Opening on lion diet and health setbacks

What the final check was, the lion diet, where you eat nothing but ruminant meat, salt, and water. And I did it for about two months. And 35 days in, I gained 14 pounds of inflammation.

My hunger went through the roof. My brain fog went crazy. I wasn't sleeping. My body said, no. And it was very clear about this. But it took me months to actually accept that because I was like, maybe I just did something wrong.

Because there's so many stories out there of, I did this diet, it made me all better. And so I wasn't 100% sure. It's taken time to really recognize that the lion diet was like, listen lady, carnivore hardening isn't the answer.

Hi everyone, welcome back. So we kind of have a TV celebrity here that we can learn about her journey. Today we're going to be talking to Adrienne Gladhill.

She is a health coach and founder of Radically Healthy. She specializes in helping people understand obesity as a signaling condition rather than a lifestyle failure.

Introducing Adrienne Gladhill and her background

After her own lifelong struggle with weight, gastric bypass complications, which is still going through, and years of trying every diet, including carnivore, Adrienne discovered she was dealing with a broken digestive hormone pathways, and it wasn't just a lack of effort.

So she now coaches individuals through carnivore-based nutrition. strategic carb use, metabolic recovery, and GLP-1 education from a lived experience perspective.

She was a former Biggest Loser Season 3 contestant, and she brings radical, practical insight, compassion, and real-world understanding to people who feel like their bodies just aren't responding to lifestyle changes alone.

So welcome. So excited to talk with you today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you because you're such an inspiration and people getting the help that they need to get these pathways speaking.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're so sweet. And we met at a conference. And this is why I love like in-person events, because there's nothing like just meeting people and like feeling their energy and, you know, giving someone a hug and talking in person.

So that's where we met at the Hack Your Health Conference. And yeah, it's just been great getting to know you personally. And you're on your own journey to go to medical school, which you are talking in detail on your podcasts and your YouTube mainly, right?

Yes, speaking into existence and praying for the Lord to give me strength and guidance going forward. Yes. Yes. Well, we would love to have you as a doctor in the community.

Um, so let's, let's talk about, cause I don't think I've talked to you personally about this. I would love to just hear about your experience on the biggest loser and like what you learned from it.

And even some of like the crazy things that like people don't know about if you're allowed to talk, whatever you're allowed to talk about. Because I'm sure you signed a paper that you can't talk about certain things, I'm guessing.

Oh, we signed a book like this big. And when you talk to people, they're like, you're exaggerating. No, I'm not exaggerating. It was like this big. So, but they, I believe it was for like 10 years and we're like 20 years now.

So this is so funny. It's like talking about high school. I was the prom queen. Yeah. Well, like 20 years ago, I was on reality TV. You talk to kids these days and they're like, what is reality TV?

Right. You couldn't talk about it until a certain time. Really? Wow. Okay. But the cool thing is, is you could still watch episodes, right? Like of your season.

It's kind of hard to find, but I found some bootleg copies on YouTube for a long time. They were on Bravo TV and then they actually have one of those TV channels these days where it shows nothing but the same show and there's a Biggest Loser channel and sometimes you'll see our season.

Biggest Loser experience and behind-the-scenes reality

But yeah, it's difficult to find, praise the Lord, because I was only 21 and when you extinguish fat cells in such a rapid manner, it flushes so many hormones into your bloodstream.

You're sequestered from your family. I was a really kind of, I can't say timid because I was such a jokester and always been an extrovert. no self-confidence.

And when you put a person like that on TV, sometimes awkward things happen. So there's some crazy footage out there. There's like this one episode, I tell a girl, she looks great, but she's still got a really big butt.

That's pretty funny. Those are good sound bites. That's what they want, right? Well, yeah, how did you end up there? Like, tell us about like, just because this so this was before kids and like, what were you doing at the time?

How did you end up on the Biggest Loser? So you guys got to keep in mind, this is before we even hardly had cell phones. We had the flip phones and we didn't even have texting.

You'd have to hit like two, three times. And, you know, to text anyone, you'd have to sit and, you know, there was no camera phone. But I had been struggling with weight my whole life and I saw like kind of some commercials.

I don't think I ever watched the show, but I had an idea of what the before and afters were. Everybody knew like season one and two just blew up. And I thought, wouldn't that be cool?

But I'm also from these small towns at the time, living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, going to college. I'm a junior in college. And I just thought it would never happen.

But then I had this incredibly vivid dream, one of the most vivid dreams of my life. And I swear God was in my dream and God was like, you're going to be on this show.

