2 Ways to Boost Your Sleep Tonight!

Her focus on other exposures with toxins and things. But today we're going to try to focus the discussion more on what I value the most, which is sleep in my recovery program and restoring. We'd like to welcome Dr. Brandy Cummings. She is not your typical nutritionist. She's a former blackjack dealer who tinily chooses steak over quinoa, roasted vegetables over kale chips, and most importantly, she understands her passion for root cause. Focused nutrition stems from her own struggles with illness, infertility, and feeling forgotten by conventional medicine. After overcoming severe mold exposure that triggered the loss of her first pregnancy, as well as countless other debilitating symptoms, Dr. B explored every corner of improving cellular health. She researched overlooked causes of chronic illness such as mold parasites, reactivated viral infections and dysregulated nervous system, and was alarmed at the lack of continuous care offered by the conventional model. Dr. Cummings holds an impressive list of qualifications with her doctorate of Clinical nutrition from the University of Western States in Portland, Oregon. She lives in Ohio with her husband and two young daughters and is proud homeschooler, foodie, and Lego enthusiast. You can find her at WW ResilientMotherhood Health. Welcome to our show today, Dr. Brandy Cummings. All right, I have Dr. Cummings, fresh off of a retreat I was at with her, and she has an incredible amount of knowledge about something that is very topical and important to me, both her work in nutrition as well as her focus on other exposures with toxins and things. But today we're going to try to focus the discussion more on what I value the most, which is sleep in my recovery program and restoring your circadian rhythm. So welcome to the show, Brandy.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Oh, yes. Let's discuss the circadian rhythm disturbances that happen to me all the time, because I don't actually ever. What is it that I don't do? I'm always up before the sun's up, and so I don't go outside and do all the things I'm supposed to because I'm inside operating a lot. So, like, I guess start with how you would prefer to optimize someone as poor at doing grounding and things like that as I am.

You know, it's interesting because my background comes from nutrition, and as I was going through school, the message was very much like, you know, everything starts in the gut, food is medicine, and so on and so forth. And while I can support those messages, the more I started learning around about circadian rhythm and our light exposure, everything just really got Flipped on its head for me, because the more you focus on dialing in your circadian rhythm and your light exposure, the less the food matters, the more robust the lining of your gut is, the more, the better you're able to sleep. It's like everything falls into place easier when we start there. And people like to, you know, go down a lot of rabbit holes. Very intense gut health protocols or parasite cleans or whatever it may be. But if you're not focusing on the light piece, we're missing such a big component because of how it drives the. The biochemistry that's underneath, which we could go there if you. If you want. But for somebody who is unable to do those things, you know, like getting into morning sunlight, there's certainly things we can be doing throughout the day to protect ourselves from the light that we are exposed to.

Well, I certainly, I mean, I have people who travel a lot to come, both have surgery and. Or take advantage of our programming in Austin. So they get thrown off a little bit by obviously travel. And if you have a much, much earlier schedule, like I run just due to, you know, my nature of what I did, I'm going to bed pretty early. I'm, you know, I'm cutting off eating early so that I have a little bit easier time getting off to sleep. And I do the things where I, I feel, you know, some basic things can help by, you know, stopping food intake relatively, like three hours before I go to bed. That's pretty much my thing. And then I stopped drinking a couple hours before bed, and I try to get the, you know, the room that I'm going to sleep in cooler and restrict the light and try to make it easier so that I can sleep. And I try always to get six and a half plus, which for me is good. And then I hop out of bed and I'm gone before it's light out and I'm inside again, you know, especially on an operative day. So I don't. I don't then from a circadian rhythm, get that balanced out. So how. How goofed up am I?

