The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Eliminating Adult Acne for Good: Regain your self-esteem and confidence without wasting money on ineffective and harmful products by Leigh Brandon

Episode Date: November 26, 2023

Eliminating Adult Acne for Good: Regain your self-esteem and confidence without wasting money on ineffective and harmful products by Leigh Brandon https://amzn.to/46sNiyV Bodychek.co.uk Are you fed up with products that don't work? Are you ready to take control of your acne once and for all? Are you willing to do whatever it takes to regain your confidence and self-esteem? If you've tried everything to overcome your acne and nothing has worked, it's most likely because you haven't addressed the underlying causes. Many people waste a lot of time and money visiting professionals who only suggest products and pharmaceuticals that treat the symptoms rather than address the underlying causes. This leaves many in despair, not knowing where to turn. In 'Eliminating Adult Acne for Good', Leigh Brandon explains why the medical establishment might not want you to cure your acne, why traditional treatments rarely work, and the danger of the associated side-effects. With a mountain of scientific evidence and clinical experience supporting his methods, Leigh Brandon explains the cause of acne in a simple, step-by-step, natural approach to finding and overcoming it, enabling you to achieve and maintain clear skin for the rest of your life. Acne can destroy your confidence and self-esteem, affecting many aspects of your life, such as your career, relationships, and social life, but it doesn't have to be that way. 'Eliminating Adult Acne for Good' will provide you with the education, tools and strategies you need to help take back control of your life and eliminate acne for good. About the author Leigh is a Functional Medicine Practitioner, CHEK Practitioner, CHEK Faculty Instructor, Active Release Techniques® Therapist, author and podcast host. His extensive training and years of clinical experience has given Leigh the ability to provide a truly holistic approach to helping his clients over the years, which they have found very effective often times after other approaches hadn’t helped. Leigh was (and still is) obsessed by sports as a child and has always been active. Aged 14, he began weight training in his school’s gym, and took up weight training seriously at 23. At the age of 27, he completed his first course with the American College of Sports Medicine and his career took off from there. Since then, his passion for learning continues and he turns that knowledge into wisdom through the experience of what is now over 27 years working with clients. Leigh has always sought the ‘best of the best’ to learn from and is as passionate now about his work and gaining knowledge as much as he was in 1996, when his career in health, wellness and performance started. Leigh has formally studied with some of the world’s greatest minds such as Paul Chek, Bill Wolcott, Dr John Veltheim, Dr Michael Leahy, and Dr Dietrich Klinghardt. As well as being passionate about helping clients, Leigh has also been a member of the faculty of the world-renowned CHEK Institute since 2010 teaching and presenting in Europe, USA and Australia. He has also published five health and wellness books and has a number of online professional education programmes.

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We have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's a multi-book author. Lee Brandt joins us on the show today. His newest book is hot off the presses, November 23, 2023. It's called Eliminating Adult Acne for Good. Regain your self-esteem and confidence without wasting money on ineffective and harmful products. He's going to be talking to us about that and some of his other techniques.

He is a functional medicine and check practitioner. We're going to find out what that is. So we're going to learn a lot about health and fitness today. He began working in the health and fitness industry in 1996. From 2001 to 2007, he trained at the Czech Institute, becoming a proficient in integrated movement science, nutrition, and holistic lifestyle coaching. The training helped him go on to help people with many sports injuries and pain syndromes, skin conditions, and gut problems after many other modalities had failed. Since 2010, he's been a member of the Czech Institute facility faculty, actually teaching in Europe, Australia, North America, as well as creating new content for the Institute.

He's the author of four books on health and fitness, and he hosts the Radical Health Rebel podcast, helping educate the public to enable them to lead a more fun-filled, productive, fulfilling, and happy life. Welcome to the show, Lee. How are you? I'm great, Chris, and thanks for having me on the show. Thanks for coming. It's great to have you. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Sowebinar.com especially if people are suffering from acne but uh everything else it's uh bodycheck spelled b-o-d-y-c-h-e-k.co.uk there you go and what and what does the check stand for is that just a name or does it refer to a well it's your health

thing is both so it was established by a guy called Paul Cech, a Californian, but it also stands for corrective holistic exercise kinesiology. Ah, there you go. There you go. I'm going to pretend that I know what kinesiology is. Go ahead and tell us what that means for those who are as dumb as I am. There's two meanings to kinesiology. The meaning in the Czechzech acronym so kinesiology is the study of human movement ah so but there's also applied kinesiology which is used it's generally called muscle testing or at least muscle testing is a tool that's used to get yes no answers from a person's body so it's normally working at the subconscious level so kinesiologists what they do is they they will work with a client and ask the client's subconscious for want of a better phrase questions that their body can give them answers to so for instance it might be what what uh vitamins or minerals are they lacking in or what foods are they sensitive to and things

