Undoctrinate Yourself - #8 - Michelle Shapiro RD

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Michelle Shapiro is an Integrative, Functional Registered Dietitian in NYC who has helped over 1000+ clients reverse their anxiety, heal long standing gut issues, and approach their weight in a loving way. She has a virtual private practice where she helps clients work one-on-one towards these goals. Michelle has had a personal weight loss of 100 pounds, which led her to her calling of helping clients lose weight in a safe, effective way. Find Michelle on Instagram ⁠@michelleshapirord⁠Listen to Michelle's podcast ⁠Quiet the Diet⁠⁠Michelle's Website⁠ www.michelleshapirord.com⁠Support the podcast by becoming a patron https://www.patreon.com/UndoctrinateYourselfPodcastFollow the podcast on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@undoctrinateyourselfpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Dr. Alexis on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@dralexisjazmyn⁠⁠

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Undoctrinate Yourself podcast. I am back this week with another very special guest for you. This is Michelle Shapiro. She's a registered dietitian and she refers to herself as a functional and integrative dietitian, which is super interesting. And I think we need to dive into what exactly that means because I think in dietetics, there's a certain approach that's maybe more in accordance, at least in the past with like the food pyramid and things that maybe don't make sense that much anymore. So I'm really excited to hear her share about what it means to be functional and integrative within the realm of dietetics. But let me just start by introducing her and welcome her onto the show. I am so excited to be here. And it was such good timing because I've been so

particularly obsessed with brainwashing in the nutrition world recently. And I'm like, who better to talk to about this with or on than the Undoctrace Yourself podcast with you? I mean, come on. I am so, so excited to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm excited to get into that with you too. I know we share actually a lot in common, which we'll get into for sure, but we're kind of new friends and I'm excited to learn more about you on this show and continue building the relationship and coming on your pod, quiet the diet, which you'll also tell us all about, I'm sure. But let's just start by like, like we said, defining what integrative and functional means within the realm of dietetics. What does that look like for you? Yeah, absolutely. So you asked me the question right before we came on. Do you consider yourself an integrative or functional dietitian? And I say, both because I think they actually have different definitions. When I think of integrative, I think of holistic of or relating to the whole, right? And then I also think of integrative as being Eastern and Western combined when it comes to traditional medicines versus modern medicine. So I think that integrative medicine and nutrition is the bridge between what we would

consider traditional medicine like TCM, Ierveda, and what we might consider modern medicine. So I think that that's what I think of when I think of integrative. Functional is a very specific approach. to nutrition and medicine, which means that we are looking for, and I'm already rolling my eyes, that root cause. And in extreme brevity, to give an example, if someone had a thyroid condition and they went to an alopathic dietitian or doctor, they might say, here, let's give you this exogenous pig hormone that will replace the function of your thyroid. If you went to a functional dietitian or doctor, they'd say, why is your thyroid doing that in the first place? And we'll seek to understand the mechanism and at all times possible and whatever way,

possible reverse the mechanistic failure, whatever that is. So the goal is not to manage a lot of these conditions. The goal is to reverse when possible. And that has to be done through a very specific way of looking at the root cause of what is causing that. But I think root cause has been so like, I don't know, co-opted. But at its core, it means what is the real problem here? And why did this happen in the first place? Yeah, I think that's a really important point to bring up. And also, I mean, I get the eye roll when it comes to root cause because also there may not be one thing. It could be. Oh yeah.

There's never one root cause. Exactly. Yeah. So it could be a range of things that kind of feed into each other and create this state there in. But on the plus side of that, like a lot of times because maybe all of these factors can synergize in kind of a negative way and create a like a feed forward loop. But if you can correct one of the things, sometimes other things also get better, which is

encouraging to like build momentum in that positive direction. It's so true. I've been really, because of a person. experience and I know it's funny we didn't even know if we were going to talk about this, but really, really quickly, when it comes to something like mass cell activation syndrome and you're thinking about like pots and these other conditions, they're really like neuroimmune endocrine disorders. So they're really like involving every single part of our body. So it's like if you do one thing in your body that let's say one thing like a B vitamin, right, B vitamins can

influence like your anxiety, your liver function. They can influence your like physical nerve signaling, like they can influence all your energy metabolism. So like even just one thing that you do can intervene in many different ways for symptoms, which is a huge blessing. And then also it can be on the flip side dangerous because if you have one kind of injury, it can influence you in all these different ways too. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I think MCAS is super interesting for a lot of people and just like histamine stuff lately because we see. So when I joined the lab that I'm doing my postdoc in, one of the projects that they were introducing to me when I first joined in February was, this post-COVID project, they were trying to understand post-COVID syndrome, and they weren't

looking at some of the negative effects of the vaccines in combination with that, which I'm personally interested in, but it's kind of taboo with an academia to talk about. But a lot of people after the vaccines or after COVID or both are having a lot of histamine issues. And I personally went through that as well, and I know you have as well. And it's quite an extensive journey. And a lot of people don't fully recover from the post-COVID syndrome or the post-Jab syndrome for up to a year or more because I guess it takes a while to clear spike protein, which seems to be playing a role in like the prolonged effects. But I mean, maybe since we already brought it up, if you want to share briefly about what you've been going through with regards to that,

it could be interesting. Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny, Alexis, like when I was first became a dietitian, I became a dietitian. I was like, oh, I want to help people lose weight, right? We both had these major weight loss journeys. That was like a huge, a huge goal of mine. And then on my weight loss journey, which I know we'll talk a little bit more about, but I experienced because it was so rapid, I experienced a lot of nutrient deficiencies, which ultimately led me to really severe and serious panic attacks, thyroid disorders, really serious gut issues. And, you know, I kind of thought like when that happened, that was like, all right, that's my thing for life now. And I've healed from these things and I'm better. And then I got hit with

mold and COVID. And it was just like, darn, my work isn't done. But I feel very like, I was like, oh, I thought I did the things already. I thought I healed already, right? But I really. But I really will say that there's so much wisdom in mass cell activation syndrome. There's so much wisdom in these inflammatory conditions and these immune-centric conditions because they force you to take care of yourself in a way that you never thought you'd have to. And they force you to really look at your relationship with stress and your relationship with these other things. And I'm just grateful because I had the wonkiest, weirdest symptoms. And then when my clients are experiencing them, I'm like, now I understand what that experience is like. Have you found that in

yourself and with your clients too? Yeah, so much. Like ever since I was going through the histamine stuff at the end of last summer and like early last fall, it was probably like three months of intense issues. I think it was probably catalyzed by a parasite. I had some raw oysters in Baltimore in like August and my GI, like gastrointestinal tract was having some symptoms after that. And then everything kind of escalated with the histamine stuff. Like whenever I would exercise vigorously, I would get these incredible migraines with like visuals and and just like getting these also like histamine attacks where like I could feel my airway swelling and it would just trigger anxiety because so as part of this I also learned that like histamine has so many variety of actions across different areas of

the body and like can directly trigger anxiety circuits in the brain so it's like physiologic anxiety it's not like you're ruminating and creating yeah it's not mental at almost at all yeah I agree you can almost feel it differently right like I feel like I'm like now I can say to my clients I'm like okay, there's a histamine specific anxiety, by the way. I've never talked about this on a podcast. It's very specific where you're like awake at night and your eyes are bug in, but you're not mentally anxious at all. You are just zingy.

It's like you're like electrified, basically. And that's again, because there's a lot of nerve signaling that happens as a result of histamines. And you also brought up something, which is really important, which is this relationship between mass cell activation syndrome and pots, right? Like this is like kind of known that it can cause dysotronomia. but and so some people are experiencing dizziness when they're working out. They're experiencing dizziness when they stand up. Heart rate changes in all this.

And at the core of all this is literally dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. Same thing with mass cell activation syndrome. So it's very weird when people come to me with these weird heart rate issues and they're like, what do you mean I'm going to do vagus nerve work? And that's going to influence it because our brain is the signaling center for our heart rate and our autonomic nervous system, which controls all the things that we like don't have inputs in basically, you know, like those like automatic functions of the body are being directed from there. So and when you have constantly high histamines also, then it leads to like vasodilation

constantly, which then will lead to, you know, poor blood flow issues. There's a lot of different mechanisms. But the picture is very clear for us now, which is that it's like it's a nervous system thing. Like it's, it's an immune system thing that becomes a nervous system thing or a nervous system thing that becomes an immune system thing. But it's that I feel like the science, we've kind of got it now. It's like, okay, this. is a major dysfunction of the nervous system where the body is constantly on guard, essentially. Yes, absolutely. And just to circle back, like, with regards to like you working with your clients and like seeing these histamine things pop up now that they're in your awareness,

like I've really had the same experience too. Not only I think are more people having histamine issues due to like COVID or the vaccines, but also like now I just have so much awareness of it because I personally went through it and I did so much research for myself to figure out what was going on. And then so now like I can see histamine, you know, symptoms kind of a mile away. And it also made me realize that I think I always had some level of like a histamine intolerance situation, whether it's like a genetic predisposition. Like growing up, everybody in my family, like on my mom's side, their nose would always run when they ate basically anything. And like, people would just be blowing their nose at the dinner table and it was totally normal. Like,

never thought anything of it. Same with me. And then I always also had like low blood pressure, like basically all the time. and also histamine related and like became exacerbated when I was going through all that stuff. But like it's just very interesting like the kind of pleotropic effects of histamine depending on what part of the body and how just like all encompassing it can be when it comes to like how people are presenting clinically. It's just very interesting and but also could be very scary depending on how it's presenting for people.

It is. It's a it's and there's mass receptors all over our entire body. Right. So it really could be. And I always say it's interesting with with mass activation syndrome. because I feel like it shows up how it shows up for what your body wants to do. What I mean by that is I'm not a person who's ever had a skin condition. I've never had a rash even in my life.

But I will get like, I'll get like the first thing will be like I'll get leg tremors and like dizziness. It's my body's way of like showing me something's up. And like we all have different patterns from a, you know, even a spiritual way. Like we just have different ways that our body communicates with us. So histamine symptoms could be like, you know, histamine symptoms could be like diarrhea or it could be constipation. And it could be leg tremors or it could be numbness. You know, it could, it could be like hyperactivation or hypo activation of different things. And it really depends, again, how it manifests for you. But the picture is clear in that there's an accumulation of

stuff on top of stuff and then something's going to kick you off. And COVID and the vaccines both were tremendously successful at activating our immune systems. Both of them were strong contenders to activate that immune system and then ultimately that nervous system. And There's a lot of different mechanisms that we know that the virus and the vaccines both did that. But I would say I have to agree with you just from, you know, what I've seen, both the vaccine and the virus caused quite similar responses in clients. It was just the same. It would maybe be a little more delayed with the virus itself than the vaccine.

But it was very similar, huge, huge immune responses in people's in people whose bodies were already kind of tapped. I think that's and that we didn't know we were tapped. That's the other problem. it's like we thought we were good, you know? And then it was like, it was a real challenge for us to see that. And then also, you know, there's this whole neural and muscular component of things, too, where like mine got kicked off because I got a bad chiropractic adjustment and I found out I was hypermobile and they loosened all the joints in my neck, aka my vagus nerve did not love that. And so every time

I, you know, I had cervical instability. Anytime my neck would move out of place, it would instigate this heart rate response. So I would go to a doctor and a doctor would be like, this is a cardiac issue. I'm like, it's so not a cardiac issue, even though it's showing up in my heart. It's a blood flow issue coming from other, from my nervous system, which was very, it's just, it's all, it's coming from all these different angles and it's very complicated, the science behind all of it. But ultimately, it's really just like you have to treat the nervous system and you have to go very baby steps and very slow with your body, which is very unpleasant for people like us, you know,

who want to go, go, go. Oh, yeah, I totally feel that. And actually really interesting about the hypermobility because a friend of mine who was recently diagnosed with EDS, like a genetic form of it. Like she was saying she's been doing a lot of research on it and how there's a lot of histamine stuff that comes up with hypermobility. They tend to go hand in hand, which just did a podcast about this five minutes before we started. By the way, my trainer is a hypermobility trainer. It's, they call it the triad, which is mass cell activation syndrome, Ellers Danlos and dysodonomia. So then, and, and you know what? I've been

throw into the mix, too, neurodivergence. Also, there's a huge relationship between all that, too. It's really, it's really very fascinating and really, like you said, very unpleasant. And I, I hope people take from this also this tangent that I'm forced us to go down. And I'm sorry, but that there is no matter how absolutely crap you feel, because these can produce some of the worst symptoms in the world, there is always a tool for you. And there's always a pathway you can go down no matter if you're at a point where you're like, it can't, it can't be this bad. And I can't do this.

