The Melt Method with Sue Hitzmann

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin and welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where we're going to connect with some some of the coolest people in the world. Plus, I give you fast tips that you can put into action to uplevel your health and your life. Now today's show is all about the gut pain connection and something that you can do for 10 minutes a day or less. It's going to get you and keep you out of pain. It's also going to help you get energized, focus, lose weight, feel better. I mean, just amazing. And I'm so fortunate because I've heard about this woman for this woman for years and actually happened to run into her in a green room in a TV studio in Toronto, Canada. And I'm like looking at her going, I can't believe I'm finally meeting you. People have been trying to get us together forever. Her name is Sue Hitzman. She developed the Melt method. She's going to tell you all about how that came to be. And it's something that I immediately was like, all right, I got to get this for my son Bryce, who tricks. I've got to get it for me. And you're going to love what you're hearing here about how, how quickly you can get out of pain because here we are all about figuring out the root cause of everything. And of course, diets involved too, as you'll hear. Let me tell you a little bit about sue before we jump in. Sue is the creator of the Melt Method and she has now trained, gosh, 1600 people in this. She's the author of the New York Times bestselling book the Melt Method, a breakthrough self treatment system to eliminate chronic pain, erase the signs of aging and feel fantastic in just 10 minutes a day. And she's been doing this now for years. She developed in her private practice and because people were leaving her practice feeling great, coming back in pain again. So she decided to give them some homework in the hopes that they could not need to see her. Sort of a bad business decision. But it actually worked out quite well for her because now she's trained, gosh, over 1300 professionals from 13 different countries in the mountain method. It's everywhere and there's a reason for it. The reason it's everywhere is because it works. Now she's been all over again. I met her in a green room. She's been on Dr. Oz, Nightline, good Morning America, the Rachel Ray show, Live with Regis and Kelly, and in a bunch of different magazines. So just a super, super brilliant person. And it's really interesting how she's going to explain how all of these things between stress hormones and sleep and pain and gut and weight loss and focus all connect. So I'm super excited to share. Today's guest, sue, hits with you. So let's do it. Sue, welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here with me today.

Thanks so much for having me, jj.

This is such a hot topic because, you know, I love anything related to the gut and a lot of people, when they do the virgin diet, see this big shift in their pain and inflammation. So I love the fact you're going to tie it all together today with gut health and pain. But before we go there, what I'd love to talk about is how you got into this whole thing and how you discovered the melt method.

Well, I created it. You know, it's a self treatment technique that I developed out of my private practice basically to empower my clients to help themselves get out and stay out of chronic pain by simulating the hands on method I was using in my sessions with them. And I started to call it hands off body work. And I started developing these simple techniques that they could use at home to, to deter the negative effects of their daily living that caused what I call stuck stress and these common imbalances that were ultimately leading them to pain. And what I basically realized in working with people is that I could make great changes with them. But when they went home to their daily lives, what I really realized was that daily living and their repetitive postures and habits were far outweighing my one hour a week with them. And when I started sharing this at home work with them, it was so transformative because they were not only coming back sustaining changes, they were coming back better than they left me in the first place. And so that was Very empowering to me. You know, I started this in the late 90s, and by 2004, I had helped so many people with chronic disorders that ranged from disorders and diseases to, you know, knee pain or digestive issues or sleep problems. And I was finding that they all had common imbalances that they could address at home. And basically what I taught them to do was address what I call connective tissue dehydration. And connective tissue is really a missing link to pain free living that diet and exercise don't directly address. And that's what the melt method is. And again, I just wanted to get my clients out of my office so that they didn't have to rely on me solely to get them out of pain. That empowering somebody to help themselves, I thought was much more important. And that's basically how I started the program.

You know, it's funny because you look at that and you sort of go, well on the outset, that looks like you're making people independent of you. Possibly a bad business decision.

Exactly. When I really first started, I thought I might make myself unemployed really fast if this works. But it was the opposite. I went from seeing 30 people a year to over 500 people a year, because instead of having to see them 12 or 20 times, I could see them three or four times, figure out exactly what was wrong, develop a protocol for them to do at home, and slowly span their sessions with me out further and further until they could resolve their own chronic pain and their own issues and just come to me every once in a while for a tune up. Or if they got into an acute trauma or something, they always knew they could come back, but it got them out of my office faster.

