Episode #180: Unexpected with Dr. Jill Carnahan, MD, ABIHM, ABOIM, IFMCP

Welcome to Better Health Guy Blogcasts Empowering your better health and now, here's Scott, your Better Health Guy. The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health related decisions with your own personal medical authority.

Hello everyone and welcome to episode number.

180 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Dr. Jill Carnahan and the topic of the show is unexpected. Known as your functional medicine expert, Dr. Jill Carnahan has been featured in People Magazine, Shape Parade, Forbes, Mind Body, Green, first for Women, Time, Townsend Letter and the Huffington Post as well as seen on NBC News and Health segments with Joan London. She is a prominent global keynote speaker and a prolific writer, sharing her knowledge on stage and in podcasts. With over a decade of producing popular content, her articles can be found in journals, newsletters, books and on social media. She is the Medical Director of Flatiron Functional Medicine, a widely sought after practice with a broad range of clinical services including functional medicine protocols, nutritional consultations, chiropractic therapy, naturopathic medicine, acupuncture and massage therapy. As a survivor of breast cancer, Crohn's disease and mold toxicity, she routinely treats patients who have come to her for solutions to their medical mysteries that haven't been solved. Her YouTube channel and podcast features interviews with the world's most respected names in medicine, science and functional medicine. She co authored the personalized and precision Integrative Cardiovascular Medicine textbook and just released her prescriptive memoir Finding Resilience through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith Through Forefront Publishing. People relate to Dr. Jill's science backed opinions delivered with authenticity, love and humor. She is known for inspiring her audience to thrive even in the midst of difficulties. And now my interview with Dr. Jill Carnahan.

This is Dr. Jill's second time on the podcast. In our first show we talked about Mast cell activation syndrome way back in episode 20. It's an honor to have her back today, 160 episodes later. Thanks for being here Dr. Jill.

Thanks for all the work you do Scott. I am delighted to be here with you.

What aspects of living on and growing up on a farm may have set the stage for the development of your own chronic illnesses, cancer and Crohn's and later mold illness? And how did those conditions as you were growing up drive you to the passion that you have today for working with really Complex cases. How did those challenges impart you with fortitude and resilience?

Yeah, it's interesting. 25 get cancer. And then I look back and say, okay, what led to this? It's asking that question, why? Which all good functional detectives do. So I looked back and realized that there was a big piece of the puzzle that was I grew up on this very wonderful farm, wonderful family. I was one of five children. And a couple of different things. First of all, obviously, back in the 70s and 80s, corn and soybeans were the main crops in Illinois where I grew up. And it was highly, you know, used pesticides, chemicals, glyphosate, all the kinds of things. In fact, that was before glyphosate, so it was before Roundup Ready soy and those kinds of crops. But still they were heavily sprayed. That was just the norm. And as I' talked to my dad several times since trying to investigate, we actually found his record handwritten the year I was born. And the list of chemicals there is astounding because some of these are actually now banned. All of them are known to be carcinogenic or toxic in some way. And sadly, many of them are still used in the US like atrazine. There was a form of atrazine on that list. Atrazine, as you know from Tyron Hayes's work, is a known endocrine disruptor. It was the subject of Silent Spring, where they found all the frogs that had gotten the runoff from that started, you know, not having normal genitalia and were having transition in sexual reproductive organs because of this exposure. And when I realized that link to atrazine, it was literally years after my breast cancer. I remember looking up on a map of the US and the use of atrazine in the US and the brightness of the red in the area exactly where I grew up was like the most dense area in the whole United States. And I was like, oh, my goodness, this is a big piece of the puzz. And then, of course, we had well water, which, you know, it seemed like a wonderful, good, clean source, but I'm sure it had runoff from chemicals. And then you throw in my genetics. I was born with probably impaired detox, glutathione, all these snips. And so it was a perfect storm. Now, I don't think that the chemicals caused my cancer, but I think they contributed. And that's the important thing, is this environmental toxic load is the elephant in the room. I sure will dive into that. But growing up, that environmental toxic load, unbeknownst to me, was playing on my cells. The other thing that's important to understand is when you have cancer at 20, survive, those cells started to go rogue 10, 15, 20 years prior. So I actually think that, number one, I probably had in utero exposure from my mother's toxic load. And we know from the 20 years ago studies of cord blood of infants showed 200 chemicals as the baby is born. And this is 2001, literally, you know, over 20 years ago. So now it can only be worse. That was in Canada. So this toxic load from my mother in utero. And looking back, my mother had some migraines and health issues and probably chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, undiagnosed, but she definitely had those kinds of symptoms. And then later on, she had developed Hashimoto's. I developed Hashimoto's, and several years after my own breast cancer, my sister developed thyroid cancer. So you have two girls in a family. There's no doubt the environment had a plate on this, right?

Yeah. And obviously that experience growing up obviously now has given you a lot of your passion and your fortitude and. And obviously your resilience that you talk about in the book. You also say in the book that incurable doesn't mean healing is not possible. It simply means there's not a drug that reverses the condition. And I totally resonate with that. I think so many people are essentially told to give up or to live with their condition for the rest of their life that there is no hope. What can you say, based on your experience to our listeners, to provide them with hope?

I love this guy. And it's what I put. So it felt like it was so important to put it right in the front of the book. Because what happens is our medical system is based on drugs and surgery. I was trained in it. There's a place for good allopathic medicine when you have a heart accident or a heart attack or a stroke, we need these acute interventions and the drugs that, you know, prevent the worsening of a stroke or the stent that prevents the worsening of a heart attack. These are really critical things that are successful. However, when it comes to chronic complex illness, especially the rise in autoimmunity, which is only getting worse, we're at the tsunami mummy's edge of autoimmune epidemic. Post Covid, as you and I both know all this to say these things. Chronic and complex illnesses are not well treated by a drug. It's not one diagnosis, one drug. It doesn't work. It doesn't reverse the disease. It may at Very best, slightly control symptoms. So for my example was after the breast cancer, about six months after I completed complete chemotherapy and all the drugs and surgery that I had to cure the cancer, I developed Crohn's disease. And I'm sure your listeners know, but Crohn's is an autoimmune disease where the body attacks the gut lining. I had an nod to gene which made me high risk. And then you throw a chemotherapeutic agent that creates more permeable gut endotoxemia, which I know we're going to talk about. And this dumping of the microbes into the bloodstream for me was a trigger. It was like an on switch to cause my body to attack my own gut lining. Now, I was told when I was diagnosed, number one, Crohn's is incurable. Number two, you're going to need lifelong drugs, steroids, probably surgery to remove part of your colon. And this is going to be a lifelong diagnosis. Number three, and I know you've heard me say this before, Scott, the doctor told me point blank, jill, diet has nothing to do with this. And I was like, this can't be true. It's the gut, right? And I didn't know much, but I went on a journey and started to really dive into it. And I did find, I found the specific carbohydrate diet, which is one of the big ones. Elaine Gottschall wrote about it years ago when her daughter was sick with ulcerative colitis. And she found this diet really helped and all that to say I was like, what do I have to lose? And Scott, I started that diet within two weeks. All of my inflammatory, my fevers, some of my symptoms, they were gone. Now, I was not cured in two weeks. It took years to change the microbiome. But I today consider myself completely cured from Crohn's without drugs, without surgery. And it took dealing with the microbiome at that level. So now I like to talk about reversible autoimmunity. What if these autoimmune diseases we're told are incurable, are actually reversible? And you know, some of the biggest drugs out there, Humira just went for another patent because they're running out, because there's such a big billion dollar blockbuster that's one of the drugs used to treat Crohn's. So some of these autoimmune drugs, they're immune modulators in the highest sense of the word, but not always beneficial because they also weaken the immune system and they are huge Blockbusters. Not that there's anything wrong. I see a lot of patients who come with Crohn's or colitis. They're on an immune modulating drug. I don't take them off of it. But what I do is go to the root cause, and sometimes we can get enough change that they can come off the drug and be completely in remission or eventually even cured.

Reminds me when I was moderating a conference in Amsterdam years ago, and on the panel was Joe Burrascano and Dietrich Klinghardt and Ann Corson, and someone asked the question, does autoimmunity exist in absence of infection? And they kind of looked around and I think Dietrich Klinghardt took the microphone and he said, no. Right. So the idea that it's not just a mistake that the body is making, necessarily, that the body is doing what it is can do at that time in our best interest to protect us from something most of the time. Would you agree with that?

100%. I would go one step further, too, to say in functional medicine, the root, especially autoimmune, is almost always toxic load plus infectious burden. Those two things are always at play in these kind of complex, especially autoimmune disease.

In the book, you also share the quote. Being brave is not about the absence of fear, but allowing yourself to feel the fear and choosing to do it anyway. And this brings us to your own first experience with rock climbing that became a metaphor for the challenges of everyday life. And how might our own experiences with chronic illness be like climbing a mountain?