Like you really can. But it's going to take like tiny little baby steps. And it's just not the kind of condition where like, you know, So give me some with IBS. I'm like, all right, I could fix that up. Let's clean that up, you know. But something like this, it's really takes very, very delicate maneuvering and very slow pacing to work with. Absolutely. And speaking of tools, maybe I'll share just briefly a cautionary tale for one of the tools that I was using. I was using the enzyme, the DAO enzyme isolated from like, I think poor kidney or something last fall when I was going through a lot of issues. And so for people

who don't know, like diamine oxidase is the enzyme that breaks down histamine. And so in theory, it's supposed to help keep histamine levels at bay, especially like from dietary sources. Well, I was eating a low histamine diet and I was using that supplement. And I didn't put two and two together, but my histamine attack started becoming more frequent and more intense when I started using it. And so I was using it basically all of last September. And like two or three times a week, I would be like this close to calling an ambulance because I could barely breathe. Like this, I had to do like a lot of self-regulation, like I was doing chanting, tapping, like just anything to get my nervous system to downregulate. And I ended up running out of them and the shipment was delayed for the next

batch. And so I was basically fasting because I was scared to eat because I didn't think that that was contributing to it. I thought it was helping me. But then what I ended up doing is just eating anyway because I went like 24 hours without eating anything. And then I was fine. And then I never took them again and I was never had another attack after that. So for me and I actually ended up doing some research on the DAO enzyme. And it seems like there could be a reciprocal relationship between gut mass cells and lung mass cells that if you push gut histamine too low, it can create this response in the lungs that's like equal and opposite basically, which is like perplexing in some ways. In other ways, it kind of makes sense because we know the lungs and the gut are both these very communicative

barrier surfaces that have like this access between them. Like we think about the gut brain, but there's also the gut lung. And so that was just for me, like for anybody who's taking DAO, if it's working for you, great. But also make sure that some things are, like, if you're taking a lot of supplements at once, it's hard to tell what's working, what's not. And like, just important to survey frequently, like what you're doing and how you're feeling in relationship to those tools.

Yeah. I do love Dow generally, but Alexis, like your experience is gold. Like, that's your body and you know that. Yeah. And that's the truth. And that is actually very fascinating to me. And I will say that if you are dealing with it. mass activation syndrome or histamine intolerance at all like you know histamine intolerance of any kind

you have to go so ridiculously slow with supplements like i know dr becky campbell who works with histamine supplements or it was beth o'hara or dr um becky camel they will literally tell you to take one eighth of one supplement to start like that just do one eighth of one dose of one pill like that's how slow you have to go because you have to understand that the body's in a state of defense so anything you put into the body can create a new state of defense and threat. So you have to basically just go so tiny and so slow, even with breathwork and things like that. Because you don't want like, so funny, like being a New Yorker, like, I feel like people who are very like being calm is not a comfortable state for a lot of our nervous system. So you have to go just every single thing. It's just like

these little moves that you can make. But I'm so glad that you're healthy now. I'm so glad that we're able to be here and that you're healthy now. Oh my goodness. Oh my God. Same. Yeah, for you as well. because I know that journey has been, I think a bit more recent for you. I don't, I think you've said that recently you've been feeling much better, but it was like earlier this year, were you even having issues? Yeah, it was earlier this year. And it was, it was literally got, all of it got kicked off by that chiropractic adjustment I did where basically he didn't know I was hypermobile and he just dislocated like, he like sublacks

a lot of the joints in my neck. And so I left, I was so dizzy. I couldn't see straight. My heart rate jumped up to 170 when I was, when I was laying. And I have had perfect heart rate my whole life. it's not even a consideration for me. And that was really, like, I was like, oh, my God. Like, I had to think of all the mechanisms.

I was like, wait, okay. Why is this thing that happened to my neck causing something in my heart? And that's when I really started to understand all of this. And I've always been a person who's kind of sensitive to supplements. I've always been a person who's hypermobile without realizing and didn't understand kind of the bigger picture. But it was actually like the movement of my joints that caused the nervous system response because my body was like, oh, my God, what is that?

Why did you do that essentially? So I was like seeing clients in a neck brace earlier this year for a couple weeks because I could not, I had no range of motion. I couldn't move an inch to the left or right. And I had a lot of amazing practitioners who had to work alongside me whereby I'm usually self-treating. But it was like so foreign to me. And this is such a, it's such a different landscape. So I am really grateful we experienced it because I think so many of my clients are now experiencing it where Alexis, I've had the same clients for like five or six years. They've never had any symptoms like this.

And after COVID or after the vaccine, I was like, what the heck? I know these people's bodies. I've known these people's bodies for years. So it was very, it really took a lot of like a totally new approach. And I'm glad we were forced to dig into the science so much because it helps us to help other people even better. Yeah, totally true. And regarding your chiropractic adjustment, I think maybe this seems to be a trend because my same friend with EDS that I mentioned before, she had a congenital defect in her lower back, like the structure of it.

And she got a chiropractor adjustment. And he literally broke her spine. Oh, my gosh. She could have got it. And she barely walked for an extended period of time. She had extensive rehab. And it's like she's also hypermobile. So I'm wondering, you know.

You have to be very careful with car. And my trainer is a chiropractor who Taylor Goldberg, who I work with. And she will tell every chiropractor, you need to screen every single. It takes two minutes to screen for hypermobility. You need to screen every single person. A hypermobile body doesn't do things the same way. it's a different body. So the same, and this is the same nutrition, right? Like everyone's body is totally different. An insulin resistant body is not going to operate in the same way, especially if it's

genetically driven. I mean, there's literally nothing that you can do about that. You are just causing a fire when you're, you know, inflaming it essentially. So yes, that's a sensitivity around chiropractors. I have other sensitivities. I wish chiropractors would have to, but I love a lot of them, but some of them I wish wouldn't give supplement and nutrition information, as you know, I can imagine. Yeah, it seems like, I mean, I don't, I don't, I've never been to a chiropractor and I don't personally, like I'm not friends with any, but it seems like just from what I see online that a lot of them dabble in many different areas. It's like maybe outside of their training unless they do like continuing education. I don't know. Yeah, a lot of the kinesiology stuff is when I get nervous, you know, it's like you poke someone in the ribs and you say you have a vitamin B12 deficiency. Like that kind of stuff. I'm like, no, no, I don't think so. I don't know. You know, but I otherwise have a deep respect for chiropractors. And I, there are many who are close friends and colleagues who I've seen personally who are fantastic. but it takes that little layer of screening that becomes quite necessary. Yeah, it really does.

And that's the case in any profession. If you're vetting, you know, a practitioner in any area, it's going to be highly variable depending on the person. Like, their training, their integrity, like just so many variables when it comes to picking one that's right for you. And so, yeah, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind whenever you're looking for a practitioner in any area. But having said that, I would love to, so we've alluded to your story on like your weight loss journey, but I would love to circle back to that because we've never talked about it personally, but I know the audience would also love to hear about your experience. And you mentioned like your rapid weight loss and kind of how that shaped the way that you're practicing dietitian now.

Absolutely. Yeah. So I grew up in Queens, New York, always in like a very extremely diverse of like race, gender, body size, like any type of characteristic of human extreme diversity, which was like I think why Queens is like the best place in the entire world. high school is actually one of the most diverse high schools in the entire world, like could be the most, which is very cool. But that being said, what was so beautiful about that was I always had grown up in a larger body. Like my whole childhood from when I was like four, I just grew up in a larger body. And I really didn't experience any like issues socially or in school or anything because it wasn't like a homogenous atmosphere where you had to be one type of way. I think people were much more accepting. I was going away to the University of Delaware. And I was like, wow, I'm going from my high school had 5,000 students.

in it, by the way, and my literal high school. And there's another high school a mile away that also was 5,000 students, just Queens is a lot of humans, you know, and I was class con in my high school, shining achievement of my life. But I was like, um, you know, I was going away to school and I was like, people aren't going to know me as Michelle Shapiro, the class clown, you know, they're not going to know me for all these things. I'm going to be judged on my appearance. And I realized when I was going away to the University of Delaware, which is a much more homogenous place, I was like, I'm going to have to like socially fit in from appearance standpoint. So I was like, I'm going to just lose a lot of weight somehow. And what that resulted in was quite disordered. I rapidly lost close to like

a hundred pounds in three months, which I would like for recommend to anyone. And what happened was all of college, I was really faced with debilitating chronic illness. I had horrible panic attacks, acid reflux, all other sorts of digestive issues. My thyroid was tanked. And I would go to doctors and they, and now having been in like a healthy weight, they would say like, you, oh, everything's fine. You should just lose more weight in fact. You know, it was not even a consider. generation like that that weight loss could have caused negative side effects. Of course, you know also like you're pouring toxins and dodgously through your body when you're losing weight. Like there's so many different things that were happening. And I had all these nutrient

deficiencies. So I really was sick. And I left school with a dietetics major. And as you can imagine, like there's nothing in a alopathic dietetics degree that's going to help you with the fallout of rapid weight loss. This was, you know, I started school, what, 14 years ago, 13, 14 years go, that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about how do you calorie count to lose weight and help your clients with that. It's not, you know, there is an understanding of the body, but we'll talk about my kind of qualms with, you know, and quarrels with the dietetics degree.

But I didn't have any information like that. So I actually sought the help of a naturopathic position who's now who I told him in our first appointment was going to be my best friend and is my best friend, Dr. Robert Kachko. And that was really my intro into functional and natural pathic medicine because he really sat with me. We ran a Dutch test and like, I don't know, whatever it was, like 2012 or something like that. And that was the first time that I was like, oh, my anxiety is coming from these kind of different parts of my body. And then I kind of put together this, what I like to call battle plan for all of my health, which I kind of separate lifestyle, supplement, food, movement. And I said, what can I do from every single angle?

And I was reading like hundreds of books on anything related to my symptoms. And that's where I really fell in love with naturopathic functional integrative medicine and nutrition. And knew that my practice was going to be encompassing those things. It wasn't until about, you know, a couple years in that I made my own business, which was this, but it's certainly my health journey and my learning that this rapid weight loss, even though it's great to get the weight off, I guess, you know, it's very, it needs to be done very carefully. So my goal is to help my clients not have to lose weight the wrong way so that they don't have to not even keep it off, but just deal with the metabolic and toxic consequences of that. And also really, um,

I just love working with anxiety. So I have a lot of clients. I like the more debilitating the panic attacks, the more fun we have. I love a panic attack sufferer, to be honest with you. Yeah, I mean, from a relatability standpoint that you were there. And so you totally understand them in that way. Super interesting. So there's a couple things I want to ask you about.

So first, I know like something that's not really talked about with extreme weight loss is like what happens afterwards. Like so for me, for example, when I also lost like 100. pounds. It was more like over the course of a year, like maybe 16 months or something like that. Which was still quick, obviously. Yeah, it's still quick. It's still quick. But I like, I think after I lost the weight and reached like my quote unquote goal weight, it's kind of like what now, which is a problem with just having like weight as a readout or like something that you're achieving. So like I ended up going into CrossFit and getting really interested in like Olympic style lifting, which was fun because it gave me something else to focus on outside of just like,

what my body weighed on the scale. But for you, like, did you have any sort of strategy for, like, keeping that weight off or keeping your mentality from, like, I don't know if, did you experience a lot of disordered eating after the weight loss? Like, I personally did, but I think that's pretty common. Oh, definitely. Yeah. I mean, you're definitely afraid to gain the weight back, right?

