Dhru Purohit Show - The Number One Food For Maintaining Fat Loss And How To Sustain A Healthy Weight And Body Composition With Michelle Shapiro

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Lifeforce and Lumebox. The weight loss journey isn’t always based on healthy and sustainable habits. Often, the pressure to lose weight can lead to drastic actions that can be harmful. Today’s guest is on a mission to share her weight loss journey, which she does not recommend to others, and provide guidance on how weight loss for better overall health can happen with compassion, empathy, and long-term healthy habits in mind.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Michelle Shapiro to discuss weight loss, the myths and misconceptions, and the healthier way to lose weight. Michelle shares her weight loss journey and the symptoms she suffered through. She also shares her thoughts on diet culture and calorie tracking, the importance of individualization, her hot take on intermittent fasting, and the importance of exchanging ideas for growth. Michelle Shapiro, Integrative/Functional Registered Dietitian from NYC. Michelle has supported over 1000 clients to reverse anxiety, approach their weight with love, and heal digestive issues. Utilizing humor, nuance, and compassion, Michelle helps clients access their liberating self-awareness. In this episode, Dhru and Michelle dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Misconceptions about weight loss that are damaging (0:00:53 /0: 00:53) Scarcity Mindset (1:41 / 1:41)  Protein for weight loss and body composition (3:10 / 3:10) Metabolism changes in response to weight loss journey (8:00 / 6:07) Michelle’s weight loss journey and the symptoms she suffered (11:00 / 9:13) Gut health for body composition (20:25 / 18:25) Michelle’s Losing Weight Lovingly Protocol (24:57 / 22:57) Weight loss as a symptom and diet culture (29:00 / 25:57) Is calorie tracking important and helpful (39:00 / 35:33)  The importance of individualization (50:00 / 46:47) Foundations that apply to all humans (54:00 / 50:00) Anxiety and panic attacks as a fire alarm for the body and how to treat them (55:00 / 51:34) Intermittent Fasting and who should avoid it (1:01:00 / 57:00) Eastern medicine and the importance of exchanging ideas (1:17:000 / 1:13:30) Back to the basics (1:21:00 / 1:17:17) Also mentioned in this episode: Quiet the Diet, Michelle’s Podcast To learn more about Michelle, follow her on Instagram, Facebook, or her website.  Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress go to mylifeforce.com/dhru!  Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device! That's over 40% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle Shapiro, 12 years ago, you lost almost 100 pounds in a very drastic move to lose weight. We're going to get into your story. But the kicker is you did it drastically and in a way that you do not recommend people. Now as a functional and integrative dietitian, you're on a journey and a mission to not only help people lose weight and improve their body composition, but more importantly, feel good from the inside out. And we're going to get into how you do that on today's episode. But let's start off, just like you felt you had mistakes that you made on your journey of weight loss that led to a lot of challenges that you had to unwind for years.

Again, we're going to get into that. Let's start off with some of the top mistakes you see when it comes to the body composition and weight loss conversation that's happening today. I think the biggest concerns I see in people approaching weight loss is not having enough protein, and we can and will talk about why that's so important along their weight loss journey, severely restricting in the beginning and putting themselves into a metabolic disadvantage in the long term. And then also having a really negative and scarcity mindset around weight loss, which then can produce nervous system changes that will not support long term weight loss as well.

Great. Let's unpack those for a minute. Right? I'm going to go backwards. What is this mindset, this scarcity mindset that you see working with your clients, seeing the conversations on social media, on podcasts, just seeing people's inner dialogue? What is that scarcity mindset that's so damaging? I think around weight loss specifically, we have this urgency and feeling to make ourselves smaller and limit ourselves. And what ends up happening is our bodies listen to those messages and our nervous system really wants us to stay alive. And so we will respond with either slowing down our metabolism, create anxiety and depressive symptoms when we are telling ourselves, you are going

to starve, our body is going to react in a way that's not going to be supportive for us in health in the short or long term. So it's an approach of sort of restricting. And the challenge with that approach long term from what I've seen is that it just doesn't work and it makes you miserable along the way. Yeah, absolutely. And then we also have tremendous amounts of studies and they're really well researched that when we restrict, it will lead to potentially more binging patterns. And those binging patterns are going to be a huge issue from, again, an emotional standpoint in the weight loss journey and a physical standpoint, too. Because just from even a calorie perspective, if you're cutting calories all day but then end up binging at night, you're not going to be in the surplus that you're

looking for. Let's go to a few of the things that you mentioned here. Again, before we get into your story, let's go to the first one. You were talking about protein. We've had that conversation on this podcast, a bunch. A mutual friend introduced us and connected us, Dr. Gabriel Lyne. You know, she came on, I think it was like three years ago and really sort of blew a lot of our audience's minds on this topic. Some of the clips that we had on her with protein have like 20 million, 30 million, 40 million views on social media. Let's talk about it from a dietitian's perspective, why is protein so important for people's weight loss and more importantly, body composition journey? Absolutely. So the reason we know weight loss is so important and that

is commonly known is that it helps us to maintain muscle mass and muscle is more metabolically active than fat. It's also interfacing from an immune system perspective with the rest of our body. Muscle is so essential in a weight loss journey because of the capacity to burn calories more efficiently because of insulin signaling and also just because of its effects on the rest of health. What I think is more of the hidden reason why protein is so important on a weight loss journey is that as you lose weight, you release toxins from your fat cells. And in order for your body to properly detox, we need a lot of protein for our liver to

function, for the creation of glutathione, that master antioxidant we hear about. Actually, the components of it are three amino acids. So we really need protein to help keep up with that toxin load. throughout the weight loss journey. Yeah, another thing that is kind of part of that, and I'd love to get your perspective, is that just the fact that from all the sort of research that's out there, protein seems to be one of the most satiating things.

Absolutely. Where it's confusing for a lot of people, and I will make some broad strokes and say that I think that it tends to be also a little bit more so with women, and I'd love to hear your perspective, is because when they start to go on this journey of like, hey, I might want to lose a little weight, improve my body composition. Well, a lot of them, first of all, aren't even talking about body composition.

They're just looking at the number on the scale and they're like, here's where I'm at. I want to be less, right? They think through the restriction lens that they're going to eat less. And so the idea of actually maybe eating more protein is going to help them, ultimately, feel better and look better, is confusing for them because it feels like they're eating. more, but sometimes it's actually what they need when it comes to certain macronutrients, especially things like protein. Absolutely. Yes. Protein is the most satiating nutrient and is also the most vilified nutrients. So I think people are really nervous to consume it. I think there's been

so many years of meat foods, protein foods cause heart disease. I think there's all these concerns that kind of combine into, I'm going to be better off if I just eat very low calorie. and protein does usually come out as being one of the first cuts. I absolutely agree with you. But protein is the most satiating nutrient. It is a thing that will make us feel the fullest. And in my opinion, then prevent more of that disordered relationship with food, prevent those binging episodes, which are inhibitors on this weight loss journey from a mental and physical standpoint.

So I think the second thing that you mentioned in between protein being the first and the last one being about the mindset piece was around sort of metabolism, right? Sure. Is that right? Absolutely. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Yeah, so our bodies are designed for survival. They really don't want you to lose weight. Weight loss is not a favorable thing that our body likes. Even though the end result of weight loss, if you had a more favorable body composition is good for your body, your body doesn't really know that or understand that. So what it's going to do along your weight loss journey is kind of try to stop you. It might drop your metabolism. It might increase your hunger. And there's hormones that are responsive to that and create the kind of landscape of our metabolism along the way. Metabolism also refers to energy metabolism, which means how do we actually get the nutrients that we need from food?

It refers to any process that turns food into energy. So along the journey, you want to do things that are supportive for your metabolism. So making sure that you have enough minerals and vitamins in addition to those macronutrients to basically let your body know, we're not starving. We want to do this. And this is an okay thing that we're losing weight. Got it, got it. In the practical sense, when you look at how people,

try to approach their, you know, diet or lifestyle today and they're telling you, oh, you know, hey, I want to lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds. What does that, what does the bad advice look like practically? What do you see out there when it comes to the metabolism conversation? What are we people doing that is ultimately end up sabotaging themselves? I think tremendous amounts of cardio. I think severe calorie restriction to start with. I also am nervous about things like vegan diets when it comes to weight loss because I do think

in the beginning people do get that little weight loss benefit from a vegan. diet, but then ultimately the results start tapering off. And then you get into a position where your metabolism is impacted. The tricky thing about this metabolism conversation is that some of the recommendations in the short term might help you lose weight on the scale, but they might be hurting you on the back end from that metabolism perspective. So really severe restriction. I think restriction of any one macro nutrient in any direction is a concern for me. I think you really need a balance of all of them because anything that your body can kind of signal as a an unsafe as a threat is going to start down regulating your metabolism.