Oh, Scott brilliantly said, and thank you for, for sharing that, because what I realized, the story of the rock climb was I had a writing coach I worked with real closely in writing the book. He kind of helped keep me accountable and, like, deadlines and stuff. Wonderful, wonderful man. He happened to be a professional rock climber. So in one of the interviews where he's asking about my history, so help me frame the story, he said, hey, Joe, you want to go rock climbing? And I am an adventurous person. I have a high dopamine. I love dopamine. And so, like, sure, it sounds fun. And then I'm like, what did I get myself into? And literally, Scott, I had never even set foot in a rock climbing gym. Like, I never had, like, zero experience. And all I knew is I needed shoes. I went in and got the shoes. And so like, okay, show up at the foot of the mountain. He takes me up, he gives me the helmet, gives me the harnesses, everything. But we're just first, like 45 minutes of a hike to get to the base. And I get to the base, and I look up where the third Flatiron. And in Boulder. If you don't know Boulder, this is like over a thousand. It's like the Empire State Building. It's crazy. I mean, this is not a small climb. And only at the very end, when I finished, Topher's like, jill, I have never, ever in my life taken someone who's never had any experience here, and I never would. But there was something in you. And this is where the resilience comes in, because there is something that I was born with and that you can have as well as a listener, if you. It's like the same thing that Viktor Frankl writes about. He's in the concentration camp, and the most horrific, horrific. I can't even compare none of my experiences compared to what he went through. But what he did is he said, no man can take away what's in my mind. My willpower, my desire to live, my desire to overcome. And if you're listening and you're suffering with some illness or you're a doc and, you know, some of us as docs, it's even worse because we think we should have all the answers. We think we should know. Even for myself, there's been times we're like, what else can I do? And so we feel ashamed that we don't have all the answers for ourselves or those that we love. And many of us, that's what drove us into functional medicine, because we came against some place where we couldn't find the root cause of the answer. We wanted to go deeper. But all that to say that rock climb was terrifying. And what I realized is I had no idea how profound it would be in my journey, in my book, and even writing about it. But what happened, Scott, is if we think about the past and have regrets or have those things come up, we can't do anything about it, right? But a lot of us dwell on, oh, my gosh, this divorce or this relationship or this situation or this thing or this move. There's things in our life we may have regret over, but if we dwell and. And focus on that, there's no amount of thinking positively that can change the past. And then if we go in the future, and this is my thing, I can tend to forget the past, but I can go in the future and worry, what about this? What if this happens? What if there's a big recession? What if all these things, and we can go in the future and we can worry and fear and we can set ourselves all off a kilter, set up our sympathetic system for overdrive and stress and worry, and those things completely affect our immune system. But if we are present in this moment, like, here I am with you, Scott, and I'm completely present, and I'm so happy to be here, and I'm just honored to be your guest, and I get to tell people about what's happened in my life. But today, at this moment, I'm here and on that mountain. That was what I learned, because I'm going up that mountain with no experience, trusting my guide and trusting that I can figure it out on the way up and that I'll have enough strength to get out. It took me three and a half hours. This was a big climb. And then if I looked back, I would be terrified because I see this, like, thousands of feet down. The trees are, like, this small, and I'm like. And I didn't look back. I told myself, if I look back, I'm going to lose the courage, this little bit of the thing that I'm trying to overcome. And then, same thing. If I look up and I'm like, there's no way I can do that. So I had to stay present. And the other thing was, I was on rock. Rock's pretty solid, even if it's sideways. And I had to keep reminding myself, like, wait, I'm on rock. It's as solid as it gets. And I had to trust in my ability to figure it out in real time and all of those things. Not staying in the past, not looking in the future, staying present, trusting our bodies and our minds to figure it out in real time. Those are the principles that literally help us build resilience and survive anything that comes our way. And then when you get to the top, first of all, the very last bit, my body, like, had adrenaline. I think I had. My cortisol probably went down. I was literally shaking. I'm like, I don't know if I can get up that last little bit. I was so trembling and shaking. I think my blood sugar was low. I think I was. The adrenaline was wearing off. But as I got that last bit of rock and pulled myself over the edge, I literally wept tears because I was like, I can't believe I did this. I can't believe I overcame this. This mountain and did something that I have no experience. I can't believe it. But you know what? Then after that, I had things that were hard, and I still have things that are hard. And I'm like, wait, I remember we can remember those things. In some literature it's called ebenezers. They used to put these rock formations out and make an ebenezer to remember the things they had overcome. And for me, that climb was an Ebenezer to remind me that no matter what comes, I will have, I won't have it ahead of time, but in the moment I'll have everything that I need and that trust that I will have what I need in the next moment. And the next moment in the next moment is literally my definition of resilience. Wow.

Wow, that's beautiful. And I think just in the past few years with the pandemic, for me, my primary strategy for coping with everything going on in the world is to be present, not to think so much about what's to come. I can't control all of the future, so I think that's a tremendous strategy being present. Our friend Dr. Neil Nathan, he wrote the book Energetic Diagnosis that talks about the use of intuition as a valuable tool in medicine. Most conventional doctors probably don't tap into that all that commonly. What role does intuition play in your work with your patients? How does it guide you and how do you access your intuition?

I love this. You know, this goes way back to the farm because I did not know it, but I was born this very intuitive, creative, highly sensitive little girl. And I was born into a family of stoic, hard working German farmers, engineers, analytical. And I have the analytical piece too, thank goodness. I got a little bit piece of that in my mind as well. But I thought it's almost like you take a, you know, a wolf cub and put them in a family of bears or something. I had a wonderful family, but I did not feel like I fit in. And so I kind of suppressed this little nature of my little creative, hippie, rebel child girl that I was and became the stoic, you know, achievement oriented, masculinized in the sense of achievement driven, productivity, all that. Again, we both, we all have masculine feminine traits. And I took on a lot of very engineer, analytical masculine types of traits to succeed in undergrad and then in med school and to really survive. And in the world of medicine. It's incredibly masculine. And if I would tell you some of the kinds of behaviors and abuses really that happen in med school, it's horrendous. It's like a, the worst kind of fraternity hazing you can imagine. And so in order to get through, you have to suppress that sensitivity, that intuition. And there's such a premium placed on the science, which I love the science. It's equal to intuition. But because of that, you lose your ability to be in touch with that piece of yourself that has the inner knowing or the gut instinct because you are told that that has no value. And so what happened is through medicine and my training, I became, and again, I, when I first started speaking, I always joke I wore like black pantsuits. That's the farthest thing for me in the world. But I was trying to fit in in this masculine society to say that I'm, I'm enough as a woman, I can still, I can, you know, keep up with all of you. And, and so that training really kind of beat out that ability to trust the intuition. And I started to doubt and saying, okay, this is valuable, the science is valuable, but my intuition has no value. And again, I think many people coming out of medical training, especially the conventional system, can relate to this. I talked to Sarah Gottfried and other women like myself that we all say it was very similar. To survive, we'd become incredibly analytical, science based, masculine. There's a piece that's important there. But what happens then is you start to feel and notice that your pattern recognition system, which is really one of our best assets, is noticing and seeing things. And what I realized is the analytical mind is like an old analog computer. It can calculate things really fast and do a lot with labs and data points and things. But when we shift over to this intuitive sense, it's literally our subconscious. When the moment that patient walks in the room, the look on their face, the energetic feel of our connection, the listening to them, I see their eyes, you know, look off to the side or they might have a tear rolled on their face. There's all of these things that my subconscious is taking in and noticing. And that again, I didn't value at the beginning of my medical career. Now I value equal to the science. But all that data subconsciously is giving me information about that patient's trajectory, diagnosis, their past, what questions to ask next. And that is actually taking in millions of pieces of data in a, a fraction of a second in our subconscious and actually giving me, in my brain, good information to rely on. And what happens is when you first start in practice, you may not have a huge database built up of experiences, but over time, now I'm 20 plus years in the practice, I have loads of experiences in my subconscious, can process through those almost instantaneously and say, oh, I see this pattern, I see this pattern and I have this sense that, oh, I think there's mold related illness here. And I'll ask Some questions. And what I do now is actually trust that I've allowed that to come up and be truth, just like science and following that and then proving it with science. But I feel like the, the best physicians, especially in this realm of super complex chronic illness, just like Neil Nathan, we have to tap into that database because it's so much more powerful at getting to answers. And we can still use the science, but we almost have to relearn that. And when I say feminine, masculine again, we all have both as parts in general. The masculine is more analytical, the feminine is more intuitive and heart based. And you need both, you need both equally in order to be a great clinician.

Conventional medicine does not often have many options for these complex chronic illnesses like Lyme disease, like mold illness. I personally was much more drawn to functional and integrative and alternative medicine. Wondering if you can help our listeners to differentiate between functional integrative and alternative medicine. How are they different or are they the same?

Yeah, so we have allopathic medicine. If you haven't that term, that's a traditional md, then we have osteopathic medicine, which is right alongside and pretty equal in the training. And those DOs and MDs both can get surgical residencies and train in the US system. The AMA regulates that. That's our conventional system, the only asset there is right now. Our conventional system reimburses better for those do's MDs other than that, and it is expanding. There is very similar training to say naturopathic medicine, although they do not have as in hospital medicine training, inpatient. In the hospital system, they're more outpatient. And they're also not trained with drugs, so they don't prescribe drugs. But in all of their aspects they look at root cause similarly. And then we have other types of professions like chiropractic and massage therapy and physical therapy. And I could name many, many, many more. But these are kind of all that health related professions. And in the beginning, 20 years ago, when I was in allopathic medical school, those things that weren't allopathic medicine, so process of elimination. All of those other fields were considered alternative. And I hated that term because it's like alternative to what? Like, why are they like the sideshow? And I hated that. And literally in med school, I was the first one at Loyola to create a medical school interest group where we brought in other practitioners and learned from them as medical students so that we knew it was out there. And then there was integrative and integrative, like Dr. Andrew Weil made this very famous with his fellowship in Arizona. And what we did with integrative was we had this realm of we practicing medicine, maybe a few herbs and things, but integrative, we're pulling in these other people, people that like we refer to the massage therapist, we refer to the physical therapist, we refer to the naturopath. And so we have a referral network, but we're still practicing pretty pretty much the same medicine. But we're starting to integrate concepts like maybe diet is important and maybe food and maybe some of the lifestyle things. So we're being more holistic minded, but we're still kind of this hub where we're the referral source, but we're not actually doing the work of naturopathy or homeopathy or any of these things. And then what I've loved with functional medicine and many of us in the field, I'm sure anyone you've ever talked to who practices functional, functional medicine has the same story. When you hear I remember knowing what I wanted to do from a child and actually going into allopathic medicine feeling like I'm going to infiltrate the system, learn the system really well. But in my heart I knew I wanted to be a more holistic healer. I knew that food had powers medicine. I knew that there were other things out there. So I kind of came in with this ulterior plan and motive and then brought the practitioners into the medical school and started to, you know, do that. I did a rotation with a traditional Chinese acupuncturist who is also an md So I started bring rotations into the school, but then then functional medicine and again relating to your other doctors. When I heard what that was and first heard Jeffrey Bland describe it, it was this massive aha. Because it's like that's what I've been looking for. That's what I want to do. And the difference in that is this the doctor like myself in the office is actually doing the workup, doing the practice and looking at root cause. And the difference between just integrated medicine is you're actually going to the biochemical pathways you learned in second year and all of the metabolic pathways we learned all of that stuff. But what we did is we learned it forgot about and just had ICD10 code. Here's your diagnosis, here's a drug. And we learned the matchup between drug and code, that's allopathic medicine in a nutshell. What we do now in functional medicine is take all that undergraduate biochemistry, physiology, metabolic pathways and genetics, and we actually use that in clinical practice.