I lost weight in a disordid way and I kept that eating disorder going for a couple years after. Yes. I feel like, honestly, I, when I was in the dietetics degree, it actually helped me, which is surprising because I don't know if you know that there's a disproportionate amount of dietitians and healthcare professionals who suffer from eating disorders because we want to know the secrets of weight loss, Alexis, right? We're like going into it to learn that's why I wanted to be a nutritionist. Originally, I was like, I want to learn the secrets of weight loss and I want to help people in this way, right?

And I thought I had all the answers and then you learn you don't. But I remember my dietetics degree, even my friends who were disorder and they're eating were eating like so much more than me. And I was like, that's weird. Like they're, I'm not eating the right amount because you have to remember when I was in school, there was no like too low. It was like, yeah, it's kind of bad if you go below 1,200. But there was not really, you know, so much evidence for that. And people were really, weight loss was gold, baby. Like weight loss was, you know, you wanted weight loss. So I think from a physical standpoint, yes, and I was so focused on the illness I was experiencing. I wouldn't face the fact that it was because I was starving myself and severely nutrient deprived. And I'm assuming because

you have a toxic load pouring from your fat cells and then your liver has no nutrients to detox them with. You're just in this like toxic state for a long time. And that's what I was really experiencing. But my panic attacks were so debilitating that I was, I was only still focused on the symptoms and not understanding the bigger picture. And there was no one saying you have new, and I was vegan too. There's no one saying you were, you have nutrient deficiencies and that causes anxiety. No one was saying that in 2010. You know, that was not even a question that that was happening. And so it took a lot. And I will say from a social spiritual perspective, weight loss was very challenging for me because I would have like male friendships who like were never interested in me like that.

And if it became interested and it just makes you understand how differently people view people in larger bodies. And it's it's very jarring. And that's something I work on a lot with my clients. I have a very spiritual practice. And a lot of the focus is on identity and the work that I do. And that's kind of the hardest thing is, you know, there'll be a point in a weight loss journey. with a client and they'll be like, what am I doing when I get there? Right?

Like it's like, what do I do? The act of weight loss is kind of the easiest part because you're regimented, you're structured, you're strategic. And then after it's like, yeah, oh, I just do what for the rest of my life? So totally and how people perceive you is very, um, it's very painful in some ways, honestly, because, um, you're realizing that people really did dismiss you. And they really did view you differently. And you were a little bit invisible in some ways.

Um, and, uh, I, I think assuming a different role, even from like a romantic perspective, my friends stay the same. I still have the same friends when I'm like three. But I think it was that's hard to navigate too, the identity piece. Absolutely. And maybe another piece that plays into that and like maybe you can share it on your story about it is like the skin that can be left over after you have a massive weight loss. Like a lot of people don't think about caring about that while they're losing, you know, the weight. But it's I think something if you're a bit preemptive about you could probably minimize to a certain extent.

And of course, there's going to be some. But that was something that I wish I had thought about before losing the weight because I would have really loved to care for my skin as I was dropping the weight so that maybe the elasticity. There's definitely like a genetic component too to how well skin bounces back. But did you have any struggles with that at all? Oh, definitely. I think, you know, so funny, I had this really obnoxious trainer friend who I'll tell you why he was obnoxious.

But he basically said to me at one point, he was like, do you think what he just randomly asked me? he was like, do you think what you're eating is like good? And like, you know, when I didn't have any disorders, it was a couple years ago. And he was like, do you. And I was like, yeah, I feel like I'm really strong on my diet. Like I, you know, I'm a dietitian who I'm pretty aware of what I'm eating. You know, I feel great about it. Why do you ask?

And he was like, do you feel like your body reflects what you're eating? And I was like, sir, first of all, I'm not the one. Second of all, um, I said to him, I was like, listen, my body as a person who weighed a hundred pounds more than I weigh. Because I've been roughly the same weight since I lost maybe like 10 pounds. here and like, you know, within that 10, 10 pound range basically since I lost weight. But my body's not going to look like someone who's never lost weight. And I really truly accept that. And I also feel like our bodies, you know, even our fascia.

Like it just, it's totally, it's, it totally does not reflect someone who's like was a gymnast growing up and was in a normal size body. Like, I, and I think there was a lot of acceptance around that. And I think it's very, um, you know, it's, it's so funny when I have like people who would say like diet culture was so damning. for people who were in mid-sized bodies or like, what's perceived as normal size body because they were like, I want to be super skinny. I'm like, that wasn't my thing. I just wanted to be not like regarded as and dismissed as a human being. Like I, I wasn't going like we never like,

people who have been in larger bodies from childhood never dream of being skinny. That's not even, or even having like so much muscle tone and being ripped. Like that wasn't my goal. And I was very understanding of that. I was like, I just want to be in a body that is healthier and that also feels safer for me. But yeah, no, I just, it's like, I, I've never had this conversation before, but, but of course I have loose skin stretch for everything. You know, I, it's, that's what's going to happen if you rapidly lose weight. And also just being in a larger body in the first place, it's, our skin isn't elastic enough to ever bounce back to what exactly someone's, um, would be. But it's also just like, dude, like to that trainer, like, I, like, you don't, you haven't lived one day in my body.

You have no idea what it's like. And I like that my body's a reflection of. of what I've been through and I can I can sit with that and feel comfortable with that but it's it was definitely hard in the beginning and I definitely also knew I wasn't going to end up being like sick you know I like my body's fine but I knew it wasn't going to be like sick you know at the end yeah yeah totally I think I mean managing expectations is important in lots of different ways and I don't know I always go back and forth about it because like a lot of people will you know get tummy tucks or whatever afterwards which I think is totally fine and valid too like I've

definitely thought about it. Because sometimes I just want to kind of move on with my life and I feel like I have this constant reminder of my old life just like chilling, you know? Exactly. Which is like a real, by the way, like actual trauma thing. It's a very, um, yeah, I do think surgery could help level the playing field quite a bit, by the way and, and put you in short of a scar could put you in the body of someone who's never been through it.

But I also will say like, you know, if it doesn't limit like you have a loving partner, you have an amazing life. Like if it doesn't limit life for me and that's how I. I've always felt like, I'm like, yeah, I'm not, I don't like love my arms and I'm never going to really like love them and I don't really care because I'm just like, it's fine. I'll just do what makes me feel comfortable. And I also think that's a piece of this conversation we'll have, which is the difference between being kind of like body positive or being body neutral. I'm very big on being body neutral, which is that like we don't have to love our bodies,

but we have to like respect our bodies. I do also love my body. But we don't have to. You have to respect your body though. And that I think is what's really, really important. but I also am like supportive. So I'm wants to get surgery, you know, I'm like, do whatever, you know, make yourself feel awesome. Who cares? Yeah. Yeah, that's my perspective as well. So speaking of like keeping the weight off as well, so do you have any insights about how you were able to maintain that? Because I personally didn't really think much about it and was able to keep the weight off pretty well. I mean, obviously I had the disorder eating for a while after losing the weight, but I really got into like the strength training. And I also was strength training quite a bit when I was

losing the weight, which I think helped. There's also something with like, if you're losing weight for the first time, I think it's way easier to keep the weight off versus like yo-yo dieting and keep gaining the weight and losing the weight. I think it's because your body, first of all, it's leptin. I'm telling you, I think leptin's a huge piece of this puzzle. I also think your body anticipates that you're going to starve it again and is not going to play ball with you. And I think that's just like it might not be the most scientific way of saying it, but absolutely losing weight a second time is a million times harder. And we both had the luxury of, I guess, the one privilege we had was that we only had to lose the hardcore weight the first time. You know, I have a theory. Okay.

This is my theory. So you know that leptin responds, like if you have leptin resistance, it could be a big reason for weight loss resistance as it's proposed, right? So I am the most bland, boring eater in the entire world. My guess of why it was okay and easier for me to probably maintain weight than other people was because I only eat very bland foods and leptin responds to like combinations of flavors and fat and sugar together. I'm like, I'll, I would literally eat a piece of boiled chicken and a baked potato separately and be like the happiest. I have like no flavor.

It's hard. Like it's so I would never recommend another person eat how I eat. But I just don't. It's funny because like I was, I think I was in a larger body because of nervous system dysregulation. And I was always, that was it for me. It was never like a interest in food thing. Like food wasn't even really a coping mechanism for me.

I was overweight when I was like five. And I just kind of gained like 10 pounds since then. And then you just end up and like a much, it's like not that hard to be an overweight kid and then become an overweight adult. Like it's actually very easy to keep gaining weight essentially. And for me, I came from a house where my parents weren't cooking or anything like that. So I was eating fast food and like grabble stuff.

But I never had like the super, you know, people, I'm the opposite of a foodie. Like I think that honestly helped my left in a lot because it probably kept my levels pretty even throughout. but I was vegan during way after my weight loss too. And that certainly hurt me in more ways than one. You're lucky that you had strength training and you had protein and the knowledge of that at the time.

It took me a long time to convince myself to eat meat. Again, I've been eating it for many, many years now. But that was a transitional process too. And I feel like what I lucked out on is, A, I think I'm a person who tolerates carbs quite well for the vegan diet. Like it's actually a little bit more of a fit for my genetic type than other people. bulls and my metabolic type. And I think that I, it's the leptin thing, I think is why it made it not that hard to

keep it off. I will also say like when, when the disorder eating kind of went away or I healed it or whatever we want to say and I have a wonderful, thoughtless relationship with food, which I feel like is the healthiest thing is indifference, you know, just like, yeah, I'll eat this and it doesn't matter. But in that process of gaining the better relationship with food, too, I think that the thoughts around food being less and less as time went on really helped. I think when people have that,

I don't know why I didn't have that urgency or desperate fear. I was going to gain it back after that. But I think that really helps too because that's going to lead to binging and restricting and all these things. And I just felt like this is the body. I feel like I would have landed at this weight if I never had been that higher weight. And my body just like adjusted over time, I guess. I don't know.

That's my maybe explanation of why it was easier for me. But it wasn't from a muscle perspective. you know, Dr. Gabriel will be the first. It wasn't from a protein consumption perspective. I got good at that later. But yeah, it certainly wasn't at the time. Yeah, super interesting. Did you have any antibiotic use as a young kid? Because that's something for me that I tightly associate with my rapid weight gain because I was basically getting like recurring strep throat in first grade. And then I ended up being homeschooled in second grade. But I was essentially on antibiotics for like six months

straight and ever since then like that's when I started really rapidly gaining weight and when I went back to third grade I was like weighing double my classmates and then it just kept spiraling up from there and I didn't I didn't think of myself like I didn't really eat differently from my classmates and I was still like an active kid like I was doing all the same things but my body was just not responding the same way did you have any like antibiotic exposures or anything like that question I actually was like a very non sick kid so was my sister I feel like I maybe had strep once every three or four years very low antibiotic, you know, use, but I had tremendous amounts of trauma. So mine could just be from like a, you know, a mental standpoint. I also had like a tremendous amount of intergenerational trauma.

Yes. I'm the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's probably something around there. But I think mine would have come from also, you know, being in a household where, again, no one's cooking and you're mostly eating fast food and things like that. I love my freaking parents. I, and they, there's no judgment. You know, they did what they could do. They were working really hard. And that was the reason. Um, I think that was my piece. was very environmental slash emotional, I would guess. Yeah. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I mean, it's very interesting, especially as a kid, like you don't really have any control over what's happening to your body in a lot of ways. You're just kind of eating what everybody else is eating and doing

whether people are doing. And it's just, it's weird in a lot of ways. And like, I think it could be easy to become resentful of that. But at the same time, like, personally, I know that I wouldn't be on this path and helping others and like so invested in health and healing. If, like, I think, it's I didn't go through all that stuff myself. So it's, I think, a very powerful gift in many ways. I think so too. I really, I feel that way about mass cell. I feel the way about weight loss, anxiety, everything.

