The Two Pillars of Longevity: Mastering Metabolism and Human Connection with Dr. Molly Maloof

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Ray Ban stores and other authorized retailers. I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition specialist, Fitness hall of Famer and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. And in each episode we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. I have been waiting to interview this doctor for a while now. I am super excited to bring her here. I have been literally listening to all of her interviews, read her book and I was like oh my gosh, there's so much that I want to talk to you about. Could you just stay for stay for hours. So I will give you a heads up. This is a two parter. We are going to be going deep in this first part about wearable technology. Really? You know what can you find out by using a continuous glucose monitor? How what do you why should you look at hrv, what stress really does to you and what social isolation does to you and what are some of the biggest needle movers, the big rocks that you can focus on that will have huge metabolic health effects because metabolic health obviously is one of the biggest things taking us down that along with social connection. So we're going to be digging deep into both of those and then we'll come back for part Part two where we are going to talk about sexual fitness, sexual health and some of Dr. Molly Maloof her big latest legacy project. So let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Molly Maloof. She is a health optimization and personalized medicine expert. She worked in San Francisco and la, then moved to Austin. Now she's currently over in Wyoming. And, and she has been working now in digital health, consumer health, Biotech Industries since 2012. Visor to over 50 companies. In 2023, January, she came out with the spark factor. And the spark factor is the secret to supercharging energy, becoming resilient and feeling better than ever. It's really the biohacking guide for women. But again, she really focuses on the macro things. Like, a lot of times I feel like biohacking goes deep into the weeds before it fixes the big things first. She focuses on fixing the big things first and came out during our talk that this, a lot of this was her own personal experience where in medical school she actually created a course to help doctors overcome burnout and all of the health problems. Because when she did it for herself, she went from being an average student to like 99 percentile on her boards. And she also taught a pioneering course on healthspan in the wellness department of the medical school at Stanford and then launched her own company, Adamo bioscience. Again, you're going to hear more about that in our second interview, but let me tell you a little bit about Adamo bioscience. The vision of her company is to demonstrate that love is embodied medicine that enhances longevity and awakens a healthier, happier and more resilient world where intimacy is the undisputed force for human flourishing. More on that again in the second interview. Again, in this interview, we're going to be digging deep into stress connection, human connection, HRV and blood sugar and really, how do we heal metabolic health. So I will be right back with Dr. Molly Maloof. Stay with me. Hey, JJ, virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things, and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. On your laptop or on your phone, Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. 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Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

Dr. Molly Maloof, I have been dying to do this interview with you. I'm so happy you're here.

Jj you are one of my heroes. So it's a huge honor to be on your podcast. You're one of the most legendary healers in the world. So thank you.

Oh my goodness. Wow. So I have literally, I've been like listening to all the podcasts with you. Went through the Spark Factor and I was like, can I have you just for days? I wish you were at the house. I'd sequester you here. But I, we were talking offline and I like the idea of like digging into longevity the way you just mentioned. Maybe give a high level overview of longevity and then we'll start to dig in.

Yeah, well, if you talk to a lot of the men in the biohacking and longevity worlds, they'll tell you, oh, it's all about, you know, doing all of these really intense small molecule discover, you know, drug discovery in order to find the missing, you know, link to longevity. And I have a very different perspective. I think that the vast majority of people in America and the world will be able to lengthen their life pretty significantly through optimizing their metabolism and optimizing human connection. Because I see these two pillars of health broken in so many people in modern society that it seems like first principles to think through. How would you take an average person to optimal health and get them to live a longer and healthier life? So I used to teach a course called Live Better Longer Extending Health Span for Longer Lifespan at Stanford. And one of the biggest, you know, the biggest areas of optimal health that I really dug into were blood sugar regulation because it's affected by your sleep, your stress, your movement and what you eat. And also, you know, your stress levels are affected by your relationships and your stress levels are affected by your sleep. So I was really looking at blood sugar as like this ultimate biomarker for longevity. And then the thing that blew me away, that I didn't understand was just how important social connection was to longevity and that loneliness was worse for your health than smoking, drinking, sedentary behavior, and obesity. And I was just like, whoa. Like, this is an area that I should understand more. What is human connection? And that led me down this path of talking to experts like Helen Fisher and Sue Carter, these luminary scientists that have been spending their careers studying the science of love. And Sue Carter wrote a paper called Loving Longevity. And one of her biggest areas of research has been oxytocin neurobiology. And oxytocin is a natural anti inflammatory antioxidant, it's mitoprotective, it's cardioprotective. It's basically your own inner capacity to heal yourself through feeling connected, feeling safe. And that hormone is released when you have, when you cuddle a loved one, when you hug a loved one, when you pet a dog, when you have orgasms, and when you feel safe within your social bonds. And I see at post pand, post pandemic, I saw all of our social bonds start to deteriorate and people's mental illness just started to skyrocket. And I asked myself, we've got to figure out what is underneath all of this. And I spent so much time studying metabolism and mitochondrial health, and that's largely what the book is about. But the book ends on the book. My, the book the Spark Factor ends on the role of connection and longevity. So this is really what I've based my career around.

Boy, you know, if you look at the worst science experiment for human connection.

Yeah, social isolation.

Oh my gosh. Social isolation and then turning your neighbors in. Yeah, turning your neighbors in. Oh my gosh.

And then like forcing people to live in a home where they have no freedom and no ability to, to move. You know, humans are naturally designed to move and naturally designed to expand and explore and to tell people that they have to stay in one place. So two ways that you will dramatically induce mental illness in animals and animal studies is immobilization and social isolation. So they will literally isolate animals and also they'll do immobility studies and this will guarantee mental ill illness. And I don't understand how we didn't take this research on animals and realize it would apply to humans. Because it's not like we're not mammals as well, you know.

Well, we just did the experiment. We like. I just wonder how many years this is all going to set us back. In fact, my son and I were talking about that we, we actually had during the pandemic. One of my sons, my bonus daughter, my husband and I were all here and then my ex husband, another son were over every week and we just, you know, like we were paddle boarding down the canal and like doing all sorts of stuff and really spending a lot of time together. I was like, I'd never normally have this time. This is kind of a gift that you just have to take. But it's like, gosh, you just wonder. We were talking about some of the kids he tutors. He's getting his PhD in math and he's like kind of a math ninja mentor, like life mentor. I said, what do you think about some of the kids in high school? He goes, it wasn't those kids in high school. So I kept feeling bad for the kids who are graduating from high school and now going up to college and they just missed everything. He go no, think about the little kids going to elementary school. And I went, oh, you're right. Like yeah, they're set up for years with issues on it. So the connection side of things, because you've, you know, we've heard about it, how are people even identifying it, talking about it, doing something about it, you know?

