The Connection Between What We Consume, Our Sleep & Our Health with Sachin Patel and Dr Jen Simmons

Hello, and welcome to Perfect Practice Today. I am very excited because we are having a fireside chat with Dr. Jenn Simmons. Dr. Jen is from Real Health, Maryland, and she is an exceptional human being with an amazing story that I know is going to inspire not only the practitioner in you, but if you're a prospective client who's looking for somebody who's empathetic and compassionate and somebody who really knows their stuff, then Jennifer is your person. So, Jen, thank you for being here today. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule and being willing to share the amazing journey that you've been on and what you've created for your clients as well.

Thank you, Satchin. I'm so excited to be here.

Well, let's start with your. Why? Why is it that you do the amazing work that you do in the world? Yeah.

So I actually come from a pretty unique background. So I spent the first 17, 18 years of my career as a cancer surgeon, and specifically a breast cancer surgeon. And I come by that pretty honestly. I was born into a breast cancer family. And what that meant for me was that as. As a child, I had a cousin. Her name was Linda Creed. And Linda was a singer songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s. She wrote all the music for the Spinners and the Stylistics. She was like the queen of Motown sound and totally larger than life. I mean, she was my absolute hero. I had an actual rock star as a first cousin, right? And she wrote, I think, 54 hits in all with her writing partner Tommy Bell. And her most famous song was the Greatest Love of All. So she wrote that in 1977 as the title track to the movie the Greatest, starring Muhammad Ali. But it really achieved its greatest fame in 1986 when Whitney Houston released it in March of 1986. And at that time, it spent 14 weeks at the top of the charts. Only Linda would never know that because she died of breast cancer just one month after that song was released. And so that no other family had to go through that pain and horrible loss that my family went through, I decided to become a physician and most specifically, a breast surgeon, because that was the only thing that I knew how to do. And in order to intervene, that was, like, the best choice that I had. And I spent a long time at the top of my field. And in 2015, when I had all of these balls in the air and thought that I was an expert juggler with my career and my family, and I'm an athlete and a philanthropist and, like, filling every single second of my day in every crevice of my being. And it all came crashing down on me. And so in 2015, I was diagnosed with my first autoimmune disease. And I was sitting in the doctor's office, and he's a friend and a colleague, and I'm listening to what he's telling me, and he's telling me that I need to have surgery and chemotherapy and radiation because I have the only kind of autoimmune disease that's treated just like cancer. And I'm like, having this out of body experience where I'm hearing Charlie Brown's teacher, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, as he's talking to me. And even though these were things that I recommended to people every single day without hesitation, without reservation, when it was coming at me, something instinctually told me that it was just wrong. And I went on this journey to figure out how to heal myself. And the first thing that I did was learn about food and learn about nourishment. Because as a medical doctor and I was trained at a very fine institution, and as a medical doctor, we're not taught anything about how to nourish ourselves. We're really not even taught how to heal, right? That is not part of the traditional medical paradigm. The traditional medical paradigm is diagnose and manage symptoms. And that is what makes a really good doctor in the traditional medical paradigm, right? You're a good diagnostician. You can fit those symptoms into a category and give it a name, give it a title. And so I first learned about nutrition. I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and one of the first lecturers is Dr. Mark Hyman. So here I am, like, I'm a physician. I'm going in with trepidation, right? Like, I think I'm a big shot. I think I know it all, but I know that I don't know it all. So I'm like a little confused in there, but I'm trying to open my mind because I know that I don't want to have my thyroid removed and chemotherapy and radiation. And so Dr. Hyman starts to speak and he introduces himself as a functional medicine doctor. So here's my cynical side saying, wait a minute, I've been a doctor now for like 23 years. What is a functional medicine doctor? I don't know such a thing. There's no such thing. It's absurd. And then I said to myself, like, jennifer, pay attention because you're here for a reason. And within five minutes of what he was saying, I was like, oh, my God, this Is it? This is why I'm here. This is why I got sick. This is what I was meant to do. And I literally, like, from that minute on, I enrolled in the Institute for Functional Medicine and, like, you know, took on way more than I probably should because I'm still working full time and still, you know, have all my balls in the air not recognizing that I was my own undoing. But that was really, like, my awakening, my aha moment. Like, I was meant to do this. And so I spent the next three years really submerged in learning about functional medicine. And in 2018, I said, I'm leaving surgery. And everyone thought that I had lost my mind, but I realized that there is so much more, and I didn't want to be part of the problem anymore. I wanted to be part of the solution, and I didn't want to only help that one on one person. I wanted to be able to help many people heal from a breast cancer diagnosis, prevent a breast cancer diagnosis, and other chronic diseases. And I knew that functional medicine was the answer. I love that I opened up my practice just a year later in 2019.