And so from there, I was like, well, I guess I have to go out of my comfort zone and apply. I mean, I'm not sure if I believe my dream, although it was so vivid, I can remember it to this day.

And so I found an old friend's camera that was in the garage. It was like a VHS and you had to put it on your shoulder and keep it plugged in. I mean, we're talking ancient stuff going on here, you guys.

Terrible video quality. And I submitted it and I got picked. I mean, it was so smooth for me. I hear other people, they're like, I applied for 10 seasons.

I got two interviews and it stopped right there. And it was like this wait, blah, blah, blah. And people talk about what they went through to get on. And I had just applied one time and I was right in.

Wow, wow. So what was the experience like, honestly? You said how, yeah, if you lose all that weight, so our fat cells are actually protecting us in some instances because we have no way to get rid of toxins, so fat stores toxins.

So I see this a lot with even GLP-1s that are dosed improperly, and there's massive weight loss. A lot of the times, women in particular, They'll then have to get their gallbladder out and it's like they look so good But their body does not is not dealing well with this because it's not done properly So I'm sure yeah, you dealt with hormones your liver was probably like how like I just couldn't imagine cortisol like Were you allowed to eat even like how did how did this happen?

we're um we also back then didn't know you know everything i ate was like salt free even if we were allowed to have some popcorn that we popped ourselves we were putting like fake butter i can't believe it's not butter and no salt salt and so my legs were cramping at night and i could not sleep i literally the sleep wouldn't turn on and So I wasn't sleeping and my legs were cramping every single night.

So I was getting up, popping out of bed to stand up to stop the charlie horses. But as far as what was it like, I got two different experiences. So in the beginning, we had 50 people, one from every state, 36 of us were sent home.

And I actually got sent home day one. We were so sad, but it turned out so cool. One of my best friends to this day is from the 36 of us. We got community, we got a doctor, a psychologist, and a nutritionist.

We got more than they got on the show. And I'll tell you what happened when I got on the show, but as an at-home contestants, I got access to Dr. Hazenga, who was on the documentary that they just released.

And I think that was the first time they really introduced Dr. H, but he's amazing. He's a former football doctor, physician for like the Raiders or something.

I don't know. He was amazing. He did all these tests of our body, our body composition. He gave us a specific macros and calorie count and three meals a day.

He created shakes for us that were whole food shakes to He said we were refilling our glycogen, so we would work out and then the shakes would be ricotta cheese, a couple tablespoons of frozen fruit, a little bit of frozen, like a tablespoon of frozen juice, concentrate, maybe a little sugar-free hot cocoa.

And then like a little bit of honey and you blend that up and it was so good. You'd have that right within 15 minutes of your workout. So he was very specific.

And I did two workouts a day, an hour and a half in the morning, an hour at night. And it was specific that you had to lift weights. It could not just be cardio.

He was, he actually was onto a lot of things. He also told us that we were not allowed to be vegan. And I don't know if that's like a popular thing to say, but he was like, listen, you know, he works in California.

He had vegan clients and they had heart attacks. from the vegan. And he said this would happen like in their 40s, which shouldn't be happening. So he said, I want you to eat meat, but he only said the palm of your hand.

And so anyway, nutritionist, psychologist, community, we had calls every week and I had support and I'm a type A person. So I was watching the previous seasons, how much they lost each week.

I wasn't even close to that. And so I was thinking, there's no way I'm going to make it back. I was really sad about it. And then I got the call and they brought some of us back to do a weigh-in on set and found out that I'd beat everyone at home and pretty much everybody on set as well.

Wow. So you were doing it like the actual right way at home. And then when you got brought back in, what was it like? Was then it was like totally different world.

And Dr. H had said, he said, this isn't even what I want for you. I actually wish you weren't going back. You're doing such a great job. This is going to derail you, he said.

The doctor is a really good guy. And he was like, the best advice I can give you is to stick to what you're doing no matter how much pressure they put on you.

And being a 21-year-old who'd been overweight my whole life, I didn't have a lot of. Plus you're isolated, you don't have family, you don't have friends, you are on an island and they're filming everything you do.

I resisted for like hours and they made a whole episode out of how I'm so arrogant that I won't even work with these world-class trainers. We're just trying to get you to basically eat nothing and just work out and burn more calories, right?

Weight regain, alcohol recovery, and deeper root causes

Yeah. So we'll go into that in a sec. Another thing I just want to throw in there is that I've learned now throughout time, it's not just that I was so consistent that I got back on.