like that so so kinesiology has got a got a double meaning oh wow there you go and uh my my if you ask my body what's lacking it's like uh brain cells uh so there you go uh give us uh this new book that you put out you're helping adults overcome adult acne i was always surprised that when you get older you can still have acne i'm like i thought we got over this in our teens i thought this was like a teen thing uh give us a 30 000 overview what's inside your book so i talked quite a bit about my own experience so i i suffered from acne from the age of 13 to 31 so in terms of what you were saying yes adults definitely can suffer from acne i've had people in their 50s with acne so i talk about my own experience and

you know going through school was was hard enough you know you know what it's like at school i mean luckily for me i was quite good at sport i was quite good at academics but when you got a face full of acne um you know whenever when when you're at school you always get a nickname right everyone gets their nickname so i could i could rattle off a few of my old classmates but my my nickname was it right really yeah my that's mean yeah evil it's So, you know, my skin was so bad that that became my nickname at school. Wow. But you kind of, you know, as a teenager, it's bad enough. But then as you get older, you start to think, well, it should just go away because, you know, I'm now approaching my late teens, maybe my early 20s.

And you think, well, this should be gone by now. And then you get into the early 20s and, you know, you start getting into relationships. That becomes tricky when, you know, again, you've got a face full of acne, even going for jobs, you know, you can turn up for a job interview. And first of all, your confidence isn't great if your skin's really bad. But what I found was, and whether this is just my own perception or whether it was reality, I always felt that people would look at me like a teenager, even when I was older, because I had acne and they wouldn't take me seriously. So even though I was very confident, you know, turning up that I could do a particular job and people interviewing me were just not

seeing through the acne. It was like, well, this guy's just a teenager. So I'm not even going to consider him. Wow. So, you know, it caused me a lot of, you know, emotional stress. Yeah. But it also cost me financially, I believe. And not just from lost jobs, although that was probably the biggest financial loss, but the years and years of taking medication that wasn't working. So when I first went to see my gp so my mother took me i was you know 13 years old and he put me on a cream and a cleanser and they didn't work so i went back and he said okay well now i'll put you on an antibiotic and it worked

oh really so i thought great excellent and then six weeks later the acne came back oh no and it came back worse so after a while you go back to the doctor and he says well if that if that antibiotic isn't working i'll give you another one and that was my story for the next 18 years 18 years 18 years yeah which is not not good yeah um you know if your life's in danger antibiotics are an amazing thing but yeah if your if your life's not in danger then they're not so great yeah so so i talk about my story and i'm sure you know my story is pretty similar to the people that i've worked with you know the main things that people suffer from is a lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence. It's not a nice thing to have. So the other thing that I talk about as well.

So there's a chapter in the book called The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. And I go through all the pharmaceutical approaches to acne, which is the only things that really people have access to if they go to their medical doctor or they go to their dermatologist. And I go through and I, you know, i list what the good things about them are i.e what they do for acne sadly that list isn't particularly long the bad is the side effects that you get from those medications and you know some of them are breast cancer, liver failure, kidney failure, suicide. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I feel acne is probably better than all of those. Yeah. Right.

At least you're still alive. You still got a chance to put your acne right. So the ugly side is really the, I suppose, and it's probably come quite a lot more to light in the last few years, but really the, let's call it corruption of the medical pharmaceutical industry. People say to me, well, if they're that dangerous, why are they allowed to be used? And there's one simple answer to that question, money. And again, in the book, I show the regulatory agencies of each of the country's medical regulatory agencies. And I show how much of their income comes directly from the pharmaceutical industry

and it's frightening you know it really is a case of you know the fox looking after the chicken coop so so that's that chapter and i go into quite a lot of detail about all of the side effects and the side effects actually come from the uk's National Health Service website. So it's not like I'm making this up or anything like that. This is, you know, out in the open. And we've seen a lot of that with a lot of different drugs out there. You know, there was the OxyContin things and different things like that. Give us a 30,000 overview of your life. Tell us about your journey.

And, you know, you've written several books. Let's get a plugin for those. And, and what, what got you interested in this, these modalities and, and health? So my initial,

my initial interest, I guess, if you want to go back far enough is as far as I can remember, I was absolutely sports mad as a, as a young child. Neither of my parents were, as most English lads are, crazy about soccer, as you call it. We don't call it soccer, but we know what that is. And all through my school days, I was just crazy about sports.