So what was your. I mean, clearly I can tell you're passionate about this and what was going through your mind, right? Because you have to give up. There's an ego death, essentially, that has to take place. Right. And this case probably two, right? The first one, when you had to kind of release the ego and say, okay, I'm here to learn something, and you receive some powerful information, and then the ego death of that title that, you know, that you had to let go of. So what was that experience like for you?

Well, so when I was on the fence of deciding whether or not to leave surgery or try to, like, create a hybrid in the confines of that practice, I went out to dinner with a friend, and he said, let me just. Let me just present something to you. Here you are driving down the Autobahn in your Ferrari, and you pull over, get out of the car, and walk into a Prius. Like, what is going on with you? So, yeah, I mean, this was like a major, major, major move, but I can only describe it as an elevation. So it definitely came at a big financial cost because I essentially started over, right? Like, I went from the top of my field to the new kid on the block. And a lot of people assumed that the reason that I did it was I lost my skills or they thought something else was going on with me. And in Philadelphia, where I practice, functional medicine is virtually unheard of. Like, I still two and a half Years later, no, two years later, I still, you know, look out at blank stares when I tell people that I'm a functional medicine physician. So it took a lot of faith, but I, but I knew, I just was filled with certainty that this is what I was meant to do. I mean, I really did have like almost a spiritual experience listening to Mark Hyman, which is, you know, why he, he holds a very, very, very high place in, in my perception that I inherently knew that this is what I was meant to do. And there's no question about it. And on those hard days, and there are plenty of them, on those hard days, I remind myself that this is what I was put here to do and I have a purpose and I owe it to people to do this. I love that, have an obligation.

So if I were to come to you or not me, let's say, but a female with breast cancer were to come to you, pre Mark hymen and now, what would the difference be? What would they experience differently from now and then?

So pre Mark Hymen, I was really only advising people on the very traditional treatments for breast cancer, which are surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. I was operating on them. I mean, I, I do believe that I was providing a very special service because, because I was what's considered an oncoplastic surgeon. So I did reconstructive work and I was always kind of looking for that silver lining for people. Yes, a breast cancer diagnosis is horrible, and I can't fundamentally change that. But I can say, like, is there something that you don't like about your breast that we can take this opportunity to correct? And that really resonated with some people and other people were actually quite offended by it, which is, you know, what makes people individual. But I was not really changing anything for them in terms of their long term trajectory. I wasn't intervening to that extent because I was trying to and obligated to function in the confines of traditional medicine, which are like, I had 15 minutes to see a patient. You can't possibly begin to educate people in 15 minutes. So I would do what I could and I made handouts and, you know, please study this at home and that kind of thing. But anyone who practices functional medicine knows that it's a very time consuming practice. It's a very time consuming endeavor, highly worthwhile for both the practitioner and the patient, but very time consuming. Now, fast forward to now. I do still review the traditional treatments with people because I'm not throwing out the baby with the bath water right at the point where people receive a breast cancer diagnosis, their sink is overflowing, Right. They're already exceeded their toxic burden. So you have to clean up. Right? So chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, they're mopping up the floor. But at the same time, I'm saying to them, now we have to figure out how do we turn the faucet off, how do we unclog your sink? So the major difference now is that, like, I'm helping people figure out the why. And even if we're not figuring out the why, we are still cleaning up their environment so that they can go forward in health. Because people do not know how to be healthy. They don't know what it means. They don't know what to do. They don't know what's interfering with their ability to be healthy. And so I'm just facilitating that for them.

I love that. So how many people would you say you've seen in your career? How many client interactions have you had?

Thousands. I can't even begin to guess anymore. I've been practicing a long time.