I love hearing this. Honestly, it's great because I'm thinking about. You sent me your melt method program, which I promptly gave to my son, who's a tricker and always, like, he's always in chronic pain. So he immediately. We were home for Thanksgiving, he was using it, and I'm sitting here listening. Okay, why did I, like, give it to him? Because I'm one of those people that I go to my chiropractor and they're like, really? You know, and it just makes sense, like, we all need to be doing this on an ongoing basis. And, you know, you have something, you talk about a pain cycle. So what exactly is that?

Well, you know, I think what people really need to hear is that although I think a lot of us spend some time in focus, you know, eating right, exercising, and claiming to do all the right Things I always say, there's a little dirty secret in fitness is that a lot of the fitness professionals even are injured. And what they're missing is as much as they think that they're proactive, they're actually very reactive in how they go about the their own healthcare. And so when I talk about the pain cycle, the reality of it is, is that we're all on the pain cycle. It just depends upon how far down the rabbit hole you've gotten. And what I try to explain to people is that, you know, daily living causes this cellular dehydration in your connective tissue. In fact, most chronic issues actually originate in an imbalance in the connective tissue, then altering neurological function.

Okay, you're gonna have to say that now in English, because I'm just visualizing people listening, going, all right, A, what's connective tissue? B, does that just mean I need to drink more water? What, you know.

This is what I would say to anybody is like, you know, even if you don't have chronic pain, I will guarantee you felt connective tissue dehydration. So let me point it out. Like, have you ever sat for long periods of time and then when you get up, your joints feel really stiff for like the first couple of minutes as you get walking, or you wake up in the morning and your feet feel really stiff on the floor? If you've. That's what I call a pre pain symptom. And the problem is, as you move around, it's the blessing and curse that stiff achiness goes away. And because it goes away naturally, we never really do anything about it. But if you think of connective tissue, this is the three dimensional flexible scaffolding under your skin. It is completely inseparable from your skin to your bones. It has no separation. And this is the stability architecture that's under your skin that supports your muscles. It gives your muscles continuity, it gives you joint shock absorption. It keeps your organs suspended and tucked back in your belly, helps with postural alignment. But on a cellular level, connective tissue is also providing every cell, blood vessel and nerve in your body stability and an environment to function in. So if you're getting those pre pain signals from your body, that stiff, achy feeling, and you don't actually address what's really the cause of that, it starts to accumulate like sediment in a river. And then all of a sudden you're telling me, hey, my joints are kind of always hurting, or I have to crack my joints a lot or I'm getting chiropractic adjustments. To realign myself. And then if that's the route you're going or you do what most people do, you ignore it, or you pop an Advil to deal with the aches and pains that you have from day to day. That causes a bigger problem and sends you much further down this pain cycle because it exhausts your nervous system. It starts making your nervous system work harder and harder. It slows down your metabolic system state, it starts to make you feel exhausted in the middle of the day. But at night when you try to fall asleep, you're not falling asleep quickly, you're not staying asleep, you're getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. And then you're waking up the next day with a backlog of stuck stress that your nervous system has to manage. And now again, you're causing more issues in your body's ability to manage stress and repair. And that wreaks havoc on your gut system. And that's where you and I like meet right up, is that it's great when you can get somebody to alter their digestive behavior, their eating habits, what they're putting in their body. But again, if you're not addressing the issue in the connective tissue, you could eat all the right foods, drink adequate amounts of fluid, but think of connective tissue like a dried out sponge. Just like a dried out sponge doesn't absorb water as well as a moist one, if you're not actually actively partaking in stimulating this tissue. And that's what Melta is all about, these gentle compression techniques and pull techniques to revitalize that tissue. You're eating foods, but your body's not assimilating them, breaking them down, transporting them, and then bringing them to the cells that need them. And so you're just getting more toxicity in your gut, you're getting more and more constipated, you're feeling hungry more often, you're going for the wrong foods. And again, now you're down that pain cycle where on a chemical reaction, as that metabolic state starts to really slow down, your body starts pumping out more cortisol and stress inducing hormones. You get less of the dopamine and the norepinephrine in the body. And that is again going to really cause havoc and effect on the gut system and the metabolic levels of the flora in your gut and the balance of the gut's ability to absorb and transport nutrients to cells.