So when I first left school, I got office job after office job and i was never really satisfied and then in the 90s this profession came around personal trainer and i thought wow really i i can i can make a living helping people get fit in a gym i was like wow this is this is like my dream so so that was the start of my journey in back in the 90s but then the more the more I learned the more I realized I didn't know so I would always be looking to learn new things all the time so I've studied lots of different areas from you know exercise nutrition lifestyle you know deep tissue therapy energy medicine you know I've studied a lot of different areas, but it really, I suppose, started with my love of sport

and I guess probably not being good enough to be professional at sport. You know, it's the kind of the closest I could have got to it. So over the years, what I've done is, so obviously I had acne issues myself. So I like helping people that are going through the same problem. I also have had a number of sports injuries.

So I had a minor tear of my anterior cruciate ligament. I've had what's called a subacromial impingement twice in my shoulder because I play a lot of tennis. And 10 years ago, I ruptured my L4, five and L5 S1 lumber discs, which put me out of action for 22 months. Wow. So what I,

what I now do is I really focus on helping the kind of people who have the same problems that I used to have. So the other thing, the other thing that I had myself, having had antibiotics for 18 years, was that I also had gut issues. Yeah. That'll do it because the antibiotics killed the gut.

Yeah. Microbes in your gut. Absolutely. Absolutely. So what I do now is I mainly work with people with skin conditions. Within that, that would be mainly eczema and acne. I work with people with gut conditions, whether it's, you know, IBS-type symptoms, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, something called SIBO, so small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

Oh, really? Which is quite common. Oh, wow. And sports injuries. that so that's what i tend to do in my work and you know my my passion to help people i guess really comes from having the the sympathy of having gone through those problems myself so i can really connect with those people because i know exactly how it feels and how much it negatively affects your life. That will definitely do it.

I never even heard of SIBO before. That's the first time I've heard it. But I'm looking at the Mayo Clinic and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth occurs in small and abnormal increase in the overall bacterial production in the small intestine. Wow. You know, we've had a lot of people on the show that have talked about gut health and, uh, more and more people are starting to figure out that a lot of stuff, you know,

even brain swelling and stuff that goes on in your brain, it all comes from the gut. Like your guts, like your, it's like a central source of everything really when it comes down to it. Absolutely. And there is a chapter again in, in my book

eliminating adult acne for good whereby you know the chapter is called balancing the gut skin axis because you know if there's if there's an issue in the gut and and the gut is what we call leaky or intestinal hyperpermeability the contents from the gut can leak into the bloodstream and then is or can be released through the skin so that's where you can have a toxic built up in the skin and that's one of many causes of acne so that's that's another that's another issue as well so i join on a number of facebook groups groups, to try and chip in whenever I can and kind of try and point people in the right direction. Although it can be difficult because a lot of the owners of the groups don't want you to give too much information away. But what I find is that people come into those groups asking for advice, but they're coming to the group with the wrong mindset.

They're coming to the group saying, what product can I use? Or should I use this product? Or should I stop using this product? Well, if they've read chapter two of my book, they will know that the products aren't really going to get the job done because what they're doing is they attempt to address the symptoms. But what they don't do, they don't address they attempt to address the symptoms. But what they don't do, they don't address the root cause of the problem. So what I try and get across to people is that, you know, if you're driving along in your car and you get an engine warning light come on your dashboard, what's that telling you? It's telling you there's an issue with the engine, right?

Well, the way that our medical paradigm is at the moment is that what most people do is they'll take a black piece of tape, cover over the engine warning light and say, everything's fine now because I can't see the light. Right? Yeah, that's pretty much true. I'll deal with it next week. Yeah, know you're going to keep driving your car around until eventually the you know the engine's going to blow up whereas what should you do you should take note of the warning take it to a mechanic

let the mechanic find the root cause of the problem fix the problem and then you drive your car out and the light's not on anymore not because it's covered over but because the the root of the problem, fix the problem. And then you drive your car out and the light's not on anymore, not because it's covered over, but because the, the root of the problem has been fixed. Yeah, that'll do it. So the difference between that analogy and the way that I work is that I don't actually fix anybody. I teach them how to fix themselves. Ah, and if you teach a person to fish with their health,

I guess they keep their health for a long time to go. Absolutely, yeah. There you go, there you go. Well, I'm glad you went on this journey. The gut health thing, does that also play an important role in acne? Absolutely crucial, yeah. So the one thing I mentioned,

if you've got a leaky gut that can that can lead to to acne but if you've got uh what we call dysbiosis which is a an imbalance of bacteria in the gut there's a particular type of bacteria and they give off a toxin called lipopolysaccharides and again if you've got a leaky gut those toxins are going to end up in the bloodstream and try to be excreted through the skin as well as other toxic kind of exit routes if you like but if if someone's got a fungal infection in the gut if they've got any kind of parasite infection like a worm or a fluke or anything like that again they're going to be giving off high levels of toxins, which can lead to acne. So the gut is absolutely crucial when it comes to acne.