Well, the reason I asked that is I'm curious if there are any specific trends. Looking back. You know, it's easier to connect the dots looking back. If there's any specific trends that you're able to identify that could be helpful for somebody who's listening to this, who may have breast cancer, maybe some red flags that they can look out for, whether they're emotional, mental, spiritual, biochemical, environmental.

Absolutely. Well, the one thing that I'll say is that the diagnoses are getting younger and younger and younger, and it has nothing to do with genetics. Our genes are not changing. They're not changing so rapidly. Right. So we're pretty much living on the same gene code that we lived on thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. But what's changing is our environment. Our environment has become increasingly more toxic, and it's significantly more toxic now than it even was five and 10 years ago. And so people think like, oh, I'm too young for breast cancer. Well, guess what? No one else has had this degree of toxic burden like this current generation coming up. So what I encourage people to do, both pre diagnosis, at the time of diagnosis and after the time of diagnosis is dial in, dial into. You don't take the you're too young to have breast cancer or you're too young to have anything, because we've never encountered the amount of toxic burden that we're encountering now. And that has ramifications on people's health across the board. So don't accept Answers like, oh, you're getting older, you should be tired. It's not true. It's simply not true. And we know when we look at those, those blue zones that these people are highly, highly, highly functioning until very old ages. We are not supposed to be tired. We are not supposed to be feeble. That is a result of toxic burden in our environment. And so don't dismiss feeling bad as normal. We've normalized it in this society because traditional medicine doesn't know how to intervene. Traditional medicine doesn't know how to help. And so they normalize it because they can't fix it. But it doesn't mean that it should be normalized or that it can't be fixed.

Yeah, that's so important, you know, and the reason I say that is because you're on the other side of the hero's journey, right? Having encountered the challenge and met the mentors, got the training, you know, overcame the obstacles of bringing this back to your community, you know, quitting your, your previous life, if you will, and, and, you know, coming around full circle. And it allows you to be, I feel, because you went through some of the challenges your clients face, it allows you to be a lot more empathetic and ask yourself, what would I want? How would I want to be treated? I want someone to listen to me. I'd want someone to explore all the different possibilities for me to heal and look at my blind spots. Because the other thing too is sometimes the woman might be the canary in the coal mine. You know, what's affecting her is probably affecting her children and spouse and other people who live in that same environment or exposed to that same environment. Whether it be the lighting in the house, whether it be mold in the home, whether it be nutrient deprived foods, whether it be the stress, whether it be the emf. I mean, there's so many things that are globally affecting that entire family unit. And sometimes this illness can be seen as a blessing because it's a wake up call. And, you know, if the interventions are provided in such a way that it can benefit the entire family, I can see this as being a huge win. Hello, my friend. It's Sachin here. I trust you're enjoying this content. If you haven't already, I wanted to let you know about my free book called Perfect Practice. This book is for entrepreneurial practitioners in the functional medicine space who want to help as many people as possible. I've shared some of my best tools and resources in this book and it's absolutely free. Just click on the link below. And we'll send it to you at no cost. So with that being said, what are some of the interventions that you have that you provide to your clients? What is something that. Let me phrase that a little bit differently. So what's a connection that you've made through this exploration of functional medicine, lifestyle, nutrition and so forth that you've made to cancer that you would have never made otherwise?

Well, let me say that I was never taught any of the things that I work with patients about now. I was never taught any of this. So never was I taught how food can either both prevent and reverse malignancy, right? So what we eat and what we drink is our very greatest interaction with the outside world. And so it's of utmost importance. In addition, it is in close proximity with our immune system. So that interaction, 70% of our immune system is housed in our gut. So that interaction is happening constantly, every single day. And so, you know, we were taught while people were going through treatment, whatever you do, don't lose weight, right? So drink milkshakes. And they're giving out boost and ensure in chemotherapy centers and feeding them crackers and orange juice. And all the things that I know are the very worst things for cancer patients. And I'll go to say probably the worst things for everyone, not only cancer.

Patients, and at least I won't give them cancer.