Let's go back to your story here because this is going to set the foundation for an important part of whatever else we end up talking about. As I mentioned in the opening, you 12 years ago were in a place and position. I believe that you grew up in Queens. You're going to share a little bit more about this. And then you were getting ready to enter into university. Actually, we went to the same university. You finished. I dropped out. I think you're cooler for that. I think it's a good. And in preparation of going to university, you said it's important for me because I feel like I'm going to be in a different setting. I feel like I'm going to be judged for being overweight. You can expand on this a little bit. And I need to lose weight as quickly as possible, which again, we're sharing

here, you do not recommend this and it actually led to a bunch of problems. Add to that story. Absolutely. Yeah. So I did grow up in Queens, which was a super diverse place in every way you can imagine, which in my opinion makes it the best place. And really, I occupied a larger body for all of my childhood. And then going into college, you know, it hadn't really affected me socially, academically in any way. I was doing everything I needed to do. And I didn't really feel sick from it. But I was, it was kind of like I started off kind of bigger as a kid and then just gained 10 pounds every year and it really accumulated. And as I was going off to school, I realized Delaware is a much more homogenous place. And if I go there and I'm in a larger body, people are not going to feel about me how they felt about me in Queens.

So I went on this, again, highly non-recommended weight loss journey where I lost close to 100 pounds, a little over 90 pounds in a three to four month period. I basically just stopped eating and actually ate a vegan diet, which was really a disguise for an eating disorder. that was happening. And eating disorders are chronically underdiagnosed in those in larger bodies because a criterion for eating disorder is actually having a low BMI. So oftentimes they're missed in people. It's just like people were celebrating me and saying, this is great. When I got to school, I spent all four years chronically ill. I had never had a day of illness before then. I had a strong immune system. Felt really good all the time. I had panic attacks, gut issues, thyroid issues. Doctors had no idea it was going on with me. And what happened was if I did have talk about,

that were built up and they were being released by my fat cells, I was not giving myself the nutrients I needed to be able to detox them. So it led to this kind of cascade of illness that I do see in a lot of clients when they drastically lose weight. So we're always hearing weight loss is good as fast as you can lose weight. It's so important to lose weight, but we don't look at the consequences of what happens when you lose weight rapidly. And it's not just that you don't keep it off. There's other consequences too. What were some of the reasons that you think that those health issues were happening. You said you mentioned you're having autoimmune type things. Yeah. I mean, all these things were popping up again. Besides this just toxic piece of weight loss, I also believe that I did

not have enough nutrients for my body to signal how to function properly. Autoimmunity comes from a place in many cases of just an unsafety, again, this lack of safety in the body and your body not knowing where do I direct my resources? That's really what autoimmunity is, is where do I send my immune system? How do I support this person? I was on such a locale. I had no protein, no minerals, nothing. And when you're in that state of stress, you're losing water constantly, you have to replenish those things. Or else there's downstream consequences throughout the entire body. Were you also eating, obviously there's healthy ways that people can be vegan, et cetera, right? I used to be vegan. I'm not anymore, right? So we have that in,

we have that in common. Were you eating more of a processed vegan diet? What kind of vegan diet were you eating. I mean, when you're eating that low of calories, you're just not eating much of anything. I was eating like a lot of just vegetables with like Pam spray because that was like a thing. Pam spray? Like like the like non-stick spray that we used to have because it's like zero calorie, like margarine spray. Got it, got it, got, got it. You were cooking in that. Just omega six spray. Yeah, basically. And then I would have like a veggie burger. And I really am issuing a, this was a true blue eating disorder. I mean, that's, it's not true veganism like you said. I was not really having processed foods. I just wasn't having much of any solid nutrients. I was getting like air,

basically. It just wasn't good nutrients. At what point in time did you start to feel that, I mean, you knew it was a problem because you were suffering from all these symptoms. At what point in time did you start to get some glimmer of hope that there was another way of going about this? What was that turnaround moment in your story? Yeah. So I was going to a lot of doctors when I was in college still and they were saying to me, you should actually lose more weight. That was actually their answer to this. They were like, this has nothing to do with anything besides the fact that this is just timing and genetics and you were just planned to be sick at this time. I didn't realize that the starvation led to this lack of homeostasis within my body until I saw a naturopathic physician,

Dr. Robert Kochko, who ended up being my business partner, kind of by force after we had such a good appointment. I was like, this is going to be a very long-term friendship. And really, we sat in that appointment for two hours. And I realized, I was like, oh, this is medical care. And it changed not only my personal story, but also led me down the path of functional and natural path of nutrition. Not to get too personal, and you can say skip on this, but since we're bringing it up, you know, at that time when I was like vegan, I saw, you know, I was part of like the community and a lot of people were going vegan or like raw foodist or whatever. There was many like women that were part of that community that like lost their periods.

Oh, absolutely. Because they were so under eating. There was no fat. There was no other things. Not too different than like a marathoner who lose their period because their body is like, hey listen, this is not the right time to be thinking about fertility and creating a baby. Is that anything that you experienced? It's a really good question.

I think because I started at a higher weight, I might have had some like reserves for the fats that I needed to create those hormones, but I have seen people in larger bodies lose their periods very quickly. I like to think of the body also as the body shows you your biggest vulnerability. For me, my cycles have always been perfect. Like, you know, I have a lot of clients and friends who were on birth control for a long time or they had PCOS, even at a young age. This was one thing that my body did not show me as being a problem, but any other way the body wanted to, it showed me in ways of like nervous system, autoimmunity, you know, digestive issues. But it didn't pick on me in that way.

You know, the body picks and chooses. When you met this doctor and they ran some basic test, helped you get kind of organized, what were a few things that stood. out as why your body was saying, ouch, in all these different ways. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think what was so illuminating for myself was we ran a Dutch hormone test. And it's different to hear I'm stressed. And for someone to look at you and say, you are stressed.

In New York, we never believe we're stressed. We're like, we can handle it. We'll do anything. To see how stress was impacting my stress hormones and ultimately my nutrient levels, my vitamin B12, that to me was like, what you do in your life is tangible. and I can show you in your labs. And that was a real turning point for me because my cortisol was sky high. And the downstream effect of that is,

I ultimately probably would have lost my period if I didn't intervene. Or I would have had other hormonal issues because my hormones were starting to tank even then. And it was only how long into it a year into it or something when I had started seeking medical care. So the Dutch test, which is a dry urine test. A lot of practitioners run it. Sure. and they're looking at sort of your 24-hour sort of hormone cycle of things, cortisol, a bunch of other components that are there.

Was there something else that stood out in sort of the lab work that you got done or at least the analysis? Because partly it's lab work, partly it's his clinical experience of looking at you. What were some of the other pillars that stood out? Yeah, I definitely think the experience of being witnessed, which is like as a practitioner so important in the work that I do. just having someone look at you and repeat things to you that you're saying, like, yeah, I eat this in a day.

Even he was looking at my diet. We were doing a dietary recall and he was like, you're eating still like 800 calories a day. Like what is going on. Having what you are doing be laid out to you and shown to you like a mirror, it really was impactful for me. We ran every nutrient test, every stool test. I had really was just showing that my body was not only inflamed, but just deficient. So a lot of, at the time, a lot of those like blood,

nutrient tests were really important. We ended up running a hair mineral test too. And all of those were really taken into context of the symptoms I was having as opposed to just looking at a test. And I think that's what drew this picture for me. And I had that moment where I was like, oh my gosh, starvation is driving autoimmunity. Starvation is driving these medical conditions. I didn't consider it before I went there. I thought weight loss is good. That's what I thought at the time. What kind of program and plan did you put together for you? And what were some of the changes that you made? Yeah, so it was an extremely comprehensive plan. And I now do the same with my clients. I call it a battle plan where it's broken up into lifestyle, supplements, food, any kind of breathwork movement. And it really was just about in the beginning getting nutrients back in, which was a challenge because my mindset was I really need to keep this weight off. I need to stop eating and continue not eating. So it was it was really challenging. Once I started to implement things from that original plan, I think it was a little bit of like a cascade. in a positive way, an avalanche of, I feel a little better. I believe this and I believe this

will work. And then we continue to introduce then more supplements and kind of a layered plan. At first it was just let's get some sleep. Let's calm your nervous system down. Let's get nutrients into the body through food. And then we kind of went into heavier hitting supplements to support my gut lining to support the absorption of those nutrients. And then giving those nutrients, we ultimately did a tremendous amount of IVs also because I was really deficient in nutrients. We're going to jump around a little bit, but you mentioned gut health. And one of the things that you're known for with your integrative and functional approach

as a dietitian and working with clients is you're helping people understand how important gut health is to not just their whole body health, but also the role that it plays in the process of their body composition, transformation, their weight loss journey. What are some of the key lessons you want to share with our audience here? Yeah, 100%. I think when I think of protein as it being a really important. component of a weight loss journey and a body composition journey because we absolutely need protein to build muscle in the first place, which is the cornerstone of the body composition

changes we're talking about. I think if people have dampened digestion and they're not able to tolerate protein, they often think this is why I'm not, I don't need protein because I'm not interested in protein. So what happens is if you have low stomach acid, which is very common, people will have symptoms of acid reflux. And one of the symptoms of acid reflux is actually having no interest in protein. So I think what ends up happening is people think, I don't need this because I'm not feeling like I need this, but instead we need to correct the low stomach acid issue. And this is a huge, huge problem for people with a vegan diet because long-term vegan diets

can actually accommodate to have chronically lower stomach acid. So for myself, that was the case. And I said, I'm not going to stop being vegan because it feels good to not eat meat. I don't want to eat it. I kind of describe the reflux lack of interest in protein as like this kind of face. I don't want that. And I think people, again, mistake those signals and then miss out on that vital protein. So that's one way that a stomach issue can then cause a change in what you consume.