Okay, so you, you just rocked that one out because I, I love talking about how everything works together and you just showed how Your pain impacts what you eat, how you weigh, you know, how much you weigh, your gut, your mood, everything. And, and it also tells me that like when we're going to approach something like someone has, goes to the doctor and they've got adrenal exhaustion, you know, we always have to track back, it's something we talk about in functional medicine, to the root of the cause. And so say that someone's got, you know, that was such a great metaphor of the dried out sponge. They've got the dried out sponge, connective tissue. And obviously there's a big connection here with what you're eating and sleep and all that, but where do you start in terms of just going right to the cause and helping their body? Like what is, what is really the foundation of melt method? If you could just, I know it's, it's physical and they're going to use rollers and stuff, but just, if you could just explain how it works a little bit so they know how to do it.

So what we know about connective tissue, again, the supportive infrastructure under your skin is that again, like a sponge, it transports nutrients to cells, it's stabilizing on a macro level, on a global level, it's stabilizing your joints and your posture. And to again, just daily living. Those repetitive postures that we take like sitting, cause excessive tension and compress on most importantly the backside of our body. So, you know, you're sitting for long periods of time, you're compressing the back of your legs, you're pulling on the fascia on the back of the body, and when you go to stand up, that tissue has this balance, it's called fascial tone. And it's a balance between stiffness and elasticity. So for a lot of us, if we sit for long periods of time or we do repetitive postures, we are stiffening this tissue again like a dried out sponge and we're losing fascia's elastic properties. So elasticity, what's important for people to know is that it's not fascia's ability to move and adapt. It's actually fascia's ability to stabilize it as it moves and adapt and then quickly return to its ideal shape. And that's the fluid flow of fascia that allows that to occur. And again, when that fluid flow of fascia and that elastic property declines, the cell damage accelerates. So you're not only increasing your risk of joint pain, again, it's going to affect your gut system, it's going to affect your mood, it's Going to affect your nervous system, your body's overall functional efficiency.

Okay, so someone's in pain. Someone's in pain. I'm going to use myself here because I was just thinking about it last night. You know, I get. I get massages, like at least every other week. I go see my chiropractor, who I adore, and I wish I could see every week, shout out to Dr. Chad Larson in Solana Beach. Oh, my gosh, But I'd love to see him every week. I'd like to actually just move in there, but I can't. But it's just. I'm your classic. I'm your classic problem child standing over here. And I know better. I should know better. This is naughty. But, you know, I was just thinking about last night because I've been doing a lot of writing with this next book and my upper back, every time I go to the massage therapist, they're like, oh, it's like it is dried out sponge up there. It is blocked. So it sounds like to me that if you were really going to approach this correctly, you would of course be eating correctly. That's obvious. You would not be masking it by hitting yourself with Advil, which has always driven me crazy, you know, because then you're going to make even worse repetitive behavior because your body can't tell you to stop it. You are moving throughout the day and getting up and moving your posture and. And doing things like chiropractic massage. But then you're doing on a regular basis your type of stimulating processes to keep things fluid, moving and hydrated. Right?

Yeah, that's right.

So.

So two things, you're hitting a good point here. One is that to find, to even be in an environment, to be in a. You know, if you're in a. You know, I live in New York City. You know, again, if you're in a place where you can find a great therapist, that's number one, is you got to find. You have to have the resources. Second, you got to have a lot of time and a lot of money. And even people who actually have a good income don't have any fre time to take out to go to see these therapists. And again, the problem with the therapist is, just like you said, you'd almost have to move in to really sustain the benefits. You'd have to have it done daily. So what Melt is, and this is why it's so great for me as a therapist, is that I can set somebody up and get them into the right direction. And then if they can. 10 minutes a day. That's the beauty of melt is it takes 10 minutes a day.

I love that. That's totally doable. And if you think about it, takes way less time. Just that 10 minutes a day. I think of what it takes me to go to the chiropractor's office, go through that whole thing and then it's gone. It's like, it's, it's like I drag myself in there. I think, oh gosh, he's gonna. My, my old therapist, where I used to live, who I adore to, would just like, she'd laugh at me. And I'm like, I'm sorry. You know, I'm your first patient.