What did you learn about the ecosystem of being on the farm, the microbiome of the farm, the terrain of the farm. How did those lessons and observations carry over into the ecosystem and the microbiome and the terrain of your own health and the work that you do today with your patients?

Yeah. You know, I used to say, Scott, that autoimmunity begins in the gut. I'm sure you've heard other practitioners. That's not new to me. But I go a step further now and say autoimmunity actually begins in our soils. And my brother, my older brother runs the farm. And it's quite a farm operation now because of my cancer. And some of the shifts then them understanding what the chemicals and pesticides and things were doing, not only to their soils and causing decrease in diversity in soil microbiome, but the health effects, like on my sister and myself. They literally now are completely GMO free, which was unheard of just a decade ago in central Illinois. And partially organic, which again is a big deal on these big, huge farms with acres and acres. It's hard to do organic because you need the manpower to weed. So all that has shifted. But what I love talking to my brother Jeff about is how closely the microbiome of the soil and the microbiome of our body are related and how, as we see 10 years ahead, the changes in the soil, the application of pesticides, things like Roundup, which actually chelate minerals and cause depletion of minerals in the soil. That's one of the ways they work. They cause depletion of minerals in our microbiome, preferentially allowing things like Lactobacillus to be killed and Clostridia, which is, can be a bad thing to proliferate. And so we see this parallelism of decades of the soil being abused and being applied with application of Roundup and glyphosate and organophosphates and pesticides and herbicides and the changes, and then our microbiome. And again, it's relative because our microbiome diversity is one of the foundations of our health. There's more DNA material in our gut, in our microbiome than it is in our whole entire human body. So this changes in the soil, changes in the food because of the changes in the soil, the decreased diversity. For example, an apple today has about a fifth of the magnesium as it did 50 to 100 years ago. So even if we're eating organic produce from our local farms, we are not getting the minerals that we need in those crops. So the soil is so key. So growing up on the farm, I really understood this. This connection. And I start even now. I'm not a big environmental activist, but I feel like I need to be because it's so important to protect our resources and to protect our soils. And actually, if I want to help a person's health in the clinic, helping on the farm and what we're growing and what we're eating from that soil is actually maybe the most important thing I could do.

That's also some overlap there with Zach Bush's work. Right. And he talks a lot about the importance of the soil as well. Unlike most others in your family, you had that hypervigilant, hypersensitive immune response with very limited tolerance for your external environment.

Wondering if you look back now and.

Think that that might have been mast cell activation syndrome.

Yes, 100%. Again, we didn't have that term back then, but I basically was a histamine factory. And so I Absolutely. And even. Especially after the mold in later years, one of my biggest things was hives and congestion and allergic reaction. And I had horrendously bad. Had again, you could have called it back then, we called it atopic diseases, which is like your eczema, your allergies, your asthma. I didn't have asthma, but I had severe, severe allergies and severe eczema. Literally, my skin would almost be bloody and raw from itching and scratching, you know, so now, unbeknownst to me, I was also silent celiac. And I think the gluten in my diet probably made all of this way, way worse. And I didn't know it until I was in my 20s.

I have commonly used the analogy of the bucket or the overflowing sink, where once the bucket or sink is overflowing, that's essential, the development of symptoms. You use the term. And I borrowed this from you. Occasionally you use the term margin to essentially empty the bucket enough to provide some margin for additional stressors before we then are overflowing again and having more symptoms. So talk to us about the top contributors that you see that fill our bucket and then also the top tools that might help drain or empty the bucket or create margin.

Margin, yes. So true. And I like the idea of margin because if you're a practitioner like me and you think of toxic loading, you really start to comprehend how toxic our environment is, how much we're all exposed to, and how it's exponentially increasing every year. And I had a bad 20 years ago with cancer. It's so much worse now. And I remember when I understood the breast cancer was related to environmental toxicity. I started to clean up. This is 20 years ago. My beauty products and my cleaning products and my hair and makeup. And I realized, realized how many things I was using were toxic. It was overwhelming. And that was 20 years ago. So it's only gotten worse. And especially for young girls or young children, their body surface is so much that, I mean, it's so much more of a big deal for the absorptive surface. So all that to say that this toxic load concept is a big deal. And if you're a practitioner, the scary thing is you're like, oh my gosh, how in the world I'm going to find every last drop in that bucket? It's overwhelming. And then how do I detox from all these things? So. So I like to think of it really simply in the margin concept is all you need. Our bodies were born created to detox. So we have the liver, we have the ability to detox. And so if given that margin back, so say your bucket is analytically basically overflowing. The things that we typically see are autoimmunity, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Those are the big three. There's more than that, but those are big ones. And of course, with me, I had both cancer and autoimmunity. And so when that bucket overflows, as a practitioner, you don't have to know every last toxin. And you can test, and I do test all the time, and different things like metals might be slightly different from mold, but you're still going to do similar principles to lower that load. And so giving back margin all of a sudden allows your body to do what it's supposed to do naturally, which is detox. So you don't have to empty the bucket, you just have to give back margin so the body can do what it's supposed to do, which is daily empty that bucket. And I'll go a little further because it's real common now to see books and protocols and programs like January, especially 21 day detox. Take a, you know, 30 day elimination diet. And these are great if someone has no experience and that's the only thing they're going to ever do a great like intro into that. But what we need to do as practitioners and as patients is implement daily methods of detoxification. I literally weekly do the sauna, I daily do PMF mat. I daily do Epsom salt baths. I daily do dry brushing. I eat clean, water, clean, air clean. So I practice these things. But you have to actually implement daily practices and procedures because our load is so heavy. If we do just a once a year kind of thing, we're never going to keep up.

Totally agree. I've got my energetically imprinted dandelion in my distilled remineralized structured water here as well. So many people reach out and are really focused on heavy metals as a primary contributor to their complex chronic illness. I'm very much of the opinion that besides the infections and mold and so on, if I'm just thinking about metals, I tend to think that the pesticides and the chemicals trump metals in many or most situations.

And I'm wondering how would you kind.

Of compare the relative impact of pesticides and chemicals in our modern environments compared to heavy metals in terms of chronic illness?

Yes, Scott, I totally agree. And one thing I love about you is you are so insightful as far as you interview so many people and see these patterns and you really do put together things on. I mean, it's amazing. So kudos to you because that's so true. So metals basically. Well, really. Let's just think about, for example, if you have a mold exposure and you come into my office and you don't know it's mold, but you're really sick, you have cognitive decline, you have exhaustion and pain and all kinds of things. How do I think about this? Because there could be a lot of things going on and mold, for example, is going to really trash your detox system. And same with many other chemicals, you're basically using up your glutathione much more quickly. It's kind of a saboteur. It actually decreases nadph, which is one of the things that recycles glutathione. So all those factors lead to you walking into the office, you don't feel well, and your, your depletion of glutathione is so low that, say, you were exposed to gadolinium or mercury or lead or metals or glyphosate or pesticide or phthalates or parabens or any of these chemicals because you're so impaired detox because of that mold, you're going to look like you're really toxic. And this is very common for people. But if I don't take care of that big elephant in the room, which is typically the mold that's depleting the glutathione, and start the detox process, I could go like whack a mole at all these other little things on the playground and never really get anywhere. Because the big thing in the room is the. The detox and the depletion of glutathione. So I'm a big fan of taking big picture and saying this patient's toxic mold is number one, and then infections are number two, and metals for me are number three. I put that towards the bottom because what I've seen is as I detox the patient, take care of the infections. Sometimes the detox is so effective after that their bodies is doing its job that the metals or the other issues are no longer an issue because their body's actually getting rid of it. And it's not always the case, but I usually wait towards the end for that or if people are stuck and not getting better.

So if metals are number three, then would you put the pesticides and chemicals after the metals or before the metals? Most commonly, I know it's going to be different for each patient.

Patient, but I would do before because again, what I'm doing at the very beginning is clean air, clean water, clean food inputs, daily inputs that are clean because that's 80% of the battle. So the detox is like after the fact. But if you can get ahead of the game and start to be clean inputs, you can save yourself a lot of grief. And that's those daily practices of filtered water, mineral water, air filters, like all the stuff that we need to be doing just to keep those inputs clean. And then when why do detox? I'm thinking about likely chemicals, toxins I probably tested. So I know the top ones. VOCs are usually on there there. Parabens are usually on there from receipts and things. Typically glyphosate is on there. For most people, some type of mold is on there. And what I do is I try to create a protocol that's going to take into account the whole toxic load, not just mold. So my detox protocol is really incorporating detox on all levels, including metals. So I might throw a little zeolite or something else in there. The thing with metals that I am not the IV chelation expert, so forgive me if someone out there is listening, you're like, well, Jill, I do that and I know how to do it right. I totally agree. I am not. And I know know that when you start to mobilize metals, if you don't know what you're doing, you can get them stuck in the wrong places. Like they can go back in the brain. So I am not a big fan. Again, with my expertise at doing heavy IV chelations for metals, especially in the beginning, I'll leave that to the experts. But that's my thought on that. Because you can do more harm than good.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. And my hesitation with heavy IV chelation is the test might look better six months afterwards, but they then, you know, a year later, two years later, things have started to come back out from the bones and other tissues and so on. And so I don't think, to your earlier point, I don't think IV chelation is okay, we've checked the box, we're done. We don't have to revisit detox. I mean, the 21 day detox really should be the as long as you're still breathing detox, because you really need to detox daily and lifelong. You're talking a lot about the external environment, clean air, clean water, those things. I'm wondering where you think EMFs fit in this conversation in our external environment. And do you find that EMF hygiene is important in your patient work?