I feel that we are like conduits of things and vessels for information. And the way that we get information for other people is that it has to happen to us first. And I feel that way healers. Like, I think it's really, I think it is, I think it is super beautiful. And I also, I want to know what it feels like to feel like you're in a larger body and you're being rejected or invisible in some ways. And I think it's so important and valuable. And I would not trade one day of pain, discomfort, invalidation for anything in the entire world. And I really do truly believe me that. I don't believe it when I'm in it. When I was having the histamine reactions, I was like, no,

I thought the other one was the bad one. I don't want to do this again. You know, I didn't want to do it again. But I, I, in reflection, I totally, I do feel that way. Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely when you're going through it, it's really hard to see the bigger picture. But once you come out the other side, it becomes very clear, I think, and that just applies to, like, everything in life, too, which is beautiful. So I would love to talk about, okay, so we talked about weight loss and, like, you know, maybe some ways to maintain sustainable weight loss and some theories around leptin and maybe childhood antibiotics use and different ways that can contribute to early childhood weight gain.

And, but I'd love to talk about, like, something we've discussed before is, uh, what's food and what isn't food because the modern food environment, quote, unquote, is so full of this frankin food that's brand new that our bodies have never seen until like the past 50 years even with like the Cold War crisis and all this survival packaged food that was made for basically a last ditch effort to feed yourself if you have to go into a bomb shelter basically. So like suddenly that food became like a main staple within like the diets of Americans. And I think we're seeing how that's playing out. But how do you define food and what do you think like when you're thinking about food?

What does that look like to you? Oh my gosh, Alexis, we're going there, right? We have so much to talk about. We have so much to talk about. So I first want to kind of lay the context of something else. And I'm going to bridge back to your really important question. So I just want to say, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s, we see a lot of diet, diets become popularized, fed diets, diet culture, right?

And what a lot of that was was nutritionism, right? Like low fat, fat is the thing. Maybe carbs are the thing. Maybe this is the thing. And so a lot of these foods also that we see that are highly processed, yes, they came way before that during industrialization and all these things. But there's also, food has been manipulated based on what we view in society as being healthful or what we view in society as being productive, right? And this is something that Dr. Gabriel Lyon talks about a lot

in her book, too, is that the morality aspect of it and all that. So I just give this one little example that's really fascinating about indoctrinating yourself. And when I think about food or not food. When I was working as a dietetic intern, so you do like a kind of residency style thing where you work for a year and you, um, you pay to work basically for a year. Um, and you're just like, literally you just pay to work for a year. Um, and you're getting some training, but you're basically just working. And I was in the hospitals and they were using Ensure, right? Like we see always in hospitals, people are using Ensure in the two feeds. My best friend Dan Frazier, who's a dietitian with me, he sells real foods, what, um, for two feedings. So actually like, entural and nutrition.

they use real sweet potatoes and turkey instead of Ensure. So he has the biggest problem in the entire world because he goes to hospitals and he sells the product to dietitians. And the dietitians in the hospital say, real food isn't sterile. That's what they say. They say real food isn't safe. And this is straight out of the indoctrination from like Abbott and Natalie and all those companies. And I'm like, they are walking robots. You're literally saying food isn't safe to eat, but chemicals are safe. So what I'm drawing this picture of when it comes to food or food like commodities here, I call them food like commodities, is that the very essence of what we consider to be food has also been, we've been indoctrinated and to believe what we believe is food.

Healthcare professionals are saying we can't put real food. Because when you get a tube feeding, too, Alexis, you know you still have an aftertaste. So people who aren't even verbal, can you imagine what a difference it would make to not feel that chemical metallic aftertaste in their mouth to just taste some sweet potatoes or turkey because they can't eat at the time or ever again potentially. Like what a difference it can make in someone's quality of life. And this is, I mean, it's like he's fighting the machine itself by trying to get food into people's stomachs. And it's the most wild thing, but that food is not sterile, right? When we think of like how we were, we were made to believe the fig Newton's were healthy because

they were low and fat, right? I always think of fig newtons and those devil's food cookies from Weight Watchers, those smart ones. cookies. Love those, by the, I love those, by the way. Did not help with a toxic load or anything, but I feel like we have to understand that what we believe to be food changes. And the most dangerous trend that I'm seeing now is actually, again, with dietitians. And I love being a dietitian and I love dietitian. So I'm saying this with very high expectations for us. But in this kind of really kind of off the beaten track version of the body positivity movement came a lot of like nutritional recommendations that are like all foods fit.

And these foods are all safe and okay to eat because it'll repair your mental relationship with food. And I'm just so concerned about normalizing those foods, even though I understand the point is so that we don't have restriction. But I feel like we can safely restrict foods that aren't foods, like we said. And I know this is a part of our bigger conversation, but I just wanted to bring that picture in of like how indoctrinated we all are. I'm using that word on your podcast on purpose.

And we don't even realize how like brainwashed we are about things that we just kind of spit this stuff out that's so counter to, you know, anything reasonable. Of course, real food is sterile. Of course, a bunch of processed chemicals are actually hard to digest and harder to get nutrients from. Of course, you know. Oh my God. Yeah.

You bring up so many cans of worms, honestly, like it could go a million directions. But like the hospital food situation is just every time. I see it, it makes me livid what they're feeding patients who are supposed to be healing. Like, in general, the whole hospital environment is basically the exact opposite of what you would want for a healing environment. It's all like fluorescent lights, frankin food, you know, loud noises, loud noises, like EMF everywhere, like this weirdly sterile environment that's like so unnatural. And it's just like ironic that they would say that real food is bad because it's not sterile. When now we're even learning that there's basically,

no part of the body that's sterile. There's a brain microbiome. There's a liver microbiome. Like, there's microbes everywhere and they're a part of us. It's not something that we need to kill and eradicate. And that's like the whole germ theory, which has served us in many ways. It can help in certain cases. But in other cases, like, we can't really apply that mindset to thinking about health in general because, like, we can't live without these microbes, these, you know, fungal organisms, bacterial organisms, viruses. Like, they're all in the heart. There's billions, trillions of Yes. You know, yes. I actually, I rarely talk about this too, but I left working clinically. I was working in nursing homes for a long time on like multi-organ kind of system failure clients who also had Alzheimer's. That was like the floors that I was on late stage Alzheimer's. And I remember giving Alzheimer's patients and shore and my hands were like shaking when I would do it. And you absolutely had to. I mean, there was no way around it. Because if the state comes in and surveys you, they'll basically say how much weight loss did each person have. Because mom, monitoring for weight loss in an elderly population and a compromised population is essential.

You absolutely have to maintain muscle mass weight loss, as we of course know, right? And you would have to say then, I need to put something in place that's an intervention to prove that I'm doing something about this person losing weight. And you cannot make whole milk smoothies. You could not make anything. It was Ensure. There was a deal with the Ensure companies. I don't think it was all for profit.

Obviously, people want to do good. And that's why they're doing these things. but I just remember I literally was like, I'm not going to overturn the state survey in New York. I have to leave this environment because I realized about myself and it might be a huge flaw. I feel I can only influence on the individual level. And sure, on a podcast on a large level on social media, great. But for myself, I'm like, I need to do one on one because there's so much on learning

that has to happen for people to start to even help themselves that it's like, I can't take on this machine. And that's why I actually left the clinical world and just went into private practice. Because I was like, I need to just be able to like really sit with a person. I'm not fighting Jaco. You know, I'm not fighting all these regulations for the state. And I can't prove that Ensure is, has high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup salts and soybean oil and everything that could possibly be toxic to the brain to an extremely

compromised population. If I, if we can't get there, I can't work in. environment anymore. Oh my goodness. Yes. So, so true. A lot of times,

like, I think this general, there's a quote from like Buckminster Fuller about like instead of fighting the system that's in place, make the new system that makes that one obsolete. And like that's really the move. That's what we're doing. Yes.

These are like monolithic structures that we can't really ever have the strength to overtake. We just have to create a better solution that people will naturally gravitate towards. And I think that's the most effective way and the most, yeah, the most effective way for us to remain sane as well because there's only so much you can do within that broken system to actually make positive change. Like thank goodness for people like Marion Nessel and people who are willing to take on the food industry. I'm like literally thank God. Thank goodness for you. I am that is I am so flawed as a person. I can't do it. I don't have the heart. I don't have the stomach for it. Like thank God there are

people like that because it does have to happen on that level too. But I got to work on the individual level and on the people who are already interested in not being of that ideology because it's just, it's just I won't, I won't be able to make the impact I want to if I'm fighting, like you said, the monolithic machines. I'm not doing it. I'm sorry. Yeah, I don't blame you either. And I've kind of taken the same mindset in that. And like, I think it's just your story and your anecdote is a perfect example of like the issue with like the insurance based model and like having health care lie within capitalism because then it's just going to naturally optimize for for the bottom line like that's just what's going to happen when

the healthcare system is embedded in this model and you can see that with like the insurance model it's like you have to do these interventions in this order in order to you know get it covered by insurance or get government funding or whatever it is um it's just so it ties the hands of the practitioners and the physicians and everybody who's working in that area to actually do good who are good people who literally devoted their lives to helping other people every single dietitian doctor physical therapist, you know, nursing assistant, every single person, nurses, every single person in a health care facility came there to help people. And I am meeting more and more health care professionals who are, it's not only burnt out.

It's like, it's like you have this awakening where you're like, I'm literally not helping people. And let me tell you, there's so many valid ways that people do help in hospitals. We cannot even remotely dismiss that modern medicine. Thank God for modern medicine, too. It's not even a question. But it's, you know, the very fabric of the. of the concept of what it is is reflected in what happens there.

And what I mean by that is like, you know, dietitians, dietitian visits are required for certain medical conditions in hospitals, whereby physical therapists actually get, there's reimbursement for physical therapy. So physical therapists are treated differently than dietitians in hospital, and they're paid differently than dietitians in hospitals. They do have more education in some cases also. Not all, though, but in many cases they do have more education.

but the reimbursement is really commensurate for like, what are you worth to me? You know, what's a dietitian worth to me? I have to have these dietitians here. I don't, the, the alopathic medicine does not regard nutrition as being quite valuable for someone's health, maybe to keep them alive as in TPN, EN, you know, entrial nutrition and peripheral nutrition, but that is reflected in every minute in a health care facility. And dietitians will be the first to tell you that because they're like, all they want to do is put a little diet into the system and a doctor could very easily be fighting.

them every step along the way about they have to you know and in certain states you have to the doctor has to literally approve the diet so it's like you know that also is going to make people feel very disempowered and it's going to make people not want to help people in the same way and that's just the environment is like we know you don't respect nutrition because you're not getting paid for it and because it's not in the alopathic model and it like affects real practitioners and it affects real patients which is kind of more important to me that it affects the patients ultimately And I mean, I think the medical school curriculums are directly to blame in a lot of ways for this whole, like, kind of just writing off of nutrition as a valid source of healing or a valid mechanism of healing. Like, if physicians were taught, you know, even a week's worth of lessons on nutrition, maybe they would have a better mindset with regards to, like, these are what we could, this is what we can accomplish using a nutritional approach and how important it is as a fundamental approach to health. And I think it's just wild, like, the way.

that physicians are trained and there's just no emphasis on like the main pillars of health at all. There's no emphasis on sleep, movement, hydration, diet quality, like circadian biology. Like it's just so missing of the basics of what it means to be a healthy human. Well, it's not, it's not missing. It's intentionally left out because the for profit model for medicine. What's the way we profit? Surgery's and medications. That's really the way.

