juice the ripe fruit that we're not taking advantage of because we're not looking deeper into what Ayurveda really has to offer.

That's so great. So I would love to hear more on your perfect health for kids. As you were talking about. We have patterns from childhood. How do we actually support our children to not have some of the maybe patterns and issues that we have?

Well, that's exactly why I wrote that book. I have six children. My wife and I have six children. And it was really clear that it's a big responsibility because you're creating, really creating, molding, mentoring these little young kids. And they become old people with issues and stuff that you really don't want to have. You want to make it easy for them in their life, you know, and it became very clear that really in the first, you know, three years, you know, but during the entire childhood, there is so much that parents are responsible for to allow the child to feel safe enough in their life, to experience who they are and let the truth of them out and not glob onto the coolest thing out there that their friends are providing as their experience of safety and security. And also to give them access to a healthy body that gives them the clarity to make really good choices in their life. So I really wrote that book so parents could raise their kids without chronically getting sick. And how to understand how to deal with their emotional ups and downs and understand their children. And it starts out like knowing who your children are. And we have the children. Parents do a body type analysis of their children and know what their mental, emotional, and physical and behavioral body types are. So they begin to understand how is my kid ticking under this situation or that situation, and why is my child really outgoing? And why is my child really shy or why is my child really smart or really good at math or really not good at sports or good at sports or whatever it is. And we begin to understand who they are, and then we can begin to direct them towards things that they do well in, excel in, and feel confident in, and get positive reinforcement for it. So they feel safe as a young child, safe enough to let the delicate petals of their most important flower, their being open very gradually and slowly so they can feel more comfortable being themselves, even as a young child. Of course, there's no question that we all get hurt as kids and get knocked around and it never goes quite the way we would like. But generally speaking, the more safe parents can create the environment for the child, the more loved they feel safe in that they feel safe and Secure in the fact that they feel loved allows them to take a risk, to open up those petals and be more connected to who they really are.

I love it. So I'm curious on the parents. How can a person, a woman, a man, prepare for welcoming a child into the world? Like, what would you recommend them to do? Mind, body, spirit. To prepare to create a healthy family.

Yeah, that's exactly what I think we're here to do as adults is to figure out what makes us tick, to understand the truth of us so we're not just wrapped up in the Ayurveda. There's three emotional body types. There's what's called sattva. Satwa is the nature of the heart to just give and to love and to care and to be concerned and to be generous. Like the sun. It just gives. It never gets anything in return. It just gives, gives, gives, Loves, loves, loves, Warms up the earth. And the earth just responds by being beautiful and amazing. Right? That's what the sun does. Its nature is just to be giving. And from the ayurvedic perspective, that's our true nature, is to be giving and loving. That's just our nature. But. But as a young child, that's really risky. So we protect, we wall off, we lock off parts of our delicate self, close the petals of the flower, and we use our mind to stimulate ourselves to become safe and secure. So we become what's called rajastic. Rajastic means mental stimulation. So I use ice cream. Whoa, that was good. How do I get more of that? That made me feel really good. So then I want more ice cream. Then I want a cup of coffee. Then I want a new bike and I want new shoes and I want roller skates and I want a little. I want a car when I'm 16. And. And I want. And I want. And soon it becomes money, power, fame, sex, drugs, you name it. We're stimulating ourselves to be excited. And if you look at our culture, we are an overly stimulated culture. And this produces chemicals in the brain. It activates one particular hormone in the brain called dopamine or neurotransmitter in the brain called dopamine, which is the I gotta have it right now hormone. And the more you stimulate it with sugar or coffee or dark chocolate or a new car or a new house or a new job or more money, then the more money you need to make, the more chocolate you have to eat, the more coffee you have to drink. So it's a diminishing hormone. The more you activate it, the More, you need to activate it to get that same reward. Pleasure experience. You with me. So people see the logo on the Starbucks sign, dopamine levels start to rise. They don't have a choice anymore because the dopamine levels are making them go get that cup of coffee when you go shopping, the dopamine levels begin to rise as you shop. And as you browse, they rise, they rise, they rise, they rise. And as soon as you purchase the item, the dopamines plummet. And then you're low again. Then you go, boy, I need a Starbucks. I need a donut. I need a cup of coffee. I need some dark chocolate. So then you go eat something, and you start to rise your levels up again. So we have become a culture of addictive dopamine addicts. I mean, it sounds crazy, but we sort of have a culture that is very rajastic, very stimulated. It's not the worst thing in the world. We need to be stimulated to make things happen, happen, to make the world a better place. But we oftentimes trade that in for a sattvic experience of life, which is just to be content in your own true nature. Of course, if we were all just content sitting around meditating, we wouldn't have a house, a car. I wouldn't be able to talk to you on the phone either. So there's some benefit, of course, of having that certain amount of rajasic activity in our world. It's natural, it exists, it's real, and it's important. Necessary. That's the word I'm looking for. But the problem is that the overstimulation creates an inability to be satisfied. So people, in time, eventually kids, over time, quickly become unsatisfied. You know, they get so super stimulated with their video games, and that doesn't do it anymore. I need, you know, when I was a kid, we would, you know, gosh, we would. You know, the crazy stuff we did is mundane compared to the crazy stuff kids do today. You know what I mean? I mean, unbelievable. We thought we were crazy. They're way more crazy today in terms of adrenaline, jumping off of cliffs and having complete fearlessness about the things that they do. It's unbelievable. We used to go on family picnics and hang out at the beach and just picnic all day long. Now it's a soccer tournament. That's what parents do. Sitting on the back porch, just chilling around the house, talking to the neighbors has them replaced with shopping sprees. We just. We just don't have the same culture we once did. And that's because of overstimulation. And eventually that numbs us, doesn't satisfy us, and we move into a Thomasic way of life. And this is the risk where we start to feel like I am not getting stimulated by the movies and by the stimulation, I'm not getting content. So I become. I start finding things to wall me off and numb me so I don't have to feel the lack of satisfaction anymore, like potential and drugs and alcohol and addictive behaviors. And that's kind of the risk that we go to. On the other side of the extreme of being sattvic, which is fully connected with the petals of a flower open, is to have the petals of flower fully closed, no access, and you wall off from society and you go into seclusion. And unfortunately, that creates depression and sadness. And that's something that's quite epidemic in our culture because we have a very secluded culture, more than we used to. And, you know, so I wrote the book really, to help parents begin to understand that there's a way we can raise the kids physically, mentally and emotionally to keep them healthy so they're not going to the doctor getting sick all the time, but also, more importantly, so they can create a platform of a great mental and emotional spiritual experience of life.