Yes, a couple things. There are genetics that are related, that are related genetic SNPs that make you a little bit more susceptible. A lot of this relates. I am not the expert here either, but I've read enough to know the calcium channels in our cells can be affected by this. And so people who have more genetic mutations in those channels are going to be more affected. The other thing I found, and I always quote Klingheart, but I may be someone else who did the research, but I think, think there was a study done, very simple study, with petri dishes, growing mold and a regular household router. And one petri dish was shielded and one was not. And from my recollection, the petri dish that was not shielded produced about 600 times the mycotoxin levels. So what I see is anything biological, the Lyme in our bodies, or the mold in our environment, in our bodies, or any other kind of even parasites. They are assessing our EMFs. They notice it. They're biological, living organisms just like us. And I do think that study shows what I've seen in clinical practice, which is if you have mold or mycotoxins in your body or in your environment and you have a lot of EMFs, they're going to produce more toxins in that same environment. So I don't know that. It certainly could be the EMFs on our cells directly, 100%. I think that does affect our mitochondria and our ability to produce energy and ATP and cellular communication. However, what if it's even more than that? It's the organisms in our bodies or in our environments. That are actually responding and causing more toxicity and more toxins. I think that might be just as big impact of an an issue. And I think that's why those with mold toxicity or mold colonization tend to have more trouble with EMFs than those who don't. Because if that mold is really producing more toxins in your body, granted, you're going to have bigger effects in an environment that has high EMFs.

Totally love that. When I started being a patient of Dr. Klinghardt's in 2006, at the time he wouldn't even take people that weren't willing to reduce their EMFs to have a sleep sanctuary and all of those things. And sadly, back then most people laughed at his thoughts about EMFs. And, and I think most people today are probably not laughing so much anymore. It's a significant issue. You've lectured on LPS or lipopolysaccharides and endotoxins, wondering, do we have a way now to test for endotoxins in the body? How can we mitigate them? And then might there be now an overlap in this conversation with endotoxins that are produced in the body and those that are environmental exposures, such as actinomycetes, for example, example, do we need to look both inside and outside the body to reduce LPS and endotoxin?

Okay, so let's frame many of your listeners know because you always speak at such a high level, but endotoxemia, what is it? First of all, so LPS is a gram negative bacterial coding. And typically it's in our microbiome, it's the bacteria of our microbiome. And what happens is in the situation where there's some permeability in the gut, which I typically now assume that we all have some degree of intestinal permeability or leaky gut gut, some worse than others, things like mold make it really bad. Chemicals, chemotherapy, there's a lot of things that alcohol makes it worse. But in general, most of our population has some degree of leaky gut. So we have these bacteria in our gut, the microbiome and the coatings of the bacteria when they cross over in the condition of a leaky gut. So the parasites, they cross between the cells into the bloodstream, which is only one cell layer away from the lumen of the gut. They are literally the most inflammatory trigger to our HLA immune system activation. And what that is is basically our dendritic cells are like Pacman, waiting in the bloodstream for things that come through the gut, saying, oh gosh, is That a bacteria? Is it salmonella, Is it a parasite? They're ready to protect us from foreign invaders. But what can happen is if a corn antigen goes in or lipopolysaccharide bacterial coating goes in, they can still react. And what they do is they react, they clamp on and they send a signal to our immune system. Send all the troops, there's something bad, something dangerous. Al alert, Alert. So that goes off when we have the lps. And LPS in all people is known to be a very potent trigger of cytokine production. Now this even happened in Covid. There was an absolute connection between lps, leaky gut and Covid situations becoming worse because that trigger of the cytotoxins and the chemicals like IL6 and IL2 and TNF Alpha, we can measure these in the blood. So basically that lipopolysaccharide crosses over into the blood, triggers an inflammatory reaction. And we know now, Scott, it's crazy. When I really looked at the literature, the associations with LPS endotoxemia are heart disease, obesity, diabetes. In fact, the pathway to becoming diabetic is almost always linked to LPS endotoxemia. That's crazy. It's in the gut. It starts in the gut and then we talk about insomnia, mood disorders, even low testosterone in men. So there's many, many, many things. And if we take that as a whole, that's the most of the chronic complex disease and at least in the us, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, even cancer. So this LPS endotoxemia story is so far reaching and it relates to our, relates to the permeability. And then what you said is, could it be environmental? Because we know in a water damaged building there's toxic soup and some of those toxic soup components are mold, but some of them are bacterial components like actinomyces or other types of triggers. And LPS is one of them. We also know from the teeth, if someone has a root canal and their immune system is weak, that dripping of a little bit of bacteria that might be left from a non sterile situation into the bloodstream can cause basically LPS endotoxemia in your jaw. You can have LPS cross the blood brain barrier. In a leaky brain situation, you can have LPS be a trigger to endothelial dysfunction and heart attack. So this is so far reaching and it's also a trigger for autoimmunity. So I just covered about everything. We deal with like 90% of it. So this is such a big story because then what do we do so number one, I just said most of us have leaky gut, so we need to again be thinking about what can we do to shore up our guts. And the very basics. I'm a huge fan of spore probiotics because number one, they're one of the few probiotics that have evidence with lps, endotoxemia and even fatty liver, which fatty liver is just a consequence of that dumping of LPS into the liver, which is again the first pass after the blood goes from the gut goes right to the liver. So if we have high lps, it's dumping into the liver and that's one of the big contributing factors to fatty liver disease. So all of this to say, what do we do? Well, spore probiotics are a huge form of help and they tend to help diversity of the microbiome and they can decrease endotoxemia. Number number two, bovine immune globulins, whey protein or colostrum. I like bovine the best, but all three of those serve similar purposes because they basically add immunoglobulins to our diet, to our gut. And these immunoglobulins can passively bind up lps. They can also bind Candida, they can also bind H. Pylori, they can bind COVID virus. Literally. The studies show that this immunoglobulins, bovine immunoglobulins, whey protein is a small source and so is colostrum. All three of those things can passively act as binding agents in our gut for these, these pathogens that can create inflammation. So I'm a huge fan of spore probiotics, bovine immune globulins. And then my newest friend, kid on the block is butyrate, butyrate, butyrate, love, love, love. Butyrate is a short chain fatty acid. And we know that this affects the bile acids and the cardiovascular disease risk and so many things. And I think it's been underutilized butyric acid in one form or the other. Again, long Covid guts that are passed maybe past a salmonella or a IBS type of thing where they got sick and got, they call it post infectious IBS and all of of situations. Those are some of the core things we could do to shore up that lps. And again, we all have it. And the more leaky our gut is, the more it's going to affect our system. But that's it in a nutshell.

I love it. And my understanding is there really is no way yet to test for LPS in The bloodstream. Is that. Is that still the case?

That's correct. The research talks about. So that what they'll do is postprandial four or five hours is the cutoff. And if they see that quadruple at four or five hours in the morning, blood. And again, it's research only. We don't really have the ability to test for direct lps. What we do have is we can check igg and IGA to lps, and that's the antibodies to it. And it's a decent way to check. You can also check antibodies to occludin and zonulin, which are those trapdoors between the cells that determine leaky gut.

We talked a little bit earlier and you talked in the book about how your mother may have herself had a bucket that was overflowing, that some of these things may have been in play even before you were born. What are some of the you would suggest people think of as top options for preparing for a healthy pregnancy?

Yeah, this is so key because many women go in, they want to get pregnant, they'll maybe spend a lot of money on fertility treatments, but they're not really thinking about their body as the home to a fetus for nine months. And what happens is the placenta has a microbiome, so it's going to transmit to your baby. When you give birth, especially vaginally, you actually inoculate your baby with the gut microbiome from your vaginal flora. And that's why C section babies are known to have different microbiomes than vaginal deliveries and sometimes lifelong long, because it's a difference in the route of how they come out of the body. And the other thing mothers can do is think about detox well ahead of their pregnancy. If you're pregnant, it's too late because breast milk contains a lot of our. Like we detox through the breast milk and even the placenta and the womb that we can pass on toxins to the baby. So you never want to detox while you're trying to get pregnant or during pregnancy or even after because you're breastfeeding. But if you think ahead of time, a year or so, you can do some basic determination detox. You could do, you know, enhance your glutathione, make sure your clean air, clean water, clean food, and then all those things are practical because if you get your environment, you have clean food, you have a source of clean water, you have air filters and clean air in your home, that's going to affect that baby as well. So getting Those things to in place at least a year or so ahead of the time when you really want to become pregnant is ideal. And then optimizing thyroid, optimizing your detox routes, making sure, again, I wouldn't sauna, I wouldn't take binders, I wouldn't do any of that while you're trying to get pregnant, while you're pregnant, while you're breastfeeding. But it is, you can do it six months to a year ahead of time. That would be ideal.

How might highly sensitive people be more intuitive but also more likely to experience symptoms in their physical bodies? What is an hsp or highly sensitive person? You talk about that in the book. And how is being highly sensitive both a blessing and a curse? And how might it even impact the size of the bucket that we talked about earlier?