Well, there's so one thing it's important to understand when I was studying loneliness is that there's objective social isolation and subjective social is isolation. So objective means that you're literally isolated, there's no one around you. Subjective social isolation can happen to anyone where you could have people around you, but you just don't feel connected. You feel Lonely and disconnected from those. I don't know if you've ever. I mean, anyone who's been in a relationship knows what it feels like to be fully seen and present with someone, and then for someone to close up and for someone to close off and to feel like, whoa, we're disconnected right now. And to me, it takes a certain level of awareness to be able to recognize this, because it can creep. Creep up on you, especially during, you know, things like a pandemic where it kind of crept up on us. We just all sort of quarantined, and then we all didn't really know what to do. And then we were all isolated, but some people were living with people, but they still felt alone, you know. And so one of the things that I learned at Stanford that's really important about breaking out of loneliness is recognizing this concept called maladaptive social cognition, which is that the more lonely you. You get, the more you're isolated and. Or the more you feel isolated, the more your brain starts to actually become primed for social experiences being risky and dangerous, which is really strange. But basically, if you think about, like, primitive times, if a person was on the outskirts of their tribe, they would have been very in. They would have. But basically, they would have been in danger because they could have been attacked by an animal or a neighboring tribe. So it makes sense that the nervous system would prime you to be on guard if you've been isolated, because if you are in, if that is potentially dangerous and primitive programming is that. That's really ancient programming in your brain that doesn't just get phased out through modern life. That's still there. So you have to recognize this maladaptive social cognition, because what happens is, is you'll start to socialize after being isolated for a while, and then you'll just start to pick up on little social cues as super negative, even though they might not be a big deal at all. And you just have to train yourself that. Like, I had to teach my. One of my siblings this because she was pretty isolated. And I said to her, maddie, I was feeling the same way, you know, like a year ago. And I literally had to go out of my way to build a community because I was in a new town, new city, didn't have as, and I wasn't feeling good. And I called my best friend, and she said, you need to make more friends. And I go, okay, I know I can do that. And I went out and I made friends. And the thing is, you have to learn that it doesn't take that much work to make a community. It actually takes a small nucleus of friends. And then having you introduce them, basically, you have them introduce you to more people. So you use your social structure to create people around you. So what I did was I made friends with, like, two or three people, and I said, hey, I'd really like to meet more, and do you have any people that you should introduce? Me too. And it just sort of snowballs, and it sounds scary because you have to kind of get over the awkwardness of making new friends in a new place. Or if you're in a city where you don't know that many people, you have to kind of, like, do a little bit of extra work to go out and find friends. But it only takes one, because one will lead to four or five, five will lead to 10 to 20. Before you know it, you might have a group of 100 people, you know, in a new town. So it. I just think it's a prioritization thing for a lot of people. A lot of people get so stuck in their family structure, they get stuck with their community. Like, their community is really small, and they don't want to branch out because, honestly, the pandemic made people feel very unsafe socially. But I have personally, you know, seen this method work really well with a bunch of different friends. And. And I think if you are a community builder out there listening, it's even more your responsibility to be the one to gel people together. Because women. Women were literally, like, the most important part of social. Social bonding for, like, millennia. Like, it was literally our. We're designed for it. I mean, we're oxytocin dominant. Men are vasopressin dominant. Men are designed for protection, they're designed for defense, and they're designed to ensure that the survival of the tribe. But women, in particular are just. Are so profoundly capable of creating these social bonds. And so I've really encouraged, like, all of my girlfriends to, like, you know, keep this community going, you know, because I'm moving to a new city, and I have this massive community in Austin, and I'm just like. I hand it off this, like, I have a WhatsApp group with about 100 women in it that I made, and it took me about a year to make that group. But I just think it's about prioritization and recognizing that it's your strength. If you are a woman out there listening, it's your strength to build community.

Well, literally, we would have died if we hadn't built communities. Yes. You know, but it's so different than the men. I look at the men and they'll have, like, couple guy friends. They don't talk about anything of importance to them. You know, it's like. It's crazy. So, yeah, it's. It's.

It's.

The first thing that I always tend to do is, like, naturally start to build communities wherever I go.

You're a huge beauty builder, and then.

You have them wherever you go, which makes it super fun. So I love to relate this over to the metabolic side too, because they're all intertwined, you know, whenever one thing. But, you know, metabolic health, just as this major issue going on that's just gotten worse and worse and worse.

Yeah.

What I love about it is now we've got such simple things that we can do that give us the information so we can see what changes we need to make. So you are the one I follow when I look at. Okay, what's going on in the med tech side. So I'd love to dig into some of your favorite tools and specifically talk about blood sugar. Talk about hrv. And I've been waiting for this. Waiting for this interview because I was getting so frustrated with my HRV because I was testing it every morning through my Apple watch and Oura ring, and it was like, 15, 14, 13. I'm like, what the heck? You know, what the heck? I do meditation. I do sauna, I lift weights, I do hit. I like. I was like, okay, come on. Then I got a polar HR H10 and it was like, 50. Go. Okay, so I'd like to break that apart too.