And it's not from, oh, my stomach hurts. It's mentally it changes the way that you want to consume things. And I think that's one little piece. And then along the weight loss journey, too, it is really hard if people are having chronic gut symptoms to absorb nutrients in the first place. For protein to be broken down and repackaged, you need to have strong stomach acid. You need to have a really good lining in your small intestine to be able to do that. So I think most of us are very gut impaired without realizing. And what we really don't realize is how it influences our food decisions. You know, what's interesting about

the gut conversation is that over the years, you know, especially kind of me being very familiar with the world of functional medicine and meeting a lot of practitioners, The theory and the thought process was, you know, hey, restrict, restrict, restrict. And that's going to be the way that we're going to remove all these sensitivities that people have to different foods, gluten, dairy, et cetera. And then through that process, if you were lucky enough to work with a good practitioner, then maybe help you sort of rebuild. Now I feel like there's a much more sort of balanced approach that actually works,

which is it's not about severely restricting all these different foods that somebody that might still be challenging for one person or another. but if they're not particularly challenging for you, actually still some diversity in the diet actually make sure that you're not restricting so many things that your gut can still be healthy. Is that something that you see? Oh, 100%. This comes up a lot in the conversation about elimination diets because elimination diets, if people aren't familiar, are very specific prescribed diets, usually by functional medicine doctors,

like a low Fodmap diet, a low histamine diet. It could be a low carb diet. It could be a specific carb diet. And basically the goal was of elimination diets that they would be healing agents, right? The goal was if you go on a low FODMap diet for IBS, it'll fix your IBS. When in reality, you're just taking away a trigger or a stimulus, but you haven't fixed the issue. If you have IBS because you have leaky gut, let's say, sure, you take gluten out or something

like that. If it's not celiac or if it's a gluten sensitivity, a non-celiac gluten sensitivity, if you take gluten out, you are taking something out of the diet that is not infuriating your gut, but you haven't fixed the holes in the lining of it. your gut. So the elimination diet itself isn't healing. It's just doing something to take away a trigger. Elimination diets are helpful in that way and in the short term, but in the long term, you miss out on that microbial diversity and all these things that make, you know, you really want to challenge your gut and make your gut work hard. And that will help with all these other conditions.

But elimination diets I'm not a huge fan of for that reason, unless it's very urgent and short term, because these are immunological conditions, not gut conditions. They're acting on the gut. Let's take a step back and go to the framework that you developed, right? This I think it's called loving weight loss journey. Yeah, losing weight lovingly or yeah, losing weight lovingly. The framework that developed out of your own experiences and working with a lot of different clients, right? Somebody comes in and, you know, meets with you and obviously do an intake and all those components.

We are obviously talking to a lot of people here on the podcast. here, so we're not giving individual advice that's there, but paint the broad strokes of the foundational pieces that are there when it's related to helping people reestablish a healthy relationship with food and also move towards the direction where they're going to dial in their body composition. Everybody comes from a different starting place, everybody has different issues, but you've already mentioned a few different themes that are there. One is like auditing people's protein intake, right? And actually making sure do they have the amount of protein that they need in their diet to create satiety, to preserve lean muscle mass, and all the other beautiful

things. What are some other broad strokes that you look at when it comes to their diet, their lifestyle, their stress to help them actually start to put together their battle plan, as you call? Absolutely. And they don't need me to start putting together a battle plan, by the way. Even taking just little pieces of inventory and auditing your own life, you can always take one or two steps forward. So what I would have people inventorying, even before they see a practitioner, is kind of the foundations of life, right? Like, are you sleeping? Are you waking up at the time, you know, at a certain time? Are you looking at the sun when you wake up in the morning? Are you going for some sort of movement throughout the day, especially in the morning, though? Is your blood sugar

regular? These are the important kind of pieces that I would have people looking at first, because I'm going to be working on the foundations with people anyway. And these foundations are so essential for any piece of body recomposition change. The other thing I have clients do in those, initial sessions and would advise any practitioner do, and I'm sure they do, is really assess where that nervous system piece is. And we kind of act in a funny way when we feel threatened and make sure that the body's ready to receive those changes and receive that weight loss in the first place because there usually is a kickback mechanism if we're not ready. And if you do have a really disordered relationship with food, that needs to be audited as well

and that needs to be inventoried. So what have people do is write down foods on the left side of a piece of paper and say, let's say it's bread or, you know, meat. And then on the right side, just write how it makes you feel when you see those foods. If you have a tremendous amount of food fears and feel extreme confusion around things, that needs to be addressed before going on a weight loss journey too, because you don't want to have more disorder thoughts, more nervous system dysregulation as you're going along the journey too. You know, zooming out a little bit, big picture, there's a lot of conversation today just about the idea of weight loss. And it can sometimes feel like it's, you know, it's, you know,

It's a little political in the sense of, of course, there's different people that are arguing about this is a better approach or that's a better approach. And then there's the sort of foundational sides of whether or not we should really be telling people to lose weight in the first place. Yeah. Right? I'd love to hear your sort of opinion, you know, if I give you a little soapbox for the things that you want people to know about because I feel like you have a unique lens on it.

You have your foot in the sort of integrative and functional world. you have another foot in the world of being somebody who was in a, as you say, a larger body and had went through that, you know, firsthand. And yeah, you have a unique perspective. So I'd love you to just talk about it. If I just hand the mic back over to you and just feel free to rant a little bit. I love ranting. Thank you, Drew, for the opportunity. I would also say that the reason I say occupying a larger body instead of using the term obesity is because I don't believe people are diagnoses and I don't even believe obesity should be a diagnosis, in my opinion. It's a bold opinion. It's a bold opinion, I believe it's a symptom. It's a vacillating change in your body. It's not a permanent

diagnosis. And so I don't believe that it warrants a medical diagnosis. And it's certainly not I am obese. It would be I am experiencing holding on to actually weight. We don't say I am anxiety. Exactly. And even saying like, you know, right, I am IBS. I am these things. Yeah. And anxiety is another one that I think is a symptom too. But yeah, I think when we start to categorize ourselves as these things and obesity is so much weight for people emotionally, I like to, you know, I like to to take that weight off and just say it's a symptom. And it's something to be worked on. So in the climate and the political, moral climate of this conversation, for a very long time up until, you know, in the past 30 years, let's say, diet culture, as we know it, are these diet

companies, these predatory fad diets, reigned as being the kind of prominent approach to weight loss. And they were really fierce in predatory marketers, as we know. As a result of diet culture, there was downstream effects and how people viewed bodies in society and people were legitimately and still are treated very differently based on their body size, which is an insane thing that I even have to say that people are all worthy and the size of their bodies, I almost laugh when I say it does not dictate their moral value. This is something that is emphatically true and true all across the world. It's the same for race, gender, any sort of orientation. And I think what happened as a result of that messaging and that internal moral struggle is that there was a huge knee-jerk reaction

from a moral political standpoint, which created the body positivity movement, which has really been around, again, for even 30 years possibly. And this wave of it we see now as being not only a moral political movement, which what it started as, but it's now become a nutrition practice, a clinical practice. So proponents of the body positivity movement would believe that all weight loss is damaging mentally and can lead to eating disorders. Proponents of the body positivity movement who work as practitioners because it's a political movement, not let's say health at every size practitioner, Hayes practitioners, believe that attempting weight loss is so risky and non-fruitful that it should never be attempted, actually. So I would say that the initial diet

culture was probably quite wrong from this moral standpoint. And the knee-jerk reaction is a concern to me because it's prescribing psychological solutions for physical issues. And that could be something like I would give the example. You can't intuitively eat your way out of a parasite. You can't intuitively eat your way out of any other medical condition and certainly not diabetes or something like that. So I'm concerned where this moral framework turned into a clinical framework. Yeah. It makes sense. And so for today, for a lot of people who are listening, they can kind of get wrapped up and pulled in one direction or another. But I think part of what I feel from just looking at your content, it's like, hey, if you want to lose weight, guy, girl, whatever, or on the flip

side, if you want or somebody who's underweight and wants to gain weight, right, that's your, that's your right. You can go down that journey. You want to go down in a way that is sustainable, that's not just focusing on the number that is actually focusing on a few other things that actually we know are more related to health. For a lot of people, they actually can have a tremendous change in their body composition and their weight goes up. Absolutely. I saw this at the gym that I work out at, which is called Ultimate Performance. It's here in Los Angeles. And you see these people who have gone on this pretty intense journey of fitness to improve their lean mass. And you see the starting weight of both men and women in some cases. And their starting weight went,

is their end weight is higher than their starting weight. If they were already a little bit sort of, you know, typically this is not the case for individuals that might have a lot of weight to lose, but people that were already like feeling like, oh, you know, I just want to lose it like last 10 pounds. Their end weight is actually maybe the same or even a little bit higher, but you look at their body and their body is completely transformed. And their health is completely transformed.