Yeah, I love this. This is where, again, growing up in a stoic German family, I had no idea I was an hsp. Elaine. Erin. Erin. First she wrote her book, it's called the hsp, I think something very simple like that. And I literally, in my 30s, found this book, Scott. And I was literally glued to the book because. And I literally cried because I was like, oh my goodness, this is me, this is why. And HSP, they're about 10 to 15% of the population. And what we are, is we are highly sensitive to sound and light and smells and overstimulation. And she talks about that psychological effect and how we need to rest and retreat sometimes and, and we might, we might appear to be like isolated or, or maybe just socially shy. I was never super socially shy, but we can appear to be something that we're not. But what it is, it's like overstimulation. I can remember as a kid I would go to my girlfriend's slumber parties, you know, like seventh grade or sixth grade. And I'd be the one that like, by 9 o' clock I was snoozing. And I would get, you know, the. They steal your bra and put it in the freezer. That's the trick of the high school, junior high girls or, you know, something stupid, right? But I remember always feeling like, like totally, I didn't fit in because I'll be. These girls, they could have all this interaction all night long. And I would come home and you can ask my mother to a tea every time I came home from a slim party. I get sick the next day every time. And my mother finally said, jill, you can't go anymore. And of course I'm like loving my girlfriends. And I remember at that moment, among others, like, what is wrong with me? Why can't I keep up with the other girls? Like, what is wrong with me? And I knew, like, amusement parks. Most people, as children love amusement parks. They were a nightmare to me. Hot sights, sounds, sweat noises, horrible food. And the rides themselves were very disruptive to my system. Like, I hated roller coasters. And now I look back, like, oh, no wonder. Those are all traits of a highly sensitive person. So that's the difficulty and what it creates in a person who doesn't understand this. Number one, in relationships, your partner, your parents, your children all think, what's wrong with her? She can't handle this or that. So there's always this feeling like something's wrong with me. Number two, you get easily overwhelmed in situations. And so you feel like, what's, you know, wrong with me in social situations or this? And understanding that is so powerful, because the other side of this, there's a huge gift. And what it is, is I would observe environments. I would observe in. In textbooks in medical school and pretty much my whole entire life. And I would see patterns and details and things that other people missed. And in conversations, I'm sitting with someone one on one, and I'd see a flicker in their eye. I'm like, what happened when you were 12? Tell me more about that. I'd notice something that no one else noticed. And same with my patients. If I'm listening and I'm with them present, I'll notice these details that no one else asked them about and no one's had noticed. So in the blessing part of this, I am an incredible detective, because the details I see and I see way more details and things than other people. And that's part of what floods my nervous system is I get so much stimulation. And the beautiful thing is now I know coloring, pemf, mat, being in nature, being near water, being on a beach, I can ground myself and restore that. And I know for me, whether it's in a relationship or friends and family or at work, I have a certain amount of alone time. I just require. I have to recharge alone. And I can be in my head and thinking up great, beautiful things and be happy, and that will recharge me, that I can go back into the world. But this is a trait that's common. If you're listening and you have this, you're nodding, you know. And I just want to say the biggest thing about it is understanding you're normal, you're not crazy, you're not weird, you're not. There's nothing wrong with you and there is a gift to it. Now, the other piece that you said that I really want to talk about that I wrote in the book, and I don't think anyone's ever written about this, is she talks about the psychological effects. They just, just described what I think is this environmental toxic. The people that we see, the canaries, I think many of them are HSPs. I think many of them unbeknownst, are the ones. And so not only is it socially, emotionally, mentally straining, it's chemically, it's so we're the ones that are going to get breast cancer at 25 because of the chemicals. We're the ones that are going to get sick from mold and the other people don't. So I think there's a connection to the environmental toxic load in the hsps. Those are the ones I see in my clinic that are sick from the environmental toxins too.

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, there's obviously a lot of overlap here with hsps and empaths as well, right? Being able to sense things. But then also sometimes that becomes more of an issue in our physical bodies as well. You became a vegetarian at age 14. My observation over the years has been that people with chronic illness sometimes do need some animal protein to accelerate their healing. Wondering, are you still vegetarian today? And can vegetarians heal as readily as those that consumes some healthy source of animal protein?

I love this. So I look back and again I had silent celiac. Unbeknownst to me, my gut was probably a mess and I didn't know it. Later when I had Crohn's, I realized I had severe fungal dysbiosis. So at the age of 14, all I knew was and I was hypochloridic. So type A blood tends to be less production of stomach acid and typos tend to produce a lot. So yeah, so. So I was the type A A plus blood and that meant my natural stomach acid production was low. So looking back, here's what I think happened. I had low stomach acid. I'd undiagn no celiac, so malabsorption nutrients. I probably had a zinc deficiency due to the lack of stomach acid. Zinc causes when we're deficient, causes an abhorrence to meat. We don't like the taste of meat. It doesn't taste good. And think about this. If I have no stomach acid and I eat a piece of hamburger or steak, it's going to feel really awful in my stomach because I can't break it down. So I think I. I mean, there wasn't a big ethical thing. It was just, I don't feel well with meat. Why do I have to eat it at 14? And I think now, looking back, it was because of malabsorption, low stomach acid, low zinc. That led me intuitively at that time to be like, oh, meat doesn't feel good. But I say Now, Scott, at 25, I realized that vegetarian lifestyle almost killed me. So I'm in agreement with you because what happened is I was severely B12 deficient. Had no idea. I have some snips in my B12 metabolism, and I needed more anyway. And then taking out meat for 10 years, from 14 to 25, 11 years, actually, I was severely deficient. Probably like severely, severely, like a hundred, you know, level off 100 in the blood. And I gravitated away from meat because I didn't feel good, but it was because I was so sick in other ways. And then when I realized, because I didn't know any better and because I had fungal dysbiosis, I was more of a carbitarian. So I had processed, so I didn't know any better. That was what I thought was my source of protein. I had lots of carbs and lots of sugars. I had lots of gluten. So I was the most horrible vegetarian diet you could imagine. Not knowing that, it was almost killing me. And then when I realized with the breast cancer and the Crohn's, I had to switch. And when I did the specific cardio carbohydrate diet, I absolutely added meat back in. Now I still have avoided red meat because I just do not do well with red meat. I don't feel well. I don't digest it well. But fish and chicken, absolutely. And I actually need that protein from animal products. And I think now what you alluded to, I can help a vegetarian or vegan, and I have no problem whatever lifestyle you choose. But some of the most unhealthy nutritional patients that come to me are in that category. I hate to say that, but that. That's the truth. And I was one of them.

Yeah, we talked a little bit about the wrong choices in beauty products and personal care products, that they can lead to endocrine disruption, to an overload of pseudo or xenoestrogens. What do you recommend today to people that do want to have some healthy makeup or maybe color their hair, but they don't want to add to their buckets?

Yeah, this is so tricky because what we have is we have These like super beautiful organic brands that are almost like edible. And there's some out there that we love and I use some of them, but some of them don't work. So like you really want to style your hair or you really color your health. Some of those things. I feel like they're amazing and super safe and simple. And then we have this midline. And this is one reason why I created actually a skincare line that I, that I have because I wanted something that actually had the kind of ingredients like retinols and peptides that actually have the power to be anti aging on our face or our body, but didn't have the toxins, the parabens, the phthalates and the chemicals. And in that middle is where I like to land. I still use the natural products, but if I really want anti aging under my eyes or my skin, I like the powerhouses of peptides, of hyaluronic acid, of retinoids and I use them, but I use them in products that don't have the phthalates and parabens. And then on this side is the most common stuff. And I won't name brands, but your.

Class if you want. You're welcome.

Okay, well like l' Oreal and Estee Lauder and those really common brands out there, they are so, so toxic. Bath and Body works. So toxic. And that's like the most popular place for people to get these things. So you really need to go to like your health food store or online some of the vendors. Now the good news is even like Sephora online is a classic like place where people get beauty products. There are good choices. So tarte is a mineral based bare minerals. And there's some others, like Jane Ireland makes some really clean products. Those are some of the ones that I tend to use. But you can literally look and see if you see Parabola or any sort of perfume or fragrance is going to be phthalates. And that's another thing, your perfumes, a lot of women love these beautiful expensive perfumes. I was no different. Now all I use is essential oil based. They're super cheap, they're inexpensive. I could make them myself. And they're my. My scent is coconut and vanilla. It's fairly simple as like you could eat, you know, like his real smells are like mom's cooking cookies in the kitchen. But that's my perfume and I don't mind it. I just am fine with that because the other kinds of perfumes, now if you have a really wonderful expensive perfume that means a lot to you. At least spray it on your clothes and not on your skin, because we absorb so much to the skin. But perfumes and fragrances are a huge source as well, and most women don't even know that. And fragrances can be hidden. They'll just say fragrance, and it doesn't tell you, but it's almost guaranteed to be a phthalate or a paraben.

How common is it that your patients are type A personalities, overachievers, do, do, do to feel their worth and their value and don' deserving of wellness. Is that a common pattern that you see? And might there be a type C personality that also sets the stage for chronic illness?

Yes. So, yes, the type A's are, because again, they're seeking out what's optimal health. They're the biohackers out there, like, what can I do to optimize my brain? And they've done everything in their work life and everything else, their family life, and they're like, okay, now my human body, there's not a bad thing about that. As far as the drive and the ability to follow through and maybe set a plan and do it. That's all good. And that's what's made them successful. And I'm part of that category at times, too. But the difficulty is when you either feel like your value or your worth or your ability to be loved is based on achievement, that tends to be a big issue because there's no amount of achievement that will ever fulfill that love tank or that fulfill that worthiness tank. And again, I'm a recovering perfectionist, recovering kind of workaholic. And those things are so. They're so subtle. And because guess what, Say you're an alcoholic or a drug addict or you overeat or you shop and you have, you know, a huge debt. Those things society is, you know, kind of shames you, which shouldn't be the case, but there's a lot of shame around those things. When you're a workaholic and you're doing amazing in business and you're starting new companies and you're, you know, changing the world, there's a lot of recognition and things that are positive accolades that come with that type of addiction. And yet it's still just as harmful if it's affecting your relationships or personal life or your ability to really rest. For me, one of the things I realized is I can go, go, go, go, go, go. But to actually sit and rest, I almost get anxious. I want to be doing something. And even my best thinking and writing, I was Moving and walking and dictating, like movement was always my thing. But as I dealt with my old trauma and some of those patterns, I realized that sitting still and being still with myself, sometimes the fear or the sadness or the old emotions would come up, and that's what made me anxious. But being with myself and allowing that to come up and it sometimes feels like a tsunami wave and then it comes down is part of the healing and of part. Part of the recovering from that perfectionism, that type A, that workaholism. So I really believe at the core of most workaholics, type A's, there's trauma.

Guilty as charged, I would say.

I know. Me too, Scott. Me too. Yeah. Yeah.

Stress plays such a key role in our lives and in illness. Not being able to move into a parasympathetic healing state that supports rest, digest, detoxify and heal. What are some of your sorts of simple tips to reduce toxic stress and shift into a parasympathetic healing state?