Let's kind of like. So to transition from the connection piece to the metabolism piece, you know, I put blood sugar monitors and HRV monitors on my clients when I first start working with them to help them realize the relationship between stress and metabolism and metabolism and stress. Because metabolic stress can actually be stressful on the physiology, but, like, social stress can be stressful on metabolism. And I use this platform called Heads Up Health that my friend Dave founded, Dave Kurinsky, who's a fantastic biohacking entrepreneur. And you basically can feed all these data streams into one platform and see, you can basically graph everything out. And I love data, and I love information. And I don't. I don't necessarily recommend people become orthorexic with information. Like, it's really important that you don't become obsessed with stuff, because that can actually cause more stress than help. So I'm all about using these as almost like diagnostic tools, and then. And you can use them for interventions. As well to do tests and see what works for you and what it doesn't work for you. But, you know, I've got a friend who's got a company called Hanu Health, and you use a polar heart strap and you download an app and you can actually see in real time. It's like a real time telemetry of your stress. And so you can actually note because, like, the thing about the aura ring and the apple watch is that they're very far from your heart, so they're not actually that perfectly accurate because, you know, you're moving a lot and when you have something that's actually next to your chest, it's going to be the most accurate by far. And I love Hanu because not only is it, you know, it's just basically great to have a real time monitor, you know, it's basically to see, oh, this thing causes me real stress and this thing doesn't. And I, I do have people using the aura and I don't think it's the worst solution, but it's definitely not the perfect solution by any means. And, but I didn't have a client who noticed pretty clearly that her heart rate would go pretty high when her and her husband got in a fight. And I said to her, you know, look like this has real effects on your, on your physiology and your metabolism because let's go look at your, what's going on with your blood sugar when this happens? When you have a really stressful day, your blood sugar levels are higher and you have to see these, these correlates, these, these relationships. And Martin Picard is this researcher who studies social stress, psychosocial stress on mitochondrial function. So mitochondria are the organelles in our cells and that process food, which are turned into substrates when we digest them, processes them into energy. And they also are sensing and integrating the environment to determine am I safe or am I unsafe? And if I'm safe, should I. I'm going to make hormones and I'm going to create, like, healthy, you know, blood sugar levels. If I'm unsafe, I'm actually going to prioritize survival. I'm not going to prioritize hormones. I'm going to make sure that you can get out of danger. I'm going to raise your blood sugar, I'm going to make you a little bit more insulin resistant. And it's all in design as an adaptive response. The problem is it's highly maladaptive if chronic. And this is the problem with most modern American lives, right? They're Eating the wrong, the wrong fuel. They're not moving their body. So they're not. The car's in the garage all day long producing exhaust, which on a cellular level is basically oxidative stress. And then there's a lot of stress going on. And that stress does tax the mitochondria and it changes their function. And so there's a lot of research on caregiving stress in particular, which a lot of women are responsible for and caregiving stress. Basically the way I would describe, there's stress on the outside, right? And there's stress on a cellular, cellular level. And on a cellular level it's called allostatic load. It's like how full can you get a cup before it overflows? Allostatic overload is when your stress cup on a cellular level is so overloaded that you're starting to get the side effects of this, which is your heart rate starts to rise because your body is trying to say, well, I mean, I'm not safe, so I'm going to raise my heart rate. And then it also, that will lower your HRV over time. And so the number one thing that a lot of people are just missing is this awareness that like stress management is not just about self care and recovery. It's about literally looking at the sources of stress in your life and asking yourself, what can I do at the root? You know, what can I do at the source? What conversation do I need to have? What kind of therapy should I be looking at? For me, I mean, I did a fair amount of work on some trauma from college that had just been sitting in my nervous system creating a lot of stress. And I've discovered even more, more amazing things lately like neural therapy. I don't know if you've ever heard of neural therapy, but it's an osteopathic tool in the toolbox. And I've never done this before, but I did this in November and never done it before. And I was kind of nervous about it because they're basically injecting your nerve ganglia all over your body, which are basically the seat of your autonomic nervous system. And they're resetting, they're basically resetting your autonomic nervous system and relaxing your body and basically creating a much more parasympathetic state. I felt like I did a 10 day meditation retreat in like an hour. And I was so chilled out for like the next few weeks. And I've still remained a lot more relaxed. And people have heard about the stellate ganglion block, but what they don't realize that there's all these other ganglia in the body that you can that a really good practitioner. There's probably only 250 good practitioners in the country that do this. And there's this guy Dr. Tudor in Sedona. And I felt like I got a nervous system reboot. I mean, it was the coolest thing I think I've done in a long time. And so there's a lot of stuff that people can do to regulate your nervous system, especially if all of the things that you've tried haven't made a dent in your hrv.

So is that how someone would really know? Because I think one of the challenges. Long that's been going on for years, because I started to look at stress 20 years ago, mainly because I saw two things. Number one, I saw that people who were stressed out had more belly fat, couldn't lose weight, couldn't build muscle, then had thyroid problems, then their sex hormones went off, then their blood sugar with, like, all these things, right? I'm like, hmm. But the challenge was that I had to identify all these things and tell them, look at all the markers, as opposed to, gosh, it would have been simple if there was a test. Is HRV really the one that we would watch for for this?

I mean, it's. It's definitely one in the toolbox. But I do. I still use cortisol testing, especially if someone's going through, like, a really challenging period of time in their life and they're fully burned out. You know, burnout's something that a lot of people have dealt with, and I don't talk about burnout enough in my. And I really could write a whole nother book on burnout.

Well, define burnout. Like, what would you say with burnout? And explain HRV and cortisol testing as well.

So there's a lot of people that are basically not, quote, unquote, depressed, but their work has created so much stress on their physiology that their bodies are adapting by basically. First, there's a lot of high cortisol states for months. And then eventually the body gets this negative feedback and it starts lowering the cortisol until it's this flat. You got a flat line, and there's no morning cortisol response. So when you get out of bed in the morning, you literally can barely drag yourself to work. And coffee no longer works without making you feel terrible, and you're basically just tired all the time, and you just feel like you have no juice left. And it's usually related to chronic work related stress. Usually. I've experienced burnout a few times in this life. And there was a final point where I was like, I got to figure out a solution to this. So this doctor that I worked with in, in my mid-30s, he taught me that you could take a. You know, first of all, there's a few different options. But if you see on your cortisol testing that there is like literally no more morning response. And now there's actually. I mean, if there's actually a home cortisol testing you can get nowadays, which I don't know how accurate it is, but it's. I mean, I tested it when I was testing the home cortisol and I saw it was low. That's what I did. The urine cortisol from precision hormones and it was still really low. And I was like, okay, I've got enough data points to know that my cortisol is low.

Meaning that it would give you an immediate, like an immediate result.

Yeah, there's like, there's new, there's new testing companies that are, they're making it really easy. I wish I knew the name. I can't remember the name. But basically, you know, there's. Dr. Wilson is kind of like the father of quote, unquote, adrenal fatigue. But adrenal fatigue isn't really a real term. It's actually hypothetical hypothalamic pituitary adrenal dysfunction. And it's to me, the way I kind of put this, it's the body's ability to respond to stress by helping to literally almost put you in like an. How do I describe it? There's a way to. It's. It's what's called illness behavior. It's like you stop moving so much, you basically are tired, you sleep more, and your body basically is trying to like conserve as much energy as possible for healing because it can't, it can't make enough on its own because it's just been overworked for so long. This happens to doctors all the time, by the way. They're so.

It's 40 to 60% or something crazy. Like, why isn't that profession making some major changes? Come on.