Yeah, I love that too. And I love that you had your children were antibiotic free, or mostly antibiotic free. Can you talk about that? Because in our culture, you hear ear infection and fevers, colds, and it's just like the norm for children to be sick. But I love the picture that you paint. That's not how it has to be.

Well, you know, I mean, I agree. I was really blown away when you first started having kids, and then they get sick and then, oh, my God, what do you do? I mean, no one really prepares you for that when you're a parent. A lot of parents are like, do I take them to the doctor? When do I take them? I'm not really sure. I said, you know, if you're asking the question if I should take my child to the doctor, then you should have already taken your child to the doctor. You don't play around with your kids. You take them to the doctor, and if they have to take antibiotics, you have them take antibiotics. Now, that said, you want to do everything you can so they don't get sick in the first place. So maybe they get a little runny nose, but within two days they're better. There was never a concern that I would need to take them to the doctor because it never really got that Bad. And that was the track that I took with my own kids. In the book, I definitely share some of the experimental techniques that I used on my own kids that worked early on. And then I kind of showed how we kind of evolved them into being something very efficient and very easy for my kids. And nowadays, gosh, I still have an 8 year old and I really feel like we just don't do colds anymore. We haven't done a cold or I just can't even remember when we ever had an issue like that. And if it is, it's really kind of a rare event. And there were times we had to get the kids antibiotics. And usually it's some kind of extreme sequence of events that took them out and put them under the weather or something and then you do it. But generally speaking, I watch very carefully the kids and I'll give you the top four things that I did for my kids when they were young. And sort of what I do now in the wintertime, when it's really the most risky time for colts, is you have to make sure they have adequate vitamin D. So I put two or three drops of the vitamin D that we have, which is about 2 or 3,000 international units of vitamin D, in their water every morning when they have breakfast. So they have a little bit of vitamin D. They don't even know they're having it, but that's already in their glass before they even come into the room. And then I give them. And I bribed my kids at a very young age to learn how to take pills because that made my life a whole lot easier. So I gave them something, a shopping spree at Target or whatever it was to get them to be motivated. When you have a lot of siblings, that works really well because their older siblings tend to set the tone. If you can't do it, you're just not good. So the kids feel embarrassed and they figure out a way to swallow pills. So my kids were swallowing pills at four years old, which is always great. So I give them a couple of herbs and I give them an herb called ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is a great, phenomenal herb for stress. It's an immune builder. It's an adaptogen. It gives them energy, stability. It can help them sleep at night and get them energy during the day. How many herbs do you know that can put somebody to sleep and give them energy to run a marathon? I mean, it's not sedative, it's not stimulant. It's just deeply, deeply rejuvenative. And probably one of the most well researched adaptogens in the world. Super, super safer. And kids get run down, sleepovers, long days playing. They do get run down. And their diet isn't always as good as we would like it to be, so their immune system gets compromised. So ashwagandha gives them that deep energy reserve and stamina so they can have the energy to be calm, energy to go to sleep and get the good night's sleep they need. Secondly, I give them an herb called turmeric, or we have one called cold cough, which has got a couple of herbs but turmeric in it, a little black pepper, and some herb called sitoplati, which is just a very natural nourishing agent for the lung tissue. And you can either just use turmeric as well by itself, but we have one called turmeric plus, which is turmeric and black pepper. And the research has shown that when you add turmeric, 2 black pepper, 16 parts turmeric, 1 part black pepper, you increase the absorption rate of the turmeric by 2000%. When that research came out about 10 years ago, it spurred unbelievable research on turmeric for cancers and extracts of turmeric for cancers. And it hasn't stopped since. So you can kind of make your own version of an extract, which Ayurvedic medicine traditionally did. They didn't extract their herbs. I'm not a big fan of extracts. I'm a big fan of taking stuff out of the ground, combining it smart. Like when you cook, if you're a really good cook, you know how to combine the right stuff so it tastes phenomenal. Same thing with herbal medicine. If you can combine the right herbs, you actually create more potent versions of the herb. Just like when you add the black pepper and the tumor together and all of a sudden you have a potent source of turmeric for your child's cold. I give the one capsule of the turmeric plus or the cold cough a day. That plus the ashwagandha, a little bit of vitamin D, and they're done. And we simply just don't do colds. And then in my car, we kept our trade secrets. Here, we kept a bottle of chewable colostrum. This is when they were very, very young, where you're kind of in that zone where your child is not going to swallow pills, but they're still in that vulnerable, they're not nursing anymore. They're kind of in that no man's land where their immune system hasn't really kicked in and they're still sort of at risk. And then we give them this chewable colostrum. So if they come in from school and their nose is a little bit runny or they look a little run down, give them one or two chewable colostrums. It's a very powerful immune stimulant. It's a lubricant demulcent agent for the respiratory mucosa. And since they're young, their limbic, their thymus gland rather is extremely sensitive to colostrum, which is what originally triggered the immune system in the beginning when, when the mother's milk first produced it. And a little bit more of that colostrum will super activate and charge up a child's thymus activation and bring their immune system into a much higher level. And that has been nothing short of a miracle for me and many of my patients. Plus the other three herbs, the vitamin D, ashwagandha and either cold cough or turmeric is what I do. And we really just don't do colds anymore. I mean, it's just crazy to say that. Believe me, if they did get us, they'd be sick and they'd be at the doctors getting antibiotics if they needed. I don't play around with that.