It's built on. And modern medicine is very new compared to. to all other traditional forms of medicine TCM, Iroveda, which are like 10,000 years old. It's quite new. And I think it's, again, like, you know, the phrase I think of is like, yeah, we get it. Like, I get it. You don't believe this. And I know that you don't believe this.

And that's reflected in how the people are treated in hospitals. That's reflected in the schooling that you learn. Like, we get it. The whole thing is capitalism. I know. You know, it's like there's no, there's no area that it doesn't touch. There's no area that it's not reflected in. It's very obvious.

And nutrition is, I mean, the food. industry is very profitable for different reasons. But it's it is certainly selling sickness in a different way. But it is truly true, not just from a, um, trying to be a conspiracy theorist way, but it is truly true that it is not profitable for people to be healthy. And there are many ways, unless like you're selling aura rings love them, you know, or something like that. But it's, it's really not profitable for people to be healthy. And it is really reflected in every single area of health care. So I have people just really reflect on that with the decisions they're making. and like you said, the practitioners they're seeing, it's just really important.

And this is the farthest I've ever gone on a podcast talking about the indoctrination piece because we're here. And I'm very happy to be talking about it with you of all people. Oh, yeah. I love this type of conversation just because it feels like it's such low hanging fruit. And I think you're totally right when you say like people aren't healthy people aren't valued for their health. And it honestly never ceases to blow my mind because like from a governmental standpoint,

like at the highest level, a healthy population. is a more productive population. So like ultimately that will benefit everybody involved. But in the current way the health care is structured, which is over one fifth of our GDP with our massive health care spending, there's no incentive to make that number smaller because it's just this massive money-making machine. But we could easily come up with a system where it's like this other sector that's making the money now. Like all these healthy people are contributing to the economy in different ways. It doesn't have to be like we're leaching literally the life force energy out of people to fund the governmental machine.

I think I know, but it's like, it's so funny whenever you, whenever we're saying stuff that's like so obvious and true, but it's also sounds so crazy because people are like, no, they're doctors who have eight years of, how many years of education? Like 10 years of education. Like how could it be that they are literally not getting that this is for profit? Like how it's just, it's very hard to understand that education doesn't lead to you seeing the bigger picture. It's really, I think what helps me and helps me to explain to people is just like having people have experiences. And then now that 60% of the population is chronically ill, people are waking up because they're just like, there's not one, they go to 25 different doctors and they don't get one answer. So eventually they're

like, oh, they're not working from a playbook that's going to help me. There is a playbook that they're playing from that would help with acute illness. It's not even a question, but modern medicine is not equipped for chronic illness. It's not made for chronic illness. The model of it does not mean to eradicate chronic illness. That is not the goal of medications and chronic illness. It's always management, right? So it's like that that is not, it's just the view of the body as being something that is a vessel for profit. Unfortunately, as opposed to something that is whole and, and requires return to self. it's something that is broken and needs fixing, basically. Yep, I couldn't agree more.

And I think we could probably go on this topic for a couple hours, but I'd like to circle back to how food fits into this. So you mentioned the insure product, which isn't real food, and we're giving this in hospitals. And it's causing more harm than good in a lot of cases, especially if you're replacing real food with this. So in your mind, what do you think of as real food? are these things that are growing out of the ground?

I think I heard you on another podcast saying, like, as close as you could get it from the source, that would be like real food. If you could hunt or gather it, that would be the best case scenario. And I don't mean to, you know, co-opt paleo in saying that. But I think that from an evolutionary biology perspective, yes, the closest is you could do it yourself probably is probably the better. And when you, I have this little visual I do with clients too where I'll have them close their eyes. And if anyone's listening, they can do this. and just think of where an orange comes from, right? And so people are like, oh, bushes in Florida or something, you know, yeah, I can think of that.

And people in New York are like, I have no idea, you know, where that comes from. And we've never seen anywhere sunny. We don't know. And then I'll say, where does like an Oreo come from? And the first thing someone's going to think of is like a factory, right? So it's a really easy example is like if you need heavy machinery and if a food has a word on it, by the way, that's not how it's going to exist in nature, right? Like that's, of course, an easy, and just an easy visual for people is like, is this something that is naturally exist or is this something that's more manmade? And I would say anything that's in the very manmade column. By the way, there are still healthful options in the manmade column. And I love technology for that. Like I'm, I'm happy. I have beef jerky. You know, that's so great. I would not be doing, you could do it yourself, but I would not be doing that myself. So I'll take that leg up. But I can also picture how beef jerky is made. If you really can't think of it and it requires that heavy machinery, that's when it gets.

gets into the not food column, the food like commandee column for me. Mm-hmm. It's actually like kind of a mind trip because so back when I was losing the weight, I was naturally leaning towards more of these man-made processed food products because they have these very convenient labels on them where you can read exactly what the macros are and you don't have to weigh anything. It's like super easy to track your calories in and calories out with that. And like, so that's what I was doing.

And I didn't even have a concept of food quality at the time. and I really think this is what set me up to have terrible struggles with my gut and like IBS after the weight loss. Just because, you know, I was not really fueling my body appropriately. It was just kind of junk going in, even though like I considered it healthy. It was kind of a low fat, highish protein diet and like higher carb diet. And it's like kind of, you know, a relic of the 90s or early 2000s, like the fat phobia. But yeah, so I think that's an interesting concept when it comes to like thinking about the manmade foods that a lot of times we're reaching for them. because they're convenient in some way or easy to, you know, track if you're trying to lose weight,

but ultimately, you know, and may end up hurting you more than helping you. We have, like, this is, I, again, I've never talked about this. I'm so excited to talk about this right now that I'm sighing because I'm too excited. I'm like, okay, we can do this, Michelle. Like, what I think Dr. Gabriel Lyne does so beautifully and that you understand so well and that I always connect with her on is like, our physical percent. of if something is healthy is changed based on the societal trend, which means that, like, I was crushing whole grain cereals because I was vegan. And that was socially, it's still very

socially like, you know, a lot of people will say it's like healthier because our, what we physically feel is healthy at the time, but also is like socially attractive and also feel safe. So there has been another indoctrination, which is that, again, foods that are. not in nature are safer because they're sterilized, they're pasteurized, right? So we definitely feel like, and it fits that schema of like weight loss, right? So we're like, okay, I'll get all my like crazy diet, I'll get my fiber crackers. I'll get all my crazy diet foods because it's still in that for-profit model of food and commoditization of health. That's still the problem. So I what I thought was healthy, like my eyes deceived me because of the social understanding.

of what was healthy. And I'm, I'm so certain, Alexis, that when we look back, we will not, we will now know that what we know now was right. I know that the return to actual food that is not, you know, produced in factories has got to be the path. I feel really, really strongly about that. So I know in 10 years, I will still be saying whole foods are better than highly processed foods. I know I'm certain on that. I know nutrition has the most amount of nuance. I'm known for being one of the most nuanced practitioners where I can see both sides of anything. But I know for a fact, objectively, I will still be saying that 10 years from now. You know, I know that that will be, I wouldn't have said it, I wouldn't have said it 10 years ago. And but once you know it,

and there's kind of like this level of truth that you hit. And once you hit that truth, you're like, okay, I'm past what I view as healthy to now understand what is healthy. And that could mean, by the way, we're having a histamine reaction that orange could totally flare us up and not be healthy for us at the time. But it doesn't mean that I think that an orange is objectively unhealthy. I just know that for me at the time, it was actually a threat, you know, or something like that. Yeah, I think it's really important to consider context and nuance when it comes to what's healthy for a given person. And like, it's just going to highly depend on what your goals are and what your current health state is. And something for me that was huge was once I had that realization of like

the quality of the food going into me is important and more important in some ways than the quantity of the food coming in and that eating real food is going to help regulate my appetite and help me naturally eat less and maintain a healthy weight and a healthy body, that I naturally made a shift towards like more high quality foods and away from the processed foods. And that also opens the door to intuitive eating. So like I want to, I would love to hear your take on intuitive eating, but something that really was the case for me was that once I stopped eating all the processed foods, which like hijack your reward system, and make you crave them more, then you can kind of get into the natural rhythms of what your body is

craving and what it desires. And then you can kind of follow those without being worried about, like, gaining weight, for example. Oh, such a good question. And I completely agree with you. So let's talk about binge eating because I'm going to lay the foundation of this conversation, this piece of it, using Ben Genie as an example. All right. There's three current ways in my head or camps or schools of thought to treat Benjeding. Okay. One, you would find an eating disorder facilities, which is going to be you need to liberalize food restrictions. You need to put some sort of structure around what you're eating. But it's really important to not restrict because if you restrict, you're going to binge.

Okay, that's one model. And that's very common in eating sort of facilities. And amongst intuitive eating practitioners, health at every size practitioners, people who believe from a social and moral perspective that body positivity is important, which I do believe too, but that's a social and moral model, not a nutrition model. So that would be that section, liberalized food restrictions, but still have structure. Next section would be where I live in is somatic. and nervous system-based eating, right?

So you're really focusing on how your body is reacting to different foods from a physical perspective and a nervous system perspective. And then the third kind of school of thought, if we wanted to fix binge eating, and sorry, to go back to the second school of thought for binge eating, would be I firmly believe that binge eating is caused by some physical discomfort or mental discomfort in a lot of cases and or honestly positive sensation. it's sensations that are over or under our threshold of what we is safe for us,

and then we seek safety in binge eating. And it will create very safe chemicals in our body that makes us feel really good. So I always want to know what's going on with someone a minute before binge, instead of knowing, you know, and then what's going on during and everything like that. But I want to know what happened, what conversation your brain was having. That's the model I live in. The third model is that if you eliminate highly processed foods, your urge to binge will be less because those foods themselves also,

cause binging, binging, right? So that's like people who do sugar addiction programs and things like that, right? So I think that the most comprehensive model of all this would kind of encompass all three. What the intuitive eating model or the eating disorder center model leaves out is that these foods themselves, like you said, they do cause actual cravings themselves too. So you can stop the mental craving, but physical cravings are still real at the. that point. And these foods do, I mean, they are designed to cause us to eat more, right? So I think if we incorporate all three of them, it would be really great. I also think this would all be so much better if the eating disorder model would only use actual food as the things you should

liberalize when you're liberalizing those restrictions. If you only liberalize restrictions within actual food as opposed to food commodities, that would be great for binge eating because it is bad to mentally restrict for binge eating. There's many studies that show that many. mental restriction does lead to binge eating and does lead to more cravings and more consumption of food. So mental restriction is extremely dangerous. It can be lethal and it is really important to address. But when you say you kind of like have to eat every food, that's when you get into like a dangerous zone. And I think that's where we're kind of headed. So that's my three buckets. And what I wish we could do is combine all three of them in the world of real food. I love that. And I'd like to,

I was just triggered to think about stimulants while you're talking about that because one way that people used to restrict binge eating and also, I would say just within disordered eating in general, is to kind of dull out their hunger cues by using stimulants, whether it's coffee, Adderall, or other stimulants, nicotine, like, it could be any of them, really. They kind of give us the chemicals that we would get from the binge and then maybe avoid the binge, but have all these other tradeoffs. Like, do you have any thoughts about stimulant use and abuse and how that plays into health and illness?

There was a literal doctor in Long Island in the 80s that every, Ruan went to who would just give them meth emphetamine. Like it was literally like he was just giving everyone. It was fenfen like also like that was like the biggest thing in Long Island in the 80s. And I forgot his name. And it's funny because everyone in Long Island like knows his name and everyone in Queens knows his name. I myself, by the way, my weight loss journey, I was having like seven months low carb monsters

a day. It was and I am I, what I will be egoic about is that I literally went cold turkey one day because I'm just a very like hardcore person. I was like, I'm literally not doing this anymore. I also was working, this was so ridiculous. I was working at stop and shop as a cashier.