Yes. So breath is huge. And you guys have all heard, it's all over the place now. Breath, work and using breath to change. And you can do either like a. A 4, 6, 8 breath, where you breathe in for 4, hold for 6, breathe out for 8, box breath, where it's 4, 4, 4. A lot of these are calming to the sympathetic system and upregulating to the parasympathetic. And again, there's a lot more experts out there than me on breath. That's very specific, simple things. Even just breathing through your nose and holding and breathing out. Hopefully you're doing that with me as you're listening. Just very like, I felt calm all of a sudden, just really nice. On the other side of that, you can actually use breath to upregulate if you need energy and go where you're actually doing more of a psycho holotropic breath, or one of these breaths where you're actually stimulating, blowing off of CO2 and changing the ph of your blood and you can stimulate your brain to be like, on. So those are all kinds of ways you can use breath. Breath is powerful and breath is number one. And I always say even those who are chronic fatigue or long Covid or you're really suffering and you can't exercise. I'm sure a lot of your listeners have exercise intolerance and what you can still do is move. So I always say, even if you can't do a big workout, you want to be movement. Maybe it's just a walk. Maybe it's, you know, a Hike, whatever you could tolerate. But movement is so key for our nervous system. And literally there's a thing with the limbic system system and the retinal, peripheral retinal inputs that having things go by us, so meaning we walk and we have the motion going by us sideways, is calm, calming to our limbic system. So just whenever I feel stressed or I need an idea or I lear to go out and walk and I get the best ideas when I'm moving because that's a great way to calm. And even though we're active, we're still in a good like rhythmic. And the cross or our bodies back and forth is also calming. So there's bunches of things there. A hug, so so simple. But we co regulate one another. So if you have a friend or family member or a spouse or a child and you're feeling stressed or whatever, you can literally copy co regulate. And many of us are like hug and then get away. We want to hold and hold that hug gently until we actually feel in our body that kind of release. And that hug is powerful. It's why we hug. We maybe don't know it, but it's a powerful stimulator of co regulation and we can do that with another person. And we can not only have us co regulated but we can co regulate them. So that's powerful. Eye contact. So getting together with a friend and having coffee or just having a conversation, the eye contact between people is one of the ways we co regulate and it goes way back to birth. And our mother, they're holding us right here and looking down and gazing into our eyes. That's one of the first ways that our mother would regulate our nervous systems as babies. And some people never had that or didn't have it. And so even now it's maybe it's hard to hold the gaze, but that's something you can work with. For me, being in nature. So the sound of water, hiking in the woods, hiking on the mountain, any sort of natural surroundings and we know like on beaches. I've had some conversations with docs like myself that treat lots of mast cell and severe patients who are very active and always if they're vacationing or if they go live and they live near the oce, it's probably the negative ions, it's the fact that their feet are maybe more barefoot on the beach sometimes. And there's probably lots of things but that's very good for the nervous system and very calming. Music. Music has power. And most of us have those memories where we remember a Song, like the song from the 80s, like, oh, I remember my seventh grade dance and that boy that asked me to dance on that song. And, like, that feeling of being in love and it wasn't love at all and whatever. But we have these memories and then we'll go on. And the song can trigger that. You guys remember that you're in a car and you're like, oh, I remember my first kiss, or remember this. And a song can trigger that. So music of whatever type has the ability to regulate, I will say more coherent music has more data behind the regulation, like classical or binaural beats or even some symphonic music versus, like, heavy metal is a little bit jarring to the system. No judgment, if you like that. But it's a very different physiological outcome. And there's literally data to support the differences in the synchronistic kind of music versus something that's a little bit more harsh or jarring or maybe has different beats or whatever. So you want to. Whatever feels good to you. So music I love. And then, gosh, there's so many other things. For me, part of the recovery was making myself sit and be still and. And. And also letting someone take care of me. So many of us who have had trauma, we're good at taking care of others, but to let someone in is actually very vulnerable. To ask for help or to have needs or to let someone in to take care of us, because all of a sudden then there's vulnerability and what if they hurt me? Or what if there's old trauma pattern? Actually asking for help or letting someone help you is another way to start to heal.

I. I felt very calm when we were doing the breathing, and then there was a long pause, and I went, oh, my gosh, zoom. Connection dropped. And then I became very sympathetic. How has curiosity played a role in becoming the practitioner you are today? How does it lead to solutions that others may miss, miss, or never consider? And is curiosity synonymous with being a seeker?

So this is another thing that I realized. So in the I. I write a lot about flow, and Steven Cutler was who turned me on. And of course, Milai Chicks Mihai, if I'm saying that right, he was the original flow researcher, and he actually died while I was writing the book. He's one of my heroes. I'm saying that because what I realized when I was studying flow is purpose and passion and curiosity are some of the drivers of flow states. And flow states are those timeless, effortless states where we feel like we could be doing something immersed in. When I was rock Climbing, I was there when I'm with a patient, I'm there. When I'm coloring, when I may be out in nature, maybe I'm riding my motorcycle. Those are all flow states. And that part of the entrance into flow is curiosity. And I again I didn't realize that this was a quality that I had in spades. But as I started to research, I'm like, oh yeah, I always want to know the why I'm so curious. And that it's almost like opening your mind to possibilities and saying what else is possible? Because if we have a very black and white answer, analytical view of the world, we might be like okay, A equals B equals C or whatever and we, that's all we can think of. But if we open our mind to possibilities. And the old IQ test used to be very, you know, driven by shapes and doing this and calculating data. Nowadays a lot of the big companies like Google and Amazon, they're hiring employees more based on curiosity. And they do that by having this open ended question, here's a jar of marbles, what's the 10 things or 20 or 100 things you can think of to do with them? And one person might say oh, they're little like space aliens and they do just something stupid, but it's like totally creative, off the wall. And they can actually rate their potential for their employees to come up with good creative ideas based on this test of creativity. And it's not IQ based, it's different from iq. So what I realized in researching for the book is creativity is a powerhouse. It's like a superpower. And it's also, I did not know this either highly associated with genius. Like some of the greatest geniuses of our time, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, I could name many, many more. One of their high qualities was creativity and curiosity. And literally the doorway into creativity. Finding new novel solutions to a problem has to have curiosity at the foundation because you have to say what else is possible? What? And when I say that for that phrase, what else is possible? That literally even as I say it, it's a neuro linguistic trick, it opens your mind to think. So if you're in a situation where you're like, oh gosh, I have the bills due at the end of the month, I don't know what to do. You can literally tell yourself, well Jill, what else is possible? And that literally allows your subconscious to start brewing and thinking of ideas. And I especially like you doing that right before bed. You have a solution, a situation you think is impossible. You think about it right before bed and you say, well what else is possible? Go to sleep, guess what, you'll dream up solutions. Your mind at night will like work overtime to help you find. And our subconscious is like, that's what it's for. It's meant to chew on all these things that are subconsciously assimilated during the day and come up with, with solutions. So part of the creativity and the ability to find solutions to complex problems is curiosity.

In the book you have a list of lab tests that everyone should do before the age of 30. We're not going to cover all of them, but I do have a few that maybe we can just do some rapid fire thoughts around. So the first one was apob, part of a lipid panel can contribute to cardiovascular disease. As I understand there can be a genetic component. Wondering how commonly you see elevations of apob. What are some of the tools that you might consider to reduce or optimize it? And would you be working more with optimization of gene expression or more towards the reduction of lipids overall?

Yeah. So this is a whole hour topic we could have and I'll try to just give you a snippet. And I will also say like my friend Mark Houston is a brilliant. He works the heart and he knows endothelial dysfunction in and out. And if I ever have a question, I ask him because I feel like I know this well enough. But I am not your best, best expert. But I do know this cholesterol is not the big, the whole story. Right, We've known that. And cholesterol is a precursor of, first of all, it's what your bile stores. So when you're detoxing, you're actually, you know, using that to pull out some of the toxins as well. And it's a precursor of all of our hormones. So male and female hormones are cortisol and we need some cholesterol. We know that mortality is optimized between 210 and 250, which is higher than most cardiologists will recommend. Yeah. So I'm going to say I like people to be a little higher than their cardiology. Now the caveat is say you have a 55 year old man who's just had a heart attack. Those are the ones that absolutely benefit from statins and from lowering cholesterol. There's no question it's anti inflammatory. So secondary prevention of a heart attack, especially in men, there is good data and I would use a statin even in them. But back to this apob and where does this play into this? I'M looking at the big picture and what I'm looking at is back to the LPS story and all of that. The LDL and the APOB and the particulate size of the cholesterol. The bigger issue is not what's there, it's what's occurring oxidized. And this is the same as reactive oxygen. We have toxicity of any type in our body. Poor food, poor environmental air quality, mold in our home, all of that causes oxidation. It's like your old car starts to become rusty. That's oxidation. Oxidation is what causes inflammatory cholesterol particles. So I go, not that I don't look at that number and try to treat it and I'll give you some things I use, but I go back and say what's causing oxidation? Environmental toxic load. But let's go to detox. Let's go to inputs, clean air, clean water of clean food, clean diet for sure. And there's a small percentage of people, usually the APOE 4.4s, which are high risk of Alzheimer's and hyperlipidemia. They do not do well in saturated fats, period. They must be on a vegetarian or very low saturated fat animal product diet. There's no doubt in my mind that's the best thing for them. But for the majority of other people, I am not afraid of a little saturated fat. I love extra virgin olive oil and typically the cardiovascular research just supports that so heavily that I'll put them on a good dose of extra virgin olive oil, sometimes even taking a little bit extra. And that's not a problem. Now purely cholesterol levels and oxidative stress. What do you do? Well, fish oil over and over again shows decreased blood viscosity and anti inflammatory effects. And especially now that we're getting some of these products that have the SPMs. So if you think about EPA, goes to DHP, goes to DHA, goes down to this pro resolvent and mediators. These guys down at the bottom are called called spms. We never used to talk about them post Covid. They're one of my favorite things to use with fish oil. They're one of my favorite things to use cardiovascular disease. So I would put someone on a combination fish oil and SPMS for sure. If I'm really looking at just oxidized ldl, reduced rice will bring it down just like a statin. And that can be used, but it must be used with CoQ10. So that's kind of a standard. There's also things like obviously plant based sterols and phenols so you want to get lots of fruits and vegetables. Leafy greens. Fibers are crucial. And some people benefit from niacin. That can be good for increasing the hdl. And APOB itself can be a little tricky to address. That's why I'm kind of skirting around the issue, because there's not always one intervention nutritionally that will change that. But if we look at the whole lifestyle and all the things that I've mentioned, that's usually the best way to go.