Right, and you do that daily or.

Is that just when you get during the school year, starting early on when they first start going, because that's when they start getting more exposed in the summertime. I lay way back on all that stuff and they're usually going to be fine. And if they start getting run down, I might start bringing some of those herbs back in because I kind of keep an eye on them. But during the school year I try to do that daily. I do it five days a week, the weekends, there's no routine at all. We just let it go.

That's probably good for the parents, right? Because most parents can get colds as well. So following a similar daily plan would be good for the parents, right?

Oh, yeah, that's. You know, most people who read perfect adults for kids, they say that was better for me than it was for my child. I got so much better personally because the same exact rules apply for parents and adults as it does for kids. Same herbs, same symptoms. We get the same symptoms, just that they're very, very common in kids.

Right, so you said they're more exposed at school. Can you just talk a little bit about germs? Because I'm curious. We try to sanitize everything and we don't want our child to be in contact with germs. I know there's a lot of talk about germs, so can you talk about what germs are and what we do about them?

Well, there's two understandings of germ. The germ theory was followed by Louis Pasteur, who basically thought that there was a germ that caused everything and that he obviously invented penicillin and was able to kill the germs. And then before that, around that same time, there was another brilliant scientist who was the father of modern physiology. His name was Claude Bernard. And he was really more of the one who understood the idea of susceptibility, that it was the host that was vulnerable, susceptible to the germs. So there really is two sides of it. There is exposure, the germ theory, and then there's susceptibility. And I think there's really both. Pasteur on his deathbed, you know, they had a big fight. There was like a whole thing about when this whole first thing happened because, you know, do we boost the host, the person, there's vulnerability, susceptibility, or do we just kill the bug? Well, they found the bug, they used the penicillin to kill the bug. And, well, you know, history told the story. And Bernard's theory of susceptibility was left, you know, alone and was never really addressed again. And even on Pasteur's deathbed, there's an old, very famous quote that he said, it was his deathbed confession, where he said, it's the soil, not the seed, that the germ is nothing and the train is everything, meaning that the germ is not what we should be focusing on, it's really the terrain we should be focusing on. So it's really the susceptibility of the child. So that comes back to. I mean, yeah, keeping your kids clean and hygiene, obviously, that's critically important, but the susceptibility. When you go into a school, the germs are everywhere. How many kids get sick? They don't all get sick. Why? Because some kids are more vulnerable than others. So how do you keep your kid from being vulnerable? That's really what we're talking about, and that's why I wrote the book was how do you keep your kid from getting susceptibility, from becoming susceptible to the infection, because they're all going to get exposed. There's just no way to get around that. And that's where you understand the colds start in the digestive system. The digestion is where it all happens. And kids come in here. I see Kids all the time. I do phone calls on a regular basis with parents, with their kids, and I ask them how is their bowel movements and nobody seems to know. It's like the big unknown question. Nobody knows how the child's pooping. Basically, it's very important to know how your digestion is. Do the child get tummy aches a lot? Do they bloat? Do they get gas? Do they get constipation? Do they have loose bowel movements? Because the immune system is most focused inside the intestinal tract, inside your gut, you have those little villi, those little finger like projections in the gut that absorb nutrition and help detoxify. They drain into the lymphatic system on the outside of the gut wall. The majority of the lymphatic in the body is on the outside of the gut wall. And that's called. I wrote an article in one of my newsletters called the most important half inch in your body because that's where 80% of your immune system lies. So if a child is stressed out, and we talked about earlier how stress bangs away at the gut, irritates the gut, compromises the production of neurotransmitters that make the mood stable, makes a child unable to cope with the stress. The gut gets irritated and inflamed, and now the immune system, the lymph around the gut gets congested and your immune system literally gets stuck in traffic and it can't get to where it needs to get. So we end up having these local immune allergic hypersensitivity reactions or an inflammatory reaction, which is usually excess mucus production in the respiratory sinuses that trigger the proliferation of opportunistic bacteria. Because those bacteria and bugs that we're exposed to just love to produce and reproduce in mucus. Even in just, I think it was in one study, some bacteria produced over a million times in just eight hours. So in eight hours you're going to have like a million more bacteria. I mean, they just love to produce. So if you give them an opportunistic environment to do that, they're just going to do it. And then you're stuck with this incredible amount of bacteria with the lymph system that's stuck in traffic. So then you sort of need kind of to hit it hard with an antibiotic to kind of take it out. But before that happened, wouldn't it be nice to make sure digestion is strong, elimination is good, quality of the villi are healthy. The lymph on the outside of the gut wall is draining. Well, there's not an excessive amount of stress making the kid bang away at the gut, causing irritation, inflammation in the gut, compromising the ability to cope and handle stress in the first place. Those are all very doable things. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally. I love it. So how does a parent know when their child is constipated? Like, I don't think a lot of people even know what that might mean. Like, when do they know? Like, oh, it hasn't. My child hasn't gone to the bathroom. How much should they go?

