Restoring Fertility: Sarah Kleiner on Light, Circadian Health, and a Natural Pregnancy at 43

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. This show is for men and women who are exhausted, inflamed, living with brain fog, gut or skin issues, and who won't settle for answers like, your labs are normal, or, just take this pill. Here, we focus on the root causes of disease and on what I call repair deficit, the gap between what your body needs for optimal health and performance and what it's actually getting. This podcast is not personal medical advice. It is education to help you ask better questions so you can make better decisions about your health. Thank you for joining us and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone. Dr. Stillman here today. I am excited for another Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing episode with my dear friend, Sarah Kleiner. Sarah, hello.

Hello.

Sarah has a great story that we hear all the time of being told you're infertile. You know, there's so much that goes along with that that I think people know enough about. That I won't get too into the details of, of, of what that means in the conventional allopathic world. But you chose a different path and had a different experience. And we were just talking about your second child who's 3 now, right?

Yeah. He'll be 4 in October.

So obviously you proved them wrong.

Yes, I did.

And so I like to start, Sarah, by asking everybody who they are and where they're from.

So I'm Sarah. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. I've been here all my life, definitely trying to get out of the city and move somewhere a little more rural at the moment, but this is where I'm from. And I am board certified I'm certified in applied quantum biology by the American Naturopathic Medical Board. I've been working with clients in the capacity of health coaching for about 15, maybe 16 years now, but more so in the quantum biology circadian space for the last, I would say, 5 years solid. And yeah, that's me in a tiny little nutshell.

Tell us your story.

Yeah. So I have been in the natural health world for a really long time. I have an older child with a vaccine injury and that put me down the rabbit hole of Like everything is BS in the medical world.

Yeah. Yeah. We're surrounded by toxins and we're told they're medicines and we're told it's normal for everyone to get cancer and be infertile and be confused and depressed and anxious and otherwise, you know, slowly going or rapidly going crazy. Yeah. That's normal.

Yeah.

It's just life.

In that world for a long time, 18 years, almost 19 years now, but I decided, you know, because of my older child who has severe disabilities that I knew I wanted to have a second child and we just never could get it together because she has so many challenges. She's very difficult. It's hard to raise a child with so many needs and then think you're going to have—

How old is she now?

She's 18. We have guardianship and she's with us full-time. So.

So you had 14 years, a gap between—

15.

14 or 15, 15-year gap between the 2 kids. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was during the pandemic really that we were able to slow down. I stepped back from, I was teaching yoga full-time and kind of working one-on-one with my clients there doing nutrition and yoga coaching. And the pandemic shut everything down. And I, we took a step back from everything and we were like, we got to do this. I had just turned 40 and we're like, it's time for the second baby. You know, if we don't do this now, we're never going to do it.

Wow.

And thinking I've been living so healthy and clean for years, you know, low tox, non-tox everything and clean eating and, you know, all of it.

Doing everything right.

Doing everything right. Everyone says that these days. That's like the new, like, what is that? What does that mean?

I know. It's like when people tell me that, you know, it's like when people, people are like, oh, well, diet and lifestyle. It's like, what diet?

What does that mean?

What lifestyle? Oh my gosh. We asked that question. Sometimes I, I hope my patients don't think I'm confrontational, but a lot of the time when they say like, I have this or that, I'm just like, what does that mean? And it's not that I'm trying to be confrontational or interrogate them, but these details do matter, you know? So anyway, back to your story.

Yeah. And you know, at the time I had been following a carnivore diet and doing some fasting because I thought it was the best for anti-aging and weight control and autophagy and just the best diet. You know, I was in that, that kind of crew of this is the proper human diet.

And there's a story there. I want to hear the story of how a yoga teacher goes on the carnivore diet. Cause usually I feel like it goes the opposite direction.

That's how I got my start online, believe it or not, in 2019. I got to start sharing online by accident in 2019 because I had severe IBS. I had so many gut issues, bloating. I would eat and look 6 months pregnant and I was miserable. And I felt like I had really run the gamut of the different diets. And a friend of mine who is a functional medicine doctor said, you got to try carnivore. I was like, you're out of your damn mind. You're insane. Who would do a dumb diet like that? That's crazy.

Yeah.

But I was at that point of desperation. I was in so much pain. I couldn't even sleep at night because my stomach would keep me awake. And so I said, I'm going to try this carnivore diet. I had been a yoga teacher for 12 years. And lo and behold, my gut issues were gone within about 2 weeks. And I felt so much better. So I was very convinced I had found the Holy Grail. I was sitting in an Ashtanga yoga class, or, you know, it's not really class. You show up at the ashram in the morning and you have your practice. And I was finishing up my practice one morning and I'm looking around at all these People I know are vegan and vegetarian and they have vegan potlucks at the studio. And I'm like, I'm a carnivore, I'm Carnivore Yogi. And so I started this page called Carnivore Yogi on Instagram and it just like, it took off. People were just like, I got to follow this chick who's a yoga teacher, but also doing carnivore. This is wild. And so I got very involved in that community. They were very kind. I'm still friends with some of the people in that community, a lovely group of people.

They didn't excommunicate you for eating animals?