You know, that's the nice thing about melt is like what, what I did in the book was that I broke it down into what we call meltdown sequences. And each sequence takes about 10 minutes. And what you learn in the book is how to determine which sequences you should be doing the most often and setting yourself up to actually fix a problem rather than paying attention to a symptom. So this is something else that's important for people to know. Like if you're like JJ and you're sitting there, you're writing, you get so focused and you've got your eyes looking at a screen on a computer for long periods of time, that narrows the field of vision down, that causes stiffening in the neck, it gets your back tight and then you're typing away. Well, you would think, oh well, wow, my neck is starting to hurt me. And you want anybody to like jam a ball in there or their hands and dig it out and press on the areas that hurt. But I always say the areas that hurt, you think of them as the victim of your body. So if your kid was crying out for your help, you wouldn't walk up to him, punch them in the face. You would find the perpetrator, the problems, and then focus on fixing the problem rather than the symptom or the crying out that the person is doing. So it's interesting with our bodies that we don't do it that way. When some part of our body hurts us, the first thing we want to do is press on it, push on it, pull on it, crack it, whatever. But the idea of melt is to actually identify that the areas that are hurting you are crying out for your help. You got to go and find where the stuck stress is accumulating. Where is this connective tissue sediment, if you will? Where is the dried out sponge localizing its dehydration? And can you start to draw fluids toward the neck to restore it? So for you, I would tell you, hey, before you get down to sit at your desk, melt your hands, because you're going to be doing things like typing, and that can definitely dry out and cause stiffening in the forearm muscles and the tissue around the forearm, and that can cause you neck pain. So you treat your hands. That take you about five minutes. And then you'd work on your upper back. You do a little gliding, shearing, and rinsing with the roller, try to draw fluids back up to the neck. And then you'd go about your day, and you'd sit there and you type away. And so for 10 minutes before you sit down at your desk, Great thing to do. And then, of course, my obvious tip to anybody who sits for long periods of time is just every 30 to 40 minutes, you don't need to, like, go out for a big walk or something. Just stand up, bring your arms up over your head, take a big breath in, and when you bring your arms down, make a firm sh. Sound. Like a sh. Out of your body to tighten up your abdomen, stimulate your gut, and do that four or five times, and you'll find your heart rate increases, blood flow increases, it decreases stiffening in the back, and it improves circulation, which, again, is one of these things we need to do. We're too sedentary in our daily lives. And then, like most people, you decide at the end of the day, then you're gonna go to the gym and exercise. And I'm like, wait a minute. You've been sitting, dehydrating your connective tissue all day long, and then you want to, like, just go and move in that unstable body. That's a bad choice. So if you.

It makes it worse. It hurts more.

It makes it worse. Yeah. You can become stronger, more dysfunctional body.

It does. You just make it worse. Especially if you go take an Advil and go do it. Then you're like, totally. So I just want to. But I just want to wrap this up with a bow, because we're up against the time. Because what I'm hearing here, because again, I think of our community, and the big thing I want to impress on everybody is if you're looking at this and going, well, I don't have 10 minutes. Right? Because I know that will be the one objection. Because there could be no other objection. You're going to get out of pain. But think about what your life is like when you can move more efficiently. You're not hurting. You know, it's just like the same thing with getting a good night's sleep. You have more energy, you have better focus, you're more productive. It changes everything. And it's actually a great thing that you can be doing. And it's kind of a meditative state. So it's going to lower your stress hormones too, help you get out of pain, help you get more out of your workout. It's not about working out longer. It's about working out more effectively. So all of this works together, right? It's going to help with gut health, weight loss, like, you know, mood. It's like a magic bullet here. So I want to just encourage everybody to get on over to meltmethod.com that's M E L T. And I've been watching sue for years and years. We have a great mutual friend who's been trying to hook us up. We ran into each other and I was like, oh, my gosh, finally. And just in the perfect time. Although I could have used you. I don't know, 10, 20. Where were you, Sue?

Years ago, I was in my office working on tens of thousands of people that I was doing.

Well. I love what you've done. And it, it did, it didn't, it didn't take your business away. Now you've expanded into all of these countries all over the world. So it's just awesome. I want to remind everybody to go to meltmethod.com and sue, thank you so much for joining me today. Now, after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question, so stick with me.