And their health is completely transformed. And if we looked at their blood work and their lipids and other stuff, chances are that those things are also going to be improved, which is why one of the things that a lot of people on the topic of body composition talk about for this podcast is that so many people actually don't even know what their body composition is, right? That in itself could be a whole triggering thing or not triggering thing, but I'm of the opinion that you want to know. Absolutely. Right? Yeah. Do you generally tell your clients to go and get a true account of their body composition and then how do you recommend them going about doing that? Absolutely. Yeah, I do think

it's really important. And like you said, there's a place in a time because I have a client who's in the throes of disordered eating or an eating disorder. It might not be the place in time. It might be so threatening and not safe for them. It might not be the time. But there is a place in a time. And I think we do need to know our numbers. I would say if you do feel triggered, I have a little hack. I would go to get an in-body before you get a Dexa scan because Dexa scans are usually 12 to 14 higher in body fat than an in-body. So like just- Say it one more time.

So Dexa scans are more precise. Yeah, they're more precise. So you're- The body fat numbers are 12 to 14% higher than on an in-body. So it's like if you want to kind of ease your way in, you can get an in-body first and then work your way up to a Dexas scan, which is more important and more accurate for sure. Totally, totally.

But hopefully the goal would be to start pulling yourself out of that sense of triggering because the triggering is, and listen, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to sweep under the rug. you know, all the psychological components that play into it. But generally speaking, is that if you start to unwind this old messaging that people told you, you're going to want the truth about something. And the truth will ultimately end up being the thing that sets you free on it because the implications are that if you get an accurate idea of your body composition and you start to understand how important maintaining your lean muscle mass is on your journey to

weight loss, you're not going to be super upset when you don't see that number drastically going down in the beginning as long as you are maintaining or potentially even increasing your lean body, lean muscle mass. Absolutely. That's there. So, yeah, my heart goes out to everybody who's in that sort of category in space. Yeah. Now, the vast majority of people are not.

No. Yeah. So for them, you know, going in and getting. getting an in-body scan or a Dexas scan and getting a true sense of where they're at so that now they can have a better benchmark instead of just relying on the scale that's at home that can fluctuate based on a lot of different things. And people also feel safer and less triggered by getting body fat scans because we have such association with numbers on the scale with being good and bad.

But people don't really have those associations with body fat. They don't feel as emotionally compelled by body fat numbers. So sometimes people are less triggered. And I think truth is very compassionate. I agree with you. I think giving truth and honest information is compassionate. But truly some people's brains take that information and it is harmful for them in the short term. So that's why not every piece of information is for every person at every time.

And that's why I think that's the beauty of working with a practitioner. As you can see, is this person ready to kind of take this information in? Yeah. To add to the story, I think that also in the functional medicine space, what they've helped a lot of people understand is that you could be thin. and super unhealthy. 100%. And, you know, Gabrielle's, Dr. Gabriel Lyon often talks about this, too, is that when you look at kind of people in the nursing home, the people who are greatest risk per falls and, like,

the higher mortality rates are actually in the lowest BMI group. And I definitely witnessed that in working in nursing homes myself, because if you are in the lowest BMI group, the chances are, you also have the lowest proportion of muscle mass as well. So absolutely focusing on building muscle as opposed to losing fat or losing pounds on the scale, it's so much more of a hopeful way to look at this too. And I think it is just so much more effective and important. It's just, it is really more important because then you'll have the kind of foundation to actually be able to burn fat more efficiently anyway. So, you know, you mentioned Dr. Gabriel Lyon. I listened to your guys' podcast together. And one point

that I actually really enjoyed that I think a lot of the audience enjoys is they want to hear people who have different thoughts about approaches, kind of talk and sort of stress test each other, each other's ideas out. So I'll set up this next question here. The thing that you guys were having a little bit of a difference of opinion on. That's what best friends do. Exactly. Yeah.

Which is great, right? That's actually how we all learn. That's how we all change. I'm sure you've changed your mind on things over the years. I've changed my mind on things over the years. Because of people like each other, all of us talking. Right. Right.

I'm healthy conversation. Yeah. So the thing that you guys were having a conversation on was the topic of whether or not tracking your calories is, something that is useful. Now, to kind of set up the positions, if I understand correctly, Dr. Lyon, who's talked about on this podcast before, she's shared that, hey, listen, I'm not a fan of long-term tracking of everything. I am a fan of making sure for a lot of people that they do track their protein at least, but she is a fan of short-term tracking. And the primary reason why is that

a lot of people, if I understand correctly from her perspective, is that a lot of people actually have no freaking clue what their total caloric intake is, how it's broken out by things. And because even health food has become so highly processed, it's so easy to overeat on things that taste great and are made with generally good ingredients, but not realize that you just crushed a thousand calories in that snack or whatever. Right. And if I understood where you were coming from at that time of that podcast was that generally don't even get people started down the tracking of calories because it's not something that's sustainable. It brings a lot of stress to individuals. And it's not the way that you are going to find that they're going to long term be able to

stick to a diet. And it did seem, I don't know if you guys concluded on this that you're like, look, I think there could be some value in tracking protein. Did I set up your positions? Yeah, Absolutely. Correctly. Yeah. So basically when I make plans for clients myself, I am keeping calories in mind in those in that. I'm kind of taking the stress off of my clients having to do the numbers and association with food. My concern with tracking calories is you lose nutrient quality along the way if you're only focusing on calories. And that puts you into a place where you're going to start favoring non-nutrient dense foods in order to just make the calories lower, essentially. Like you might choose a Quest bar instead of a steak because the calorie, the numbers are

working out for you. I don't like viewing food and sort of numbers. I want people to focus on quality. And I think quality leads to the right quantity. And that's really my goal. And yes, I do also find it triggering for some people. By the time clients come to me, they've had calorie tracked for years, usually. I mean, my clients are very eager to make health changes. And they've also probably been to several functional medicine doctors, not even alopathic doctors, functional medicine doctors, several functional nutritionists by the time they land in my door. I'm like the last stop on the train for people usually. So to say they haven't been restricting calorie counting by the time they get to me,

it's old tools for them. And it's not something that I've found to be super effective because they're kind of at the level where they're in a minutia state also and they're not understanding why they're doing all this calorie tracking. They're doing everything and they're not getting results. And often it's because they're stressing themselves out so horribly about all of this that they're missing that foundation of just cortisol management, blood sugar management and missing those foundations. So I don't want people to miss the foundations

for numbers. Yeah, totally. I think the lens that I'd like to add into it, not having your training or Dr. Lyons training just for my observations that are there that I see and having gone on my own journey of, you know, tracking my calories for a period of time, primarily actually to add lean muscle mass and go from being. Make sure I'm eating enough, right? Make sure I'm eating enough. Go from skinny fat when I first measured into my body composition. And yes, it was after a big trip to Italy that I was there for like two months, but still being in that skinny fat category, which a lot of South Asians, Indians are, to now like seriously focusing on like, okay, I have to, especially in my, you know, almost being 40 at the time, I really,

this is the time now to start to build muscle while it's a lot easier before I enter into like the next decade of my life. So one of the things that I sort of noticed is that there's a lot of people who are highly calorie focused and they're thinking about like, oh, this is this much calories, this is that. But ultimately, they, if you would ask somebody, how many calories do you eat in a day? A lot of people actually don't do not know. I believe that. Now, I don't know if that's the same thing with your clients, but it's not like they can come

to you. It's kind of like people with their budgets often, right? They'll talk about not making enough money or they'll talk about like they're spending too much, but they can't give you always like that exact breakdown of like, hey, here's how much I spend on this, here's how much I spend on that. Hey, I know that I'm spending too much on food and that's the biggest thing that's sort of breaking my budget. I know it's a problem and I need tips and strategies to get involved in it.

When I often would see people in the calorie conversations and just chatting and even hearing from my listeners, a lot of people would say, I know this is a lot of calories or I'm mindful of this, but ultimately like their tracking would just break down and they would eat whatever they would want to eat. Right. And so I saw that there could be, that I definitely agree with both of you, that long-term calorie tracking is very difficult for people. And focusing more on satiety and making sure you get, you know, your body generally, we lived for thousands and thousands of years without calorie tracking. Our body generally, when it's in a right space, knows what we need to do. Yeah. The challenge is that we're just surrounded by all these crazy inputs that have completely hijacked

our health, our appetite and how we navigate stuff. But generally, I find that a lot of people actually don't know their total calories. And the other thing that I would say, which is my bigger point that I want to get to, when I first started this podcast, you know, and starting in, like, the functional medicine space and meeting so many incredible practitioners, functional medicine is great at sort of looking and finding that sort of one thing that might be the thing for somebody else. They're dealing with a parasite. They're dealing with that. They're dealing with this. And I started to see over a period of time that I was leaving my audience with a little bit, the vast majority with a little bit of the sense that, hey, the reason that you can't lose weight

is actually because you're dealing with this rare situation that, yes, increasingly more people are dealing with like mold, like a parasite. Hey, your gut health isn't perfect. And that's why you as a person cannot lose weight. When the reality is when I would take the time with some people just to actually look, they genuinely were just overeating, right? Not that they aren't also struggling with nutrient deficiency, not that they aren't also struggling with some thing that's out there, not that they also can't get their nervous system and better check and their HRV is off, but they still were eating and overeating. And those things probably were contributing to that. So that's where I've sort of changed my mind over the years, not that I'm a practitioner,

where I've actually doubled down on this idea of you probably still are, overeating and you don't know where it's coming from and these lifestyle components that are off could be contributing to the reason that you are doing that. But we don't want to get so far down the rabbit hole that you have this super, you know, one-off thing. And that's the reason why you're gaining weight and actually you're not overeating. And, you know, so it's kind of like the merging of both of those worlds that are there. So that's kind of how my perspective is a change. changed over the years. I just so completely emphatically agree with you to the point where I have functional dietitian friends who we are so granular all of us. And we look at each other recently.