Well, the, you know, there, I got some haters. Oh, the yogis? I kept it a secret. I would block people in my real life if they found my page. I would just like block them. I try to stay secret, but—

I don't know why I think that's so funny. I think that's hilarious.

It is really, it is really funny. I mean, it is, but I was just like, I just started this page to share what I was doing. And then it attracted a ton of people. This was 2019 and it was, it was genuinely really helping for the first year. Then when I started the fertility journey, it was no longer helping.

Well, tell us, how did that journey start? You obviously started having, trying to have a child. And then at what month were you guys, this guy's like, this is not normal. Something's wrong.

Well, I got pregnant immediately, like the first try, but then I lost that baby with, you know, it was an early miscarriage. It was like 8 weeks. And then my doctor said, well, you know, you're 40. This is par for the course at your age. Just try again. You'll be fine. So a couple months later, got pregnant again.

Was that a functional medicine doctor?

That told me that?

Yeah.

No, just my regular OB-GYN.

Okay.

Yeah. They said this is just 40, the stats, you get pregnant, you, it's miscarriage is really common. And it, you know, there's a partial truth to that for sure. So I just took it as word and then the next one came and I lost that one. And then the pressure started. Your age, you're, you know, running out of time. You need to look at IVF. And so reluctantly I went down that path, still not really questioning my diet and my low thyroid numbers and all these other things as potentially playing a role because I was so enmeshed in the carnivore community. And so many of the carnivore doctors were like, no, this is a great fertility diet. And I even talked with Dr. Kilts and he was helping me, who, by the way, he's eating carbs now. But he was a big proponent of the diet back then and carnivore for fertility, and it wasn't working. So I went through, did 2 rounds of IVF, which both did not work. While I was doing the IVF is when I was introduced to Dr. Kruse. I've only had one conversation with the man my entire life, and I kind of just took that conversation and it pushed me to study more and learn more and change everything. So I will always go back and credit him with that starting point of this journey into circadian biology, quantum biology, but I chose to study with other people.

Well, I mean, you chose to. Like, it's impossible to study with Jack.

You can't. No, you can't study from Jack.

I don't think it's feasible. I think you can sign up to be a patient. Sort of frustrating for me because I found his stuff and I was like, this is very compelling, I would like to learn more. Yes, but there was just sort of like, read 800 pages of blogs.

The blogs. Yeah.

I was like, I don't—

I don't—

I did, I did read a lot of the blogs, but I did too.

I totally did.

Yeah, but there's only— you can only train in this with other people, which is actually not a bad thing because I think that The trainings that are out there, like the Institute for Applied Quantum Biology, it's much more practical for clinicians.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah. Because, you know, Jack says a lot of really great things, but how do you apply that to the mom, you know, with the kids and the working person who can't move and the person who lives in Canada who literally can't leave where they are. So there's a lot of where I went on to study with Quantum Biology Collective and, you know, other mentors, teachers that I had was I had to understand how, first of all, I could apply this to myself and my life, but also then to my clients, because I was still at the same time working with people as a nutrition coach and a lifestyle coach. And I was eager to give them this information as well. So I changed my diet. You know, that was one of the first things because I started understanding seasonality of food and that we're not meant to stay in a ketosis or low carbohydrate state. And it's just not a, not healthy to do that for long extended periods of time. So there was that recovery period, but then there was also the the light signaling. Got my very first tan that summer.

First ever?

Well, probably since my 20s. I did some tanning bed stuff in my 20s, but, you know, I'm in my 40s. I had pretty much been hiding from the sun for most of my adult life. I just was told it was bad for you. It was going to cause skin cancer. And, you know, I bought into it and I really thought about it. I had never really been outside for a sunrise and I was absolutely staying up every night on my phone with blue light in my face, searching, ironically searching for fertility cures.

And my gosh, yes.

You know, it's like the irony of it, but everyone does it. Everyone's on their phone at night and they don't realize what that's doing.

I think we need to unpack though, for those not sure what we're talking about, here's the crash course. So light times all your circadian rhythms and your circadian rhythms control your hormones. And You know, it's a bit embarrassing, I think, for modern medicine to have sort of neglected one of the fundamental forces of nature, light, let alone the electromagnetic spectrum, the rest of it, the invisible parts like radio and microwave radiation. But, you know, it's actually staggering to me, you know, and I discovered a lot of, like, I read Fritz Hallwitz's book, The Influence of Ocular Light Metabolism. Sorry, The Influence of Ocular Light Perception on Metabolism in Animal and in Man. Say that 10 times fast. And that's an old book, 1976. It was out of print. I had to buy a I mean, it's a tiny book. It shouldn't be more than $10. I had to buy it for $200-something on Amazon because it was out of print. And I'm glad I was able to get a copy before, I mean, all of them disappear, I guess. But my, there's chapters in that. There's a chapter on light and thyroid, light and testosterone, light and ovarian function, light and adrenal function. This was all worked out decades ago. And all of the animals in nature, I mean, this is so well studied. They all respond to light and it drives their fertility. And people will say, oh, well, the Polar bears come out when it gets warm again.

Yeah.