It really was my age. And the fact that I had only lost a little bit of weight one time in my life, I bet some of these older people, their metabolites were way more in the tank.

They've lost and gained weight several times in their life. It wasn't an equal playing field. I mean, I'd like to say I was the most amazing person ever on the show that ever existed, but it's just, it's not true.

It's biology. Yeah. But I'll take it. I got my spot to be on the show that I dreamed about. And when I got there, like I said, they created drama out of everything.

You don't realize these people are sequestered from their family. They are not allowed to talk to anybody at home. And what I learned was I wasn't keeping up with the previous seasons.

I don't know if you've heard this. because a week on TV is not a week in real life. It's a filming week. They have to coordinate camera crews, directors, the actors, I mean the trainers, the scenes, the equipment they're renting, they have to coordinate all of that and that takes time and it's almost impossible to get that all in a week.

So our weeks could be three weeks long, it could be more, it could be less, but it was rarely I don't think it was ever seven weeks or seven days. So when I wasn't keeping up with the previous seasons, it was because I was competing against something that's not the same as real life.

I was competing against TV. Yeah. Reality TV is not realistic. That's for sure. Yeah, so I get there and I find out that the whole thing is kind of fake.

Like our gym is made out of canvas. When we're doing our last chance workouts, they're turning all the fans off because it was interfering with the mics.

And we're in the desert in a black canvas tent. So of course people are puking and sweating. It's because we were in a sauna. horrible well and to bring up like about the electrolytes if you're in ketogenesis whether you're starving yourself or you're doing it the correct way with high fat moderate protein low carbs you need electrolytes like you need electrolytes so the fact that they like weren't giving you electrolytes or letting you have salt is ridiculous you know just because they wanted the scale to look better it's almost like you know like trying to make weight for wrestling You remember those kids in high school that would wear like garbage bags like to school because they had a wrestling match?

I don't know. My kids in my high school did that. We're like, those are the weird wrestling kids. But wrestling is actually, it's a good sport. Lots of, it's a very mentally tough sport.

But anyway, this is not what you signed up for, right? So how did you first, how did the season end up and then what happened after? So being the naive 21 year old that I was, I really thought this is going to be great.

I'm going to go there and compete and I'm going to work the hardest and be the fastest. And that is all going to play out for me. And all that did was annoy my fellow contestants even more.

Like, the social game as a 21-year-old, not good. From the second I walked on set, they hated my guts. They wanted me to leave. They were like, she's too small.

She's too perky. Please, please make her go away. The trainers weren't big fans of me because I beat their contestants, which made them look bad at their job.

So I was very not liked. And then all the production assistants that were there, they'd been with these contestants for months by the time I got there.

So everybody there hated me, which is a complex as a person who struggles with obesity that I already struggle with, is not being liked or loved or being viewed as less than.

It's a real struggle with people who struggle with obesity. So I really struggled, but with my hard work, I was able to stay for three episodes or four episodes, which turned into three or like a very long time.

I was there for months. I was there for months and months and months. There was only one episode after I left. So I made it to the very end. I made it to the makeover.

That was really cool. And I had my hair done by Warren Takobi, and they dressed me up, and it was the first time I saw that I had a waist. And it was, I mean, I know that we can be really negative, and I'll tell you, I hid for eight years after the show, and we can go into that.

And I think a lot of contestants have a lot of trauma. I can't even contact most of them. They've gone into hiding. They never want to talk about it again.

They've gained their weight back, and there's a lot of shame, and it's public shame, and they're just, they're gone, and it's so sad. But it's such spiritual warfare to like shame, you know, gluttony, you know, spirit of like, self rejection, you know, and, and Adrian's believer and like, I just look at this and it's like, you know, we're not addressing the root cause for the obesity.

And this is why obviously this is why your career, you know, why you went into it, but oh, that's so heartbreaking because you know, they're just dealing with like, demonic oppression, I mean, at that point.

Oh, that's so sad that most of them have gained the weight back on into hiding. Oh, I ache for them. It's so sad. And for me, I needed to hit a tipping point.

For me, that was 330 pounds, which is 200 pounds more than I am now. And that's when I was like, okay, I'm going to quit drinking. I'm going to go to AA.

I am going and I'm not saying I was like this crazy alcoholic, but it was to the point where it was like everything in my life that is affecting my ability to maintain a healthy weight needs to go.

It's got to go. And I have to say, the reason I bring this up is because the 12 step program was amazing in reprogramming my brain. into what I can control and what I need to be giving to God every day, what you need to be giving to God.