So, yeah, so that connection between what we're taking in from the outside world is not there at all in traditional medicine. And so that is something that I work very, very, very hard with people to understand that connection, to teach them about what we're taking in and to help them control their environment in as much as they can. We're never going to control everything, right? We cannot possibly avoid all of the toxins, but we can do a lot better. A lot better. And so, you know, people are astonished with the. I actually have a course called my answer to breast cancer. And people, even people who think that they're educated, they're astonished with how much they learn about what is in their environment that is actually endangering their health and the simple fixes that they can do in order to remediate that. And, you know, another thing that I talk about all the time that never gets talked about in training is sleep and the connection between people who don't sleep and the development of cancer. And, you know, I actually, I have someone that I'm working with right now, and she's like, I sleep fine. That's not an issue of mine. And I said, really? How many hours a Night. Do you sleep? She said three, but they're really good. Three.

Wow. Three. No. It'd be funny. Sometimes I'd ask that question. I'd ask people, how do you sleep? Like, oh, I sleep amazing. My sleep's not a problem. And then I ask them how they feel when they wake up in the morning. Like, oh, I feel exhausted. I feel terrible. I'm like, you just told me you had great sleep. People equate closing their eyes and then waking up at some point in the future as sleep. They don't really pay attention to the quality and quantity. And perhaps the end product of healthy sleep is feeling energized, refreshed, and balanced. And if you don't feel that way when you wake up, then I would agree with you that sleep is probably one of the lowest hanging fruits for us.

And the other thing is, I suffer from this a little bit myself. So I assumed that because I wasn't overweight, that I was healthy. And I think that there are so many things that are happening with people that they don't associate with not being healthy. So, for instance, I saw someone last week, and she said, I'm a very healthy person except for my breast cancer diagnosis. And I was like, oh, okay, well, you know, let's start to unpack that a little bit. And it turns out that she has normal blood pressure and normal cholesterol, and she doesn't have reflux because she's been taking cholesterol medication, antihypertensives, and reflux medication for 10 years. Ten years. Oh, my God, 10 years. So people don't understand what being healthy means. And they think that if they're not suffering from symptoms, that they're healthy, and some of them even are still suffering from symptoms, but they've been taught to ignore them.

Right.

This is the best that you're going to feel again, like, normalizing all of these things. Oh, it's normal to be on cholesterol medication? Really? Is it not normal? To me, yeah.

It's common, but not normal. Right. You know, and as you share that triad of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and low stomach acid production, which is what we all know causes in most cases, you know, digestive issues and reflux. I mean, those are all sympathetic, dominant situations. Right. So more stress.

It's actually the recipe for breast cancer.

Right, right. You know, one thing I wrote an article about a few years ago that I thought was, you know, that it's very relevant to this conversation is how to cause cancer, because there's so many articles on how to prevent cancer, and it tells you what not to do. But an article that, and I would love to see you do this as well, is where we write an article that says how to cause cancer, and then people can check off like, hey, I'm doing like nine out of ten of these things. Yeah. And not knowing it. So, you know, it, it's, it's a shame, you know, that people don't necessarily have that recipe for health. You know, we've been getting. We get a recipe for disease management, but very rarely do we get a recipe for health. And you know, one thing that is sad but true is that that's what makes the system run right, is people not knowing how to take care of their magnificent body and what it's actually capable of. And that's message is in many ways suppressed. And we don't get that training in chiropractic school either. So although we have this really deep philosophy that the body can heal itself, we're never really taught how to do that. So that's why when I went to functional medicine training myself, I was like, wow, like nobody ever taught me this. And I'm so glad that I'm learning it. I had another question for you that maybe it comes up in your consultations or is an area that you explore, but how much do you find trauma plays a role in cancer? Have you made a connection there at all?

Absolutely. So just statistically speaking, for people who have a new breast cancer diagnosis, but in early stage cancer diagnosis, 30% of those people will have documented trauma in their past. And then when we're talking about the metastatic breast cancer population, so people whose cancer has spread from the primary and is involving some other organ in their body, that's 80% of them have trauma in their past. So I'm always asking about that and unpacking that. And, you know, we're making great inroads on ways to kind of intervene in that trauma and give it new meaning so that it's not manifesting itself with people over and over and over again. And this is a topic that you and I share and love to talk about, and that's the medicinal mushrooms and specifically psilocybin. And, you know, they're doing great work at Hopkins and I'm hopeful and anxious for them to release their data and allow for FDA approval for psilocybin for use in the breast cancer population and in fact, in any cancer population, because I don't think that the trauma history is going to be exclusive to breast cancer. I think that Trauma has an impact across that spectrum and I think that it's a really useful, meaningful tool that we need to incorporate sooner than later.