To be honest with you, I think the system's kind of collapsing upon itself and there's like. And it's just like so many doctors are now waking up to like, whoa, what did we do here? Yeah, I mean, we really need the system to function because there's so many reasons for it to exist, but it just doesn't it's not designed for chronic illness. And that's why these doctors are chronically ill themselves, because they're working in a sickness system. It's a sickness billing industrial complex. It's really great for real, you know, battle battlefield injuries like car accidents and trauma and like, you know, serious heart conditions. Like, yeah, of course you're going to need this in medical industry, but it's not going to work super well for chronic illness. So I, I still use Dr. Wilson's products because for somebody who doesn't want to take prescriptions, Dr. Wilson's Adrenal. It's basically adrenal cortex and it's a adrenal rebuilder. And whether or not you believe in the theory of adrenal fatigue, when I've been burned out, I can literally feel my kidneys. Like, I have felt my back and it's. My kidneys are crying. They're like, stop working so hard. And so large doses of vitamin C and then adrenal rebuilder is fantastic. But if you, if you, if that's not working. This doctor I worked with in Silicon Valley taught me that you take like 5 to 15 milligrams of hydrocortisone, which is a very tiny, tiny dose. When you go to, like a mainstream doctor, they'll give you like 100 to 150 milligrams of hydrocortisone. If you're having a serious illness, they can't figure out this is a microdose of that. So it can be just enough to reboot the cortisol curve. And you basically take it in the morning and it starts giving you some relief from just feeling so sick. And you do that until your body starts remembering, oh, yeah, I need to make my own. And it can take six months or so to heal from burnout, sometimes longer. Um, and these are the people I would not recommend fasting for. I would recommend regular meal times. I would recommend making sure you get enough carbs because they typically, you know, these are the people that like, struggle with blood sugar. So if your blood, if your cortisol is really low, then you're going to see your blood sugar really low. And that's gonna, you're gonna wake up with headaches, you're gonna wake up exhausted. And those morning headaches are really good predictor that you need more hydration, you need more, you know, you need probably a few more carbs in your diet. And you also need, you also need a salt. So, like, that, to me, you know, this is like the, the burnout solution. Now A lot of what my book's been written about has been written about the average person who's dealing with metabolic issues, who's like maybe not, not fully burned out and completely drained, but actually just like not able to lose weight. They're finding themselves kind of stuck and they're metabolically inflexible, which is the vast majority of American Americans. Metabolic inflexibility, it's a huge issue. And, and I discovered in my early 30s that there's actually, I was actually borderline pre diabetic and I was like, oh my gosh, what, how is this possible? And I was eating quite a lot of refined carbohydrates and sugar and you know, I was like, I thought gluten free foods were healthy. I mean this is like, you know, a long time ago, over 10 years ago. And before I just really before I even started my practice and I knew something was wrong. So I put a blood sugar monitor on because I was doing some research for another company I was working for and this company was trying to figure out what could they measure in the interstitial space through like a patch, a microneedle patch. So I'd done all this research and all these different analytes and I go, you know, it's pretty sure the biggest problem people are dealing with today is prediabetes and diabetes. So you might as well just do blood sugar if you can, because that's an industry worth disrupting. Fast forward now. There's like tons of companies in this space. I'm an advisor of one. I helped co found one. I'm not going to talk about that disaster that happened, but suffice to say, I spent about, you know, eight years on blood sugar monitoring and it was a big eye opener for me because I realized that I could even, I could really improve my metabolism by just doing repetitive testing of different foods and seeing what worked for me and what didn't work. Welcome to Walgreens. What can I help you with today?

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So what are some of the big takeaways that you discovered? With using a cgm. And then what would you recommend to someone listening, like, do a. Use it for a month, Use it for three months.

Well, if you can afford it, I would definitely use it for at least three months if you can afford it. They're not cheap. That's the only downside. And these consumer companies, they basically, you know, to make a profit, they have to charge more. But if you ask your doctor nicely, you can get an Abbott Freestyle Libre. And it's, it's not the Abbott free. Saliba 3 is pretty darn effective. The Dexcom is far more accurate of all of them I found, but it's the hardest to prescribe. And so if you, if you want to get a Dexcom, you can go to levels and I can give you a link to cut the line. Levels, link, backslash. Dr. Molly. But if you don't want to spend that kind of money, ask your doctor for an Abbott Freestyle Libre 3. And you can call it into, they can call it into any pharmacy, cvs, Walgreens, and it's just widely available, which is why I like it. And it's the one I've used the longest. But it's more important to recognize, I mean, it's important to recognize that like, these are not perfectly calibrated. I have found that at least 1 in 20 of inaccurate. So I always have a finger stick monitor on the side just to double check if something looks off. I'm like, I don't know if I believe that number. And then I'll go check it and I'll, I'll be like, oh, yeah, that's not quite right now.

If it was off, it'd be all the way. It'd be off the whole way through.

Like the whole way through. And then you can kind of correct for it. You know, you can correct for it and you can. The apps usually allow for some calibration as well. So, you know, these technologies are getting better and smarter and more, more accurate every day, but they're still not perfect.

So.

And if you can't afford a cgm, I use a finger stick monitor for years. And so, you know, I still think finger stick monitors are fantastic, but you got to keep in mind you're getting a snapshot instead of a movie. And so you might miss the spike if you see a spike. And I'm actually really curious what my blood sugar is right now because I've been monitoring it for like the last three months. And my, my boyfriend is a vegetarian and he has a chef and I've been eating Very different than I normally eat. Like, very, very, very different. And I'm like noticing like here's the thing that you should know. There's a really good book by Ellen Vora and she's a psychiatrist in New York and she has been studying the relationship between metabolism and mental illness. And I can guarantee that some of the things that I'm eating are not working for me because you, if you, if you get a spike in a drop, you will start to learn what that feels like. And when you drop your blood sugar low, you can get very anxious. And if you have, if you're just getting anxious out of the blue for no reason with no like stimulus, you really need to look at your blood sugar. And so there's been plenty of times the last few months where I've been like, oh yeah, I think my blood sugar has spiked and dropped and oh like I really got to put a, I got to put a Dexcom on. So I got some sent to me.

It has been, you know, I've got a son with a traumatic brain injury and bipolar disorder. And we know like, we've, we've done everything diet wise because we want him to go psychotic, drop his blood sugar. Like, yeah, it's the fastest way to send him off, off the rails.

You know, it's like, I mean I, okay, so fun fact, I did so post Covid 2022, I was in, I got the most stress of my life. I got Covid and my blood sugar started going haywire, which people don't realize that infections are a really, really big problem that can really screw up your metabolism. And so like talking to my friend Katrine, I'm like, katrine, what am I going to do? She's like, I don't know. You can try Ozempic for a little while. It'll help you get more insulin sensitive. Well, I started taking, you know, I started taking a, it was, it was non prescription version of it, this GLP1 inhibitor. And I had dropped my blood sugar so low so many times that I was having full on panic attacks. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm done with these peptides. Like screw this peptide. Like I am never taking these again. I am nauseous and my blood sugar is so, and I was wearing a blood sugar monitor and I was like, o, this is why I'm feeling so panicked. So a lot of women just are not in touch with what's going on inside their bodies and I, I would love for the whole world to be as intuitive and have as much experience as I have with blood sugar monitoring. So you can develop this understanding of what a spike and a drop feels like. But most people have no idea what's actually going on inside their bodies because they've never seen it, and they've never related and correlated their feelings to their numbers. And I have to have this conversation with my boyfriend all the time because he just doesn't. He's not as much into biohacking as I am. And I'm like, babe, I have 10 years of experience figuring this stuff out. Like, there's a reason why I. I eat a certain way. So it's. It's really a very. Food and nutrition and metabolism is a very personal thing. And you shouldn't. You basically, like, the beauty of these devices is you start realizing that, like, optimizing health is not one size fits all. Like, you have to find the things that work for you, and you have to. Like your son, for example, he figured out probably the foods that caused him to drop his blood sugar, and he knows to avoid those. And I have found that some people do great with bananas and some people do terrible with bananas, and it's not linear for everyone. Like, different body, different metabolism, different microbiomes, different genetics. And so personalized nutrition is something I've really poured a lot of my passion into until very recently when I decided to shift gears into human sexuality, because I thought, wow, that's a frontier I haven't explored yet.