At the time I was like 16, 17. And I would literally, I was making $5 an hour like, before taxes. Like it was like, you know, it was like minimum wage and it was like, you know, 18 years ago or something.

And I would literally, those monster energy drinks for like $5 a pop. I would take my entire paycheck for the week and I would get like three days worth of them because it was so freaking extent. I just remember that. But I think that, certainly part of the model for people can be just blunting the hunger response. But what we've

learned so much is that the hunger response is so dependent on like other mechanisms like, again, leptin and all these other, I mean, there's a million, you know, recent ways that hunger can be influenced. And I think that, I will say, not that this is a stimulant drug, but what I think OZempic and semi-glutide injections in JLP1 drugs did for people was it did kind of turn off that like insulin resistance noise that people had around food in a really miraculous way where they didn't realize they were constantly thinking about food. So things that like numb the response may be helpful, but at what cost is always the question. And also, I don't, I don't know that like, you know, I do know clients who like doctors have prescribed them like by vance

and Adderall for weight loss. I have never seen it be super successful in the long term. although in the short term it is because you just literally stop eating. But that causes a whole other slew of consequences. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's definitely been my experience too. And especially with coffee and caffeine, because it's such a normalized drug, it's something that, like, so many people reach for and honestly abuse. And it's something like personally, like I got off of coffee for the first time, like three years ago or maybe like three or four summers ago. And I'd probably been having caffeine every day for like at least a decade prior to that. So like, I wasn't. going crazy with it maybe like a cup or two of coffee but i also had a stint with energy drinks um early

in college mine were like the sugar-free rock stars there was like the blue and black oh my god i know the blue one is always the low-carb one yeah yeah it was a monster too i'm so embarrassed for us i'm so yeah i know it was so bad and that's actually right after i started using those daily i would have like two a day for maybe like a month or two that's when i started getting GI symptoms and like blood and mucus in my stool and like it's destroyed the inside it's corrosive it's destroying the inside of your body of course. Yeah. We're lucky. He didn't kill us. Are you kidding me? We were doing, I mean, it's unbelievable. I also was like, you know, I was very young, obviously, but I was like smoking cigarettes. And in those things like, you know, I also like, like many people like cigarettes were like

kind of laxatives too, right? Because they were having that stimulant effect in your gut too. So I mean, that all these things that are so gut disruptive. And as we know, in the long term, if you want to keep weight off, you can do whatever you want in the short term, but you're going to pay for it at some point. There's no, it's like physics, right? Like any force is an opposing force. So if you're doing things that are disastrous to your body, you are going to have those consequences. And that is the absolute truth. There really is no way to shortcut a lot of this. Outside of, and I don't even mean, I mean, maybe GLP1 drugs are a good example that it's not even a shortcut, though. You're still doing the things you need to do for your body. You're just optimizing it. But there's no way to not have

consequences when you're doing things that are very dangerous for your body, obviously. I think the GLP1 agonists are interesting because certainly for the morbidly obese, like this is an amazing tool to get them to lose weight because a lot of them can't exercise and like maybe don't have resources. I mean, they are expensive, but like they can rapidly lose weight. And I mean, there's pros and cons to that like we mentioned before. But for the people who like are reaching for these that are maybe only like 15, 20, 30 pounds overweight, it seems like a bit brash to be prescribing them in this.

context because you can really deal with this with just, you know, diet and lifestyle means and then keep the weight off. And I think that's what we're really going to see in the years to come. Like the long-term effects of these drugs, like their use, once you come off of them, is the weight just going to come back on immediately? But I think that could be avoided with proper diet and lifestyle advice given during use, like prioritizing protein and strength training and setting yourself up for success in the long term versus like changing nothing, just taking the drug. And then when you come off it, now suddenly you don't have any tools to help you keep that weight off. And the identity piece too, right?

People who have been in larger bodies, you need that like coaching and comfort. I have a lot of clients who have been on the drugs and come to me while on the drugs. And I'm like, we can do a lot of work at the same time too. Again, if you're binge eating from a somatic nervous system dysregulation perspective, like you still have to do that work. You're not going to get away from doing that work. But I will say like, you know, a lot of dietitians are very against these drugs from like, you have to do it the hard way.

I'm like, heck no, use every tool in your tool. box. This has been pretty life-changing for some people. Again, we don't know necessarily each consequence for each person and we're everyone's going to have to, we're all face it together because we'll be those providers that are going to be there with them anyway. I'm not prescribing it, but if they're taking it already, I'll help them with whatever comes up, obviously. But I think if something is like life-changingly good, I, you know, I have no judgment. You know, if it changed your life, that's amazing. Good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think, I mean, that's the beauty of like the modern environment. There are so many tools at our

disposal that if we are getting, you know, good advice and guidance and really kind of leveraging those that can be amazing. And there can be shortcuts in some cases if we're really smart about it and just not also like over anticipating the effects of something while negating some other pillars of health that like should also be focused on at the same time. I think that's where it becomes easy for shortcuts to have a lot of diminishing returns and like harm in the long term. If we're like using them at the expense of other aspects of health and not optimizing or ignoring those parts of our lives. So yeah, I totally agree, though, that we can, you know, people can get success using these. And it's going to be great for a lot of people. But just being mindful about it and setting

yourself up for the long term success instead of just thinking about the short term number on the scale is going to be super, super important. You know the improv rule where it's like yes, end? It's like, okay, do that, but also and take care of yourself in every single way possible. You're mental, physical, spiritual help. Like, there's not one drug in the entire world that is going to support your identity or support, you know, your nervous system regulation completely. Like, there's just nothing that exists like that. You always have to like, what I call, like, be a human. And you have to connect with other people and you have to be nice to yourself and all of these things. Like, there's no, there's no shortcut for that. And there never will be.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I want to circle back quickly to something you mentioned earlier. So you brought up, like, Ierva and TCM a couple times. And I'm just curious about your your take on those, I think like, like you mentioned, they're thousands of years old. They've been developed over a very long period of time. And typically when things are worked on in an iterative fashion over a long period of time, there's a lot of wisdom packed in there. And I think we're very quick to eschew it in the Western approach of doing things. And so I'd love to hear your take on like the validity or the utility in some of their approaches. Yeah. So the first of all, the assuing is pretty like Western normal racism problems. Yeah. Literally. I don't know. Literally.

to use for it. It's interesting. Like I will, I will specifically talk about I or Veda too, but I have a, I have another aversion, which is that there's a lot of dietitians who now will post like lemon water doesn't fix your health issues and infuriates me. And the reason it infuriates me is because, first of all, I feel like the most important thing in nutrition and the entire world of nutrition is that you have self-reliance and that you have hope. I feel like that is the most important thing for any person on a health journey. So taking away a possible piece of hope from someone to me is like one of the worst crimes you can commit in the nutrition world. Like I think it's the worst thing we can possibly do. So a lot of dietitians who are in this

indoctrinated model of alopathic nutrition, believe that anything that they are not the expert of is incorrect. And I believe most things that they are the expert of is actually incorrect, by the way. And I will feel that way. But I will speak to, I'm more acquainted with Ierva and more trained in Irobeda than TCM, and I would never call myself a practitioner of either, because the length of schooling to become an Ayurvadaic practitioner is longer than our traditional medical schooling. And it's not, if you can think about that and understand that there's not indoctrination on the same level in those ways, it's a lot of information, a lot of very valid information. I have a close colleague who came on the first season of quiet the diet,

Dr. Battsacharya, Baswati, Battsacharya. And so she is a Harvard-educated medical doctor, has another degree in pharmacology and is also an Ayurveda practitioner and she only practices Ayurveda with her patients. I think it's the coolest thing in the world. I'm like, I'm kind of using you as an example to explain something. But what she describes is that the scientific rigor in Ayurveda is much more than just like what happens to a lab rat. She's like the the type of scientific data needed to substantiate any claim. The rigor is much higher. And she learned, she's Indian and she learned in India, even though she did her conventional medical schooling in the United States, she, I feel like she kind of wanted to do the best of the best, like, no matter where she goes,

it's kind of like you, Alexis, honestly, but wherever she goes, you know, she wants to be at the best school and, like, wants to do the best. Um, but I think, you know, what she learned through all of this is that, like, the, the scientific rigor that she, like, loves so much is actually so much stronger in Ayurveda and any dismissal of the science or anything like that is, it's quite honestly because it's just very hard to understand. I have to be honest with you, like I got the dosha's. I have again like that very rudimentary understanding of things, but like the way that we understand and perceive nature and its influence on the temperature outside and how it

influences how we digest food, it's such an intricate and firm science that, but at the same time it takes like real understanding that we just don't have from a Western view of things. So it would take so much unindocrinating to even be able to understand the practice. that I think it's like leagues above what people expected to be and the rigor is very high. And I mean that. And I just, I take to Iirveda very much. I don't know if this is, this is a completely ridiculous sentence I'm about to make, but I've been, I've been to two different psychics who told me that in my past life, I was a shaman in India

practicing area. No way. Specifically. So I feel it like in my, actually my last practitioner said, so you're, I didn't, I mean, my last psychic said you, like, you are, um, what you do professionally is you work with people I didn't she didn't know anything about me she thought she could have been a construction worker she had no idea said you work with people who have gut conditions but then you find out the gut conditions are just brain conditions and i was like that's my whole thing i'm like that's

that i do yes um but i i have an affinity for and and uh for understanding and learning about iirveda and anytime i even scratch the surface what i just love so much about it is that it will be so relevant to like you digest food at this time in the day because the sun is high at this time and like you know, it's, she gives, you know, Dr. Batatsuchara gives an amazing example. She's like, if you were to, if you wear a jacket in winter because it's colder, why would you not believe you have to eat differently in winter too? Like, of course it's going to affect every single part of you. But I mean, the understanding of how our genes, like our clock jeans and the time of day, it just, it actually puts words to these very obvious things in nature. And, and, um, it becomes,

again, this thing where it's like, oh yeah, duh. Of course. Like, you know, once you learn that, it becomes so obvious how we align with our environment and how that influences our health in every way. So I just have a huge affinity for Ayurveda, but I just because I know more about it and possibly because of my pay his life. But I think TCM is very similar to the rigor is really high. I think, and you know, Dr. Batschaya has worked in hospitals a lot of her career too. And she says the same thing where it's like we're eating on plastic in hospitals. We're doing all these things that are so counter to these obvious things about health. And then we think if we take these medications,

which are very hard to break down by the body and have these coverings on them that make our liver work very hard, that we think that we'll be healthier. And it's just not like, it's, it's just so counter to everything in Ayurveda, to be honest with you. It wouldn't even like make sense. Mm-hmm. Wow.

It sounds like all of us need to go listen to that episode in your first season. Like that sounds amazing. She sounds like such a wealth of knowledge. Yeah, we actually recorded for like, over three hours and she was in India at the time and it was like I can't even imagine what time it was there and I was like we have to go and I had to cut the episode down I have like four episodes out of what we recorded yeah she's she's absolutely unbelievable and her work is unbelievable and she trains um alopathic medicine doctors in Iirveda too which is really cool but I just like come on

you have a Harvard educated doctor who is choosing Iervita because of like that I think that's so beautiful I think it's amazing it is it's a great testament to the rigor of Ierva and these very ancient systems. And I think, I mean, if we just had any sense in the allopathic model, we would be like really probing these ancient practices because they've got to have like a lot of wisdom like chalk packed in there because, you know, they worked on it for this long as period of time. Like we've only been doing Western medicine for this very short period of time. Right. It's like a very short period of time. Yeah. And I mean, like you said, even for something besides the actual scientific methods that they use, like again, we only have our view of the scientific method. And we have. have our view of what a gold standard RCT is. You know what I mean? Like, that's our thing. She, she knows that that rigor is very high. And also, like, for it to have come down 10,000 years, proven, validated, proven, validated versus 100 years. It's a big difference. Like, you're 100% right. Yeah. Yeah. One other really interesting thing that I think is worth thinking about with

respect to, like, TCM and like Ierva is that, so they were kind of working out the specifics of those systems within their populations, but whether there's like variability between like genetic backgrounds of like whether something is effective or not is super interesting to think about because you alluded to earlier that maybe your genetic background is more attuned to maybe having a higher carb diet and you do well with that. Well, some other people do better with high fat and protein if they come from Nordic regions. Maybe their genes are from that area. So it's also interesting to think about like maybe Ierveda works really well in people from that part of the world, but maybe there's like tweaks that would be made to translate it to other backgrounds. Yeah.