Because of the sunlight, you know, or the animals know when to hibernate because it gets cold because of the lack of sunlight. And so when you step back and think about what controls, because it's, you know, that controls food availability in the environment. Why is there food on the ground? Why is it on the trees? What are the animals doing? How much fat do the animals have? How lean are the animals? All of this is controlled by seasonality, which is driven by, you know, the amount of incident light in the environment. And so the fact that modern medicine left that behind and just said, yeah, you can bake your face in artificial light and wear sunglasses and live behind tinted windows and, you know, you'll be fine. And then you get into the animal data and the animal data is wild. You can manipulate the proportion of pups that are male or female by changing the light that they live under. Whoa. And, but then you ask the question, well, what do we know about this in humans? And it's like nothing, nothing. No one has done any like real studies on this because it, and of course it's relevant. Like, What guy wouldn't pay money? Who's had, let's say a guy has like 6 daughters and he just wants a kid to play football with.

Right.

You know, would you pay money for that? Yeah, sure. If I can stack the deck in my favor of having a boy with the next, next childbirth and, you know, obviously vice versa. Right. I mean, so many women want a daughter and all they get is boys. So it's so important and it's so interesting, but it's like, we have so many more questions than answers. So it's interesting.

I'm wondering how that's related to the animals. I don't think I've seen that data before. Is, was it more sunlight that they had more males or females or what did that look like?

That's in Health and Light by John Ott. And then if you haven't read Fritz Hallwitz's book, it's so good. It's well worth reading. So you discovered all this through Jack Kruse and what happened next?

The work, you know, the work of actually waking up every day and doing it, adding again, the foods back in. But every day I was outside in the morning, regardless of, I couldn't always get out to the highway to see the sun coming over the horizon. I just had to be in the front yard a lot of days in my pajamas and, you know, bring my water outside. I wasn't hungry when I first started because of years of suppressed metabolism and fasting. And so I was gentle with myself. I allowed myself to gradually bring the food in, but the light started first. And once the light was very established, the hunger followed. And that kind of reinforced what I was learning about leptin and light and, and how they really work together. And then the sunlight exposure during the day, gradual, you know, started with my legs, started with short sessions because I'm very fair-skinned. But I was, like I said, by the end of summer, I was pretty tan and feeling really good. I felt amazing. And I had also lost 30 pounds. And so that was an incidental thing that had happened. I had wanted to bring my weight down with carnivore and I had done all these fasts. I did a 7-day water fast. I had done a lot of extreme fasting. In that arena. And I was somehow 30 pounds heavier from all of that. I mean, I get it now as a nutrition coach, I understand that mechanism, but when I was doing it, I didn't understand why I was gaining weight and feeling worse. And, you know, what's going on? This is the perfect diet and everyone should be fasting, fasting for longevity and blah, blah, blah. But I gave my body what it needed, the light, the proper food, the nutrition, the minerals, and 30 pounds fell off and then I got pregnant that winter without IVF. And I had been told by my clinic, you know, you probably wanna start considering a donor egg at this point. Wow. Because we never got any viable embryos from 2 rounds of IVF. We didn't get a single, which I'm glad. I'm very glad now. You know, the moral, that's a whole other topic.

Yeah.

I wish I had never gone in that world to begin with, but it is what it is. And we never got anything out of it. And then I was told, yeah, you should probably start looking at donor eggs. And I was like, no. Then yeah, came, my son got pregnant and had him at age 43. Perfect. Amazing birth. Easier pregnancy at 43, 42 than I had at 28 with my daughter. Really?

Wow.

Yeah. So much easier. So much easier. Yeah.

So question for you in retrospect, carnivore really helped you, right?

Initially. Initially.

Yeah. What's your perspective on it now?

It really should only be used short-term. It really should only be used for specific people and it should not be used for weight loss.

Ever?

I mean, maybe if someone is like 300 pounds and they just really want something very simple that they can follow, you know, that is perhaps an exception. But for the average woman that comes to me that wants to lose 30, 40 pounds, absolutely not.

Have you ever heard of a guy named Nicholas Gonzalez?

No, I don't think I have.

He was an MD in Manhattan. He died about 11 years ago. And Nick treated cancer exclusively using a very specific diet that was worked out before him by a guy named William Donald Kelly, who was a dentist who cured himself of pancreatic cancer.

Oh, wow.

And Nick's work then extrapolated or built on Kelly's work into what is now known as the Gonzalez Protocol, which we're actually— I just talked to Nick's widow 2 weeks ago, and I'm chomping at the bit to train with their foundation, which I didn't even know was an option until I spoke with her. And what's interesting about Nick's work, right, is that he was taking people at the very end of life. Not that they were doomed, but, you know, they were at the end of their physiological tether, so to speak. They were going to die or they were going to beat their cancer. Right. And what he found was that there were many different metabolic types that were not easily deduced from just taking a history. He would do hair testing and I'm still not really clear on what the protocol was, which is why I want to study it. But he would then recommend one of, I think it was 9 different diets.

Hmm.

And they were all fairly different and they could be as different as, you know, mostly vegan on the one And then it might be cooked vegan. It might be raw vegan. And then there was also like cooked meat and like raw meat diets. And he'd used a lot of pancreatic enzymes and various other, I think, glandular and enzyme preparations. Although I'm not, I'm not intimately acquainted with exactly what products he used. And what struck me about that when I discovered his work and actually shadowed him for a couple of days in his clinic was, you know, different people may need extreme diets at different times. Right. And I think it was, I think Hippocrates said extreme remedies are sometimes appropriate for extreme diseases.