Well, I know from knowing you, you know, personally that you are doing so many other things, you know, to support your health and to support your mitochondria. And I know that you don't operate every day. And so all of those things, all of those things help. And it's so interesting. Like people will come to me and they're with something like constipation or I've got this mold illness, or I don't have any energy or I'm not sleeping. And everybody wants to focus on, like, that nighttime routine. What are you doing before bed? All the things you just said, make sure you're not eating, make sure you're getting enough sleep and yada yada. But what I want to know is, what are you doing when you first wake up? Because if we can get into the sunlight, obviously you can't do this if you're operating before the sun. Sun comes up. But if we can get into the sunlight in that early morning, within that first hour of sunrise, we're getting those messages that communicate with the clock genes in our brain. We're getting that infrared light, which is going to then increase production of exclusion zone water in our body. And that exclusion zone water is kind of gel, like. And so it helps to increase resilience and robustness so that we can interact with our environment in a more profound way without getting all of these chronic symptoms, especially when it comes to, you know, pathogens and parasites and viruses and bacteria. When we have more exclusion zone water in our cells, we are more resilient against those things, and they're not going to result in downstream effects compared if we don't have as much exclusion zone water. And the other thing that I see a lot in my practice, low MSH with, especially with people with like, mycotoxin illness, which is melanocyte stimulating hormone. And that is because, you know, every, like, everybody likes to focus on the thing, the mold. I'm going to do this detox protocol, but that's great. And we have to focus on the light piece. Piece, because when we get that early morning sunrise or going to cleave something called palm C, and that palm C is going to get cleaved into melanocyte stimulating hormone, which is then going to help with our energy, with our libido. With exclusion zone water, it's going to be more protective. And so if we're in a situation where we're working schedules that don't allow us to get into that sunrise, number one, it's like, okay, is, have we tried? Like, is it a priority? Is there something we could switch around in our schedule to make sure we can do that? And then if we can't, what can we do? So throughout the day, how can we get those messages from the sun? Because again, we have clock genes in our body. How can we. We have photoreceptors on our skin and in our eyes. So how can we get that message from the light through the day that tells our body what time it is? And so getting outside, getting breaks, timing your meals so that you are eating in alignment with your circadian rhythm, meaning having, you know, good protein and fat within an hour of that sunrise, eating the majority of your carbs around lunchtime, not eating a huge meal at night like you said. And then in addition to that, protecting our eyes when we can from the artificial light that we are exposed to because that interferes with our signal. Our body doesn't know what time it is. And so if we can have, you know, like blue light blocking glasses or filters on our devices etc, that is going to help us sync up what that message is. Because there's all kinds of research, you don't have to dig very far into PubMed to find all kinds of research around artificial light and fill in the blank. Cancer and depression and anxiety and obesity and this conversation around our light exposure, I don't, I don't know why I'm not seeing it like as a first line of defense for people. And then the other thing, one last tip, I'll just say if that can really help, is to match the position of your lighting source to what's happening in the sun, with the sun. So if the sun is not overhead, outside, let's turn off our overhead lights inside and try to match that positioning and that'll help as well.

Well, I definitely have tried say for instance on like a weekend where it's obviously a lot easier for me to do something, is head out on my deck and catch the sun, you know, coming up. That's probably my most probably when I'm in alignment with natural light and it's winter time in Texas, a little odd winter right now, it's a little bit snowy here and somebody gave me a, they sent me a video from New Orleans where it was snowing quite a bit, which is for them. Wow, that's really odd. Yeah, so in Texas it's odd, but Louisiana, that's not common. So we'll just say boring. Like you know, our natural weather events we're experiencing right now across the country on a, on a good day, get up, obviously like you said, get the, the first part of the morning sunlight, which has got more of what you're discussing, which is the light that's, you know, we've got the whole thing with too much light and skin damage, etc. I don't need to go into an argument like that. But I like you're describing first thing in the morning, try to get up and do that. And is it important to do that in association with grounding or philosophically, are you trying to do those the same or.

Yeah, I'm a fan of a habit stack. And so the more things we can do at once, the better. Because the thing is that we are getting. This is another reason why this is so important, because we're getting more electrons from, you know, from the ground when we're earthing. Those electrons are what we need to drive the biochemical processes in our mitochondria and the electron transport chain. We need those electrons so when we can get more electrons from the earth. This is part of the reason why people can fast for a really long period of time. Because some people think for some reason that we only get electrons from our food, and that's not true. We get electrons from, from the earth as well. We get electrons from our water. And so if, yeah, if we can stack those habits, even better. Because then you're getting these messages from the sun that are, you know, giving good signals to our clock genes that are helping to cleave that palm C into msh and that's increasing that exclusion zone water in our, in our cells. All of that is good. All of that is going to help produce more cellular energy and to increase resilience to harmful things in our environment. And then if you can stack it with grounding now, you're getting some additional electrons which are going to support those biochemical pathways and result in more cellular energy being produced as well.