Yeah, I know. Well, normally a child should go. Everyone should go at least once a day, first thing in the morning, within an hour of waking up. That's the ideal, you know, kind of time. Anything more than that for some body types, is extra credit kind of good. And for some body types, doesn't matter. But you start getting too many problems. Four or five a day, these start to kind of, you know, pendulum shifts the other way or it's a little bit too much. You know what I mean? So that's an issue on that side of the equation. But generally speaking, at least one a day, first thing in the morning with an hour, waking up is critical. And, you know, I think the best way to have that discussion is to have that discussion on a regular basis where, you know, parents are just a little bit more tuned into. It's just something that we just kind of sort of don't talk about as a culture. But, you know, it's something that's really important that parents are. And kids start to. And they will, in time, start to feel comfortable with it if they talk about it. They'll feel comfortable if it's like, you know, you asked me that. I've never asked me that before. What's up with that? That's weird. I don't know how to talk about that. You know, it becomes like, something that we don't want to talk about because it doesn't really happen.

Right. Speaking of not wanting to talk about it, I've got to ask you, what is the ideal poop? What should the ideal poop look like for an adult, for a child?

Well, it should be formed and it should be formed enough where when you flush the toilet, it sort of breaks up. It doesn't really need to float like many people think it should float. It doesn't need to float. That sort of depends on a lot of what you ate, you know, and the density of the food that you ate. But it needs to be formed. And when you slush, it can break up. It shouldn't be loose, it shouldn't have any mucus in it and it should be, you know, a lighter brown color. But again, that will change a lot based on what you ate too. So if the color is within that kind of brownish range, you're usually good to go.

Right? Just curious because some people say that they go and they're not going or it's pebbles. There's just different consistencies. So I appreciate you clarifying. You were saying no mucus. Can you just talk a little bit about mucus and why kids have a lot of it and what causes it and what happens when there's too much mucus in our system?