I've now done two podcasts on it, but I was like, how has it taken me this long to have a podcast about sex? Like, yeah, why did it take, like, a decade to start talking about sex? When we're all talking about it, we're just not talking about it here, which is where we all need to be talking. So I know we're going to. We are definitely going to be talking about sexuality because it's such an important topic. I had the gal who created Is it called Meet Rosie or hello Rosie? And then another. Another doc on as well. Who's. But I feel like we're just starting to peel the onion. But let's finish. Let's finish Metabolic Health. Now, it's, of course, totally dialed in with sexuality, too, but for someone looking at all of this and they were going to use a cgm, what are some of the big factors? Because I know one of the coolest things between using, like, an aura ring and a CGM and really seeing. Because I don't eat late at night, but, boy, when I do, man.

Oh, yeah.

Is my Morning, blood sugar destroyed. It's like ridiculous, you know. But the other thing that I loved doing with the CGM is seeing how high I could get it to go at the gym. Oh yeah, that's what I try to explain to people. I go forget this fasted workout and trying to burn fat during a workout. Go work out as hard as you possibly can. It's not, that's not when you're burning your fat. So yeah, let's talk about, you know, what things do impact your blood sugar. What could you do right now, you know, without having a blood CGM that's going to start making a difference?

Well, you know, the one thing that I, I would say is especially for women who are hitting their 40s into their 50s, who are starting to notice their hormones shift, when our estrogen levels start to decline, we become far less insulin sensitive. So even Gwyneth Paltrow admits to shifting her diet from pulses and grains to paleo. When she started getting into her 50s, I believe she just turned 50 or so. And so if, if someone who's as gung ho with her previous diet, like realizes that that may not be working, it's probably happening for other women too. My friend Celia Chen, she was, she came to me, she's got a fantastic substack called in the Pink and she was interviewed in new by the New York Times. And basically because there was, there's this movement around perimenopause and she did not realize that her diet was creating all these problems because she'd eaten the same diet for so long. So she put a blood sugar monitor on and she noticed, oh wow, like I have a little bit higher than normal fasting morning, morning fasting blood sugar. And if I even touch bread, I notice a big blood sugar spike. And yeah, that sugar in that, in that cocktail, that's not working for me either. So the big ones are liquid sugars, powdered sugars, right, like the powdered flour, like flour based foods. These are just problematic for most people. You won't know unless you try them on. But like the, the white carbs, right, These things, they get digested quickly. Especially if you're somebody who has a lot of amylase, who's breaking down these carbs in your mouth. And liquid carbs just get vaporized, they get absorbed and they just will spike you. So you got to be super, super careful with the liquid carbs and very, very careful with food sort of food order. So this is definitely something popularized by the glucose goddess. But you know, eating your green vegetables and Your fibrous foods first, your protein second, and your carbs last. Like, she really kind of like, popularized that in her book. We actually at one point were roommates in San Francisco, both very obsessed with blood sugar monitoring and shared a lot of knowledge with each other. And I love her platform. She's got a beautiful platform. So anyone out there who wants very targeted advice, like, there's a whole section in my book on just like, how do you deconstruct the curve? So you're. There's the. In beginning of the curve is your fasting blood sugar. It's what's going on overnight. So just like you described, if you go to bed and you basically wake up, let's say you go to bed and have a midnight snack, you wake up in the morning, your blood sugar's high, it's because you didn't have a long enough fast and you didn't burn through your glycogen stores to hit into your, Your, your ketones. This is why intermittent fasting for some people can be really helpful for lowering fasting blood sugar. For me, it was very much, like, very helpful. I, I actually still do an occasional fast because I just find it really useful for keeping metabolically flexible. I don't do nearly as much fasting as I used to do, but it played a major. I mean, I actually think fasting, you got to be really careful with it because it can. It's like, it's not just a metabolic practice, but it's a spiritual practice. So very, very important to like, be careful with how much you fast. But there's a whole instructions in my book on how to gradually make fasting a part of your life if it's something that you are drawn to and think it could help. Now, some people try fasting and they're under so much stress that they just get really low blood sugar and they're bonking because they're actually not hitting into ketosis. And this is somebody who, who's probably metabolically inflexible and really should focus on metabolic flexibility first before digging into fasting. So this is somebody I would recommend shifting in and out of low carbon versus higher carb and getting into ketosis and then going back into normal metabolism, training those, the gear shifting a bit. But for most people, you know, you also need to look at just like the quality of the food you're consuming. Like, the vast majority of people are eating way too much processed foods. So I'm just a huge believer in whole foods and as many kinds of produce as possible. I'm definitely not a carnivore. I am a big believer in diversity of produce and polyphenols and anthocyanins and all the plant chemicals that can make you have, make you, make you have a healthier body. Personally, I think gut health is really key to longevity. So I'll never be a carnivore, but I definitely do eat meat on occasion, probably more than. I mean, I used to eat a lot more meat in Austin, but because I'm living in Jackson, I'm eating a lot of vegetables. Right now. I'm not eating as much. But really important is protein is a fantastic way to regulate your blood sugar. It's a great way to keep it stable. And especially if you're trying to lose weight, keeping that as your anchor of your diet can be really helpful. But don't forget about fiber and don't forget about plants, because some plants are going to be high, high glycemic and some are going to be low glycemic. But in general, you need as many different types of plants as possible to maintain your microbiome because that's going to have a huge impact on your general blood sugar levels, on your insulin sensitivity overall. So you've got to look at your overall insulin sensitivity. You got to look at the quality of your diet, you got to look at the kinds of foods that spike you. So, so there's a fasting blood sugar in the morning and there's a postprandial blood sugar after meals. So your general like how high the curve goes is largely dependent on the glucose load that you get and your insulin sensitivity. So, so there's really two camps here of like, how to beat pre diabetes and diabetes. There's the low carb people on one end and they're like all of the people that are like, you just gotta eat low carb and keto and then you'll fix all your problems. And then there's the high carb people on the other end. There's this guy called Mango man nutrition and he actually is a type 1 diabetic who prescribes a high carb diet. It's wild, but they do actually have decent numbers. And if you actually look at Verta health versus Mango man nutrition programs, they actually have pretty similar improvements in hemoglobin A1C. So I'm sort of a believer of metabolic typing still and ayurvedic medicine. There's some truth in all of these, these patterns. Some people are, are tall and skinny and eat carbs all day long. And they're fine and they eat any fat and their blood sugar goes haywire. Some people are big boned and they just look at a carb and they put on ten pounds. So you got to also just take a look at a person and look at like your family and look at your ethnicity and ask yourself, you know, what am I most suited for food wise? And I don't know if you've seen this in the world, but like, it definitely is sometimes an experimental. It can take experimenting to figure out where do you actually like lie in the carb spectrum? What's going to be best for your body.