I think in Iroveda, there's like a lot of focus also. It is really interesting on those specific spices that are like you're saying, like on natural to the region versus in TCM. Again, it might be the same thing. I wonder if that also influences like the organs, also the temperature. Like if you're in India, the temperature's probably higher. You have to think of I consider these things in certain parts of India. I definitely, I definitely think it would be very interesting. And I, I certainly, I, I, I, I think it translates, and I was asking questions on the podcast. Like, my Italian best friend is full of fire, but she only eats Italian food all the time, which is also full of fire.

What do we do about her? You know, what the foods that are cultural to us might not also be necessarily the correct ancestral diet for us anyway, you know, because if we think about what is American food, I don't know if people have been in Britain or America. It's not ancestral foods that are culturally the foods that we eat, you know, so who knows. Totally. So do you, when you're working with people, and like trying to figure out what diet works best for them.

Do you consider their genetic background at all? Or is that just something you use personally for yourself? Yeah, sure. And I certainly consider the cultural background really important too. I think, yeah, definitely. I guess is the answer. Yeah, for sure. And I will notice, you know, it is interesting in different groups.

Obviously, like I'm 100% almost 100% Ashpanazi Jewish. I noticed trends in health patterns that are very interesting amongst Jewish people like more gluten intolerance, more cortisol metabolism issues, more digestive issues that are very like centered around leaky gut. It's, it is interesting to know, I feel like to know someone's genetic background is important, but to know someone's like intergenerational trauma background is also very relevant, which is hard because like Jews love like bagels and stuff. You know, we love them. And, uh, and Italians love it too. And I see a lot of celiac and my Italian clients, too. Um, so I'm like, it, it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's too.

rough ones, to be honest with you. I'm like, you can't switch from pasta to rice very easily. It's a very different ballgame, you know. So I definitely consider that. And I also consider patterns that I see in different groups, although I won't stereotype. And it's totally down to the individual, of course. Mm-hmm, totally. And I mean, personally, it's been something I think a lot about because I've come from like a mixed background. So like my dad's side of the family is black and like native. And then my mom's side is like all Nordic, Scandinavian. Well, from Germany. But when I did the testing, I guess somehow the Vikings must have gotten down there and did their thing. I know, whatever you think of the mixing, you're like, oh, no, what happened?

Something good. Some trauma here. Yeah, but it's something I think a lot about. And like, I've been studying a lot of Dr. Jack Cruz lately in his work. And he talks a lot about like the mitochondrial haplotypes being really important for, of course, like you're inheriting your mitochondrial DNA from your mom's side of the family. And that's going to affect more so your energy metabolism and how you interface with your environment. So I think it's super interesting to potentially think about like for me, I know that I do really well with higher fat and higher protein.

Like I crave connective tissues and like fattener cuts of meat and I do super well with it. And so despite, you know, having a mixed background where like maybe from the African side of my genes, I would have been more equatorial and maybe do better with a higher carb diet. I think the mitochondrial genes for me are really driving my, at least food preferences and like what my body tends to like. So I think there's a whole, I think, area of study that we need to delve into. within modern science and like the role of the mitochondrial genome and dictating kind of how we're interfacing with our environment because it's kind of emerging as something that's super important. Absolutely. Yeah. And I wonder, you know, my question was always like, I even asked this about

DNA testing. Like, you're a good person. How many generations back does DNA testing reflect? So what they're looking at is like specific single nucleotide polymorphisms are called SNPs. And there's certain SNPs that are associated with certain. They're looking at the SNPs. specifically. But I wonder how long it takes for the snips to end up because, you know, everyone's from the Middle East Africa originally anyway, right? So I'm like, it can't be forever back. That's true. You know what I mean? That's always my question is I'm like, is it seven generations back? Because, you know, if you think of, you know, I can only speak to Jews because I'm a Jew and I only feel comfortable speaking to Jews. But because we're so nomat, we've been nomadic because we've been

expelled from everywhere. Many, many groups have, by the way. Everyone has their, no one's, Everyone's trauma is horrible. That's not even a thing. But because like the, you know, I guess it's too contentious to talk about now. But I think about people who are in Israel. I don't even want to say Israel in Palestine right now. Oh, my God. But in those, exactly, in those regions versus like an Eastern European Ashkenazi Jew,

which is like the Ashkenazi tribe or the Sephardic tribe, I think how differently the diets are versus like, you know, Middle Eastern what's available in the Middle East versus is what's available in Europe and how it affects our bodies too. So it also was like at what point does the migration pattern cause the SNIP? And like, when does I thought about that? I'm like, when does an Ashkenazi Jew become like a Sephardic Jew and cultural eating or something like that? It's always very interesting to me how many generations it takes for your body to like want the diet of that land. That's another question I have. I mean, it's a really good point because I think certain genetic mutations like, of course, the environment's kind of selecting for the successful

mutations by like favoring the reproduction and the survival of certain individuals over others and like which of those snips would contribute to the like the ability of a certain group to thrive in that area is going to kind of dictate how well that snip persists. But yeah, I think it's a really good question like how many generations this goes back. We should probably figure that out because like you said, yeah, if you just went all the way back, it would all go back to Africa and then there would be like no nuance. Yeah. I always ask that question because I'm like, we're all from Africa then. I'm like, so what, how does this make any sense? You know, and I, I, the work of Rachel Yehuda, um, really like what I've seen and again is really reflected who she's,

she's studying people with transgenerational trauma and Holocaust trauma specifically. I'm only speaking on it because it's what I have the most knowledge of. Um, but how those patterns, um, the, the third generation after the Holocaust actually has the biggest snips. It's actually when you have like the worst. So like our parents got by with a little bit more. They had the, um, in person emotional trauma of having parents who are health co survivors, but then the actual like change in the DNA doesn't come for another generation. So I'm always fascinated by that too. And I also think, you know, I had a on stage event a couple of years ago with two friends of mine who are super mixed. Like they have Native American ancestry. They have black ancestry. And they basically said like

they're like the food that's in America that's like southern, what we would associate with being like Southern black soul food. They're like is literally what slaves eat. Like it was what people could get their hands on and highly processed food. But what their bodies do really well with is actually like gone in like they went to visit Africa and they were like, oh, people are eating like you said, actually a low meat diet. And that they're vegan, both of them, which is a whole other conversation. But that that really is what resonates for them. So again, it's like what cultural pattern?

Is it the cultural pattern that's leading us to believe that's healthy for us or is it where our ancestors were at the time or you know, it's all these considerations and we have this love for these cultural foods? And then the question is always like, are the. actually are cultural foods and do they love us back? I guess are the questions we want to ask. Yeah, I mean, that's why it's so important for people to just be honest with themselves about how they're feeling. And also when it comes to the fad diets, which we should talk about, but like keto, vegan carnivore, like whatever it is, like a lot of times people are reaching for these diets

as like a form of an elimination diet in some ways where they're cutting out a lot of crap that they shouldn't have been eating. And now, yeah, they get some symptom amelioration because now they're not eating the crap, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the diet itself is conferring the benefit and just like being super honest with like, this is how I'm feeling now. I'm feeling great. But maybe in a month, I won't be feeling so great. Like, I need to constantly be reassessing and checking in with myself to see how I'm feeling. Um, because a lot of these diets can have a diminishing returns over time. And so how do you feel about like a lot of the restrictive diets? Do you think there's a place for them in a short to moderate term? Do you think they cause more harm than good? What's your, what's your take on

that? That's a good question. I'm going to speak, not even to fast. diets because a fad diet I'm going to consider as they have their own product line. That's what I'll call them elimination diets because I'm going to be more harsh by saying that because that means that elimination diets are being prescribed by health care professionals. So that's why elimination diets are generally prescribed by health care professionals and usually functional healthcare professionals. And I'm pretty against them. The reason I'm against them is is that like you said, listen, if you eat gluten and then you

feel tremendously sick and you need to not feel tremendously sick, I completely understand for symptom reduction in the very short term, why it's important. But the huge risk of elimination diets is, what is the reason someone goes on an elimination diet? Because they're having probably an immune reaction to food, right? What we need to do to have proper immune reactions to food is have proper digestion, proper detox, and proper drainage. And the process of all three of those things is extremely energy and nutrient dependent,

which means that in order to detox properly, we need protein. We need all these nutrients that come from a variety of foods. And we need balance in our diet in those ways. So we will never actually get better from an elimination diet. And I can say like there are some elimination diets that maybe are more sustainable than others. But the end game has to be incorporating a vast variety of nutrients and more importantly, ones that your body can actually absorb because very often if you already are, you know,

digestively impaired, you're not going to be able to digest and absorb those foods anyway. So I think in the short term, if you want to just have symptom reduction, great, but at the core of what detox is, we think it's like this. You take a green juice and that's what you detox. No, detoxification is a crazily energy dependent and nutrient dependent process. Primarily, I'm thinking of the actions of the liver. There's other components of detox in our body too, but we need so much in order to detox that you're not really doing anything besides maybe optimizing drainage through hydration or something. But other than that, you're taking away your own opportunity to fix the problem, essentially, when you eliminate. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's

totally my perspective, too, is that in the short to medium term, some people can get benefits out of them, but the goal should always be to figure out what's going on, like, why you can't tolerate these foods well to begin with, and then have the ultimate goal of being able to eat a diverse diet without feeling sick and just having food freedom. And I think, I mean, I don't know why anybody would want to feel restricted around food for a long periods of time. I think it's ultimately, I mean, it could be a trauma and control thing, which, okay, that's another story, but. That's a disorder eating. And I guess, listen, the reason why. I'll put clients on a keto diet for a month or something like that. And there's a reason for it.

When we are already operationally overburdened because of illness, sometimes black and white things can be extremely soothing for us. And sometimes we just need to know, let's just do this for now. And sometimes we need to find out if it's not going to work. I don't ever do that with like a vegan diet, though. I can't cut like so many nutrients out. So if it's something like keto diet, I'm still making sure we're covered from a mineral perspective. We're covered from a vitamin perspective. And we're probably covered from a fiber perspective too. But sometimes people do need something very black and white to like start. So I always say everything's on the table. But when it comes to elimination diets like low FODMAP, things like that that are very intended to be very

short term, but become very long term. Our body does lose its ability to like recognize and process things based on efficiency. So like if you give your body a vegan diet and you only have to produce X amount of stomach acid, like you're going to have low stomach acid eventually because your body operates on efficiency. So you also have to challenge your body. You can't baby your body constantly because your body will take the bait and will be a baby. And you need to have that resiliency and strength, which again, our best friend Gabriel Lyme would talk quite a bit about and that you need that challenge and that's really important too. But the reason elimination diets can work in the short term is for symptom reduction while you're figuring out and going in

and doing everything. If you have celiac disease, let's not celiac. Let's talk about non-celiac gluten sensitivity. If you have non-celiac gluten sensitivity and you cut gluten out of your diet, great. You were not basically there's a fire burning, let's say, and you're not pouring fuel on that fire. Great. What are you going to do about the fire now? Because you still have to do that. If you have gut damage on the lining of your gut and you take out gluten, that will prevent future damage.