There's a chapter in the book called Kids make mucus for a Living. And that's exactly what they do because kids are from the Ayurvedic perspective. There's three body types generally speaking, and then we can break those down to mental, emotional, behavioral body types as well. But the three body types are vata, pitta and Kapha. Vata is very fast moving and dry and thinking and worrying and restless and can't sleep so well and nervous and very sensitive, artistic and creative. Pitta is fire and aggressive and competitive and driven and bossy and tends to get hot and fiery and aggressive and can get overheated but also very, very driven in the world. And then kapha is this easygoing, kind of mellow, heavy set, hypo, metabolic, easygoing, kind of hold on to more water type body type. So each of these body types relate to nature. Of course, nature is what Ayurveda is, a science of nature. And so winter is cold and dry like the vata body type. And summer is hot and fiery and like the pitta body type. And spring is very easy going and wet and moist and holding on to more water just like the Kapha body type. So spring is a very heavy, wet, rainy time of the year. And of course kappa body types hold on to more water. So spring in nature is nature's new year, right? It's the first season of nature. It ends with winter and starts with spring. Everything starts anew in springtime. So that's the first cycle. Every cycle in Ayurveda always starts with the Kapha cycle. So our life cycle starts in kapha. So kids are in the Kapha time of their life. They're in the mucus making time of their life. They make mucus for a living between 0 and about 12 to 14 years old. And that's just the nature of the beast. So if you get a child who is a kapha kid, right? Who is a mucus making kid in the mucus making time of their life, which they're all in. And then they're eating mucus making foods like Mac and cheese and pizza, which are very mucus y foods. Boy, you just stacked up a whole bunch of mucus in a poor child who's a cough mucus making kid, body type in a cough kid who's in the mucus making time of their life, eating mucus making food. And they don't have a whole lot of chance to not get overly congested. The villi in their respiratory tract and in their gut flatten out and the ability for the lymph to drain both the respiratory tract and the gut becomes compromised. The immune system very quickly gets stuck in traffic and it either get allergic reactions or hypersensitivity reactions or they break down under the proliferation of opportunistic bacteria. That's just the nature of how that works. So kids do have a tendency to do this. So we want to make sure that your children are eating. Boy, there's so much to say about the diet, but in the springtime they are going to be making more mucus. So if you look at what nature is harvesting in the springtime, it's leafy greens and sprouts and berries and cherries. And if we lived off the land, we wouldn't have really any bread because the bread is harvested in the fall for winter eating. So the bread's gone, the grains are gone. You're really stuck with some berries, some root vegetables and a fairly austere diet that's going to really force your body to burn its own fat. And definitely not congest because there's no food that's congested. It's all the very early greens that are being harvested which have no mucus in them. They're not heavy or dense, there's no fat in them. And then come summertime, we have the cooling foods to help them not get overheated. Fruits and vegetables are harvested in abundance. And of course, in the winter we have heavier soups and stews and nuts and grains and more protein in the natural harvest that helps insulate the child so they don't get overly dried out. So in the winter we have another cold and flu season risk, which is when the winter dryness and the winter coldness will dry the child out. And when the child becomes dry and their sinuses dry out from dry heat in the houses and dry air everywhere, the sinuses produce reactive mucus. And that reactive mucus is a breeding ground for bacteria and viruses, but also bogs down and congests the villi, the cilia in the respiratory tract and in the civilli, in the gut. And that compromises the drainage of those impurities into the lymph system. Your lymphatic system, which is where your immune system is housed, waits patiently on the other side of your skin. The skin that lines your respiratory tract, the skin that lines your gut, the skin that lines your body, your skin that wraps your body has a lymphatic skin tissue called skin associated lymphatic tissue, salt underneath your skin. So any weird thing bites you, a mosquito bites you or something, you've got an immune response team waiting on the other side of that skin to pounce on whatever that bacteria may have entered and penetrated the skin. On the other side of your gut, you have the most lymph of all. Just imagine what we put in our mouth and the stuff that we eat, who knows what, right? There's all kinds of weird things that end up in our gut, and that's why most of the lymph on the outside of our gut wall waiting to pounce. And of course, there's a significant amount of lymph on the outside of the respiratory tract again waiting to pounce if any of these allergens, pollutants, pollens, urchins, bacteria tend to penetrate. And that's how it works. But if that villi get yucky, congested, dried out, irritated, whether in the respiratory or the gut, then immune compromise has happened and now we depend on local inflammatory reactions which can help us not get overly sick, but they make us feel headaches and pressure and sinus pressure and pain and inflamed and all that yucky stuff that comes along with a cold.

Right. I love that you're talking about the. It kind of seems with the seasons, because we can eat anything anytime now with the modern world that we live in. But as you were saying, with the seasons, there's just different foods and that kind of has our body go through a natural cleanse. Can you talk about some food and nutrition principles for children and what's ideal for them and how do we tune into nature more with our food?