So if you just think putting stuff on your skin is going to solve the problem in the long term, it's quite a short-sighted kind of view. Because unless your gut's healthy, your skin's not going to be healthy either. And it's probably not going to make your gut any healthier taking penicillin and or some sort of antibiotic absolutely not because that's just going to piss everything off even more so really acne is an indicator that there's something maybe more unhealthy going on than just washing your face every day with a washcloth maybe absolutely i mean when you look at the causes of acne if they go unchecked there are some the same the same causes the same things that cause acne could potentially go on to cause things like heart disease and cancer wow so the way that i try and

educate people is to say look whatever symptom you have whether it's acne or whether it's another symptom what the symptom is there for it's a way that your subconscious mind is trying to make your conscious mind aware that there's something not right in your body so whether it's your skin's breaking out or you can't you can't have a bowel movement, or you've got pain in your elbow, or whatever it might be, symptoms are trying to wake you up and say, look, something's not right. Something needs to be addressed. Now, for most people, most people can't work out what that thing is, but that's where you need to find someone that can help you work out what that symptom is trying to tell you rather than well let's just sweep that symptom under the carpet yeah you don't want to

do that you want to you want to deal with the right stuff because otherwise you just make more problems for yourself and more side effects and uh everything else um so uh what what's why is mindset important because you coach people and's, why is mindset important? Cause you coach people and help them. Why is mindset important when overcoming acne? Yeah. So I've touched on it a little bit. So, you know, what I was saying earlier about, you know, people often think, okay, what products do I need to put on my skin to clear my acne?

So that's, that's the first side of it. But the second side of it, and this is the case not just for acne but for any health journey that someone's about to go on is to get their mind in the right place because and again this comes from my 27 years of experience it's very rarely that as a professional i'll give someone advice to follow and they say okay and they just go off and do it and it's and it's just not an issue what normally happens is i go off and i give them some advice and they go off and do it and they might start off the first few weeks they're doing well all of a sudden something in life happens and it's one step forward two steps back So people need to have that mindset before they start so that whenever

they come across a bump in the road, it's not going to be a complete halt to their progress, that they're ready for it. So some of the things that I talk about in the book, and some of this is kind of simple things that a lot of people know about, but yet people still don't do it. Things you know setting clear goals setting core values and again i teach people how to set their core values around things like diet exercise sleep etc but also what i get people to do is i get them to sit down and and and I give them ideas on, on what these things could be. I get them to consider, okay, so what could get in the way of me doing the things that I need to do to get, to achieve clear skin or whatever it might be. So, you know, some of the things that I've

seen over the years with clients, you know, that they'll come in for a session with me and I'll say, well, how did you get on from last week? And how, how was your diet? And they'll say, well,

it was good, but you know, we had a, we had a working lunch and all they had was sandwiches or they got KFC and, or whatever it might be. Right. And what they're saying is rather than oh well it wasn't my fault because of an external thing that happened i i say to them okay so what you're telling me is you weren't properly prepared

for what was going to happen right so what i what i get them to do is i get them to consider okay so what things can happen like that so that when they do happen, I've already got a plan. I've already got a plan in place. So then with that scenario, I might say to them, right, okay, next time you've got a working lunch, what can you do to make sure that you're in control of what you're going to eat for that lunch? And I'll let them come up with the solution. So they might say, well, I guess I could take my own luncheon. Great. There you go. We've solved that one. What's the, what's the next problem? Okay. Because otherwise people have got excuses, but if they, if they can override that excuse, even before they get into that situation,

there's no excuse to do the wrong thing yeah does that make sense definitely yeah i mean you've got you've got tools and having the accountability partner as a coach yeah to help you stay in line can make all the difference for you as well because that's kind of what you need you need somebody to help keep you honest really yeah yeah um one thing is you you help with a few different things too you help people overcome digestive issues uh chronic fatigue uh lower back pain and shoulder pain and knee pain tell us about some of the services and offerings you do there on your website at body check yeah so generally if someone wants to work with me, they need to commit to a six-month program for any of those. And the reason I say that is not because I want to take people's money off them. It's because I want them to prove to me that they're committed to change. That's one thing. The other thing is because it

takes that long. So I'm, I'm not in the business of quick fixes, right? I, I'm not going to give you a pill and it's going to solve all your problems. As I said, I teach people how to fix their own problems. So I'll, I'll do a whole battery of assessments on people so first of all it will be i get them to do a whole battery of questionnaires so i can get a good idea of what's going on in their body and what the potential root cause or root causes of their issues are so i'll get an overview of what's going on hormonally and this is purely from questionnaires you know what's going on hormonally what's going on psychologically what previous uh trauma have they had in their life that might be yeah um what kind of uh physical history have they got have they had previous injuries things like that and then certainly for if people are coming in for, then I will do a very thorough physical assessment.