As you're saying that my whole body is covered in goosebumps. So, you know, definitely a lot of truth that you're sharing there and I appreciate that. Yeah.

But, you know, you and I are at least 10 years ahead of the curve and there's so much dissension in the ranks. I mean, true traditional medicine is just, they're getting there, they're starting to understand that there has to be more.

But.

There'S still a lot of notion where if this were true or if this were important, it would have been taught to them in medical school. And so they discount a lot of this because they were never instructed on it. And not everyone has an open mind.

Yeah, that's. Hopefully that's changing. Right. And you're certainly doing something about that.

And I believe it is.

Yeah. So is there a specific type of trauma that you've identified? Is it a loss? Is it sexual abuse? Is it something specific? Or is it just, I think, adverse childhood experience in general?

I think it runs the gamut. You know, just thinking about my metastatic patients and about, about 20% of my practice is working with women with metastatic disease and everything from rape, from sexual abuse, from physical abuse, mental abuse, adverse childhood events, loss of, of a sibling, loss of a parent. You know, it's there, it's there and it's real.

Are you doing any genetic testing on your clients?

I am, but not the traditional genetic testing that is happening in cancer centers where they, you know, test for 20 genes and they tell you, oh, you're at increased risk and there's nothing that you can do other than remove your breasts, remove your ovaries, but you can't remove your pancreas and you're probably not going to remove your colon. So, you know, you can monitor and wait for your cancer to develop. Right. So that's the traditional testing. Sounds pretty.

Sounds pretty gloom and doom.

It's horrible. It is horrible. I don't even know why they're not. Why they're testing for genes that are not actionable. But like, you know, I can only take on so much.

Right.

But what I am doing is I am doing a test called the DNA360, which is a collection of genes that are all actionable. So I am basically creating individual anti inflammatory lifestyles. Because whether people realize it or not, it's inflammation that's at the root of chronic disease. And so what we want to do is create the most anti inflammatory environment we can. And so this test instructs me as to how to create an anti inflammatory environment for people. So I am using it in conjunction with other functional testing. But a major part of of breast cancer is hormonal health. And in this test it actually like gives me a complete roadmap to their genetic pathways with regard to creating their hormones and getting rid of their hormones. And it shows me exactly where we can intervene in order to help people to really optimize those pathways to protect them going forward. And in addition to protecting their heart, protecting their brain, you know, doing those dietary and lifestyle modifications that really promote health. So I call it the Hundred Year Plan.

I love that. And DNA. Big shout out to DNA company because they do a great job and the reports are awesome, very actionable. And what's really cool about that test is that it provides you a lifetime of value. So it's not a test where if you do this in six months, the results are going to change. And it's something that people can apply in so many areas of their life. Right. How they sleep, the lighting in their home, the foods that they eat. And of course looking at their hormone genomics can play such a vital role and give give you specific insights into what their likelihood, whether they have the genes for cancer or not. But what are the precipitating factors that are going to be co contributors to that. Manifesting is really important. Yeah.

And because the genes are such a small part of the story, it's the environment that you put the genes in that is so very meaningful. And so that test is just another tool to allow us to create the correct environment for you, because that's really what it is. Your environment dictates which genes get expressed and which genes don't.

All right, great, great point there. Can you share with me maybe one of your standout stories or a favorite story that you have from a client that you've helped?

So I'm working with a former hairdresser and she was one of those women who was told that she was too young to have breast cancer. But thinking about her environment, it, you know, she was surrounded by chemicals and a lot of fragrance. And people don't realize that everything that has fragrance in it actually acts like estrogen in your body. So she was bombarded with xenoestrogens or exogenous estrogens or synthetic estrogens constantly, all day, every day. And she hid her toxic burden at a very young age. So at a very young age she developed Metastatic breast cancer. And she was one of those people. You know, sometimes you have to make a big change in people because they have to live their lives significantly differently after the diagnosis than they did before in order to have substantive change. And if you have someone who has mold illness and you know that their home is a source of mold and it can't be remediated, you know, sometimes you tell them they have to move. Well, she was someone who had to stop working in her profession. And two years later, I am proud to report that this young woman, who is barely 30, no longer has any evidence of disease. And it was about radically changing her lifestyle and her environment to allow her body to re equilibrate because she had exceeded her toxic burden. And when she put herself in a position to detox, she sent up the safe flag. Right. Those cells no longer had to go into survival mode. They weren't fighting for existence. They were able to exhale. Right. Calm down, get out of that sympathetic state into that parasympathetic state where they no longer had to, for lack of a better word, like misbehave. They came out of survival mode. And so it's stories like this that, like, light up my life.