Well, I wrote a book, another book called the Three Season Diet, which really was, I think it was the book just before Perfect Health for Kids, which was really all about exactly that, how to live your life in harmony with the cycles in terms of how you eat, eating according to nature, eating in harmony with the cycles, understanding nature really is providing foods at certain times of the year for medicinal reasons. And those medicinal reasons are our medicine. And if we just ate what nature provided, we would have all the medicine we need. Like I said, cooling foods in the end of the summer help keep the body from getting overheated. If you don't eat those cooling foods at the end of summer and you keep eating barbecued, hot, spicy stuff, you're going to get overheated at the end of the summer. And the more hot you become, at the end of the hotel season, you become overly heated. Heat dries you out, just like a desert is always dry. So the sinuses get dried out then. But then we're going to winter where it's cold and dry. So what happens is the heat is dissipated by the cold, thank God, but the dryness just accumulates because we go from cold and hot and dry to cold and dry. We just become very, very dry. And as we get old and aged, we tend to sort of dry out, don't we? So one of the major longevity techniques is realize that we are drying out. And there's a program here that nature had set in motion many, many years ago, billions of years ago, that made sure that we didn't do that, that it kept everything in balance. And so we do this aging thing more gracefully. And, of course, if you look at the foods that are harvested at the end of the summer or at the end of the winter and spring, they're all designed to kind of provoke a detoxification, a natural detoxification. If you ate, you know, if you go to the northeast or the northwest, where they grow a lot of apples, they literally eat apple cider, apple vinegar, apple pie, apple butter, applesauce, and apples all day long for the month of October, to the point where they have such a purgation effect from the apples that they get loose baboons for the entire month of October. That's not. That's very, very true. Because the apples naturally loosen up their stool. Now your body wants to get rid of something, it's going to loosen the stool. When your child gets a fever, the first thing your body. What happens to the child's bowel movements is they loosen up the stool, they get diarrhea. The body's natural response to a fever to get rid of the excess heat is to give you diarrhea. So at the end of the summer, nature harvests apples. And if you think about how many there are on just one tree, you realize that there was somebody was sending a message, we should eat a lot of them. And they would provide a purgative effect to flush our intestinal tract into looser stools, which would dissipate the. What just like a fever, Dissipate the heat. Why? The heat is accumulated excessively at the end of the summer, it's called thermal accumulation. We become overheated, irritated, potentially inflamed. Hay fever comes at that time of the year, and what a great system to get rid of it, get rid of that heat with the super cooling fruits and vegetables that are harvested at the end of summer. Apples being one that actually purgates and causes loose bowel movements and therefore dissipates the heat that way. And if we didn't do that, then that heat turns to dryness. The dryness dries out your respiratory tract. The respiratory tract gets irritated, it produces reactive mucus, and now you have opportunistic bacteria proliferating in your respiratory tract for what we call cold and flu season. So cold and flu season could be clearly prevented possibly a month or two or a season or two prior, because it's all cumulative. Our immune system depends on, in the springtime, cleaning out the villi. So after a long winter of eating holiday food, nuts and seeds and grains and all this heavy meats and protein to rebuild and insulate ourselves and antidote with warm, slimy, unctuous foods to help us not get dried out, we tend to overshoot the Runway, store a little extra fat, eat too many nuts and seeds. And it's very important, in fact, fruits are loaded with fructose, and fructose converts directly into fat. And that's why nature harvests most of the fruits when at the end of the summer. Why do we get all these fruits at the end of the summer? It's not because they're only purgatives. This fructose converts into fat and creates a layer of fat on the body to prepare you for winter. And that's why the bears gorge on fruits in the end of the summer, is because it gives them a layer of fat to protect and insulate them from the cold of winter. How beautiful is that, right? Yeah, it's how it all works. It's all natural and beautiful. So it's not like. So we eat these fruits all year long. I mean, they can be used in moderation, but we have to kind of have a sense of what they were really about. And then, of course, in the spring, after eating all that heavy holiday food all winter and extra nuts and seeds and grains and all that, we have this extra fat layer. So we want to get Rid of it. So what does nature harvest? Well, the, you know, there's bitter roots. The deer dig up the rhizomes, which are the surface roots in nature, the burdock root and the dandelion roots and the Oregon grape and all these roots, turmeric and ginger, they dig up these roots and they're very bitter. And they clean scrub the villi with all the yucky extra mucus from winter and clean them out. And then once they get cleaned out in the early spring, the sprouts of spring start to come out, that fluorescent green comes into the valleys and you eat those fluorescent greens and they fertilize the good bacteria onto the villi so the villi become very functional. And then at the end of spring, you start getting, as we do now, berries, lots of berries and cherries coming onto the marketplace. And those are your antioxidants, your lymph movers. Where's your lymph? Waiting on the outside of the gut wall to be flushed. But now the villi are cleaned, they've been fertilized with the greens. They have the lymph movers of spring, the berries and cherries to clean the lymph. And you have a 1, 2, 3 punch to set you up. So you are not producing, so you're digesting, assimilating and digesting and detoxifying in a very efficient manner. Now, of course, many of us don't really do that as well as we could, and that's why I sometimes recommend taking herbal supplements to support that. We have a variety of different cleansings that cleanses home cleanses that people can do. We have one called It's a free 30 page download of how to cleanse called. It's a free short home cleanse ebook that tells people how to do their four day quick cleanse. We have our two week Colorado cleanse that you can do, which is a much more deeper cleanse that actually resets all aspects of digestion. And of course, for Ayurveda, there's panchakarma that we do here, which really drops into not only the detox and the reset of digestion, but also does what we said earlier in the very beginning, which was to really deal with the density of the physical body, to give us the clarity to make those deep transformational mental and emotional changes that sometimes haunt us and drive us to do the same dumb stuff again in our lives that we sometimes can't get out of or get out from underneath of.

Amazing. Oh my gosh. You are a wealth of knowledge and I'm sure everyone listening to this is going to be like, I could listen to you talk forever. So awesome. Amazing. So I'm curious on the seasons, is there kind of like an ideal eating structure? Like how, when should we eat our meals, how big, how frequent does this change from season to season? Can you just talk a little bit about that?