This was like last month, actually. We had a conversation we were like, are we back to diet culture actually? Like, wait a second. It's just really important. The amount of food you're eating is also really important. And we've been commenting on this recently. I think the whole in one functional medicine approach is not functional medicine. And I completely agree with you on that, which is that we, you know, functional medicine has turned into this. You do a test and it gives you get a prescription of supplements from that, which to me is Western medicine. Actually, that's the Western medicine approach. Functional medicine is the totality of your health. It's holistic. It's looking at how every single component interacts within the environment of your body, the environment around you physically,

the environment of your social connections, and turns into something. But as it comes to the metabolic wholeness of your body, the amount of food you consume is a major component of that. And I absolutely agree with you. I'm not looking for a whole in one with weight loss with clients. The amount of food my clients are eating is a huge component of it. I do work with those like severely something like you said, like it could be an autoimmune condition kind of client. And we still have to address the amount of food. It just has to be addressed. Regardless of the fact that in this country, unfortunately, even smaller amounts of calorie foods might have more of a metabolic impact because it might impact

leptin or it might impact other things in our body than if you were in other countries. And I do truly believe you were eating the same calories here or the same calories in Italy. It would cause different body comp changes and different changes in your body. But guess what? We live here. So we're going to have to deal with the fact that we live here and we have to make these changes and we have to be a little bit more calculated because of that. Yeah.

This is all part of like the space is like growing up, right? Totally. You're growing up and you're understanding. that there's a lot more of the conversation for a lot of things that are there. You know, I was very early on some of the glucose tracking. And in those conversations, I really felt like, hey, glucose is everything, making sure to have stable blood sugar. You know, genuinely, I felt the results in my life and was a huge part of it. But naturally, the extrapolation of just sort of looking at one thing, which, as you mentioned, is not sort of

the functional medicine, precision medicine, anything that would be there. It's you want to look at the totality of it. I was so focused on the glucose conversation that I just had this approach with carbohydrates that actually, yes, we want to across the board restrict them and that our life is going to be better off because of it. And then when I went down my journey of fitness, and I saw firsthand that, wow,

as somebody who's untrained under eight on protein, grew up vegetarian, was vegan for a long time, now that I'm doing all the right things, I'm tracking my calories. I'm eating more. I'm focusing on the protein that's there. I'm working out a few days a week because that was part of my strain training goal and plan that was there. So I could get away with actually eating almost triple the amount of carbs that I was eating before.

And my fasting insulin is still in the optimal category. My hemoglobin A1C isn't a good place. It's like, oh, there's more of this conversation than just looking at this one particular thing, which goes back to this idea that you shared in the beginning of the podcast, which is that we don't want to be overly restrictive of any one macronutrient. I love carbs. Yeah, exactly. And yes, I'm not, you know, I'm not eating generally what I would say is like it was still

as how a lot of people look at it, it would be still considered on the lower side of carbs. But now all of a sudden I'm not worried about this one-off thing. And actually by building and adding more lean muscle mass, my glucose variability is improving as well too. So I think this is everybody's growing up, everybody's sharing. Are there any to take it back to you, are there any other things that as you went through your own journey and started working with clients that you changed your mind on over the years because you actually saw that this is a more lasting and sustainable way for people to not only keep their weight in the optimal body composition, but to also feel good. Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that, by the way.

I am like the epitome of Dunning Kruger when you're 10 years in, which is that like the more you know, the less you know, you know, like in the beginning, this like the X, Y axis of Dunning Krueger is like competency and confidence. So when you're first a practitioner, you're like, everyone's eating no fat. This is what we're doing. This is how it's going to everyone's going to heal. And then I was like paleo. I was like, everyone's going to fix their autoimmunity from paleo. And then you really learn as time goes on as a practitioner that everything is so individualized. and what it is is finding out what's that person's main lifestyle deficiencies. And whether it comes from nutrition or it comes from movement or it comes from sunlight or it comes from not having drainage capacity, you just find that each person has their things. So pattern recognition is so important. And I think the main thing I changed my mind on was just thinking I knew anything about someone's body that they didn't know or thinking I knew something about someone's body from a structure or protocol that I had in my head. I just don't believe that anymore at all. And I am always amazed by how two different people who have the same weight, same muscle mass, same autoimmune condition,

can operate completely opposite and that their root causes are so different. So the really anything that I don't really have a strong stance on anything, like I'm like, yeah, some my clients calorie count. Some my clients eat super high carb diets. Some of them eat super low carb diets. It really is so individual and but still there's that pattern recognition piece so it's not impossible for people to find out their things and what's important for them yeah it's so true would you add to that that there are themes everybody's so individual but there's these themes that are there that generally if we can get most of the population sleeping well right sleep congruence adequate amount of time sleeping not having you know disruptive sleep quality you know uh

having a diet that they can stick to, right, over a period of time that works for them, but doesn't underdo it on protein and other things like that. And then that they have some sense of nervous system support, HRV support that's their community. Most people are going to be generally better off doing that. So there are individual things, and I do believe we live in a world where through chemicals, toxins, you know, overuseage of antibiotics, psychological disorders, being on an extreme fasting diet, which is essentially what you were on and I was on, right? It was like an extreme sort of

long-term sort of fast in a way being on like a raw food vegan diet. There are a lot of, it's more complicated because people are coming into the situation with a lot more reason that they ended up being sick or unhealthy, right? But still, these themes are largely themes that work for everyone. Yeah, absolutely. There's foundations of being a human and you cannot get away with the foundations of being a human. And one of them that you recently spoke on a podcast about so beautifully is connection, like human connection. You really can't get away with not being a person. You have to, you can't look at your phone all day. You have to go outside. You have to talk to people. You have to connect with nature. You have to eat regularly. These things,

We so don't have nail down and people are focused on, oh, I need to eat this exact gram of carbohydrates. And it's like, you need to be a human being first. And I think when we nail those things down, that's when we can have fun going into the nitty gritty. You know, I train and mentor other healthcare professionals. And this is something where all of them are so excited about functional medicine. They get in there and they want to run tests. They want to do everything. I'm like, it doesn't matter.

It's like throwing, you know, it's like throwing your intervention in the air. It doesn't do anything if you don't have. those foundations set because it doesn't matter what goes into the body. It matters what the body does with it when it goes in. So if you have poor gut integrity, if you're not sleeping and you're not having cellular repair, if you don't have your mitochondria functioning, it really doesn't matter what interventions you put in place, what fancy ones, because the mechanics of the body have to be running properly. And they're running properly for almost no one and none of us live like humans. We all live like robots. I want to take a little bit of a pivot. I want to talk about anxiety.

My favorite. You work with a lot of patients. in this category, and you talk a lot about it online. What are some of the things that you want to share with the audience when it comes to the topic of anxiety? Yeah, I find anxiety to be a symptom and it's a message from the body that something is not right. It's kind of like the fire alarm of our body. And we often want to turn the fire alarm off because it's very loud and frustrating. But instead of doing that, I actually want people to explore that fire alarm. And what usually is underneath is some level of inflammation, chronic low blood sugars, which are then causing high cortisol. That's chronic as well. And then also noticing nutrient deficiencies and

Drew, number one, mineral deficiencies are a huge driver of anxiety as well. I want to talk about the blood sugar piece. We had somebody on a long time ago, naturopathic doctor. This is before like glucose monitors were as widely available. And she was saying, you know, so many of the people that come into her office, they're not realizing that they're disordered sort of restrictive eating leads to a place where their panic attacks, which can have an anxiety component, right? There's separate things, but they can be related, was just coming from the fact that, like, they hadn't eaten recently.

Yes. Right? And so many people actually didn't know, didn't know that the reason that they're starting to feel this sort of panic, this urgency was because they had entered into a state where their body essentially was telling them, hey, we're freaking out because we haven't gotten the right nutrients. Obviously, there's some parallels that are there to what you're talking about too. Oh, yeah. But go down that thread a little bit more of the blood sugar dysregulation. Yeah, I would say blood sugar lows and then highs are probably the greatest anxiety trigger.

and the most important thing I want someone to look at when they're having chronic anxiety. So when our blood sugar drops, one way our body can get our blood sugar up is by releasing a hormone we've spoken about on this podcast, cortisol, which we know as our main stress hormone. Cortisol is this really cool thing where it can create glucose from non-glucose entities. It's something called gluconeogenesis, which I'm sure you've spoken out on the podcast before, too. And really, it can take protein and turn it into glucose for you, which is an amazing task, because then we can have glucose. The problem is when your cortisol shoots up, that's really this huge alarm to your body. We're going to die. That's basically what your body's telling you.

So then your body starts releasing a tremendous amount of sugar and the swing from low to high can be very uncomfortable and both very low blood sugar and very high blood sugar can cause anxiety-like feelings. I will also say that cortisol is something that is released as a rising hormone. It's not only our stress hormone. It's also a rising hormone. It's kind of like the hen like cockadoodle do, the rooster in the morning, waking you up. So oftentimes when people are having chronic anxiety or chronically low blood sugar, I will actually see them start waking up between 3 and 5 a.m. So if someone's listening to this and they're waking up between 3 to 5 am. specifically, it's usually a cortisol signal. And what's happening is blood sugar is dropping.