So that was a whole masterclass. So that was impressive. Thank you. TMAO is discussed in the realm of exogenous phosphatidylcholine. It's been said that the administration, administration of PC can increase tmao, though I've heard some brands like Body Bio, for example, suggest that that's not the case with their products. Talk to us about tmao. What is it? Do we test for it and what do we do when it's elevated?

I love this, Scott, because I have a real strong opinion on this. So TMAO is produced by our microbiome. And so people who tend to eat a ton of meat and people who are vegetarian have a very different predisposition towards producing tmao. And when someone has a high tmao, there are correlations with risk for heart disease and coronary artery disease. So most cardiologists who are checking this will say, we need to lower your tmao. And what they'll say is, you need to get rid of carnitine, you need to get rid of meat, and you need to get rid of phosphoridocholine and any sort of precursors. Those are the big ones. But acetylcarnitine, it's one of my favorite nutrients. It increases acetylcholine in the brain. It helps mitochondria. I love it. So I hate taking patients off that phosphatidylcholine. Love it. It's cell membranes. It's like having an oil change in your brain and nervous system. It's helpful for cell. So many things. Love it. And then, of course, we just talked about, like, fish, especially like wild caught salmon is such a healthy part of the diet. But here's the deal. Yes, the TMAO is super high. You may temporarily. I had a patient who was a young dentist who had a heart attack in her 40s, and she had high TMAO. And we did take her off all those things. But guess what I found Severe fungal and bacterial dysbiosis in her gut. I Treated her gut aggressively. And then the TMAO went down. And I realized, realize, okay, we're barking down the wrong tree. TMAO is related to gut microbiome. So let's fix the gut microbiome and then give back a little bit. I will say I don't think, I think PC can raise TMAO with the wrong microbiome, no matter where the source. So even the good forms, which I love for patients, I'm not, I love PC, so don't get me wrong there. But even the beautiful forms, the cleanest forms, I take, body bio, I love it, they still, in a person who has the microbiome that's predisposed to make TMAO could produce TM from that.

Many people in medicine suggest that iron is commonly low and copper commonly high. Others like Morley Robbins, suggest that iron is commonly high and copper commonly low. Where do you stand on the iron copper debate?

Okay, so iron is very pro inflammatory if you think about oxidative stress, reactive oxygen. If you have iron in the cells and it's. It, it has, there's reactive oxygen, you basically again create massive oxidative stress with these heme products. So in the wrong process, person like a person like myself with one gene for hemochromatosis, which means for every bit of iron that I eat, this again, might have been the reason at 14, I intuitively went away from me because I have one gene for this iron overload. And it's never been an issue because when I went through Crohn's, I was losing blood. And so I never saw that until later postmenopausally. But all that to say for me, iron is inflammatory because I grab onto it, I hold onto it, and it creates reactive oxygen in my body. So for someone like me, you'd want actually low red meat or no red meat, which is what I do. No red meat meat. I do fish and chicken. And you'd want to never supplement with iron unless you were severely anemic for some other reason. And what I do is hydrogen. Either breathing hydrogen or hydrogen tabs is one way to neutralize the reactive oxygen, especially in an iron overload situation. Now there's another population that has excessive bleeding or some other cause of low iron. Typically women that are menstruating or heavy menoragia or periods, those, they need iron. I mean, you need iron to make blood cells, you need iron to breathe, you need iron. So there are a subset. So I would say it's about. But I would more of my patients with chronic illness Autoimmunity, Lyme disease, mold illness, have excess iron versus too little. So that's more common, especially postmenopausal women. That's one of the shifts. You're no longer bleeding all of a sudden, so you're going to have more accumulation of iron. So things change a lot for men and women in that range of like 40 to 50 years old. Copper, I see a lot more excess copper because there's a lot of things in our environment that have a copper like effect. And copper is very associated with, with estrogen and zinc, with progesterone. So I way, way more often see zinc deficiency, excess copper. In fact, we check this with kids with add, we check this with Alzheimer's patients. Copper, zinc ratios and you want them at least one to one, if not even a little higher on the zinc. Now if you take loads and loads of zinc, you can lower copper, which is how I start to lower it. And if you take too much zinc, you can lower copper too much. But I typically don't see that until postmenopause again in women and men, older men, because at that point if they take a, a lot of zinc, they have no estrogen and no correlation with that copper and they can get too low. Signs of copper deficiency, which is rare, would be like low white blood count and there's other reasons for that. But if you have chronically low leukocytes, that would be a sign of copper deficiency. But I would say 80% of the time it's excess copper, not deficiency. And the way to treat that would be to give more zinc and to make sure they're multi or their mineral does not have extra copper in it at all.

Let's talk a bit about the importance of neuroplasticity and then tie that into the limbic system. Limbic system impairment, limbic system system retraining tools. How important is it for your patients to create new neural patterns to support their healing, to become unstuck? And what are some of your favorite tools in that realm?

Yeah, and I love this concept because it's kind of like our initial part of the conversation with mold and resilience and exposures. So often we get discouraged and we're like, oh, I'm always going to be this way or I'm always going to be sick. And the truth is we have so much ability, I mean our body, cell wise size regenerates itself every year or two, right? The bone and the tissues and everything. So the brain is no different. So even if you've had like a neuroquant that shows terrible atrophy in certain areas of the brain after mold or you've had some issues, you name it. Our brains are very plastic and I believe in many many cases we can recover and recover full if not most of our function. So neuroplasticity is the ability to make new neuro neural connections but also to really restore the brain to function. And our brain is just like any other organ. We kind of set it aside. But I really think I recently posted Scott about how I think depression, anxiety and mood disorders are rarely organic and it was very controversial. But the truth is so that means like I'm born with this, I can't fix it. What I see now is toxins, infections, inflammation, autoimmunity, wrong diets, you can name a hundred things and they affect the brain, even LPS as we talked about about earlier. And so all of these things are affecting our brain and producing pattern that looks like depression and it is depression. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's the root cause is not organic in the sense of it's not. It's changeable. And neuroplasticity deals with our ability to actually change how we function. It's why we can recover from trauma, even the worst, the ptsd, we have the ability to recover and create new pathways. I always think of it as like say you had the old wild west and the wagon wheels were, you know, know, going from the east coast all the way to Wyoming or something and they would create these wagon wheels and the next sellers would keep coming and they get deeper and deeper and deeper and pretty soon you couldn't go anywhere but where the wagon wheels you'd have to follow that path. Our brains are like that. So if we repeat things over and over and over again and we have a maybe we think, oh, I'm not worth anything unless I'm achieving or I'm not worthy of love because of X, Y or Z or I can't trust my intuition or whatever patterns of thinking thinking we have, they get to be worn grooves. But in order to come out of that group, we have to think a new way or say a new thing. One of the ways I reprogrammed my brain was after breast cancer, Crohn's disease and then mold illness. I remember one day realizing my whole life I've been fighting, fighting cancer, fighting Crohn's and I'm good at fighting. I overcame it all right. But I realized with the mold, all of a sudden I had mold toxicity. The mold caused massive cytokine inflammation. My face was a wreck. I had acne, hives, horribleness. And I realized that that same of fighting was what my body was actually doing from the mold inside. And if I kept fighting, I was going to die. And that day I realized that I had heard a podcast about a man who, he needed a bone marrow transplant. And the doctor said, we need this many blood cells from your bone marrow. So you go home and then come back in three weeks and we're going to do that bone marrow biopsy and take these cells. And he said, well, what can I do? And they're like, well you could try med meditation or whatever, kind of laughingly. And this guy took it seriously and he started meditating on his bone marrow and he came back and the, the yield they had from that bone marrow transplant was like 10 times anyone else they had seen. Like, what in the world did you do so well? Every day I just meditated on my blood cells and production and, and you know, we know this, the mind body connection. But when I heard that story, I thought, well, I can meditate on my mold and my body and, and this whole fight thing. And I literally started meditating every day. And my picture was, you know, the little minions from Despicable Me, those were my little immune cells and they were in there whistling and helping and escorting the mold out gently, like whistling while they work. But they weren't angry, they weren't fighting. And I started meditating on that. Scott. And there was many things that helped me heal from mold, but there's no doubt in my mind that meditation, that neuroplasticity around the fight versus friendly escorting, calming my system down was a piece of the puzzle of me healing. I changed my neuroplasticity around what my body was doing. And I have no doubt because I could even see in the labs my cytokine levels, my TNF alpha, my, you know, IL6, those things came down. And that's all your mind and it's powerful. It's so cool that we can do that.

You talk about mold and mycotoxin illness, you talk about Lyme and co infections. I used to focus much more on Lyme, but I really do think that even for my own journey, that mold was a bigger factor. And I'm wondering how often do you find that people can have these vector borne infections be totally fine until they get exposed to mold, to mycotoxins, to the immune dysregulation that results from that where they're managing things fine, they're latent, they Get a mold exposure and now they have Lyme disease.