I'd be curious about what her detox profile looks like on her genetic test, because she may have been compromised there.

Yeah, I don't. I honestly don't remember, but I. But, you know, even people with good detoxification capability, when you submerge them in toxins all the time, they're still going to overflow. Right. The poison is in the dough dose, right?

Yeah.

So when you're, when you're constantly at it, at it, at it, even, Even good detoxifiers will get overloaded.

Definitely something to consider. Right. If you're a hairdresser, because you can. I mean, I haven't been to a barber shop in a long time, but I remember distinctly when you go to a hairdresser, there's a smell. Even when you go to a nail shop. Right. There's a specific.

Absolutely.

Like, oh, this smells kind of toxic. I mean, you can kind of tell intuitively that this can't be good for you.

Yeah.

And especially if you're there, you know, 40, 50 hours a week working with these chemicals, you're inhaling them because your head at your face is right next to people's heads, you know? Yep.

Absolutely. And when it smells bad, but even when it smells good. Right. It's still toxic.

Right.

So, yeah.

So, you know, I love everything that you shared. I can see that you're really passionate about this. I can see that it makes not only an impact in your clients lives, but it certainly puts a smile and makes an impact on your life as well. What I'd love to do is kind of maybe shift gears and talk more about your entrepreneurial journey, because I would imagine you were working for a hospital system or working for somebody else and then you shifted to becoming an entrepreneur. What was that like?

Yeah, so that was actually the scariest part of all. Right. So I knew how to be a doctor even when I was transitioning to functional medicine and like, wasn't feeling as confident as I am now years later. But I still like, knew I was helping people and that even if I didn't know everything, I still knew enough to like help them be a little better. Maybe in some cases a lot better. But the business part is terrifying. And that's one of those spaces where functional medicine and traditional medicine are still in the same spot. Right. Like, they both train you to be the kind of doctor that they think you should be, but nowhere along that journey do they ever train you to be a business person. And physicians are notoriously bad business people. You know, historically speaking, like, I don't know if our brains just don't think that way, but I do find that the more entrepreneurial people are gravitating to functional medicine. So there's something about, something about that mindset that goes together, I think. But for me, it was terrifying. Like I went from fellowship into a hospital owned practice. So like my staff showed up every day, never had to pay anyone, I never had to pay rent. I never, I never, I didn't even know how to purchase malpractice insurance. Like when I tell you I did nothing but be a doctor, I did nothing but be a doctor. So like here I am putting my shingle out on day one and I'm like terrified because I have no idea what to do until I met you. Right. So you actually, for me, you were my beacon of flight. And I would have never been where I am now without you.

Oh, thank you.

Without question. Without question. And what's interesting is that I've been in the mentorship, I think two years now, and every single week, even if it's something that you've presented before, I learned something new because I'm ready for something new. And so there's something for every stage in the journey. And you know, for people out there who are just joining the mentorship and I feel their anxiety, I message them and I say, like, this may not be for you now. Just file it away. You'll come back to it. You'll be ready for this at some point. Like, do what you're ready to do now, and then there'll be a next step. And I think that working with you, you've made it like, easy and accessible for every step along the way, for each stage that you're ready for. And so for me, you've just been such a blessing because you took the part that I couldn't do that. I couldn't do that myself. I can figure out how to be a doctor. I can figure out what to learn, I can figure out what to study. But the business side of it, I couldn't have figured out on my own. It's not intuitive. That's something that you have to learn from someone. And I was so lucky to have you be my mentor.