Cortisol is rising early thinking, we need to get glucose to this person. They're in an emergency. We need to save their life. And then that cortisol is waking you up. And they get that sensation when they wake up of, I'm awake, I don't know why I'm awake, and I'm usually more panicky. So what are the key contributors to that in the context of like the sleep situation? What are the lifestyle habits or the things that people are doing that they have that drop? And then how do you go about helping people fix them? Yeah. Within two weeks of intermittent fasting for most women, I'll see this happen. And I could see it on their Dutch test within a month.

Intermittent fasting is not something that I recommend for menstruating women at all because I see tangibly in their labs and in their sleep patterns, what happens in the long term? I have not seen it, to be honest, I've worked with thousands of clients. I've never seen it work once for women in the long term because of that. Because our bodies are really built for preservation. They really want to keep us alive. And women's bodies, even more so, we're more cortisol responsive. We have more cortisol and we're more cortisol responsive.

And our hormones change as a result of that high cortisol too. So I would say intermittent fasting, chronic low carb diets. and then also just irregular eating overall, I notice as being a huge issue. When I'm stressed, I'll wake up at 3 a.m. So it's not that my blood sugar is even the driver of it, but I'll start noticing that my cortisol starts getting dysregulated. And then cortisol has a bidirectional relationship with blood sugar. So then your blood sugar becomes more irregular, starts releasing cortisol, and you get

into a bit of a cycle. So stress can be the impetus or chronic low blood sugar, chronic under-eating carbohydrates, and intermittent fasting or really any fasting in the long term. if your body doesn't have the metabolic flexibility to handle it. Let's double click on the fasting conversation, right? So now this is being added to one of your approaches and your framework as kind of like one of the don'ts, right? For women especially.

For women especially. Yeah. And I'd love to just expand on that for our audience there, right? So you shared a little bit more about it being contextualized for women, what it means, exactly. You know, what are the main reasons that you see people even wanting to go down the intermittent fasting place in the first place. When I look at it, I see is like essentially people feel that either there's a contributor to longevity. Sure. Or it's a weight loss component, right? Talk about

why those two things are maybe not the right approach or may not help, especially women, get to those things through this, through intermittent fasting. It might be sacrificing more than they're actually getting through those. So by the time you need to get a benefit. from something, your body needs to allow you to do that thing. Unfortunately, with intermittent fasting, there's stops in place that will happen before you're able to lose weight from it or before you're able to get those benefits from it. So you have to, whatever the tool it is you're using, you have to make sure your body's going to let you do it long enough to get the benefits of it without causing other disruptions.

So I think that's a main concern with intermittent fasting. I'll say this. The people who kind of generally tout intermittent fasting are like 40-year-old men who are pretty fit already, and they probably can handle it because they might have a greater proportion of muscle mass. They might have better insulin regulation, and they don't have as responsive hormones, right? So they might actually be able to use it as a tool. I think the question around any of these tools is, is it going to work for me? And that is, there is validity to intermittent fasting being helpful and supportive for autophagy. Weight loss studies wise, more and more coming out that

calorie restriction is the same no matter how, what hours you're eating during the day. But certainly giving your bowel rest sometimes is why people do it too, intermittent fasting. A lot of times if I have IBD patients, it'll be a recommendation like Crohn's or ulcerf colitis from doctors to just let your migrating motor complex work and give your body more time to just move things along in your digestion when there's no food there. So there is other kind of medicinal benefits to it. But the question is, is your body going to let you get those medicinal benefits without freaking out first? Yeah, you know, we mentioned about how people change their mind.

Largely, a lot of the people that were really touting intermittent fasting have sort of public could come out and said that they change their mind. And a big part of the conversation or have said that it can be a tool for individuals that have an extreme amount of weight to lose. If it's one of the things like Thomas DeLauer was on this podcast, he has a big YouTube following, and he used primarily intermittent fasting as one of the tools in his toolbox to help him lose, I think, over 100 pounds on his journey. And he said, listen, I used to say it was for everybody. And I've changed my mind. It is a tool for the most heaviest individuals, potentially.

But ultimately, it's something that just helps people restrict calories that are there. Right. Then you're not eating half the day or something. Right. Then you're not eating. And that could be something that is easier for certain people's lifestyles. again, it tends to seem like it's better for men. Then you'd have people come on the podcast like Dr. Donald Lehman,

who's the mentor and advisor for Gabriel Lyon and a few other people that are prominent in this sort of space and saying that the muscle mass piece. And so if you are intermittent fasting as a woman, if you're doing any kind of prolonged fasting, you're going to be a place in position where you're going to be losing that muscle mass. And if you're not, you know, severely overweight, where you not only have excess weight to lose, but you also can afford to sort of let go of a little bit of mass in general, even some muscle mass, you're going to be eating away at your muscle.

So we've had people like Dr. Cynthia, sorry, Cynthia Thurlow on the podcast, who has shared that she, she had a viral TED talk that was all about fasting and how it was a part of her journey. And it helped her reset. And she says, yes, much like you, like, hey, this is what I did. And now I don't recommend that to people that are out there. It's just better to find something that you can sustain and do. And then stop eating at a certain time. You know, your dinner's done at seven.

And then you can eat again the next morning at seven or eight. That's basically the amount of fasting that you need to do. So you don't end up sacrificing. Most notably, of course, Peter Attia, who was such a proponent of fasting, came out in his book and on his podcast and said, it's just not worth it. It's not worth it for that benefit. In fact, what he'd lose in muscle mass and other areas,

potentially the implications on strength and how that could be a part of maybe V-O-2 max performance, even though it's mostly about the cardio component, but there is a relationship. It's just not worth one of those things. If you are in a good body composition or if you're on your way to a good body composition, the fasting thing may not make sense for a lot of people. It's crazy how we went from, you know, five, six years. even the last like 10 years where people were on one extreme. And now, again, people are growing up

and looking at it in the totality of all the recommendations. We're all doing it together, too. I think we all landed back in the middle, which I'm very happy to see. I wouldn't say all. A lot of us have landed back in the middle. But I think it's just we kind of all were guinea pigs in all this too. We were guinea pigs for the vegan diet, right? Like you and I, and even Dr. Gabriel Lyme was vegan. I just talked about this in a pot. Yeah, exactly. She was for a bit, and we all kind of were experimenting on our own bodies as we were talking about these things and we were excited about the research. And our clients were kind of in these experiments with us, which they were happy to be and

this was part of it. And I think it comes back to, wait a second, it's just those foundations. And you don't even need these really fancy things oftentimes. They're amazing. And I love the tools we have in functional medicine. But yeah, no, like maybe we don't need to starve ourselves in order to do the things we need to do and to function optimally. Maybe we just eat regularly because we have access to food and it's nourishing and great. Yeah. Yeah. So true. Anything else that you've changed your mind on or sort of

just like the way that you've said that, you know, back in the day, you used to think that that might have been a good idea. And now you don't recommend that. Anything else that you really feel that you want people to know that the tradeoffs may not be worth it or you're, you know, you're majoring in the minors or anything else that you feel that could be a big distraction as people go down this journey of just feeling better, looking better, which is everybody's right if they want to. And stepping into your best health. Anything else that comes to mind? Yeah. I think I used to, as a very highly sensitive person, I think I often would want to really cuddle my clients without realizing it and saying like, it's okay if things aren't okay.

And I think now I've really changed my whole stance on that, which is that I think a lot of clients need practitioners to be really tough and hold space for them in a way that's like authoritative, not like I'm telling you what to do, but I know what we need to do here. And I'm going to help you and hold you to do it. And I think I've become much more compassionate in that way. And I think that's how I want people to be on their journey is really compassionate with themselves without coddling themselves too much and saying it's okay if I'm not doing what I need to do. And the example of this is, when I would call, you know, Dr. Kachko and I would say, you know, my back is killing me. And he'd say, okay, did you walk today? And I'm like, because I'm hypermobile, so I have to like walk a certain amount. And I'm like, no. And he's like, don't call me then. You know, walk first, you know, and even conversations like that, which could be seen as triggering or, you know, in some way to someone, it's like, it's okay to just hold people and accountable. And I think that's really important because I think the space also then got too codily or too harsh. And I think I have really come to say, I'm comfortable being compassionate. And at the same time,

you know, really holding my clients accountable for themselves. Yeah. It's kind of like you're the pilot. You're in the pilot seat. And they're telling you that they want to fly from New York to L.A. Right. And you're like, hey, listen, if you want to fly, I need you to wear a seatbelt. Or if you want to fly, you have to get on the plane. Now, I have compassion for you. If you change your mind you don't want to go there, that's fine. But if you're going to be on this journey with me and you're asking me to be in the pilot seat or the co-pilot seat, maybe that's a better reference, we've got to do certain things to get there. Right. 100%. Talk a little bit about the landscape. You know, one of my feelings is whether with

politics or nutrition debates, I'm generally okay with actually all the debates that are out there. What I feel when people say like, hey, nutrition has gotten too polarizing, I think what they're saying is that they want, or even politics has gotten too polarizing. What we're really asking for is we're asking for civility, right? Like, hey, disagree with me completely, but like, you know, you don't have to call me an ass-a-hle or you're like this or that or whatever. Yeah. We want people to debate because when people debate and they argue out these ideas, it's all of us who end up winning and we end up changing our minds on stuff or we end up strengthening in our minds on other things. What are your thoughts on that? I love that you're bringing this up.