Yes.

Now most people do really well in the sort of middle category where they're— it's what you're probably used to hearing about people eating and eating, right? I never got the chance to ask Nick, or maybe I just didn't know enough clinically to ask him like, hey, do people's types change over time? Like, do you end up taking someone from, say, like a raw meat over to a more balanced type? But I would be surprised if the answer was no. I expect the answer to be yes because people can be so changeable and there's so many factors influencing who and what we are. That are honestly so hard to quantify, which I think is what makes this work challenging. But I bring that up because, you know, and I'll say this to patients because we were often changing diets from this to that and sometimes making pretty radical shifts. You know, the doctor never treats the same or sees the same patient twice because they're not the same doctor and they're not the same patient, which is really just a playoff of, I think it's Herodotus's, you know, a man never steps into the same river twice because he's not the same man and it's not the same river. But I really believe that, you know, I've seen people make a lot of, and we regularly get people who Well, actually we don't get them that much anymore, but we would regularly, at least in the past, get people who are like, I'm carnivore, can you help me? And the general answer that I tell my staff to give them is yes. However, we may recommend that you integrate something that you're not eating into your diet.

Okay.

And we would hate for you to not get the results you're interested in because you don't do that. And, you know, whether they sign up to work with us is up to them, but we just lay it out. Hey, we may or may not endorse that. It may not, may or may not work for you, but But, you know, we've seen, and it's really clear when you look at the data on the carnivore diet that number one, it can mean so many different things. Like a carnivore diet could technically be all fish and it could be fish with shellfish.

Right.

And, you know, I know people, I think Saladino at one point was like, oh, it's, I'm eating fish meat, honey, and fruit. What does this even mean?

Right.

And I've looked through this and you can have giant spreads in your copper, your zinc balance. You know, people often don't realize how much copper is in beef liver, so they may overconsume that relative Relative to skeletal muscle, which is richer in zinc.

Or they overconsume and end up with a copper deficiency. That's what I had at the end of it was my zinc was super high relative to copper. Cause I didn't really eat a bunch of organ meats cause I was told that it wasn't necessary. So yeah. Oh, there's all, there's like so many different little cults in the carnivore community. And there's people that the long-term, long-term people that have been doing it 20 years, they never eat organ meats and don't even eat salt. And it's just all kinds of That sounds miserable. It's wacky. I'm glad to not have to do that anymore or be a part of that. Nope. Y'all go have fun. I'm going to be over here enjoying my watermelon in the summer. Every moment of it.

I have to tell you, I think salt on a steak. I mean, there's few pleasures in life greater than that, in my opinion.

I agree. Oh yeah. They have a no salt thing and you could go real deep into that diet. And I don't really, like I said, I don't really recommend anyone that just really wants general health benefits and to lose weight. I don't recommend it. Even if you have, like I did, severe gut issues, it's not a long-term protocol. Maybe it can give you some relief, but then you need to dig deeper. What is going on in your gut that's causing it to do that in the first place? You know, if you just stop at a diet, you're never really going to the root cause. You know, yes, nutrition is incredibly helpful and I use nutrition therapy with my clients and coaching groups. It's crucial, but that is not where you stop. You have to go deeper than that.

Yeah. You know, I think that what I started to think about, and I ended up with something of a disillusioned view of the natural health world as a result of looking into the light and EMF subject. Partly I was disillusioned that in the natural health world, you know, this, this information was lost. It wasn't unknown. It was lost. Why was it lost? Because people didn't talk about it. And I sort of looked at what I was seeing in the conventional health space. And when I say conventional, I should be really clear. I mean, like the natural integrative conventional space, like the big leaders, the big names. I won't name many because I respect them, but, you know, they forgot this information. They didn't publish this information. They didn't promote this information as much as I think they really should have. And as I looked at the problem, it was really one of just a lack of appreciation for the fact that— and then I love looking up the definitions and etymologies of words. So the word diet in Greek doesn't just mean what you eat. It actually means one's way of living. And frequently it refers specifically to one's way of living as prescribed by a physician. And the word nourish means to raise up in the proper way. And what I think is so fascinating about that word, right, is if you're nourishing like a plant, you would never think to not nourish it with light. You're putting it in a closet would be silly. That's one of Jack's favorite analogies, right? Like, who's confused as to why the plant they put in the closet dies? But I started to realize, and this actually goes back to the root word of the word eat as well. So eat means to take into your body and incorporate it, but it's Interesting to think that if you get UVB light on, say, your skin, you're technically eating it because the UVB light is then turned into vitamin D. And that's why when you don't have an appreciation for light and its effects on your metabolism, you are missing a huge part of your nourishment. Right?

Right.