It takes me about four hours to do a physical assessment on someone. So I'm looking at the whole body. I'm looking at how much range of motion have they got in their joints, how much tension have they got in their muscles. I look at the positioning of the spine, the biomechanics of their jaw, their eyesight, their their hearing their balance and then if if i feel it's necessary and this is different from person to person but quite often i will also run lab tests on people as well so that's the functional medicine side of it coming

in you know i might run food sensitivity tests i might run stool tests for their gut i might run tests for their hormone levels so it depends on the client it depends on you know what's wrong with them um heavy metal toxicity tests can be quite useful for some people particularly with acne so that i've had a few clients where the cause was actually heavy metal toxicity and as soon as we cleared those toxins out of the body, bang, the skin was just absolutely fine. Wow. So once I've got all the information,

then it's a process of coaching through exercise, nutrition, lifestyle, looking at things like sleep, and also minimizing any kind of stress on the body whether it be toxins whether it be electromagnetic radiation which is a real problem today and then and then also coaching people through detox protocols because yes you can cut things out that are toxic but that doesn't necessarily mean that the toxins that are stored deep in your cells are going to naturally just come out. That's just not the way it works for some toxins in the body.

So there are a number of detox protocols that I might take someone through. There might be protocols also to help balance the gut microbiome. Perhaps in some people, I might do protocols to get rid of fungus in the body or to get rid of parasites in the gut. So it's a very it's a very holistic approach. Sometimes I do manual therapy on people. So I use a particular technique called active release techniques. So I studied in sport remedial massage therapy initially. But then soon as I learned active release techniques i stopped doing massage

completely because it's just such a fantastic technique so i've got all these tools in my toolbox and i just pull out whichever tool is relevant at any particular time with any particular person there you go and it sounds like you've got a lot going on uh some of your early books let's get a plug in for them as well too it looks like you talk about anatomy and the body and different things. There you go. Yeah. So my first three books were all in a series of anatomy books, but they had a theme to them. So one was on sports conditioning, one was on yoga, and one was on sports injuries.

So they were my first three books. There you go. So this has been really insightful. People really need to understand a lot of these things uh you know it's there's so many different things to get back the body and as you say just uh putting tape over the check engine light doesn't really fix the engine and sometimes the stuff that you may do can can actually contribute things and make it worse give people your final pitch out to work with you on board with you, your websites,

et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So if anyone wants to contact me to find out more, probably the best website is bodycheck.co.uk. That's body check B O D Y C H E K. People can also contact me on Instagram. So that my handle on Instagram is actually the name of my podcast,

which is radical health rebel um via my website body check people can people can um request a consultation with me happy to consult with anyone i can consult with anyone pretty much anywhere in the world um there are some people that i might need to see them in person and, and occasionally people do fly into the UK to see me. Um, that's more, more if someone's in physical pain, that would normally be the case.

Yeah. Um, but a lot of the other conditions like acne and eczema and gut conditions, you know, they don't need to travel at all often for those, those kinds of issues. There you go. There you go.

Uh, so this has been super insightful and we've got all your.coms in the can, right? Yeah. Okay. And, uh, this has been super insightful,

Lee. Uh, it's, uh, it's got health and, uh, you know, even mold and,

and, uh, toxins people are exposed to that they have, they need to get other systems sleeping. Well, you know, that's an important factor. If you don't sleep, you don't heal. Your body doesn't reset itself.

People really underestimate the value of sleep. Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. There you go. Thanks, Moniz, for tuning in. Check out the book, Eliminating Adult Acne for Good. Regain your self-esteem,

confidence without wasting money on ineffective and harmful products. And it may teach you some other ways to improve your health and quality of health in so many different ways. It's all kind of connected, people, because it's your body and you're living inside it. At least some of you are. I don't know who's living inside your bodies, but that's your problem, not mine. Anyway, guys, it came's your problem, not mine. Hey guys, it came out November 23rd, 2023. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com,

4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, chrisfas1, on the tickety-tockety, and as Kristen Butler says on LinkedIn, you've got to invest in yourself. So thank you, Kristen. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.