I think it's so interesting. Like my take on all of it and what I have been having people do is, and this is all the next book is eat protein first, then add in non starchy vegetables. The reason being is that I hear too often from women, not from guys, from women. I can't eat all that. I'm like, so eat it first. Because you'll get the same good blood sugar response. But I know you got it in. I'm not worried about you getting your veggies because women will eat their veggies, but they don't eat enough protein. So I'm like, eat your protein first, eat it first, eat it first, eat it first. But so if we created protein as an absolute and then we look and if you look at and go, okay, this is where the carnivore diet just, it just free. It just. It's so hard for my brain to wrap around. However, it was interesting. I did this reality show called Freaky Eaters. And most of the people that went on Freaky Eaters couldn't give up their cheese or their potatoes. And like literally we had multiple people that we could have had just chronic episodes on French fries. People who would only eat French fries or only cheese or whatever. But we had two guys who would only eat meat, one would only eat raw meat and one would only eat meat. And I'll tell you what I was going through because we had to do a case against them and why they were going to die and blah, blah, blah. But I'm looking at their blood markers and I'm like, they're pristine. They look amazing. They're ripped, they're lean, they're fit. And I'm like, oh boy. I had to go and do let's show parasites because I don't know what else to do here. We'll have to figure something out.

Or a stool study maybe.

That's what we did. We did stool Studies, because I'm like. And, you know, showed them tapeworms, but it just makes so much sense to me to eat, you know, protein plants, you know, lots of non starchy vegetables, a little bit of fruit. You'll get the fat from the protein and then from that point beyond, like, if you look at carbs and fat, they're energy calories. Like, protein's not an energy protein. If we're using protein for energy, it's because something's off, right? So proteins for building and fat and carbs are for energy. How much you need? I'm one of those people, when I did my genetics, it's like, you can do protein, you can. Or you can do fat, you can do carbs. It doesn't really matter. I know for me, if I start in the morning and hit myself with myself with a bunch of carbs, I feel like crap.

So I'm hungry all day if I do that.

But if I eat a little carbs at night, I'd sleep better. So I'm always looking at what works best for someone. We know men, if they eat some carbs a night, they're going to do better with their testosterone, your fitness levels.

And how much you're exercising, you know, Right? Yeah.

Your insulin sense. So that's the big question. You know, when you look at blood sugar and you look at insulin sensitivity, and blood sugar is kind of a late marker for insulin sensitivity, are you, are you having people test, like, I still don't understand how we're not testing fasting insulins, why we would. What the heck? Like, why are we doing blood sugar? Maybe an A1C. But, but, but where's the fasting insulin? That's like this cheap little thing that could tell us so much. I was on Dr. Phil for a couple years and we had this gal, this poor girl, she was like, we were doing this fat loss, this teenage weight loss competition, and this girl's six, four, I think she was like, had some weird growth hormone stuff going on, et cetera. So I'm like, well, did anyone check a fasting insulin? And I remember I got in so much trouble because I'm the nutritionist. I'm like, okay, it was 27, you.

Know, oh my God, right?

No one ever checked this poor girl.

I mean, it's one of the best tools in the toolbox. Hemo, hemoglobin A1C is a garbage test. It's super inaccurate. There's a lot of reasons why it's not accurate and it's not a good predictor. Of prediabetes. It's an okay marker for. For diabetes. And it's been. It's been touted as this, like, magical test that will just diagnose everything. And I had a woman, my practice, who was dealing with depression and skin problems, and her blood sugar monitor looked perfect. And I go, this is weird. I guarantee you've got blood sugar issues because you got acne and you've got, you know, all these other symptoms. And we go, runner fasting, insulin, and it's like 16. And I'm like, well, that's interesting. So what people don't realize is that your body's going to adapt to your glucose load by initially raising your insulin level. And then eventually, over time, if your blood sugar is spiking and if it's tack, if it's actually. That can actually affect your beta cell function. And over time, if you're. If you're constantly pushing out lots and lots and lots of insulin, you only have so much organ reserve in your body, only there's only so much organ reserve. So you don't want to, like, screw up your pancreas. You know, you really want to keep that thing alive, that thing kicking for as long as possible. Which is why I am a believer of, you know, if. If you're young and healthy, fit and fertile young women, and you're, like, super active. Yeah. You might be able to eat more carbs than somebody who's in her mid-40s or early 50s. And women need to accept the fact that our lives are going to be affected by hormonal shifts. And so this is why I'm a big believer in, like, get some measurements once in a while. You don't have to do nearly as often as I do. Unless you're crazy or you just love optimizing health like I do. I personally just love the information.

Well, what measurements are you recommending people do?

I mean, I'm doing a lot for my first panel, but I'm doing a full thyroid panel. Not just like T3, T4, but, like free T3, free T4, TPO, thyroglobal. I always look for globulin antibodies because there's so many thyroid issues with women.

And where are you. Do you want to have someone. Where do you want to see someone in all of that?

I like personally to see it, the thyroid, the tsh, much lower than most doctors. So I'm like, I like it around 2.5. And a lot of people are dealing with subclinical, subclinical hypothyroidism. Where their TSH might be normal, but they're free T3 and free T4 and T3 and T4 out of whack. And if you're not looking at the whole big picture, you might just miss it with tsh. So I'm like just a big believer of like, if you need a little touch of thyroid medicine, get some custom compounded made and just see how you feel. And if you feel, if you feel great, then you know it's working. Some people try it and they're like, nope, I don't want this. And they stop. But it's worth experimenting a little bit with hormones, especially if you're struggling with metabolic issues. I can, I honestly can write a whole book on thyroid stuff and it's, there's just not enough room in my book to write everything I wanted to write about, which I'm glad we're having this conversation today. But I also love to check iron levels, ferritin levels, and so just because there's a lot of women deal with iron issues all the time and they don't realize it. And you might have normal iron levels but low ferritin. And so that's not that, that's not good enough either. So you really do need to optimize your ferritin because it's your storage of your, of your iron. And then I look at testosterone, free testosterone, sex hormone binding, globulin, estrogen, progesterone. Obviously those are, those are very dependent on the time of month tested. And then I'm looking at homocysteine and CRP for oxidative stress and inflammation, CMP for just general organ function, CBC for your immune system health. And then I look at cardiovascular markers like nmr, lipoprotein profile to look at not just your total cholesterol and ldl, but the particle numbers and the LPIR score just to see if there's insulin resistance that way. And then I also look at omegas. I'm a huge believer in pharmaceutical grade omegas. I take 4 grams a day and I really believe it's the best anti aging drug that people don't realize is available.