So we're trying to get a better balance. I mean, obviously, I certainly agree with that in terms of then from a cellular standpoint, we want our nutrition. Like I'm a big protein person for what I'm doing. So I'm specifically aligned in that when I have patients come, you know, that like you said, may or may not, you know, have traditionally done fasting, I don't have them do that obviously around the time that we're doing things because we want to increase that specific macro has to be increased for recovery. So if you came in and you were trying to do fasting, you actually make yourself sick. You're actually not taking enough again. So I really have people from a recommendation standpoint, they're like, oh, you know, what, what can I do? What, what would be a good form of exercise? And I have them, you know, go walk now, doing the walk in the morning, you know, that would be optimal based obviously on weather allowing and, and then throughout the series of times they try to eat during the day to get more protein in, obviously. I don't ever really, really talk about carbs with People at all. I just talk about like high protein and amino acids and, and healthy fats. And I, I just tell folks like the carbs, you know, on a, if you think of what we're trying to lean into is basically a gluten free, dairy free type diet, high, high, high protein content with healthy fats that doesn't really leave a lot of room for carbohydrates and you're not really going to desire them in that night. Yeah, if you're running that. So that's in alignment with, you know, what we're doing. And that, you know, in our setting helps the energy that then would fall in the afternoon, remain high in the afternoons and then allow people to maintain what I want them is not upsetting their rhythm by then feeling they got to take a nap in the afternoon because that will definitely throw things off. So I put things from a balance standpoint that way because I create this huge burst of cortisol with surgery which throws everything off, puts people into a fight or flight state. So from our standpoint, bringing people into our environment is meant to lower them. So we do things to put people in a parasympathetic state. We have all these ways to promote that through lymphatic massage and nanov and hyperbaric therapy and red light therapy and you know, the diets and the walking, you know, timing that up now people will want to walk more because they're so like programmed to do different.

Yeah.

Exercises. And the exercise for us during this time is, is really walking. So we'll adjust, we'll say, you know, based on how they're doing, get up and, and try to walk earlier. I do want people, you know, timing up and getting to bed in alignment with what's happening cyclically with daylight so that they're not like staying up all night and then trying to sleep in because that's not going to suit, you know, what their body needs in terms of rhythm for, you know, the restore and repair functions that the hormones are needed to be released at certain times at night and maybe, yeah, you know, when your circadian rhythm is thrown off, then obviously those things are going to be thrown off. So you don't get enough deep sleep, you don't get enough REM sleep, you're not getting enough cycles of sleep and then you never actually achieve the. I always just layer it this way in terms of quantity and quality so that all the things that I need to have happen, you know, in terms of lymphatic drainage hormone release are not happening. So when I have somebody say, oh, I had to get up and go to the bathroom multiple times. So that's, you're not, you're not really understanding what we're telling you. So, like, for Everybody listening, for Dr. Cummings and I, you know, to execute what she wants to layer into what I do, and you really have to stop eating and drinking a certain amount of time before you go to bed so that you can go to the bathroom before you go to bed. So then you're not waking up in the middle night feeling like you. That's, that's a response that we want to avoid because that will disrupt your circadian rhythm because you're never going to achieve the depth of sleep, the quantity and, or quality, if you want to think of it that way, of, of sleep. So that discussion about circadian rhythm gets thrown off by my patients. So I have to get them out of that, that cycle as quickly as possible so they can take advantage of all the good things you're describing and get up and have a walk and achieve better balance with the sunlight and the earth and go on and rinse and repeat, so to speak. So stack the habits.

Yeah. I mean, and especially thinking about like post surgery, the lymphatic system doesn't have a pump, but what it does have is sunlight. And sunlight creates voltage and voltage moves that lymph, you know, or even like constipation. You were talking about people being jet lagged. You know, when people come to me with constipation, they immediately like to talk about fiber, they like to talk about hydration. And my biggest question is, like, what's your light environment? Like, can you show your stomach to the sunlight in the morning? Because that, those photoreceptors on your digestive system are going to help that migrating motor complex and improve your constipation. And people are just blown away at like how fast things can turn around after they've just spent so long, you know, just trying to like get more fiber or drink more water and it hasn't touched it and this, this touches it, this gets us there.

Yeah. What's your system? I always just talk about balance and you know, whether we're talking about circadian rhythm or lymphatic drainage or energy or light or anything, it's, you know, fundamentally, if you don't have balance and we're very much whole shot drug society in terms of how we think to approach problems. And I mean, my clients are very aggressive about how they approach things. So they will, like you said, get invested in a protocol and they want to obviously do it, to try to get it to fruition, to see if it will help them. So many times we have folks searching for answers, but not necessarily under underlying. Knowing the underlying reason that that's, you know, potentially not going to resolve it. So whatever it's cleanse or a protocol or a supplement or a package or whatever they're trying to do in conjunction with things you're discussing, just trying to find a balance in those. So I do like that. I, I do, you know, we promote walking. I think, you know, what I've taken, you know, from this is something that I will discuss with them is just timing of it so they can get better alignment. Unfortunately, in Austin, it's a little bit warm in the summer, so I'm gonna have to have them get up a little bit, maybe a little bit earlier and get that out of the way before it gets to be blazing outside. Because we tend to get on the wrong side of the thermometer very quickly here in the, in the spring and the summer.