That is very much received. Thank you for that. And I do want to also acknowledge you because, A, you have to have the humility to ask for help. Right. And not everyone has that humility. So I appreciate that about you, is that you're this brilliant practitioner, but very down to earth and always looking to work on yourself and, you know, personally and professionally both. I know you also worked with a few other people who are friends of our community that have helped you kind of polish this diamond as well. So it does take a village. And, you know, we've got some amazing, you know, peer mentors and a fantastic community. And of course you show up. That's the other thing is you show up, you ask questions. When you're struggling with something or challenged by something, you're always asking for guidance, which is amazing. And that's what winners do, is they ask for help when they need it. However, most importantly, you're also paying it forward. And, you know, like you said, you're reaching out to those people who you can see that this was probably you at some point. You're reaching out to them and reminding them, hey, it's going to all be okay. And as long as people have a realistic timeline, they can accomplish whatever goal that they want. So thank you for being a reminder of that. It's fantastic to see it in action, right? To see it, see your love and passion in motion is amazing. So I would love to talk about your programs and how you've structured them now, you know, since you've made this transition as well. Yeah.

So, you know, when I first started off, I was only doing one on one, and I still, I still really value that part of my work but the group programming that I have since developed, some of it from your inspiration has become almost like more meaningful because it allows like minded people to experience this together. And there's great synergy there. Like the growth that they get is exponential when they're doing it together. So I have two courses. One is called My answer to Breast Cancer and I have to credit you for helping me come up with that name. And this is a 12 week course that is for anyone along the breast cancer spectrum. It is a food and lifestyle based course that is geared at creating an anti inflammatory environment for people. And it has been tremendously well received and life changing for people. And so like it. It actually like swells my heart to read and to hear what people have to say after they've completed this course. And the other thing that I offer is something called the Real health Reset and it's based on your metabolic reset, but it's actually geared towards people who are looking to prevent a diagnosis. So it is like how to live an anti inflammatory lifestyle. And so it's really for prevention, but it's for prevention of breast cancer. That's why I developed it. But it translates into prevention of cardiovascular disease and autoimmune disease and other chronic diseases. And I think what most women don't realize is most women who are diagnosed with breast cancer, they don't die of breast cancer. Most women who are diagnosed with breast cancer die of cardiovascular disease because it's the same chronic inflammation that lives leads to those disease manifestations. And so teaching people how to live an anti inflammatory life is actually the key to preventing all of these diseases and the key to preventing and to preventing further progression of these diseases. And unlike what we were taught in medical school, these diseases are reversible. And I know that that's heresy. Like people think I'm irresponsible for saying that. And I certainly know that people have died of breast cancer and they will continue to die of breast cancer. But my hope is that I can fundamentally change the people that I reach. And for people who do make those changes, who live their lives differently after the diagnosis than they did before, change comes to them. And I just, my goal is to be instrumental in changing as many lives as I can and as many women as I affect, that spills over into their family, into their community. And you know, I pray that that's my legacy, that I left the world a better place than when I found it.

So inspiring, so, so inspiring. Thank you, Jen. This has been so fantastic and really enjoyed our conversation. I love to Let people know where they can find you, where can they learn more about you and how can they connect with you.

Yeah, so my website is called realhealthmd.com and in there are all of my programs. There's all also my blog there, but the Real Health Reset is on there. That is my prevention program. Some people use it for weight loss, but it is geared at preventing chronic disease. And then my answer to breast cancer is my 12 week course where people really learn to live an anti inflammatory lifestyle and learn what to do is to detoxify their environment both inside and out.

Beautiful. So for all of you practitioners, check out her website, check out the work that she's doing. For those of you that are looking for answers with regards to your health, please do the same. Jen, I've seen you follow me on.

Instagram @ Dr. Jensimmons with two N's.

Okay, I was just about to ask you that. Where can people follow you on social media? So thank you. And I know you do a lot of lives and you share a lot of interviews. So you've got a very active channel that spreads great information. So you're very much greatly appreciated and keep doing the amazing work that you're doing.

Thank you, Satchin. And thank you for everything that you've done for me.

Thank you. And thank you for taking the action that's required to bring it to fruition. And I still remember we've had several conversations and I remember some of those conversations were what am I going to do? Right. And you were able to find solutions and work through them. So, you know, I'm hoping that this inspires other practitioners to do the same. I'm hoping this inspires your ideal clients to seek you out and work with you in some capacity and, you know, make the world a better place, as you say.