Well, yes, the meals change season to season for sure. And we sort of talked about how. What I wrote in the three season diet book and is grocery lists that are basically lists of foods that are harvested from around the world that have all the foods that are harvested in the spring and all the foods harvested in the summer and all the foods harvested in the fall for winter eating. And all you do is you can go to my website@lifespa.com and go to the articles section and you can download a copy of those grocery lists. And then when you have them in the summertime, just circle the foods that you like on the summer list and eat more of them. That's all. Just don't give yourself permission to eat more of what's in season and try to stop thinking about what you shouldn't eat. It's kind of a bad program. And start thinking about what you should eat more of. And you do that for winter and you do that for summer and you do that for spring. Now in nature there are three growing seasons. There's a spring harvest and growing season. There's a summer harvest and growing season, and there's an end of summer or a fall harvest which we use for winter eating. And there's always one season that's dormant in nature. So we always know there's four seasons. Only three of them are active. From the perspective of a growing season, nature always takes rest. So Ayurveda simplified that into three active seasons. So we follow them. The spring is a, we have a spring diet, which is a kapha congestion reducing diet list of foods that are leafy greens and sprouts and berries, all the stuff that's harvested but from around the world, not just locally. So you have the luxury of going to your grocery store and using the grocery list as kind of a decoder for what's actually acceptable to have in the springtime. So we don't have to only eat with the seasoning, which is really a great thing to do, but it can become sort of restrictive and kind of boring for some. So this gives us the luxury to eat from foods around the world. So we do have that option, which is great. Summertime, same thing. Foods are cooling, they're pit capacifying, they reduce the heat in the body. And it's a list of all the foods that would reduce that. And of course, in the springtime, in the wintertime, we have a list of foods that reduce the dryness and help warm us up. And they're heavier, higher protein, higher fat, foods that are more insulating and more oily and slimy, and they keep us from getting dried out. So that's how it works. Very simply, just look at the grocery list and start eating more of those foods and start to realize that I do crave more soups and salads and meats and grains in the winter. And I do crave more spinach, salads and greens and fresh greens in the spring. And I do crave more fruits in the summer and vegetables in the summer. And give yourself permission to go with that natural inclination because it's really there. And the more we feed it, the more profound our food becomes as our medicine.

And then on the ritual or the cycles and the seasons. Is it important for us to have regular routines and daily cycles for our children when they wake up, when they eat, when they go to bed? Can you talk about the importance of getting in sync with rituals and routines?

No question. Probably the most important cycle of all, really, when you boil it down, is our daily cycle. That's when we kind of sort of do live daily. And most people just have no sense of that anymore and feel like their life is a struggle. They feel exhausted at the end of their day. And I think when people begin to start to realize how they can live downstream, they can feel just a ton better, you know, way more energetic. And so, you know, generally speaking, in Ayurveda, there's cycles in the morning when you wake up, which is again, 6 o' clock in the morning, sunrise. We always start with kapha. Kapha is a time of the day where it's heavy and, you know, it's a very dense time of the day. And that density in the environment helps us to have muscular strength and resiliency and endurance to handle the digging and ditches and plowing fields and all the physical labor before it gets too hot outside. So muscles are stronger in the morning. According to research done by the Soviets years ago, they would do all their weightlifting in the morning. So this is time to be more physically active in the middle of the day. The digestion is very, very strong. So most cultures around the world always had their big meal in the middle of the day. It wasn't that long ago in America, we always had our big meal in the middle of the day. Then it sort of became have your big meal in the middle of the day on Sundays and it disappeared altogether. But it's sort of making a comeback that people are stopping and having big meals again because this is when the body can cook the food and digest. The reason for that is because the cycle in the afternoon is between 2 and 6. And that's when the brain, the men, the mind wants to become alert, believe it or not. And the mind craves about 80% of the blood sugar. And the reason why most of us are not alert between 2 and 6 in the afternoon is because we're not delivering, able to deliver the amount of sugar that the brain needs. So it wants to fall asleep, or it needs to crave Starbucks or it needs to crave dark chocolate or some type of energy drink or something like that, because we just don't have the energy to make it last. So if you have a big relaxing lunch that's very satisfying, then you begin to have the energy in the afternoon that can carry you through the afternoon without needing to have those snacks or those injections along the way. So the idea traditionally was, and of course at 6 o' clock at night, that those three cycles are over and 6 o' clock at night, the cycle repeats itself. It's the nighttime version. So kapha comes in again from 6 to 10 at night, and guess what's happening between 6 and 10 o' clock at night? The body's trying to go to sleep. So the best thing for your kids is to put them to sleep early, feed them early. When I was a kid, we had supper at 5:30, 6:00', clock, the kitchen was closed. And then you'd go out, play, kick the can, come back, you're in bed by 8 o', clock, ish, slept till 7, had breakfast at 7. We didn't have anything to eat from 6 o' clock at night till 7 in the morning. That was 13 hours of our day. Fasting, they would call that starvation. Today social services would be at your doorstep citing you for starving your own children. We have lost the ability to make energy last as a culture because we feed our kids all the time. God forbid they get a little hungry. And so as a result, our whole culture has become, you know, giving them snacks. And now kids at school get meals at breakfast, then a snack and then at lunch, then a snack and then a oh my God. And what that does is it keeps them from getting hungry, but it doesn't force them, encourage them, you know, Require them to burn their own fat. Because fat burns when you don't eat. That's our survival technique. If you had a woolly mammoth soup back in the old hunter gatherer days, you eat it for three days, then you might have nothing for a week. We have the capacity genetically to make energy last because that's how we survive. That helps. And that's done by our ability to burn fat. If you don't burn fat well, or you don't encourage fat burning, we don't burn it, we store it. So we've become the most obese country in the world. We don't burn fat. Fat is calm, stable, non emergency stable in your skin, handle stress fuel. You don't burn fat. You have kids who can't focus. You have kids who can't think well, they don't sleep well, they are stressed out, they're anxious, they're worried. Lots of kids are on Prozac and antidepressants. These things didn't exist years ago. Not that everybody was in perfect health or anything. But there's a significant change in the culture that's taken place over the years that has rendered all of us, not just children, with the inability to be good fat burners. So one of the best things you can do for your children is to feed them a good breakfast, feed them a good lunch, and feed them a good supper. And the best thing that you can do is to take your own personal health as an adult seriously and eat really, really well. And if you eat really, really well, your kids will eat really, really well. I never tell my kids. I mean, of course, some extremes, of course, but I am not the dad who's in there. And I'm really into health, I'm really into what I eat, I'm really into pure foods. I'm into making my digestion as healthy as it was when I was 18 years old. I'm into longevity and feeling great in my life. So I have the capacity to grow and evolve spiritually so I can be happy and content and pass that wisdom on to my children. That's sort of my program. But I don't proselytize that to my kids and beat them over the head and make them eat all the vegetables that I eat. Daddy, I don't do that. But what happens is when they see me doing it, they do it. Like the other day, not too long ago, I watched my little 8 year old, you know, like normally when she go to a restaurant, she always wants a soda, you know, and generally speaking, we don't Give it to them. Once in a while we give them a treat and let them do that. But generally speaking, we don't do it. But so the other day at the restaurant, you know, she just ordered water, you know, and she didn't even ask. And it's just, you know, and I watched my older kids and We've got a 23 year old with my oldest and 24 now and an 8 year old my youngest. So I watched all these kids just slowly come to wanting and desiring and asking how to eat healthier. It happens to every one of my kids. And I just think that if you provide an example, they will come to it and they'll want to learn it because they're going to want to feel better too. When they see dad looking really good and feeling really good at 56 years old and they say, whoa, what's up with dad? How come he's always feeling good and he never gets sick? You know, you don't have to say anything. You just don't have to say anything. You just practice what you preach. And they modeled your behavior, if your kids will model your behavior. So really, the onus, that's why I wrote the book is perfect health for Kids. It's what we as parents can do to keep ourselves healthy and set that example. And boy, they follow. They do. They want to follow.