So in this kind of nutrition camps that have been broken out, let's say there's the functional nutrition, allopathic nutrition, body positive, there's even keto dietitians. There's all these different dietitians. I love healthy debate. And if we think about the scientific method, it is literally the job when you're working with the scientific method to disprove yourself. So a trigger word for me now is misinformation. I don't believe in misinformation. I believe in your interpretation of information. And we have to just constantly know that we were wrong and constantly course correct. So I want to keep learning new information. Where we've kind of gotten to on social media is practitioners making joke videos about other practitioners and saying they're wrong,

this isn't supported in the studies. And it's like very narrow mindedness around trying to limit information. And my concern, just like yours is, Drew, is let all the information out. And and if something's not for you, it's not for you. But trying to suppress other practitioners from sharing their information puts us all at a tremendous disadvantage. And it's very American to do this also. If you think about Iyerveda or TCM, these like enriching, like incredible practices that have been around for 10,000 years, the only way that the science is so strong and passed down is because it's constantly revised, passed down, passed down. And it's such a, that's the real, like, scientific method is 10,000 years of information.

By the time it gets here, it's been so understood and changed and revised that that's like the strongest science we have. Just doing a random study to see if, you know, strawberries affect your endothelium, that's not as rigorous of science as these other disciplines. And I do also see Eastern medicine as being very suppressed on social media. and really aggressively so. And I also find that to be very culturally intolerant. And that concerns me a lot as well from what I'm seeing.

I want to talk more about Eastern medicine in a second. But one thing that I'll say that's been helpful is that I kind of like that, you know, I'm not an expert. I get to ask questions on this podcast. I get to interview people. And naturally through the birth of social media, YouTube, other things, certain things that you think are information that people aren't being told about, those get clipped out and they put into, you know, social clips.

Sure. And in the earlier days of the podcast, I would put things out because I thought I'm having somebody on. They obviously know what they're talking about. If they're saying this study says X, Y, and Z, and that's a big reason why, you know, people can't lose weight. Oh, cortisol and belly fat. And actually, it's not about restricting calories.

It's about getting your cortisol in check. And you don't want to do, you know, heavy workouts or other things because it all sort of impacts your cortisol. And if somebody calls my guest out on that and says, listen, actually the research doesn't show that. And really what I take away from that is that because of this modern day age that we live in in the sort of marketing area where everybody wants their information to spread naturally through social media, things can get clipped, is that a lot of function. I think the lesson for a lot of like functional and integrative practitioners, not that they're the only ones that are doing this, a lot of people are doing this across the board. You got bros.

science people, you have even traditional allopathic people that are saying stuff, right? Is sometimes people actually more often than not, they don't know what the research says and they'd be better off saying, hey, my clinical experience is this or my personal experience. I'd rather hear that. Right? I'd rather hear that. And I think that the positive side of people being called out by some of the individuals that do that is I think that people have realized like, hey, is this actually what you mean?

because people would just want to hear the truth. They want to hear the truth that says, hey, I've worked with a lot of clients. And in my particular experience with working in clients in this category, I found that this works best for them, right? Because clinical experience is part of research. It's clinical experience. So maybe somebody may not evaluate the same way as a randomized placebo control trial, right? But that's fine. You could say this is clinical experience.

I think where people got in trouble, even people who have been on my podcast here, and other podcast is when you say that the research shows X and it doesn't show that, people are wanting the truth now more than ever. They want to know and they're willing to try stuff even if the research isn't fully there in the randomized placebo control trials. But they just want to hear from an individual like, what are you talking about? What was a study? In a way, we all have become, you know, a lot of my listeners, I call them in the category

of like professional amateurs, right? Somebody like me who really thinks a lot about health, wants to learn. We're not trained in it at all. We don't have any degree. We're not a dietitian or a medical doctor or whatever, but we're trying to connect the dots between things. We're trying to pay attention. So that's where I feel like the positive side of a lot of this debates

and people being called out has been is I think a lot more people are more wary, hopefully, about the way they present their information. and not exaggerating to the audience that's out there. I completely agree with you. And I think I'm like not a fun Instagram follow because I am always nuanced and I am so refused to take stances on things outside of, I will literally make a post and say, here are the things that here are the groups of people and what they're thinking about.

Take your pick, basically. And there's a middle ground for all of this. But I will never make a bold stance like, this is what this is. because there are so many different ways to look at a problem, and I love critical thinking so much. I really do fear, again, the suppression of critical thinking. And what I'm missing so much on social media these days is really the understanding of mechanism. So, and what I mean by that is, if I was thinking about, again, a study where people would say, lemon water doesn't help digestion. And people are obsessed with lemon water doesn't do anything. For me, it's not so much about lemon water fixing

digestion, but I'm thinking about, well, if we are deficient in stomach acid and that could cause even a tiny bit of a difference for someone in being able to tolerate protein foods or something like that if they have it before a meal, to me, that mechanistically kind of lines up. So the recommendations I look for in social media and I encourage anyone to look for are people who understand mechanism. And there's a huge debate about omega-6 fats and seed oils online. This is a huge contentious conversation. Alopathic dietitians are generally of the belief that omega-6 fats are all anti-inflammatory, where a lot of functional dietitians are, they're all pro-inflammatory. And really, what I'm always thinking about is, well, what is it in

the context of someone's overall diet? If you're eating out at any meal during the day, you're getting a tremendous amount of omega-6. That means at home, you're probably going to have to eat less to strike that ratio. So thinking about how is that broken down in the body, and then how is it in the context of other people's lives? So that nuance and that mechanistic understanding of the body, is really missing, and it's certainly missing in research because you're looking at one piece of one thing for one mechanism without considering, well, what's the downstream effect on the liver? What's the downstream effect on digestion? I want to hand it back over to you to just what else haven't we talk about?

That's important for you, right? What's important for you to want to relay? I said maybe we'll chat about the Eastern influence that's there. We can go into that. We can go a little bit more down the stomach acids pathway. I have a million questions, but sometimes I like to just go to a guest and say, What's something, you know, you feel in the conversation that will be useful and also is top of mind for you? I think the Eastern as it ties into our current conversation, too, is really important.

There is this narrow-mindedness that I'm seeing on social media where any allopathic, I call it the evidence-based crew who's like, it's not evidence-based to do that. I think what concerns me so much is not only the cultural and sensitivity of people, entire billions of people who have been utilized. these methods for 10,000 years versus modern medicine, which is a much smaller window of time, which is extremely valid and we really need modern medicine too. I think about the way that people are approaching this in this really dismissive way. And my concern broadly is that the most important thing for anyone's health is having hope. And when you say to someone, lemon water doesn't do anything, you can't balance your hormones. There's nothing you can do to balance your hormones. You can't alter cortisol. It's genetic. What it does is it limits the

window of opportunity for people because if you don't have hope, you're not making a health change. If you don't have hope, you will not heal. And I am of the firmest belief that that's true. So for me, I agree with you so much true. I want as much debate and conversation and, ooh, I tried this and it actually felt really good. It's so weird. I put salt in my lemon water and it gave me energy throughout the day. What? Low risk options for people. I want them to have every low risk option. If drinking lemon water is not going to, I don't think it's going to really kill anyone. Are you a fan of lemon water, by the way? I am a fan of lemon water. of salt in the morning. I love the vitamin C and I love having sodium. It's really supportive

for our adrenal glands in the morning. And we do need a little bit of digestive fire in the morning. So I'm a huge fan from an eastern and western combined perspective. But that seed of hope and that seed of excitement that we get that something might help me, that is the spirit of functional medicine. And that is what we are missing online, I feel. Yeah. And for those of you that are listening and you're like, wait, what do you guys actually really talking about? Don't worry. missing out on a lot. We're talking about the debates on social media. Oh, like if they don't see it on. Primarily, like, if you're not on Instagram and you're kind of like, what are you guys talking about? That's probably why you don't know is that it's, we're talking

about the debates that happen on Instagram of different practitioners or health experts that are making recommendations to the different audiences that are out there. So if you're not spending time on Instagram, you know, you're probably not seeing this information. And you know what? The same really goes for going into a practitioner's office, Drew. If someone walks into a practitioner's office and the practitioner says, no, you're not really having that symptom or, no, you can't really try things because they're not scientifically proven. I would leave that practitioner's office too. The same goes for a doctor's appointment. I want doctors and dietitians who are curious. That's the way that I'll know if someone is good is if they're curious and if

they're really listening and they're trying to get that landscape of the wholeness of you outside of acute care. I'm talking about any chronic illness acutely. If I have a broken arm, please just fix my broken arm. Don't worry about any other part of me. Just fix my broken arm. But in the context of chronic illness, if you are going to practitioners who are like, I always say, like, especially in Manhattan, it's like the more letter someone has the end of the name, the more toity-toity they are, the more set in their ways they usually are, honestly. I want that curiosity and hope and openness from any practitioner, my client see. Yeah. And like you mentioned earlier, we're so lucky, lucky that there are more and more practitioners, you know, that are out there. And for a lot of the

basics, these are things that people can work on at home, right? Absolutely. As we're sort of winding down here on the podcast, just remind our audience of some of those basics across the board that just we want to be paying attention to. And if we're struggling a little bit in those categories before we get so advanced on supplements and maybe other things that are there, which all are very helpful. I take supplements. There's things that have made a huge difference in my health. Yeah. What are some of those basics? that you want to remind people about? Sleep is always the first one of them going to mention.