Quick pause. If you're listening to this and thinking he's talking about me, I'm tired, foggy, inflamed, and it feels like no one can figure out why, then your next step is not another random protocol. It's a structured assessment with myself, Or a member of my team, go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Pick a time that works for you and add it to your calendar. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care, and it's not a promise of cure. It's a calm, structured way to stop guessing and see whether our approach is right for you. We have a limited number. Number of these appointments each month. If this conversation is hitting close to home, visit stillmanmd.com now and book a call with myself or a member of my team. Thank you for listening. Now back to the episode.

And that was fundamental for me. And I, it's, I'll even sometimes with clients have to push in harder on them. I get fertility people because of my story and they want to work with me and they want to improve fertility. And I'm like, how's the light stuff coming? Because half of your plan is the light protocol and you're looking pretty pale right now. So tell me about how that's going for you. And that can, you know, be a difficult conversation of just, why are you so pale? What's happening? Did you not believe me with this part? Because it's, it's part of it. You know, you can do all the things, but if you are still avoiding the sun, this is only going to do so much for you.

So we jumped back to the carnivore diet and why it worked for you. I'm curious, what, what did you start reintroducing first when you went off carnivore? And what did you notice as you did that?

I was just craving Vegetables. Like I was just craving it. Oh my gosh.

Were you craving them before you came off the diet?

Before I came off the diet, I started craving like asparagus and salad. It's like, this is weird. You know, I had been avoiding all the plant foods are all toxic. You know, it wasn't even—

Oxalates, Sarah, you've got to worry about the oxalates. And I, by the way, I can't say that without saying there are some of you who have oxalate issues. I'm not gaslighting or belittling or diminishing that, but they're not Like you're not going to die from spinach. You're going to be okay.

Right, exactly. Oh, and I craved spinach. I mean, I think it was just, I was missing all those minerals really that you get in vegetables. And so that's really where I started. It was in season here. I'm in Georgia, so plenty to choose from, but really just the plant foods. I was cooking them down, obviously going slowly. And then I was scared of fruit. I was definitely very scared of fruit, but started adding Fruits in, got amazing Georgia peaches down here, watermelon, things like that. So yeah, I was very slow to bring it in, but I did. And it did help even though it wasn't a high-carb diet, like some of the Ray Peat people that swear you got to eat 300 grams of carbs a day to survive. It wasn't like that. It was more of just a balanced approach.

That's great.

Yep.

And did you have any problems reintroducing them?

No, not really. I did use some digestive enzymes and I did have a few days where I was like, oh, I think I put too many things in at the same time. So I need to chill out a little bit.

Yeah.

So when I'm working with clients, cause I get a ton of ex-carnivores that come to me or people that are carnivore and they're having the metabolic downregulation and they're having the issues. And I'm like, let's have a whole reintroduction, kind of a ladder plan that they need to follow because you have downregulated the enzymatic function in your gut by restricting all plant foods. Your microbiome is different. So we have to go slowly for a lot of people, but no, but the one thing that was really bizarre that I have to say is that when I did get pregnant, I only wanted to eat potatoes. That was it. I think, cause I had just deprived myself of potassium for so long on carnivore diet and the B6, I would just want to eat potatoes covered in ketchup all the time. It was quite odd.

It made sense. That sounds great though. I'm crazy about potatoes.

Me too. Great food.

And we do I mean, particularly for our carnivores, but across the board, we generally tell people the thing you've been missing the most. If I had to pick one thing, it would be the root vegetables. It was interesting. I was recently reading the Gut Psychology or Gut Physiology Syndrome by Natasha Campbell McBride. Have you heard of her? You read her book?

I haven't. I have had a lot of people go through GAPS and have a lot of experience with GAPS people though, for sure.

They come to you after it doesn't work for them, right?

Yeah, correct.

Right. Well, I mean, just goes back to the point I made about Nick Gonzalez. It's like every diet will not work for someone, someone, right? You know, and in a season of life, right? But I thought it was so interesting reading her book because she's adamant that you've got to avoid carbs, maybe not completely, but largely. And I remember thinking, gosh, you know, we give people a lot of root vegetables right out of the gate and they do great. I just think it depends, you know?

Yeah. It always depends. Always depends. 'Cause, you know, I've spoken out about this online quite a bit and gotten a fair amount of hate from carnivore people. The OGs who know me when I was back there, they've all been super cool, super nice, like Dr. Baker and Ken Berry. They've always been, even though I disagree with them, we are always still respectful and nice to one another online. And that's how it should be, even though I'm speaking out about my experience and what happened. And so. You can't really argue with that.

I know. Right. Yeah. But people will try to trust me. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm curious. You mentioned too, how, you know, you changed your light environment. Walk us through, if you would, everything you changed step by step from then to now.

First thing was I need to make this a game. How often can I be outside? How often can I be touching the earth? It was my first priority before I even did anything to the internal lighting and even bought a pair of blue blockers was Especially in the morning, how can I be outside? You know? So that was the first thing that really changed that gave me a remarkable boost in energy and appetite regulation was time outside. After that, I started kind of surveying the inside of my house and the light bulbs. And I started just adding in more lamps with incandescent bulbs. I started adding those around the house. I didn't—

Before they made them illegal.

I know, right? You can still get them in Georgia. Thank goodness.

You can?

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that's great.