And believing that everything isn't about me, there is absolutely a higher power, a higher being. There's God, there's Jesus, and we have to recognize that and stop putting it on ourselves.

I learned about not having the vulnerability hangovers, which makes you a great podcaster, because you realize you've said it, and we're going to move forward in life and give that to God as well, everything, and so we don't have to dwell on the past.

I don't know. There were so many lessons from that. It was a really big one on moving forward to where I am today and being able to talk again. Yeah. And, and I really appreciate the vulnerability and like, so you mentioned alcohol.

So did you, were you addicted to food and alcohol, would you say? Yeah. And shopping, you know, that's one of the things that the GOP one does is help that dopamine center in the brain is very dysregulated.

So even when I was low carb and then carnivore, you know, I was crossing into addiction with YouTube, addiction with podcasts, addiction with information, shopping addiction, traveling addiction.

I don't know if traveling can be an addiction, but you know, it definitely crossed over. Yeah. I mean, I think it's escapism and this is why. Okay. So let's talk about the GLP one.

So yes, absolutely. It helps with food noise because people will have this food noise.

Carnivore diet, mold exposure, and initial improvement

And I think that could be flesh where, you know, you're using that, you know, to replace God or an idol, or it could be demonic. It could be a lot of things, same, you know, food and alcohol, because we know that the GLP-1 also cuts down on alcohol, like your cravings for alcohol.

They have seen that too, and it's like that same center. And these addictions, like you said, it went from one thing to another, you know, it's dopamine, it's not giving control to the Lord.

It's a lot of things. So I think that I love that you're vulnerable about alcohol being a problem too. So was this like a little bit of alcohol or a lot, or it would just depend?

I was raised by a single dad, we were talking about this before we hit record, and we moved in with my grandma who was an alcoholic. She struggled with the disease of alcoholism.

And so my upbringing has this repetitive, I don't want to say abusive, but this struggle in life that's really chaotic. And when I had my children, not only was it getting in the way of my weight, it was like, I don't want my kids to ever be around that.

So that's the main purpose of why I got rid of it. And then the work that came with it was just such a blessing. And now it's cool not to drink. So I'm grateful that that's gone and I'm grateful for that work that was done.

So we look at my whole journey here as we keep going and I did try the restricting and the running and it was great and it worked. But doing that spiritual work was a big piece of my recovery here.

And then later on, you know, learning more and more about food, a big piece of recovery and exercise, learning about stress. There's so many lessons along the way.

And sometimes I just skip right to the GOP one and I forget there were so many other layers to this whole story. Uh huh. Yeah. So let's start with one of those layers where you found the carnivore diet and you know, how much, just how much of a factor did that have in your weight loss?

I know it has been game changing for you, but also like where are its limits too? Okay, so I am on the show, I come off the show, I gain 160 pounds, I get up to 330. I do my running and restricting again, just Biggest Loser style, get 100 pounds off, the weight starts going back up, I have gastric bypass.

That did not really help me lose weight. That actually just made my life worse. And I've struggled with chronic weight gain and now blood sugar issues, chronic adrenal issues, nutrient issues ever since.

So the reason I'm saying all that backstory is because that's how I eventually end up carnivore because the reactive hyco glycemia, which is if you eat any, mine is so bad if I eat any carbohydrates at all, my blood sugar shoots up to 250 plus and then down to even the lowest I've recorded is 39. I don't even know if I caught it all the way.

And you know, this leads to passing out, potentially seizures. It completely destroys your nervous system. You have like a nervous system hangover for days after that.

And so I'm having these reactive hyperglycemia. So over the next eight years, I'm cutting and cutting and cutting, trying to find what is triggering this.

Because we know it's food. Because if I fast, I have no hypoglycemia. So we know it's food. So I'm learning along the way over eight years, and I'm down to cucumbers, lettuce, green beans, little bit of maybe sweet potato, but like very little.

We got rid of starches and fruits to begin with. I'm down to these few things and I'm still having hypoglycemia. And I'm also struggling with autoimmune.

I got the bad virus. I am just struggling. And my dad was like, you should try the carnivore diet. Wow. And he had at the time lost like 60 pounds on it.

And he was like, I feel great. I'm eating steak every day. You should do it. So I dropped those last few vegetables and it was remarkable the difference very quickly.

The other thing I did at the same time though was learn about the mold. So I also at the same time moved out of a moldy home. So between the two, I would say 60% recovered.

within a month. Like feeling so much better between the mold and the carnivore. It gave me hope because it was the most filled. It was the first time being satiated probably in my life.