So the good thing is it only you can see a net benefit with like two to five minutes, which is great.

Yeah, it's just that early part. That's what I was thinking. This is the easier, easier, you know, sell. And I always want people to do things, you know, when they get up to get things from an energy standpoint. I like that. I, I always depends on your chronotype. Obviously, you know, some people are just more suited for that. But yeah, I prefer, you know, to try to get that happening, you know, sooner. And then, you know, like you said, that window, that's a good window to try to get it done early. And then that helps people get, you know, on the right. You know, I always say, like, if things start well after surgery, then it's. It's much easier than to, like you said, habit stack or. I always talk about, you know, getting, you know, one good day after another and then that creates momentum. So that recovery is far less challenging. And all the things we do to promote and make it more efficient for them, it just becomes. I try to make it more habitual. That's why I have people here in town. You know, if I have somebody coming from Europe or Asia, I just spoke to some folks from Australia and it's, you know, they're going to be here about a month because it's very difficult to turn people around and have them go back home after such long travel, you know, times to and from.

Totally.

So that's even. That's my kind of Guilty pleasure is to have folks around us for a longer period of time as our program works very well. And certainly the more time we have with patients, the better off we feel they are. I have a great team here in Austin that takes just wonderful care of the patient. So it's really a shout out to them and all their efforts. So in terms of. We were talking a little bit before about mold, and you've mentioned it several times. It seems to me between that and parasites, you know, after I get people explanted and they're doing these things to improve, like you said, their circadian rhythm and their, their balance in that, with all the other systems working on those things can be very difficult for our patients, both, you know, short term and long term after surgery. Any, you know, tips or insights you have that are maybe ones you feel like sharing, that would be simple things to help?

Yeah. Well, again, I think it's like once you get your light situation figured out, not only your exposure to the proper sunlight, but also protection from the artificial light, once that gets optimized, everything downstream becomes easier. Your body is going to let go of toxins easier. You're going to be more resilient to these things. And so everything downstream gets easier. And that's why, you know, like, I work with, I work more in like the chronic illness population, specifically with moms. And, and so many times they come to me. I'm not the first practitioner they've come to. And they've done months and months and months, years sometimes of heavy duty detoxification protocols, and they're still not better. And when I ask them things like, okay, what have you done around light? They look at me like I've lost my mind. They haven't done anything about light. When I asked them what they've done to support their nervous system, nothing. I can't believe how many people come to me who have done these heavy duty detox protocols with no nervous system support. That has to be on board. The light has to be on board. So I mean, my tip for helping to make things easier, this light thing, this is free or very low cost. Maybe you need a pair of like blue light blocking glasses. But this is free and it's very quick. Many people report seeing results in just a few days. This is not hard. And this helps everything else downstream become easier.

Yeah, I agree with the filtration. So for those who are just listening to us, you can't see. But all of my glasses I use for recording up against screens are all made with the filtration that she's talking about to block the blue light because that is a big deal in terms of screen time. And for you folks who are just locked on your iPhones all the time, I know that that can be an issue. So there is something called downtime that you can set on the phone. If you don't have a lot of self control, that can be something that helps you. So you can set that, you know, really drop your screen times. That would probably be beneficial for everyone. So I want to thank Dr. Cummings for coming on the show, but please tell us where to find you. And I know you have a summit coming up, so please let everybody know where to to find you and obviously learn more about the summer.

Yes. So my website is Resilient Motherhood Health. That's also my handle on Instagram, so you can find me there. And then the Resilient Motherhood Summit is launching February 28th. And Dr. Rob, you are a speaker there, so we will make sure that we have your link for that as well. And that will go February 28th through March 6th. We have 40 experts that are coming to share all of their expertise. Because my philosophy is that if mom ain't healthy, nobody's healthy. And so how can we rally around these mamas and get them the information they need to take the very next best step and actually find answers to their health so that they can spend their days making memories with their kids instead of trying to plan their day around how they feel?

All right. Thank you so much.