I've got them all in here. Yeah. And there's a kid, his name is Diego. He has a company called Strainless Light Bulbs and he, I believe he's in New York, but he ships them even to California. So he's, he's got his own. I've been supporting Diego, his light bulb company. He's a college student. So you can get from Diego his, his light bulbs anywhere you are in the US. So yeah, I started just adding incandescent bulbs to my indoor environment. Not flipping on the big light any longer. I always had this visceral reaction. I hated overhead lights my whole life. And then it all made sense once I started understanding light and biology. I'm like, okay, this is a totally normal thing for me to be completely irritated by these lights. So that was the next thing. And then I bought— I think it was Matt, Matt Maruca from Raw Optics actually reached out to me.

Oh yeah.

And said, hey, can I send you a pair of blue blockers? I was like, yeah, okay, fine. So he gave me my very first pair of blue blockers and started wearing those and noticed even more of a difference and better sleep. And so, yeah, that was kind of the progression of changing my light environment.

Love it.

Yeah. Nothing complicated.

What else did you change? Actually, before we get into what else you changed, color temperature. I mean, this is, and I guess I got to preface this for people who don't know. So light bulbs have a color temperature. And the reason I'm asking is that, you know, the color temperature basically is the code that tells your brain what time it is. So like a really bright white light bulb is very similar to— it's measured in Kelvin. It's very similar to the sun in the middle of the day. So when you bake your face in that, like one does with one's iPhone or smartphone or whatever, you're telling your brain it's the middle of the day, which is why it's basically impossible to go to sleep with your phone in your face.

Right.

Even if you have some like screen tint, night mode, whatever, I don't find those to be terribly effective the way that they're built on the phones, which I also think is by design. It's kind of like, oh yeah, I don't know.

Give me just enough work. I don't know if you've seen his work at all. Yeah. I got to get him on my podcast. We've, we've chatted before, but he's done a ton of the research on mental health and light and circadian rhythms. And he's done a lot of really interesting research, but he did one on blue light, dopamine, and gambling, and basically showed the people that were gambling that were exposed to the color temperature. Everything was exactly the same. The lux was the same. The only thing they did is they pulled the blue out of it. And the gamblers that had the blue in their lighting, like I said, lux, Kelvin, everything controlled for. Only thing that changed was the blue. They were less risk-averse. So when they started losing, they just continued like playing. And then the gamblers, yeah, the ones that had no blue light in the environment were way more conservative. So if you think about that, when we have our phones in our face and we're online shopping, we got a frigging shopping cart full at 11 o'clock at night, you know, or you open the refrigerator at night, you've got that blue light in your face. It's more of like, you know, I don't care if I'm going bad on my diet and eating ice cream at 9 o'clock at night, that it actually plays into that part of your brain that makes loss, you know, less of an issue.

So that is so wild.

Yeah.

You know, I'll never forget the first time I walked into a casino in Vegas. I was there for a conference and I remember just thinking like, what is this place? There's Like crazy lights and weird noises. I was like, this is the most overstimulating place I've ever been. But you better believe that the people who make, I don't know, whatever million bajillion dollars on gambling, like they've figured out all the ways to hack the central nervous system. There's some evil genius who I'm sure is employed by all of them. Like what color temperature should we make the back of this roulette machine? I don't know. That doesn't make any sense.

I know.

That tells you how little I know about gambling. Thank goodness. That's such a great study. And it goes to show you, by the way, that like people in private industry will figure this out and not tell anyone for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. I'm, I feel like I regularly hear things about, oh, you know, this or that got published by the DOD or DARPA. And it's like, oh, they've known that for that long. Oh goodness.

Mm-hmm.

But you know, they, they don't have a reason or they have a reason not to tell people. There's an incentive for this lack of transparency. And so the public just can end up, if they're not careful, Really making, I mean, catastrophic mistakes. You know, I'm sure you see this with, you know, with kids. It's just the way that young people are interacting today is so digital and it's so bad for them and they have such a lack of community. And I mean, I just, I don't know how all that's going to play out. It's very alarming.

Yeah, I agree.

So I've, but I was getting to like what color temperature your light bulbs are.

Inside, I keep them pretty dim, you know, I try to rely on just going outside during the day. I don't try to bring in really bright bulbs. I know they have them now. I have, they have, they have all kinds of new technology. There's all these light bulb businesses and I just try to go outside during the day, you know, set my alarm.

Yeah. Like I'm curious.

Yeah. At night it's like a frigging brothel in here.

Okay. You gotta unpack that. You can't just say it's like a brothel. You have to explain to the people who've never heard about red light.

We have red light bulbs that come on in the evening, the sauna space.

The backup, backup, why red?

Well, because, well, and you have to look at lux too. So you want to make sure the lux is not too bright. That's why in my app, my circadian app, there's a lux meter. So you can measure to make sure it's below a 10. That's important as well, because you can have red light that's too bright and keep your system alert and awake and making cortisol, even if it's red. But red—

The tie-in for people, red is the color that your body can wind down with because it's not present in sun. It's present in sunlight, but blue light disappears after the sun goes down. Yeah.