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Alrighty. Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question and today's question. I always like to get questions that just fit in perfectly with what I'm talking about. And this question is about omega 3 fish oil. And the listener is Ben from Cleveland. And Ben asked jj, how do I know how much fish oil to take. Okay, well this fits in perfectly well because we are talking about inflammation and we were talking about cell walls and all of that. I'm going to break it down and make it simpler. Here's the deal. Fish oil, omega 3 fatty acids. Now there's a couple different ways you can get what's called omega 3s and omega 3s are anti inflammatory fats. They can come from hemp oil, they can come from flaxseeds and flaxseed oil, from chia seeds and from algae and from fish. The challenge is with things like flax and hemp, they're rich in something called ala. In order for you to get to EPA and dha, which can help your heart and brain. And really where you get the majority of these benefits beyond just anti inflammatory, the these have to elongate and it takes a lot of the oil to do that. So I like people to go straight to the source and get fish and fish oil and if you are vegan, go get algae. You're not off the hook. You need to definitely do this. And the reason this is so important is these things actually work to help cell membranes stay more fluid so that the cells can communicate well, you've got healthy fluid cell walls, they're not stiff, which means you just heard what happens when that starts to happen. You do not want stiff cell walls. Now how do you know how much to take? Because if you've been around my community, you probably heard me talking about giving my son high dose fish oil after his traumatic brain injury and then we tapered down to 10. And the fact that I had him on 5 grams prior to the accident because of some issues with bipolar and that being one of the reasons I think he got through this was because it's neuroprotective. Now I think everybody needs to be on fish oil because I rarely see people eating enough fish. I mean, yes, maybe if you lived in Alaska and you ate clean wild fish every single day, you'd be cool, but that's probably not you. And so ideally, here's what you do because most of us are getting a lot of pro inflammatory fats, omega sixes, specifically things from like corn oil. I hope not, I hope not. But most of us are getting those in and the challenge is we really, it's all about balance. You don't want to have an overabundance of omega 3s unless maybe you're coming out of a brain injury. You don't want to have an overabundance of omega 6s. You want to have these in balance because you need to have a balance between inflammation and anti inflammation. If you have too much anti inflammation, then you could bleed out, not clot. Well, so you need to have both. So how do you know where that should be? What you do is you take an omega 3 fatty acid index and the ideal ratio used to be, by the way, that thousands of years ago we were about 4 to 1, 6 to 3. So 4 to 1 ratio of the omega 6 to omega 3. Now it's oftentimes 25 to 1. So that means we're just walking around in an inflamed state. So you look at it and you go, what are all the things that that can lead to inflammation? Well, sue talked about some of the different things and of course diet plays a big role. Sugar of course is another one. But pro inflammatory fats and that lack of balance create a major problem. Now here's the other issue. Let's say you take that Omega 3 test or you just decide, hey, I'm just going to do this right now and get started. Because I think the bigger shame is waiting. Because if you've been eating a regular diet, you probably have an overabundance of omega 6s and you've got to basically crowd them out and push them out. And so you're going to want to eat more Omega 3. So my general starting dose with people is to say eat wild fish a couple times a week and then take a high quality fish oil, 2 grams a day. And I say high quality here. This is where quality truly matters. And I would look for one that has lipase in it. I have a fish oil product called omega plus and it has lipase in it, which means it's going to help you absorb the fat. Because as we get older, protein and fat become sometimes we have a challenge absorbing them. So I put that in. It also helps avoid the fishy burps. So it's lemon flavored with lipase in a soft gel. So that's one of the things I tell people to look for. Like you know, 10. We tend to have fishy burps when we can't digest things well. So watch for that. And with the lemon, even if you did have a little fishy burp, you wouldn't be like. But the big thing is get started there. And ideally, if you can test, I always say test, don't guess. That's fantastic. Run an omega 3 fatty acid index and see where you're at. Monitor that. But this is just one you want to be on and if you have kids, get your kids on fish oil. Oh my gosh. Because you know, we never know we're going to hit our head. Leading cause of death in kids is is brain injury. We've got to protect those heads. So fish oil is one of the things that we can do to be neuroprotective, important for everybody. I can't think of anyone that shouldn't be doing this. All right, if you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjvirgin.com and you can leave it it for me there. Or better yet, go to Facebook and drop it to me on my fan page. I can't wait to hear from you. And one more way, I'd love to hear from you. I would hugely appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you to live courageously. Show up, step up. You're stronger than you think.

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