That was one of the things I did with my son Grant in the hospital. They would only give him 2 grams and I was like, no, no, we have to get to 10. I brought them all the research and they wouldn't do it. But he hacked up his feeding tube. So then I was like, game on, man. Yeah.

I use a company called Norway Direct. It's. You can buy pharmaceutical grade as a consumer product. And it's taken me forever to find the right sourcing. I literally had to learn about the fish oil industry. I even visited Oslo and learned about fish oils firsthand. Figured out, okay, so all of these are made in certain factories. And then you trace the consumer brands from Norway and you find the brands that are made in the same factories as the prescriptions. Because if you get pharmaceutical grade omegas, you are getting a cli. Like an actual pharmaceutical product that can I believe at least I've noticed on my own labs, like in my brain function. Like I just have a better functioning brain and I have better skin and my. I mean I'm just. We. We used to have like one to one EPA, omega three to omega sixes and now it's like one to 20 and that's not healthy. And so I'm a big believer of also checking your Omega 6 levels, seeing if you're too high in linolenic acid, if you're eating too many vegetable oils. I'm a big fan of the company 0 acre farms and I also. They make some of the best cooking oil in the world. And then I also. It's mostly monounsaturated fat. And then I also source olive oil directly from Italy because I'm just such a stickler on oils. Like, you do not want to put crappy oils in your body. Big no. I'm not wild about large quantities of coconut oil, but I still do consume some coconut oil. But I'm apoe4 so I try not to go go crazy with coconut oil. But I just think that like optimal health is not rocket science like you, you just got to get your, your nutrition right and your, your relationships right and every. And exercise properly and sleep okay. And you can, you can figure out a lot of. You can solve a lot of problems that way.

I love what you're saying because one of my takes on biohacking and come on, one of my best friends is one of the big biohackers out there. But I'm always like, like, we've got to major in the majors before we major in the minors. We got to fix your diet first. Because I don't care like if you're going and doing your cold, plunging red light if your diet sucks.

If your diet sucks, you're. You're screwed. And if your relationships suck, I don't care how much you work out in the gym, if your relationships are garbage. I mean, arguably if you work out at a gym, you probably have more friends than the average person because People who go to gyms have friends because gym people are friendly, because they have endorphins running through them.

I know they're all in it together. Yeah. You don't see people fight at the gym.

Austin has a gym called Collective, which I actually, since I'm not living in Austin, I should probably cancel my membership. But they are an amazing gym and it's a community as well. And so I really tell people if they're struggling to make friends, like, go to a gym because people. People are nice. Honestly, I've never been to a gym where I didn't immediately have some friendly interaction.

Yeah. So you said diet, relationships, sleep, exercise.

And then the last one is sexuality.

And sexuality. But we have to touch exercise for a moment. Like, that's my. My world as an exercise physiologist. But I'd love, love to kind of get your take on exercise. What you focus on, what you see as important as we're 40, 50, 60 on. Yeah.

Well, when I lived in Austin, which was only until very recently, I was pretty much a regular gym goer. And I loved weightlifting, and I had a great trainer. And I'd never had a trainer before until I just decided maybe I would get better results with a trainer. And I did imagine that. You knew, But I've always been. I've always been like, well, actually, so my 20s were highly sedentary, and I actually screwed up my health pretty dramatically in my 20s because I was so focused on education and I was so unfocused on. Funnily enough, I was becoming a doctor, but I wasn't focused on health. Health.

Wouldn't it be amazing if they actually had doctors? As you're going through it, having to do the things that you should do to be healthy. Could you imagine if there was a medical school that would be that innovative?

You know, in fact, when I was in medical school, I. I was really struggling, and I was basically like, I don't know if I can make it. So I went to a psychologist, and he's like, you're not crazy. You're not depressed. You're anxious. You're just a stressed out medical student who's not taking care of herself. He's like, you got to do better at taking care of yourself. So I stopped skipping meals. I stopped eating cereal for meals. I stopped doing all nighters. I started doing yoga, started meditating. I started spending more time with my family and friends. I basically did a whole overhaul of my lifestyle. And magically, my grades started skyrocketing. My. I started getting Outstandings. I was getting very average grades, and I. I, like, started getting, like, higher and higher test scores. And that's when I was like, whoa, light bulb. Something's up here. This isn't just fixing my, like, mood. This is making me better at everything. And then I got a 99 percentile at my board exam, and I was like. And I had an average on my step one. And so my whole school was like, nobody jumps that high. Molly, what did you do? And I'm like, I didn't cheat. I promise I didn't cheat. I was just changed my lifestyle. And they're like, wait, wait, wait. You got to teach us. What are your secrets? So I created a course in medical school that was actually added to the curriculum. And I recruited all these doctors that knew about sleep, that knew about relationships, that knew about burnout, that knew about.

Oh, my gosh, is this still being used? I hope.

I don't know. I have to actually call the University of Illinois. But I brought in integrative doctors, functional doctors, nutritionists. I mean, I was like, this is not part of our education, and this has changed my life. And it's just. It was really. I actually won a few humanitarian awards for this course.

It should be in every medical school.

Every.