That's awesome. I love it. So on that one last question, just kind of on the demonstration, you obviously have six kids and you're vibrantly healthy, they're healthy, you're doing something right. And having six children, you have to have an abundance of wisdom and experience. Can you just share some of your top parenting tips on how to help your children thrive and flourish and be happy?

Well, I mean, it's really simple. I think the most important thing, the major thing, is that kids want to feel safe. That's what starts the whole program out. We all just want to feel safe and we want to feel loved and we want to feel cared for. And when we allow the kids to feel safe and secure and feel cared for, they feel safe enough to be who they are. And if they don't feel safe, then they start to create versions of themselves, personalities that they create to make you like them, to get the attention that they so desperately think they need. Every child has to go through that kind of distortion of their true self before they can come to their senses, hopefully, as a young adult and realize that I don't need to project those childlike patterns on the screen any longer. And I can take A risk to be myself. But the more safe we can create, allow them to be as children, the less thick, the less dense this mental protective wall becomes. And they have a much easier time finding the truth of them as a young adult and then projecting down the screen for the rest of their life. So really, it's about your child and children feeling completely safe throughout their lives. So they feel safe that they can talk to you about anything, whether it be drugs or alcohol or sex, that they're not going to come to you and get in trouble or get yelled at. They feel safe because they want to connect on the level of their heart. And if you provide that connection, heart to heart with your children and they feel safe, they'll always come to you. And they're going to want to drift away as they go through life at different times. And our job as parents is to reel them in, bring them back into fold, bring our attention back into their lives so they feel you there. If they feel you there in their life, they know that you're there. And they feel this. They feel the protection of that. It's like a baby horse in the wild. And when that baby horse runs away, that little baby horse feels the mom's attention there and that mom brings it back into the fold and doesn't let it go into harm's way. We have to be there. A lot of times we get so busy in our lives that the kids just, you know, sort of we can check out and not really tune into them. And that's a requirement for us and challenging requirement for parents because we're so busy, too, but to really tune into them and make them feel safe. And boy, if you do that, you know, I just had, you know, boy, trust me, we're not perfect by any means, but that's the program that I've used and it's really working for me so far. And it allows me to be. It allows me to grow because the more I can love them, the more I can experience the truth of me and let that out in some of the more extreme situations where sometimes it's not easy to be loving when they're being crazy and insane and being kids. But that's the challenge. And that's what we call the game of life.

Beautiful. I love it. Tears in my eyes. It's such a beautiful picture of harmony and love and safety. So thank you for that.

You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yes.

Thank you so much. And then people can find you@lifespa.com yep.

You can find me@lifespa.com and you can sign up for our weekly video newsletter. We put out a video newsletter every week that's got information kind of like this. We went through a lot today, but we just take a particular topic and dive in deep every week and I do a video on it and a really good article and there's tons of information on the website. All the archive newsletters are there as well and of course, lots of information on all the herbs and things that we use for the support.

Fantastic. Well, awesome. Yes. And I love all of your videos and I said it at the beginning, but you have such a radiant light in health that you are definitely doing something right and inspiring all of us. So thank you. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Oh, you're very welcome. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess.com until next time. Keep rocking it and have an awesome day.