Yes. Okay, so my theory is, I think if you just on the street, you tested 10,000 people walking by, they're feeling fine. They don't, maybe they're just unaware, but they don't really have any complaints. I bet you'd find 50% of them carry some tick borne vector. Borrelia, babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia, Rocky mountainside fever. And they're walking around, around just fine. And so what I think is many, many, many people, more than we even know, have been bit by a tick or a spider or some vector that creates a. We say tick borne, but obviously we know like Bartonella can be carried by fleas or spiders or whatever. So some sort of insect bite or vector that gave them this infection. But their immune systems are robust because the, our immune system is, is created to basically keep down old infections. For example, chickenpox, we almost all had it as kids, but we don't have all get shingles. Shingles is just reactivation of chickenpox. So what happens? What shifts that from you carrying chickenpox your whole life and never getting shingles to getting shingles? It's the same parallel as Lyme disease. And I'm like you, I had Borrelia, Bartonella, Babisia and Ehrlichia probably. I remember hiking and camping in some timber in Iowa and Illinois and I'm sure I got bit by ticks back then. In fact, I remember my parents pulling them out of my scalp. So there's no doubt I got Lyme way back, probably at 4 or 8 years old. And I was fine until I got mold exposure and started have joint pain and different symptoms. So what happens then is mold produces some really nasty immune suppressive drugs. And I say drugs because something called mycophenolic acid, super common with mold panels and mycotoxins, is produced by Aspergillus and some of the nastier molds. It is a known immunosuppressive and it is the, it's the chemical that's used to make cellcept, which is a drug that's used for organ transplant recipients. So this literally mold toxin that we can measure in our bodies who people have been exposed to mold. It's like you're on a drug for organ transplant, plant rejection, and because of that, that drops the bar of your immune system and these old infections start to pop up and create problems. So if I have someone come in who's looking like Lyme, they're fatigued, their brain fog they're really bad migratory joint pain and other symptoms. And I test them and they're positive. Before I jump down that path and be super aggressive in treatment, I always look at toxic load because typically if there is a mold exposure, just like the toxic metals, if we take care of that, sometimes the immune system comes back online enough to control that infection without an aggressive treatment protocol.

You talk about trauma as having benefits. So what are some of the benefits of trauma? And how do we know when trauma has gone from supportive or hormetic to pathogenic? And then how much of a role does pathogenic trauma play in chronic illness?

Yeah, so trauma can be so varied in what we describe. Right. We can have like horrific abuse situations or like the Holocaust with Viktor Frankl. And those are true big T trauma. Those are really, really difficult or PT PTSD from the one of the wars if you were a veteran. And those are absolutely big T trauma. I don't want to ever diminish the trauma of that for someone listening. Compared to little T, where your sister got ice cream and you didn't and you're like, oh, I'm not as good as her. So those are. But they're all trauma and our system doesn't differentiate. So sometimes those little T traumas can build up a message in our mind about our value or our worth or something that we've, you know, done or been. And it's actually a big deal for our systems. So that's trauma. And trauma can have benefits because it creates resilience, it can create life. Like for me, part of my feeling like I didn't belong and not enough led me to want to be a high achiever and we talked about the problems with that. But the good thing is I got through medical school and I, I was valedictorian in my high school and so it did lead to some achievement oriented things that were really good for my learning and my desire for knowing more and understanding more. So trauma isn't always bad in the sense of sometimes it drives us to become better, to overcome, to become more resilient or to find. What I always find is there's purpose and meaning every where. If we look. And it's the same thing. We talked about framing the minions if we frame our mind to look for the good or look for the teaching in a situation, we can have some really horrific situations and I don't wish that on anyone and I don't want to minimize the pain or suffering. But when we're in it and we can't control it, what we can do is still look for what is the meaning, message, purpose here. And often we can find some really incredible things. And if you go back, you or anyone listening, you might think of a really traumatic time in your life and go back. And now you can be like, like, oh, that was so hard. But you know what? I learned how resilient I was or I overcame this and I can't believe I did that. And so you can actually look back right now if you're listening and remember some of these things and be like, there was something good there. At the time. I didn't like it, I hated it. But then it turned out to be one of the, and I will even say the cancer that was the first of my big traumas was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. It gave me a story, it gave me a platform, it gave me understanding that I would have never gotten into medical school. So trauma can, can range and this is the benefits is it can create resilience, it can create overcoming, it can lead us to. I talk about this in my book, but I remember sitting in a group of like incredibly successful entrepreneurs and I was like, I don't even belong here. And I looked around and the, the leader who was talking started talking about, you guys all have addictions with work and it's born out of trauma. And again I was with these amazing world changing people. And what I started to realize is some the of of the most successful CEOs, you know, they're being driven to produce, to be creative, to do things based on trauma. And that's a good thing, not a bad thing, as long as they deal with that emotional part of their health. So then what do we do about it? I think we all have little T, big tea, any tea in between. We all have some tea in our life and so we do have to be aware of this and aware of how it affects our messaging around what we're, what our subconscious is saying about ourselves. This is another little thing I used to, when I, after my divorce, my divorce kind of like rocked my world and shook me apart. I did been married for almost 20 years. So all of a sudden I'm single and I'm like, who am I? I don't even know my identity. I met my ex husband at 19, married at 21. So that's all I knew, right? And the beauty of that was it shook me out of my comfort and it, and it had me really think about who am I? What do I want to become? And also look at my own patterns and even though that was traumatic, I started to realize I can change my future by changing my subconscious. And just like the minions I remember at that time I came up with something that I would say I every day on my walk because I had a very low self esteem after that I felt like I was worthless, I was unlovable, all those things. And every day my walk I would say every day in every way, I'm stronger and healthier, wealthier and more resilient, younger and more beautiful. I will overcome all obstacles, I will outlist all adversity. Things are turning in my favor. And at the time I started, I didn't believe a word of it. And it's even funny. I'm really honest and vulnerable. Even saying younger, more beautiful felt so selfish and like, oh, I can't say that. How can I be more? But I was like, no, it's okay. And beauty to me is like, how do I love people? How do I shine? It's not like just physical. And you know what, Scott? This has been six or seven years and I'm seeing those things happen in my life and I feel there's a very clear correlation with like telling my subconscious what I wanted to become before I was there. I literally chose this identity and said, I don't believe it. I don't know if I can ever be this, but I want it and I'm going to try my very best. And I told myself over and over and I look back now and I'm like, from six years ago. Every one of those is true in some way, shape or form even. I'll tell you jokingly, and I'm sure my, my ex husband the other day is like, jill, did you get plastic surgery? I haven't touched anything like that. But he's like, you look younger than ever. I'm like, yes, we're friends so I can say that, but. And I haven't got plastic surgery or any treatment like that. But I thought it was so funny. Like it's true.

A little red light therapy. Hey, that's good for us, right?

Yeah, I did my own hat back.

Talk to us about the need to decouple from our story in order to heal. I've heard Neil Nathan talk about this. The importance of not living each day in our story if we want our tomorrow to be different than our today.

Oh, so that's kind of like just what I just said. I did not believe any of that. I didn't know if it was possible, but that was changing my story. And saying over and over this is what I want to become. But it's so important in illness because. Because often we get stuck at like, oh, I'm always going to be sick, or I'm always be alone and sick, or I'm always going to be unwell, or I'm never going to get well. These things are really common, and they're very commonly like, part of our belief system. And if you read any of the great books, Atomic Habits or Small Habits, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, there's some great books out there on habits. And habits are all about identity. So if I say I'm a nonsmoker, I don't eat gluten, I never even have to think about if I'm in a restaurant or if I'm offered a cigarette, which I don't know if that's ever happened. There's just. It's like. It's like, of course I don't. That's not who I am. But if you say I want to cut back on eating junk food or I want to do this, that's a behavior. So if I am sick versus I am well, so many people have lost weight because they're like, I am thin and healthy, even if they don't feel that way. So when they think of someone's offering them junk food or they're binging at night or wanting to binge at night, they're like, no, no, I'm a thin, healthy person. I don't do that behavior. And it's identity based versus, like, I do. I want it to do I not want it. What should I do in this situation? When we start to have a change in identity, there's no more strong way to create a new habit. And we can do this with smoking or drinking or overeating or gambling or whatever, but we can also do it with health. I am a healthy person. I am vibrant and thriving. You know what's funny, Scott? I talk about my cancer, my Crohn's disease, but you would ask me, have I had cancer. And if you asked me in a moment where I wasn't even thinking, I'd almost tell you no, because I have such a. I don't identify with it at all. I'm not a survivor. I mean, I am, but I'm not. I don't even think about. I'm like, I did have cancer 20 years ago. That's crazy. Like, I have such a. Such a distance from being that person that had cancer that it almost seems unbelievable that I really had cancer. Because that's not Me that's not my identity. I am healthy and thriving and vibrant. Mold related illness that was horrific. But again, I'm thriving and vibrant. I don't think of myself as ill or as stuck. And changing that identity is so crucial the healing. Because our subconscious will bring to pass anything thing that it believes.

My last question is the same for every guest and that is what are some of the key things that you do on a daily basis in support of your own health? And I know with you that could be a whole nother hour long podcast.

Well, right beside me I have my PMF mat and I love, love, love that that's been a huge and what I do is with the aura ring, I'll track interventions to see if it changes my sleep or my heart rate variability. So I actually feel like I have a little science behind at least my n of one my personal so I love my personal PEMF mat. I take an Epsom salt bath every single night, even when I'm traveling. I order salt to the room and if there's a bathtub, I'm in the bath. As an hsp, I found that to be incredibly good at kind of getting off the energy of the day and refreshing. So it's energetic as well as detox. And the magnesium sulfate in there is really good for detoxification. I don't daily sauna, but at least once a week I sauna. I take binders very frequently. I do electrolytes every day. I try to move, but I don't. I don't really work out. It's my secret. I'm in the best shape that I've been in since 20s and 30s. But all I do is I like have a see that push up pull up bar in the so that's when I walk through that door, I do a pull up or two and in my office I have the same thing or I'll do push ups like after I brush my teeth. So I sneak in little workouts where my body doesn't even know I'm working out. And I like to do it that way because it just feels more freeing. Friendships are huge. I think connection with people and I could say a lot more, but those are some of the big ones.

You mentioned someone that I look up to in the book, that's Dr. Edith Eger, Holocaust survivor who says our painful experiences aren't a liability, they're a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and strength. And I think that just so beautifully sums up your personal journey. Our whole discussion. Your new amazing book Unexpected. So just want to thank you Dr. Jill for being so generous with your time today, for writing this book and for doing all all that you do to help so many of us with chronic illness. I really respect you a lot and just honor you for everything that you are.

Oh Scott, thank you. And I want to say the same to you. You are out there bringing such great guests, such great information. I love your podcast. I want to make sure everybody knows this that they should. You have such a gift and you have used that to benefit so many people. So thank you. And thank you for having me today. I'm honored, yes.

Thanks Dr. Jill.

You're welcome.

To learn more about Today's guest, visit readunexpected.com that's readunexpected.com readunexpected.com thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a positive rating or review as doing.

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