Blue light is the one that tells the brain it's daytime essentially. But lux can trigger that too. That's more of Dr. Cain's work, which is interesting. But yeah, everything is red. We've got the SaunaSpace glow lights. So you just flip the little switch and we have those. I actually have some UV bug zappers, which come in clutch because I end up leaving doors and windows open too much. And then these gigantic Georgia flies get in my house. So at night when we're relaxing, got my bug zappers like, because the UV is below that blue as well. So that's not going to disrupt your circadian rhythm. It's that blue and green. I think it's between like 400 and 500 nanometers. That's what tells your brain it's still day. So we've got the red bulbs, we've got our bug zappers that are purple UV.

That's awesome.

And that's how our house looks at night. We don't turn on lights or TV. And it's been that way for years. I mean, we just, it's a great thing you do for your kids. They actually want to go to bed at a decent hour. Everyone winds down, especially in the winter. It's like everyone's asleep at 7:30 at night because we don't keep artificial daylight going inside the house.

Yeah. We have red nightlights in our house. I mean, we finished the dishes pretty early and we're in Texas, so we're further south than you.

Yeah.

And so we get more natural light during the winter, but, you know, we have, I mean, we use maybe 1 or 2 light fixtures in the whole house on a regular basis because we have a combination of the nightlights. And then we just go to bed with the sun, which I think is such a powerful thing. And I always, always sort of appalled that people still haven't heard that you should do that, or they've heard and they just haven't taken it seriously, but it is, it's such a profound impact on people's health. And, you know, your story is such a I mean, just think of all the sacrifice and all the suffering you went through with, you said multiple rounds of IVF, you know, no viable embryos.

Yeah. Before the IVF, 2 miscarriages, which is horrible. You know, I never really understood how emotional and difficult that process was until going through it myself 2 times. And then I'm like, oh man, that's just, it's terrible. And then the IVF, I feel like was even almost worse than the miscarriages, especially since it didn't work.

Yeah.

I think I was even more devastated after that because it was about a $50,000 investment. Our insurance didn't pay for it between the drugs and the treatments. It was costly.

Yeah.

Emotionally, physically, it's very draining. You have to go to clinic every day pretty much, or every other day for a pretty invasive ultrasound and blood work. And then you're waiting around until 2, 3 in the afternoon for them to call you and say, your blood work said this, the ultrasound said this, and then you got to go back. It's just, I mean, People just say, oh, do IVF. I'm like, it's not, you don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah, no, it's a really hard process. And I've heard that from so many women. And then, you know, I've also seen women, you know, I've seen you mention this in, in content you've made, you had a low thyroid hormone, right? When was that?

My T3 was like a 1.5.

You mean your free T3? Yeah. And for people's reference, by the way, the lower limit normal is like 2.1. So it'd be 3/4 of the lower limit. And by the way, the lower limit normal on a LabCorp lab, like she just mentioned, is, you know, I start replacing people well above that. And so I'm looking for someone, because if you look at the data, the people who have the best quality of life and life expectancy, their level's 3.4 or above. And I know docs who are convinced that everyone should be above 4 based on their reading of the longevity literature. And so when you see these low levels, you have to really ask questions like, Well, first of all, why is it low? What can we do naturally to support it? So what did you do?

Carbs.

Yeah.

Carbs and sunlight and got it up to a 3.0 before getting pregnant.

You know? Yeah. Yeah. And I, I've seen that. I've seen women use light therapy and bring their free T3s up significantly. You know, we had a woman—

I would do the carbs too though, cuz just the light alone. I agree. If you're staying, yeah, I agree. Cuz a lot of people come to me from carnivore and say, I wanna do the circadian stuff to heal. And I'm like, I'm sorry, you gotta add carbs if you wanna work with me. There's other carnivore people now that are learning this stuff. You can go work with them. But yeah, carbs, not gonna fix it. I'm not gonna give you meds or I don't prescribe them anyway, but I'm not even gonna recommend meds cuz I tried to take T3 while I was still trying to stay low carb carnivore because another doctor told me you need to improve this number if you wanna get pregnant. So I tried to take T3 and it was not good.

You took just T3?

Mm-hmm. The Cytomel. And what was your starting dose? I don't even remember at this point. I remember I got the dose and then I had to cut it in half, the Cytomel. The side effects were so bad. So I even cut it in half and it was still too much. Just heart palpitations, insomnia, air hunger. I mean, it was like, I can't do this.

I generally don't touch thyroid hormone in the first 6 to 12 weeks with a patient unless I think they're very— they're not only are they low, but they're extremely symptomatic and they kind of have to line up all of the, like all the symptoms have to line up and it's not all of them, but the majority of them. And then I always have a shared decision-making conversation with them because Because the reality is we can, we can always start thyroid hormone. It's, it's not hard to do. It's at every commercially available pharmacy in reasonable, you know, reasonable formulations that I use every day. But I don't have to live with the side effects. And the reality is I have a case right now. It's a fascinating case, you know, without giving too much detail. Like she came in with a free T3 of 1.7, feeling tired, inflamed, foggy, et cetera, wanting to optimize. But still, she was still at a really high level of function, you know, doing her job. High-pressure professional, lots of responsibility, mom. But we just rechecked, I think after 3 months and her free T3 is still a 1.7. And so it hasn't come up at all. But I ask her, I'm like, how do you feel? She's like, I feel 12 out of 10. I feel so good.