It was the first community who was like, hey, did you know that you deserve to be nourished? Like the compassion for nourishment in that community is heavy.

It's amazing. And Learning about nutrition, learning about fat, learning about inflammation, like it's a very studious community. And it was wonderful until about 10 months in.

That's actually when my first struggles happened, but I was blaming it on mold. So I can only retroactively see what was happening now that I am fully out of mold and in a different place.

So I started having hair loss, getting cold, brain fog, sleep issues. And I tried all the different variations of carnivore for the next year and a half, two years, almost two years.

And those issues just didn't get better. So it was a great way to give me relief and hope and learn. But ultimately, I still had to address the issue of why am I chronically gaining weight?

Why am I so tired? Why am I so brain foggy? I still had to address it. And it wasn't a lack of carnivore diet. It was something else. Mm-hmm. To be addressed.

Yeah. So you're still a part of the community, but you also, you know, say that just because carnivore helped you doesn't mean you need to stay. Like stay carnivore or try harder in carnivore, carnivore harder, you know, or fast more.

Lion diet failure and turning to hormones and GLP-1s

Cause I mean, you know, we see that a lot and that just doesn't work for women. You know, I like to cycle, um, after using carnivore as like a healing, you know, a couple of months, then I have them, patient's female cycle with their menstrual cycle.

That's what I see personally because I look at a lot of data and patients. What did you end up doing once you realized that it just wasn't working anymore?

So I am full throttle to the floor at all times. So when it wasn't fully working, I was like, I just didn't find the right macros. I just didn't fast enough.

I just didn't restrict enough. So I carnivored as hard as you can carnivore. First I did the sardine thing where you just eat sardines for like three days or three weeks, whatever.

And I was walking a half marathon a day. How did you, how did you like that? Cause I think that that is good. I love it. for all. Yeah, just for, or I'll do the carnivore bar for three days or maybe just two days, but during the follicular phase, the first half of the cycle.

But I feel like if someone was doing that on top of never eating carbs or nourishing their body, because we fast and feast, but anyway, then I think it's just too much because it's neurotic almost, right?

Yeah, and then it felt so great at the time. I still eat sardines. I love, I love sardines and I still think the sardine fasting is pretty cool. Your ketones go through the roof, your energy goes through the roof, your cognition goes through, they're great foods, but it didn't cure me.

It didn't. And then immediately, even if I continued what I was doing, the inflammation that I had originally lost, it would just come right back even if I stayed consistent with it.

Because if you do it for long periods of time, it's a stressor on the body. So the final check was the lion diet, where you eat nothing but ruminant meat, salt, and water.

And I did it for about two months. And 35 days in, I gained 14 pounds of inflammation. My hunger went through the roof. My brain fog went crazy. I wasn't sleeping.

My body said, no. And it was very clear about this. But it took me months to actually accept that because I was like, maybe I just did something wrong.

So after that, I went to a functional physician who was a shoemaker provider. Amazing, amazing provider. And I'd been working with him for a long time, but I said, listen, I really think we need to look into the hormones and thyroid.

And he wasn't really super into that. He was like, if we heal the base, which is mold, you won't need hormones and thyroid. And at that point, I was like, listen, we've been working together for two years.

I need some hormones and thyroid. But he just gave me like baby doses and he gave me topical progesterone and like a baby dose of T3. And it didn't really make things.

It took the little edge off, but it didn't feel like the ticket. Then I heard somebody talking about GLP-1, and so I gave that a try. And at the same time, I started working with someone new and got a little bit deeper labs run and a little bit better.

I started some NP thyroid, which None of this is medical advice and this is actually part of the reason I want to become a doctor is to know the science of all of this and understand it deeper.

But between the GOP-1, the thyroid and the hormones, I am a different human being. Yeah, and that's the thing is, like I tell my patients, I'm like, I have plan A to Z because sometimes we just have to go through different things and try different things out, do it safely with lab work and everything, but everyone responds differently.

And with the GLP ones, it is anti-inflammatory. product, right? Having this GLP-1, we know that. And if you're, are you microdosing basically, would you say, or?

I'm a mid dose and it really actually kind of upset me that I needed a mid dose for a long time. So I started investigating how come some people, like the food noise didn't go down until a mid dose, so like five milligrams.

And I'm finding a lot of interesting information on enzymes on receptor sites and in your gut that's just blocking it. I really didn't feel much at the lower doses.