And I almost feel sad when I say you have to focus on sleep. Because for people who have insomnia, they're like, yeah, I'm focusing on it, but, you know, no changes are being made. I think having really good sleep hygiene, not using your phone two hours before bed, making sure you're sleeping in a room that's 65 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit, focusing on not looking at your phone, limiting, you know, the blue light and getting maybe red light, you know, glasses or something. I think all of that is incredibly important.

sleep starts the minute that you wake up also. So beginning of the day, you need to look at natural sunlight, go for a little bit of walk. You know, that circadian rhythm will dictate sleep at night. So just having beautiful sleep hygiene. Drew, I can't even imagine how many episodes you've had on sleep, by the way. So like, you know, hit up those episodes and start thinking about that. Making sure that you're eating regularly is also so important that you're connecting with people, that you're going out in nature. Those foundations have to be in place. And then one that I think people don't talk about enough outside of the functional nutrition space is really making sure you're getting adequate minerals. You can do mineral testing, but then also just incorporating

mineral-dense foods, oysters, liver, even adding salt to foods within the realm of if you don't have high blood pressure and you meet with your practitioner about that too. I think just consuming magnesium-rich foods and taking supplements if you need for minerals as well, they're really the spark plugs of our whole body. So it really essential for people and we're grossly deficient in minerals as well. Yeah. Just to expand on a couple others that you mentioned earlier. When it comes to the diet side, don't, you know, audit your protein and make sure you're getting enough. And carbs too. Right? And carbs, of course. Fiber. Yeah, absolutely. So really the recommendation would be, I would want almost everyone having about over 30 grams of fiber a day. It's usually the recommendations

like 28 or 35 for women versus men. I would say getting over 30 grams of fiber a day. you will not get 30 grams of fiber per day eating broccoli. It's like three grams per cup at most. You will probably have to introduce things like artichokes, avocado, chia seeds, and nuts or beans in order to meet those fiber goals. But as long as there's no gut conditions, which most people have them, building up tolerance slowly is really important. And if you can't tolerate it, then it's something I would definitely look at with a practitioner for sure for fiber. We didn't touch on it, but the movement piece, you know, you talked about it calling your practitioner, saying your lower back hurts, you're saying, hey, did you walk today? Right. So in general,

people are very sedentary. We live in a very sedentary time in the world. I think the formal definition, somebody mentioned this on the podcast previously, of a sedentary lifestyle is like less than 4,000 steps a day. I don't know if that's accurate. I don't know. I feel like I've heard 4,500 is the number. Yeah, it's around there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people just like when they first start tracking their calories and their protein, they realize like, oh my gosh, I'm so overeating on, you know, even like healthy junk food. And I'm so under eating on things like protein. When they start to actually measure their steps through, you know, most people's phones has a step, you know, counter inside of that or a ring or whatever. A lot of people don't

realize that they're barely getting like maybe 3,000, 5,000 steps. And, you know, and, you know, And so just being a more active person, walking, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, strength training is the ultimate goal. I just don't think there's anything for fat loss like walking. Gabrielle would kill me for saying that, by the way. She's like, no, it's strength training. Trust me.

But I think walking is so important. Walking for mental and physical health, it is so underrated. And I know we're all talking about it now. It really is. It's the cat's pajamas for anything that you want to do. I just think, and especially getting walking in the morning with that sunlight, and you can look a little bit to the right of the, don't look directly at the sun, but a little bit to the right of the sun in the morning and then a lot to the right of the sun in the afternoon. But aligning your body circadian rhythm-wise for the entire day while walking, the benefits are so innumerable and will set you up for the day. And this is very hard with people's work schedule.

So also I have a lot of clients who are working on walking treadmill, you know, on little treadmills, walking on little treadmills, walking on their standing desk. that's an option too. Yeah. Last piece, and I'd love to hear your sort of approach to it, you know, community, finding your sort of tribe and having supported people in your life and sort of avoiding hyper, you know, toxic relationships, things that bring you down, things that don't end up pushing you in the right direction, not that all of our relationships will be perfect. What do you talk about that when it comes to your clients? Yeah, there was one study that show that loneliness is more deadly than smoking 10 cigarettes per day. I've heard some debates about that. Oh, really? Oh, I'm down. I'm open for it. I feel like I

feel like I feel it, but I'm also completely happy to disprove it anytime. See, love it. I'm telling you. Yeah, I'm open to it. I think the most important thing with connection that a lot of people miss is not only the quantity of connections, but it's really more about the quality, which is that when you're with someone who doesn't get you and doesn't feel like your person, you actually feel more lonely than if you're alone. So it's really about being with people who kind of see you and understand you, which for me, Drew, was like not at Delaware, by the way. I came out with like 10 best friends who are all from New York.

Funny enough, like I went to Delaware and met a bunch of New Yorkers. There's a lot of transplants that are in Delaware, a lot of New Jersey, a lot of New York. Yeah. That are there. Exactly. We went and then we came right back. And I was like, okay, I'm going back to New York. But it was like a struggle for me at school because I was like, people aren't getting it.

And that feels really painful. And loneliness is very painful. and the feeling of loneliness is hard. So I would say, like, focus a lot of your life on having those connections. If you can't join clubs that are interest-based and then harnessing the relationships with people you really like. And frankly, not spending time with the people you don't. Because it's actually physically damaging to be around people who don't get you and don't like you. And it's so enriching to be around people who do.

So true. And then everybody's behavior is contagious. Oh, yeah. Whether we're hanging out with people that are bringing us down. or whether or not we're hanging with people that bring us up. We're going to be severely impacted by those individuals. I've referenced a study before, but there was a Framingham cohort study that was done and showed that essentially even obesity is contagious in a way,

obesity in the medical sense, that the biggest increase in weight gain for an individual was when their friend gained weight, not their spouse, not their parent, not somebody else. And it just shows you that we want to fit in with the people that we spend time with. And if they have healthy habits and if they're positive and they're contributing to the world and they want to grow, that's going to rub off on us. If they're not doing that, if they're drinking all the time, which that's my only challenge with New York is like it's still a lot of drinking everywhere you go. Yeah. You have to hang out in New York.

I don't drink. Yeah, exactly. But it's true. this study also, by the way, I had to add in, encompassed not only who people saw, but who they talked to on the phone, which is like energy is energy. It's not that they were eating with them. It's that they were just experiencing life with them. And we're now learning that our gut microbiome has exchanges when we're talking with people. And energy medicine is so fascinating because, like, the vibe is real. I mean, it is so true. Like the energy you surround yourself with is very

scientifically tangible inside of you. Well, if our audience wants to continue to surround themselves with your energy, how do they follow along on the journey? Where do you want to send? Yeah. So I have a podcast called Quiet the Diet, which is really about just quieting any sound that's not your own voice and how do you access your own voice to do that. And we have a bunch of amazing functional medicine practitioners on the pod. And then you can just find me on Instagram at Michelle ShapiroRD. And then I have a practice with a couple nutrition professionals who are fantastic, and they are seeing one-on-one clients. That's awesome. We'll have the links for all those in the show notes below. Michelle, this is great. I'm so glad I got to connect with you, that we

were introduced, that we had you come on the podcast. And thanks so much for also sharing, not just the foundational things that everybody can work on. You know, not everybody has access to a great team or may not be able to afford it or et cetera. If they can, great. You know, you have a great team. People can work with you guys. But also to share openly, about how you've changed your mind on certain topics. I think more and more my audience has definitely shared that it's very helpful for them who often feel confused when they hear from other individuals that are sort of experts in the space that they've gone down their pathway of being confused and changing their mind and that you will probably still be confused on things

moving forward, but at least the foundational items are in place. And if we have the foundational items in place, we're never so confused that it's like, you know, we're filing health bankruptcy, right? The foundational items are in place. You're generally going to be in a good, you know, position in your life. You're generally going to feel healthy in your body. You're generally going to be on the right track that's there. In the last little bit, it's experimentation, right? And it's okay if you change your mind a little bit or you dial it in. But just the basics puts us on the right path and the right journey. So thanks for being vulnerable, sharing your story. And also, sharing how you've changed your mind on things.

I want to keep changing my mind. I hope I'm wrong about everything. And we just keep everything. Everything really? Do you feel like you're hopefully you're wrong on everything? This is so corny, but not like love. I feel like that's the one thing.

I think love like makes the world go around and like people connecting and being honest and authentic. I think everything else could change. And if that stayed the same, I wouldn't be surprised and I would be completely fine with it. But that, if that changed, I'd be very concerned.

Got it. And thank you so much, Drew. You know, I've obviously heard so many of your podcast episodes, if not all of your podcast episodes. and you're just, and I've, you're just the most wonderful, open-minded, brilliant interviewer. So it's my honor to be here today.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, I look forward to round two someday. Woo! Yeah. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things.

Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This.

Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols

for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This. Or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.