Wow.

Yeah. There's so much that is not captured from these hormones. There have to be people without outlying genetics, like they're more sensitive to the hormone. You know, Jim Laird and I talked about this with regard to testosterone. He told me that when they were originally Looking at testosterone in men, they would see like 2 linebackers, same size, same strength, same capacity for work, right? It's kind of hard to— they are the peak horsepower of like humanity would be like a linebacker, I guess. And so it's not like one that's got a testosterone of 1,000 and one that's got a testosterone of 2,000 is any more or less masculine than the other. There has to be individual variability in one's sensitivity to these hormones. And I've seen this over and over again. for hormones that just without context mean nothing. Guys with testosterone in the 1400s who are losing weight and feeling tired and exhausted because they have a thyroid problem. So your story is just another great example of where the hormone alone is not, it's almost not helpful without, without context.

Right. I think everything has to be looked at with context because I'll have people that just bring me one lab number. I'm like, you know, We can't just look at one number. What is going on with the rest of the body? That's because nothing exists in isolation almost never. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's why I find when I do lab panels, if I haven't seen the patient for a while, I really do need to sit down and talk to them about it. Because if I don't, you know, how they feel, how they function, their weight, how their clothes fit, their sleep, all of it affects how I interpret it, you know?

Right, exactly.

That's why I'm so wary of these AI wellness platforms that are like, cause I have people coming to me all the time and they're getting bad data, bad outputs from these AI.

Oh yeah.

You know, in theory it sounds great, but in reality it's not there.

Right. If you look at just at normal lab ranges, that's gonna vary from lab to lab and then it's not really based on optimal, you know, like you said with the, the free T3, that's 2.2 up to 5.0 or something like that. You could be at 2.2 and be told you're normal and feel terrible. So it's—

Absolutely. Yeah.

It's all subjective.

Any closing thoughts, Sarah?

I, you know, I think we just need to get back to simplicity. I think we've gotten as a whole out there on the interwebs, very complicated with a lot of things. And some situations are complicated, but before you go down these rabbit holes of extra protocols, supplements, and even medications, maybe go back to these basics. I think that's what I keep coming back to over and over again myself. And then also with With clients, regardless of whether they're trying to get pregnant or they're in menopause, a lot of the same things still apply. Yeah.

That's why we used to let people go visit to visit with labs and supplements and meds and stuff. And, you know, we just didn't get the same results as if we had coaching built in.

Right.

And the, and that's where I think it's an interesting time right now. I think people are like, health coaching is, I think, relatively new because you didn't need a coach to help steer you away from all of the toxic and disruptive stuff in the environment. We didn't have LCD screens. We didn't have anyway, all this artificial light and EMF and whatever, let alone like, you know, you didn't have the option of eating non-locally, non-seasonally. But I think that one of the great tragedies to me is when I work with somebody who has gone to all these different doctors and ordered all these lab tests and done all these protocols, all these meds. And we're playing like who's who with who they've seen. And we find out like, you don't drink enough water. You never go outside. I just got an email from a patient about his, a family member of his saying like, I just want you to know this This patient gets zero sunlight, you know, and I, you know, I'm strapped sometimes for time asking all the questions in a consult that I want. And I, and that's why we do a coaching program in the beginning because we need them to understand here's all the diet lifestyle things and how they apply to you. So yeah.

Yeah. It's, there's so many things that we give people as far as protocols and nutritional considerations that sometimes we forget the sunlight. Like I said, with the fertility client, I'm like, why are you so pale? I'm not trying to insult you. I'm a Fitzpatrick 1 myself, but are you not? Do you not believe me when I say you need to start getting some sun on your skin? Cause I'm serious. Yeah.

Yeah. I totally agree.

Yeah.

Yeah. It can be, I think people sometimes don't understand, like my podcast with Andrew Cohen was great on this. In order for him to fix his sleep apnea, he didn't just take 20 minutes in the middle of the day to go outside. He moved his office outside in the afternoons. And then he would have 2 hours in the office under artificial light in the morning. And he would, he moved his back. So we got a little bit more morning light. You know, I sympathize with those who don't have a lot of flexibility. They work a cubicle job, they're under artificial light all day. You just got to do what you can do. But right, that's where we get into sometimes tough choices like, do you need a different job? Do you need to shop for a different career? You know, do you need to scale back your lifestyle expenses? But that's where I like what you said about simplicity. You know, a lot of people are just spending money on stuff that is not actually making them happy. What will make them happier than what they're spending money on is having their health.

Right, exactly.

Which is why we're all going to end up on homesteads.

I know.

Great to see you, Sarah.

Yeah.

Good to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Yeah. You're very welcome. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. If this conversation felt uncomfortably familiar and you're ready for someone to take your story seriously, your next step is to book a call with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Choose a time that works for you and confirm it. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a guarantee of results. It's a calm, structured assessment where we'll create a plan to help you achieve your health goals. We have a limited number of calls available each month, so if you see a time that fits your schedule, book it right away. Again, the link is stillmanmd.com. If you find this podcast helpful, Subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with a friend or family member who needs help getting their health back. I'm Dr. Leland Stillman. Thank you for listening, and until next time, be well.