Yeah. And so one thing, I do think GLP wands, like other peptides, I still think that your body needs a break, that we should kind of rotate through them, take a little break off.

How are you dealing with that? Have you tried to stop it for a while or have you tried to do other things to increase your GLP wand? Like naturally, obviously you've tried fasting and all that, but like Anchormancia, you know, is, for example, a gut bacteria, a good gut bacteria.

Not all bacteria is bad. And that can really increase JLP-1. So have you tried some other things or where are you at with that journey? Okay, so let's go into, and people think I'm so weird for this, but sometimes I will just spread my shots out just to touch back in with how things are working.

And then recently I had a digestive issue and my first thought was, what if it's the GLP one? And so I stopped it. The issue actually got worse and when the issue started, I was working on spreading things out and going down and the digestive issue occurred.

I went off, the digestive issue got worse. I waited three weeks. The blood sugar swings were so bad because of the reactive hypoglycemia. That it was just, it's unmanageable for me to be off it, which is, I'm sorry, I'm so tan on my squirrel today.

But one of the reasons I'm looking into reversing the gastric bypass is because of this reactive hypoglycemia. I don't see, unless I get this surgery reversed, how I could go off of it because of the reactive hypoglycemia.

But also, I found that at the right dose, this is actually correcting a digestive issue, which is believed to be stemmed, again, from the gastric bypass.

I had had this issue even while carnivore, but I blamed it on the mold illness. I blamed everything on the mold. And I went on GLP-1, the digestive issue disappeared.

I just figured, oh, it's because I'm on a mold. I don't know. And when I go off, so what I'm finding in my research is that not semaglutide, but the other medications that have more digestive hormones are actually at the right dose supporting digestive coordination.

And then they say if you're too little or you're too much, it will not, like we hear all the time, it will actually make those digestive issues worse.

But at the right dose for each person, if you have a digestive issue, like I have, we talked about this inner-susception of the intestines. Inner-susception.

When I take the right dose, the inner-susception goes away. Interesting. Well, I think this brings up an important point. So are you, are you want to compounded so you can play around with you?

Yeah. So, and this is personalized medicine and this is where the pharmaceutical companies, you know, get it wrong and they don't sponsor me. I mean, this is why my podcast isn't, you know, the number one podcast because I haven't sold my you know, soul to these companies, which we're finding out more and more doctors, you know, files come out and stuff.

But anyway, that's a whole nother episode, but y'all know what I'm talking about, I think. So, you know, it's this personalized dosing and I give my patients parameters to play around with this.

Same with progesterone. You know, I have a patient right now that I think that oral progesterone, it was helping her And then she was getting sleepy from it.

And that could be digestion, how she breaks down progesterone. But I told her, I'm like, well, I'm going to prescribe you topical progesterone. I want you to try that.

And then play around, maybe do oral one night and topical the next. I'm like, play around because you know, we're not all cookie cutters of each other.

Gastric bypass complications and reversal plans

And that's what like pharma wants us to think that We're all the same, like your gastric bypass. Sure, it might work for some people. I've only seen people have negative outcomes from them, but they're making money off of it.

It's so hard because there's so much information out there. I love that you are honest about, I can talk about my patients, you can talk about your clients, you can talk about yourself.

This is how medicine used to be done. It was called M&M where We learned from each other at grand rounds of what went right, what went wrong, what could we do better, what did we do well?

And this is not around anymore. So I think what you said, you are experimenting with it and you're playing around with the different dosing. I want to get your thoughts on this and if you would be willing to try it maybe and get back to me because I really see with your You're still cycling right or is that too much information like having a menstrual cycle?

Yeah. Oh my gosh. I have no TMI Yes. Okay. Well, we can, I mean, we need to talk about our menstrual cycle. I'll be, I'd be an open book if anyone wanted to ask me about it.

So I bring that up because I have patients now just dose their GLP-1. If we're trying to give them a break or get off because they've been on it a couple months, I'm like, we need to kind of just like give a break and see what your body's doing.

They'll just use it during their second half of their cycle, their luteal phase, because that is when we are more insulin resistant, we have more food cravings.

So I wonder like, because we're more metabolically stable during our follicular phase. So I just, I don't know if you already could tell me, but like, if you would just do where you're more erratic blood sugar just during that luteal phase or just increase that luteal and then go, I don't know, what do you think?

Do you have, have you noticed any correlation with your cycle? I think that there's a, there's different groups of people who could use GLP-1 and perimenopause as a big group.

And that would be a great thing for people who are, you know, they were doing so great. The things they were doing were working until they hit perimenopause.