But it doesn't mean that you've fixed the damage that already happened. I think that's what's really important about these elimination diets is you still have to go in and repair. You still have to do with your work after. Totally, totally. One thing that I was triggered to think about when you were bringing up the vegan diets and detoxification is a really, interesting thing about creatine that a lot of people don't know is that so creatine first of all is

completely absent from plant foods and so if you're eating a vegan diet you're not getting any through your diet the body can make creatine but as it turns out there are these one carbon groups called like methyl groups that are produced in like the one carbon cycle and uh they're activated for them ends up on this molecule called like as adenosyl methyanine sam e and as it turns out 45% of those methyl groups will be used to make creatine if you're not consuming any creatine through your diet. And what that means is those methyl groups now don't have the ability to be used in your detoxification pathways. And they're extremely important for like detoxifying any sort of compounds that need to be excreted from the body. These methyl groups get added to basically facilitate the, the loss of them

into stool or urine. And so if you're eating a vegan diet that's low in creatine or completely absent from creatine and you're not supplementing, you're basically going to be burdening your detoxification system, especially if you're, you know, eating a lot of foods with pesticides and whatever else is on them and you're maybe have mold in your house or whatever it is, you're burdening your system unnecessarily. So this is just like one example of how like your diet can directly impact your ability to detoxify, but there's going to be a whole host of other ways that interacts too because there's different vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that can directly impair or help your detoxification systems and your ability to ultimately, like, be healthy and have a functioning

body. It's also, you know, I think we're making also nutrition sound like it's even more complicated than it is. It is kind of complicated. But I think what it really comes down to is having like a deep understanding of what makes you feel good or what makes you not feel good and doing testing to validate that sometimes. Because sometimes we feel great and we don't notice something, but something is going on that's kind of lurking underneath. And it's really good to have. that I think both data and intuition are both really, really important, but we can't neglect one for the other. I think they're both really important. What kind of testing do you typically using your practice and like to use to get data for

clients? Yeah. I mean, I would say like I'm most reliant on blood testing because as a dietitian in the state of New York and New Jersey, we are pretty limited in what we can order. So what I will do is like I have Dutch testing or stool testing through practitioner relationships and they have to order it. It's a whole annoying thing unless you're in a doctor's office. or you're relying about where you're getting it sent to. But I will use quite a bit of Dutch testing. I will use some GI map testing. And I do mostly rely on blood lab testing.

And that could be like anything I can get my hands on. And I do have like a panel that I'll generally have clients start off with. But I mean, the testing really comes down to, you know, I'm much of functional medicine and functional nutritionists are test don't guess. I'm like, listen, learn, and then decide what you. want to invest your money testing on. Yes. I do believe like you have to know what you're hunting for, in my opinion, versus just like looking at everything. The interpretation of the test is going to depend on the symptoms for me. I don't believe in a test meaning anything outside of a client

experience. My client's experience is gold and that is like the most important thing that I do. But I do love blood chemistry. Like I feel like I have a lot of fun with it. Yeah, totally. And I think, I mean, I think your perspective is great there because these testing modalities can be very expensive and it just really adds up for people. Thousands of dollars. Yeah. Yeah, I actually made a community called Wellness Map where people can get access to those tests and get an analysis for them. Because if you want a Dutch test, you have to sign up with a practitioner for like a three month program to do that. So I basically just made deals with practitioners where I was like, what test are you really like amazing at? And they will basically send you the test and then analyze it for you.

And that's called Wellness Map. If anyone is, wants to sign up. Yeah, just a free resource for people because I found a lot of issues with that too. And I also do find that functional medicine has gone into this. of people like just wanting to test and just wanting to get those tests. And that's the opposite of functional medicine for me. Functional medicine is that root cause hardcore sit with yourself, learn yourself practice. It is so the opposite of slapping a supplement protocol on a test. That is that is alopathic medicine. That is the definition of alopathic medicine.

Yes, I couldn't agree more. It's basically replacing drugs and surgeries with testing and supplements. And elimination diets. Exactly. Yeah. It's the same. That's it is the belief that. It is the belief that our bodies are broken and need to be fixed by chemicals, which is so anti-erbalism, so anti-integrative functional medicine. Absolutely. So do you work with a specific demographic of clients or patients, or there certain people that you prefer to work with? You mention people with anxiety or panic attack issues. Are there other people in demographics that you like to work with? Yeah, I mean, I've, I'm really niched into working with people with anxiety, gut issues, or wanting to lose weight in a body neutral way. I also now have been working with some MCAS clients and some histamine clients. I really,

like people who have mysterious conditions also. That's really fun for me. And I like to be also their patient advocate. So I will also fight to get them access to the right doctors and the right testing. And that's kind of like what I'm really, I've been really niched into that for a very long time. But again, now I'm kind of doing like histamine stuff, which I wasn't doing before. I have a staff dietitian, Nikki, Parlitzis, who's amazing, who is actually more of like a functional medicine generalist, I would say, like a functional medicine nutrition generalist. She's a nutrition, too, who works with anyone looking to work on functional nutrition conditions. So I have her, but I've been particularly obsessed with burnout recently.

So I'm making this new burnout program, which I'm really excited about just people who are, I have made this model, which is like I think that burnout is a combination of like when your resilience is too low and that be physical or mental resiliency and you don't have connection either to self or others. And when resilience and connection drop, burnout occurs. and I'm seeing after the war in the Middle East, combined with COVID, combined with everything, like these clients that I just like bleed for and love so much, like how burnt out they are. So I just want to create that space.

So I'm teaming up with an amazing therapist friend who's brilliant Molly Carmel on that project. So that's what I'm like kind of excited about and who I'm working with now. But I have very, I take probably like one client every other month at this point because I've had the same clients for like five or six years. like a lot of my clients are pretty consistent. So they'll come to me with one condition and then we'll work through that. And then life happens and we're working on this other thing. And it's just this coaching relationship where there's like a health point person in the nutrition world for them.

So I just have these really long term. You know, I've had some clients that have done hundreds of sessions with. Like they, you know, and it's always different. Like it's not like we're working on one thing and it doesn't get fixed. We work on one thing. We move on to the next thing. But, you know, in Iervata, they say it takes as long for a condition to heal as the condition existed.

So if we're dealing with a relationship with food, it might take 20 years. You know, I don't, I'm not going to work with anyone for 20 years. I don't think. But I've had so many of those clients spots filled that I basically have just been able to take like one every other month. And that'll probably get less. And that's why I have the amazing Mickey on my team now too. Amazing. I love that.

And do you see people in person and online or is it one of the other? I see people only virtually now. I was seeing people in person before COVID. And I was working out of the assemblage, which I don't know if you know what the assemblages. It was like the coolest workspace, but it went under. during COVID. Yeah, it was, it was this very mad. The walls are made of plants. It was very for New York. It was a very, and it was all like holistic health care professionals. It was really special place. But since then, I just went virtual and it seems like, I don't know if you've noticed

everyone seems okay with it now. So I'm just like, you know what? I have clients from all over and that's what I thought was the one positive thing of this pandemic was a pandemic, was having just so many clients from so many different places. And now my clients are, you know, all over the country, just powerful. Yeah, that's great. I think there was definitely a big shift during COVID of like doing more things virtually and people getting to spend more time at home and doing more work from home, which I think ultimately is like a net positive for a lot of people. I mean, there's definitely perks to be able to go in person and get like the energy in person. But you can accomplish a lot remotely too. And I think a lot of people, even like a good friend of mine, she worked from home for the entirety of COVID.

And now they do like a hybrid situation. But people's productivity actually went up like in their business during that time, which I think it's just a testament to people. being burnt out from having to do their commutes and like going to these places they don't necessarily like at least they can do their work that they don't like from home and have some more comfort there i feel like in the most honest way like when i was in this i've never spoken about like half the shit we talked about today on a podcast and i love it um i when i used to have clients um i am so intensely energy dependent that if i would walk into a room and it would be like a a weird smell like because i used to rent offices that were like shared offices so if i walk into the

floor and it would be like a weird smell i would be like i couldn't like i was so nervous that it would affect the person's ability to think especially if it's a food smell or something like that's literally me too and i would be like you know like yeah we're very i mean you're such an emphylaxis like you know this like your your heart is on your sleeve it's outside of your body it's so like obvious you know you're a mush like i know this about you and um so for me like the virtual part, like actually helps me because I can control the environment a lot, which like makes it so that I can just get in really quick with people. And like, it's just silly to say, but like people don't have to like hug you when they say, like, you're just so comfortable

instantly that like I like to get down and dirty and deep very, very quick. Um, and I like that the veil's taken off almost like Freudian psychoanalysis. Like I'm like, it's almost like they can be more comfortable in some ways, people. That's true. Um, and I, and I, I've, I've, I've, notice that. Like I feel like people are still getting really, really good results and feel really connected. The problem is that like people have all new conditions because of COVID. But other than that, everyone was doing really well. Yeah. Yeah, really great point. So you said you're taking new clients in frequently. Do you have any other offerings that are like group offerings or anything like that that people can get into your world if they want to work with you? I love the question. Yeah.

So I have this new burnout program coming in January, which I'm really excited about. Life Beyond Burnout. It's what it's going to be called. Nikki is also going to be running a, a body neutral weight loss group. So it's how do you maintain a positive and healthy relationship with food while losing weight? And that's going to be coming in January 2. If at any time someone wants also, they can always join. We have an eight week program called Just Start Somewhere. Nikki's not only a dietitian.

She's also a personal trainer. So it's a nutrition and fitness program for eight weeks. That's really focused on, again, having that beautiful relationship with food at the same time, using really good planning and operational strategies and as well as just every workout laid out for people. and with alterations needed as needed. And that's just like a really easy $47 program. And then people can always join my online program, anxiety proof. And it's get anxiety proof.com.

I'll send you a link. And it's an eight week program to really, and it's with my business partner, Dr. Robert Kochko, who is a naturopathic physician. And we made this program before COVID. And we actually just rolled it out three or four years ago. I was like, I think it was like literally when COVID happened. We like, we're rolling it out.

It was very weird timing. And it's really just a holistic from a naturopathic and functional nutrition program. Like every single thing you could possibly need to reverse anxiety, which I feel like is totally possible. Well, I love that. Yes. So I'm going to definitely provide information about your offerings and where to find you on the show notes so people can access you and your, you know, your wonderful work.

Is there any last things that you wanted to share before we part ways? I know we'll probably do this again soon. So hard for us to part ways. Well, we are doing that because you're coming on quiet the diet. So we're at least doing it there. I would just say, I know we talk today about like a lot of the huge monopolies that are against us in ways of the health care system and ways of the food system. But I still have the firmest hope and knowledge that any health change that we want to make

is entirely possible. And I have so much faith in all of us that we can empower ourselves and we can do it together. And I've never been more hopeful about health in my entire life, despite the challenges that are mounting, despite all of these vaccine struggles and the physical. COVID struggles. I've never been more helpful about all of us together and as individuals. So I just want to say, like, even though we talked about big, scary stuff, the reality is, I feel like anything is totally possible now. And I feel more excited about science. I feel more excited about connection. I feel more excited about health than I ever have before. You know what? I totally agree. And I feel like COVID was like

the wake up call that a lot of people needed to just really realize what was happening and what things we were letting fly that really shouldn't have been. And I think, and ultimately, it was a blessing in that way. And I think, that's reflected in, you know, the clients that we work with, but also just at the societal level, I think people are kind of fed up and it's great. Heck yeah. We're so not going to take it. I know. I think of that Twisted Sister song, we're not gone. Yes. And we can all be rebellious together, which has always been my type of people. And I know your type of people too. Absolutely. Michelle, thank you so much. You're just a wealth of knowledge. It was such a pleasure having you on here. You know, we'll do it again on quiet the

diet, maybe have you back on again soon. Maybe after your program launches and we can hear about how great it's going with the burnout program. So thank you so much for coming on. Thank you guys for listening. I hope you have a great day and see ya.