It should be a curriculum for every student, because not only would it make them better at being students, happier students, but they would carry that into their practices. And the fact that most of what we learn is pharmaceuticals and surgery is a travesty. And there's a reason why, Doc. I mean, most cardiologists I meet are overweight or obese and. Or, like, if they're healthy, there's. Because they know. Like, my. One of my mentors, Ron Rabjohns, is this cardiologist in Illinois. Family friend. And he's always cared about his diet and meditation, but they're rare. Most doctors are not as healthy as they should be because the job doesn't allow for the space for people to take care of themselves. But I have found that if you invest in your health and you build your energy capacity, you discover hidden capacities. You discover, like, you can do things you didn't know you could do. Like, I had never would have thought that I would have taught at Stanford. I didn't get into Stanford. I didn't, like, as an undergrad or a medical student. And then I ended up teaching at Stanford in the medical school. And I was like, what? And I guarantee that that's. That was a product of building my health over a decade. That was not just Because I got smarter. Like, I actually got smarter and fitter. But going back to your question around fitness, I was super unhealthy in my 20s, a super sedentary. I actually think that created ADHD, because I did not have ADHD as a young person. But my brain stopped working, and so I started taking Adderall, and then I eventually weaned off of it, thank God. But it was, like, a really big problem for me to focus. And I really credit the sedentary behavior for decreasing my energy capacity and screwing up my brain function and really causing me real problems to the point where when I eventually decided to leave mainstream medicine and start my own medical practice, I was pretty chronically fatigued. And I actually could not work easily outside of just laying in bed on my computer. Fortunately, I found a job that enabled me to work online, but it was not a healthy time in my life. And I decided that at that time, I was like, I am. So I need to go back to my roots. I need to go back to what I know is true, which is I need to build a practice around optimizing health, and I need to figure out what health is on a scientific level, and I need to build my career on this. And I know it'll pay off someday, but it's. It was a huge risk. And I probably would have been emotionally, but I was way, way, way better off leaving that system. But it did take me about a decade to slowly get my body into better physical shape. So I first started with. With Feldenkrais because that's all I could do at YMCA across the street and sauna. That was literally all the exercise I could do is raise my heart rate with sauna and do Feldenkrais on the floor. And then I started walking to work instead of driving to work. And then I started using beach body on demand and weightlifting and using. No. At first I used a kettlebell and an app from this British dude and started using kettlebells. And then I bought power blocks and started doing beachbody. And then before I knew it, I was dating this guy, and he was like, you got to learn how to use a gym machine. Machines. So he taught me how to use a gym. Gym machines. And then I started running again because I'd been a runner before, and I just started enjoying running to farmers markets. So I was weight training, I was running. And then I started doing Ashtanga yoga. And all of these things started building upon themselves to the point where I was actually pretty fit. But it took me a good. A good amount of time to get back into shape. And it. And that's what I try to teach people is like, it's. If you want to go faster, get a trainer. But I didn't have the money at the time I was in. I was just out of medical school. I was like, you know, just out of my. Finishing my internship in my residency, and I didn't have a lot of cash. And so sometimes you just have to make do with what you got. And if you can afford a trainer, even better. But.

But look at how many options there are now out there. Like, this is not like it was 20 years ago. Right.

You can get in great shape with an app. I mean, Kayla, it signs. I used her app for a while, and that app is fantastic. And now my personal interest is like, how do I get in shape using nature? How do I go outside and hike? How do I learn? Like, there's so much outdoor stuff.

That's a whole nother piece of this. Yeah, that. I mean, it's. It's fantastic living in Tampa because I literally live on half an acre on the water. I walk outside, you know, into the grass. I have a TRX in the grass. I got paddle boards. So, you know, how do we do more of that? That is mission critical. Getting sunlight and getting in the dirt. It's interesting. My son with the brain injury, one of the first things he started doing, he's done so many intuitive things coming out of it, like, he wanted to get in the dirt. He started gardening and growing, and I'm like, what do you do? Like. Like, just knew he needed to do that for you.

So, I mean, one of my siblings was really struggling with depression after the pandemic, and I said, get into nature. It will help you. And she started going into nature, hiking and. And, like, canoeing. And she's like, molly, like, nature healed me. And, I mean, it just brought me to tears because people don't realize that nature is the best medicine, but most people just don't prioritize it. They don't want to. They don't go find it. Maybe they don't have access to it. But there's usually a park. In most cities, green space is better than note than nothing.

Right?

And, you know, vacations are a great, great way to sort of use nature to explore what you want to learn how to do. You know, make your vacations around fitness.

You talked about how you started putting all those lifestyle habits in place, and you got a 99 percentile on your board, board exams, and, you know, and arguably you're probably studying less, right? And I look at this and go, like, I started going to Dr. Joe Dispenza retreats a couple years ago, and after the first one, when I realized how much I sucked at it, and I thought, okay, I've got to come back and I'll. I'm going to commit to this. I'm like, how am I going to add this into my life? And the craziest was part, was because, you know, it's like, I'm exercising, sleeping. I add this in, I'm more productive. I'm. I'm getting so much more done in so much less time, right? And I think that's an important takeaway if you're listening, going, but I'm so busy. It's like, you might be busy, but not effective. You do these things. You're efficient.

You know, it's kind of like your body has this capacity to. To. Like, your body has a capacity to really run optimally. And it's not when you're eating lots of garbage food and having blood sugar spikes constantly and. And like, literally damaging the engines of the cells. It's not. The electricity is not going to flow smoothly. But when you can get energy to flow smoothly through the body consistently, then I. I mean, I think that we are all just deeply magical beings. Like, I think healing is. Is just as much a mental process as a field process, right? So I always tell all my clients, like, like, you know, when you are. When you're. When we're doing all these things to fix your health, do not forget about the affirmations. Do not forget about directing that energy properly and that medit. Those med. Meditation is like, such an important part of my life. Like, I am becoming, like, very, very much into the Saguru path because I love his work. He's super conscious being in this world. I love Dispenza's work. I love just people realizing that you can harness the superpower and that you're. Everything's gonna. I mean, everything's gonna be easier if you optimize your health. Everything's gonna be easier if you focus on the things that really work, which is sleep, movement, stress management, relationships, and your food.

You know, first with that decision, which is really mindset. Like, I love that study mindset, right? I mean, people who are excited about aging live seven and a half years longer. What I didn't realize when I sat down, I, you know, I become buddies with Dr. Joe, and I was sitting at dinner and I didn't realize all the things that I did to help Grant survive. The unsurvivable were immediately from the first time, like telling Grant, you're gonna. This is gonna be the best thing that happened to you. You're gonna be 110%, you know, prove all the doctors wrong. Like we. That's all we knew did. We didn't think we would not let any thought entertain come into our brain. Like it was like, nope, that's not coming in nothing that where he couldn't possibly. Amazing. And I think it's the same with our health. You first have to have such a clear vision of you as this healed, healthy, amazing. Like you said, magical being. Right. And you know, because everything's created twice, right. So it has to. You have to see in your mind's eye first.

Yes, totally.

Yes, yes. So meditation is. Is that opportunity to be your future self and then draw it to you. As Dr. Jo would say, totally. Alrighty. So we are going to dig into Dr. Molly Maloof's real legacy work, her big project, and that is her new company, Adama Biosciences, and everything around how to create sexual fitness, how to optimize sexual health. And again, this is that company that she is building so that that she can demonstrate that love is embodied medicine that enhances longevity and awakens a healthier, happier and more resilient world where intimacy is the undisputed force for human flourishing. I just love that so much. So be sure to come back and listen to the next interview that I'm doing with Molly Maloof all around sexual health, sexual fitness, and how to take your sexual life, your sex life to the next level. Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.