I've struggled with weight my whole life. And I'd really love to know, is it the antibiotics they put me on when I was like two years old and I had pneumonia and I almost died?

Did they damage my gut lining? Was it the moldy house I grew up in? What is it that caused me to have chronic GLP-1 issues my entire life? Because my issue didn't start in perimenopause.

It was always there. And I almost wonder too if doing things like Like trying to override a signal that wasn't there is what really sabotaged my adrenals and my hormones and my thyroid.

Because some of my throughout time, I didn't always have these symptoms. I think like trying to override it with diet and exercise. or maybe made it worse.

I don't know. There's so many thoughts and ideas there. I think that I'm a person who needs it all the time because this has been a struggle my whole life.

But I will always leave the door open, number one, for the Lord to heal us. And number two, for there's got to be something out there. Someone knows why the GOP-1 signaling isn't happening the way it should be.

There's gotta be a way to heal this and I hope and pray that we can figure it out so we can stop the future generations because obesity was only going up, it wasn't going down.

And I would love to know, is it what they're spraying in the air? I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. Is it what they're putting in our water? Is it the plastic?

Is it the building material? I would just love to know what on earth is disrupting our digestive. And it doesn't happen to everyone too, but it seems to be happening to more and more and more people whose families never had obesity before.

I don't think it's just the food. I think that's one piece, but I don't think it's just the food. I think it's all of the above. Let's talk about complications and limitations of the gastric bypass surgery.

With GLP-1s, I'm sure this is putting a lot of these surgeons out of business and they are not happy, but people are still getting gastric bypass. I know we talked on the phone when we were supposed to do this interview before and you were on your way to the hospital because of a complication.

This is something that you are still dealing with. If anyone's listening and they've had it or they're thinking about it, what would you say based on your experience?

So the first thing is, as you look back, what are these surgeries supposed to do? They are supposed to fix the idea that obesity is stemming solely from our behavior.

It is trying to restrict your food because they're coming at it as this is a behavioral issue. And if we can stop you from eating, that will fix the problem, which is your behavior, and then the malabsorption.

That for some reason, you're just absorbing your food too much. So if we can get you to stop absorbing the food and stop you from eating the food, That'll fix the problem.

The problem the entire time, I believe physiologically was not just behavioral. But again, circling back to I've done a lot of work on giving things to God and recognizing patterns, dealing with trauma, all that.

But a lot of it is physiological. Sorry. Because there are people who are really messed up and they don't struggle with their weight. You know, there are people who can effortlessly maintain a healthy body.

And then there's people like me who've worked every single day for as long as I can remember my whole life to try to not be obese. So that's number one is the premise of the surgery is a problem.

My next problem is our stomach is a brain. It is a center for our signaling to our blood sugar, our energy, and our stress hormones. So we're cutting into that, not to mention all the digestive fluid that's in there.

I have so many problems with these surgeries. What are the complications? Yeah, go ahead. Do you feel like you even got true informed consent? They said that the most common thing was dumping syndrome, which would be I would eat and it would trigger my digestive system to process it too fast and it would cause me to go to the bathroom immediately.

At the time, I was like, I can deal with that. I've been chronically constipated my whole life. So you mean like I'll eat and I'll just poop it out? I mean, I don't mean to sound disordered, but that sounded like that's the problem is that I might not digest some food.

That was the biggest one. Nobody ever said, hey, you're going to have life threatening blood sugar issues for the rest of your life. And it's at an immediacy level, it is far more serious than type two diabetes because you can have a seizure.

It's destroying your stress hormones. They are showing now that people who have gastric bypass, that they have difficulty producing cortisol for like the rest of their life.

I'm talking to people who are now, you know, 30 years in, 20, 30 years in, and their brains are gone. And I believe that they're not talking enough about the long-term consequence is that you don't have cognition anymore.

It ruins your cognition, your stress hormones. It's adrenal dysfunction, not to mention the nutrient absorption. This morning, I just had number five of my iron infusions because despite eating red meat, despite taking heme, hemoplex, beef organs, copper supplementation.

I'm still anemic every year. Every year I hit a ferritin. They won't even give me infusions in time like a six, which is ridiculous. But I get iron infusions every one to two years now.

Let's see what else. So we got nutrient. We got blood sugar issues. My adrenals are a mess. My cortisol is a zero. When I take the four-point spit test, it's pretty much always a zero.

Obviously, then your hormones are in the tank. sabotages your hormones, your thyroid. And on top of that, I didn't even hardly lose any weight despite marathoning, tracking, eating low fat, eating low carb, eating carnivore, still chronic weight issues.

It's a no for me, and I am elated for the Mayo to reverse it. Oh, we forgot the inner-susception of the intestines, which is where your intestines telescope into each other, causing bile issues and partial bowel obstruction.

Yeah, it's pretty horrible. I mean, it's, uh, surgeries, the least amount of surgeries you can have the better, you know, I mean, uh, because there are complications and then, you know, maybe even if the surgeon doesn't know all the complications or what could happen, you know, it's just, I just think that, you know, God kind of made us a certain way and try to stay as close to that as we can.

So it's, that's so tough. But I think with, you've turned what you have been through into hope for others. And once again, I think peptides have really changed the game for this.

So then they're not going to have all these complications. When are you getting your reversal? My consultation with the official surgeon is in a week.

So I'll let you know, but I am not leaving there. I have like four different reasons why they absolutely need to reverse it. So I'm not leaving there until they say yes.

I wonder if they would like let you record it for your YouTube. That would be so cool. I understand where people are coming from when they want to have it and people boohoo me all the time.

Can they not understand where I was coming from? I'm doing all the things allopathic medicine tells you to do and they're not working and I am very type A.

So to me, that leads me to believe that there is something physiologically wrong and that was the only solution at the time. People weren't talking about BHRT.

They weren't talking about T3 thyroid medicine or NP thyroid. They weren't talking about digestive hormones. And even now, I think it's under recognized that there are more digestive conditions than just diabetes.

I think there's dysregulated insulin, dysregulated glucagon. I mean, everything that I say, people can relate to who never had gastric bypass. I just think there's a lot going on here.

Anyway, sorry, Ramble. I love it.

Rapid-fire questions and closing remarks

Well, I could talk all day with you, but we're going to move on to rapid fire questions and then you'll have to tell us where everyone can find you and see more of you.

What is your favorite biohack that actually works? I'm going to go with transcriptions. I don't know if that's a biohack, but I am loving the methylene blue and I'm loving their, the way that transcriptions works is that they're not mega-dosing you, which again is a problem in our society.

They're saying, listen, did you know that there's lower doses that are very effective for you and that the higher doses could be affecting the oxidation in your body causing you stress.

I'm loving their low dose and they have this somna that even in super low doses can get your body to actually rest at night giving you deep sleep and then you stack that and then you can just come off of it.

They've formulated it to be non-dependent non-addictive forming. So I'm loving those. Yes. Okay. So next one is, and I kind of think I know what, I mean, this is kind of what you're working on now.

So if you weren't doing what you were doing right now, what would you be? Well, I'm a stay-at-home mom first, and I would love to become a doctor. I'm currently, I guess, a coach.

I would love to become a doctor. Another thing that I am secretly pretty good at, I think, I guess I'll have to let you know in two months, is I can help people legally.

I mean, not legally. I can't legally help people legally. But I can give non-legal legal advice. No, I got it. What's the favorite part of your morning routine?

Red light. I'm using a Soleil Well Red Light panel and it's, I mean, I look forward to it. It's a silent helper. It's not this in your face thing. It's just this silent, amazing thing.

My kids love it too. Yeah, that's great. If you can eliminate one toxin from the world tomorrow, what would it be? Mold. Oh, yes. Then I wouldn't have a job.

No, I'm just kidding. Right? What is your favorite scripture or book to lean on in tough seasons? My favorite scripture or book on tough seasons. That is a really hard one.

I have no idea. That's so bad. That's me needing to sharpen my faith and my Christianity. Just really need to sharpen. Yeah, no, that's good. Maybe you felt conviction in that, so that's fine.

And one, just last question. What is one word you want to leave with our listeners for the week? Hope. Yeah, that's great. Good one. Good one. Okay, Adrienne, how can our listeners find you, your YouTube?

Instagram, I share just way too much. My friends tell me stop sharing so much. So it's Adrienne K. Gledhill on Instagram, YouTube, all the places, and then radicallyhealthy.com.

Yeah. Oh, awesome. You know, over sharing is good. Um, you know, it, if it's helping people. So I think, you know, just, I love that you don't have a fear, you know, to share and have your journey help others.

Cause that vulnerability really does help others. So keep it up. Thank you. And thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it was so nice to see you again, friend.

So I'm so excited for you to be, you know, going the med school path. So.

Adrian Gledhill

Obesity Is a Signaling Problem, Not a Willpower Problem