Introduction and mission

Hi, I'm doctor Kelly Halderman. I'm a former medical physician and author of The Thyroid Debacle. I'm now devoting my life to education, research and biotech because I realize we need educated people to bring us cutting edge information, especially when we find ourselves with a diagnosis such as hypothyroidism.

When I was practicing allopathic medicine, I myself became very sick, bedridden with what would be diagnosed as Lyme and mold infections. Along my health journey, I was also diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a condition I was told that could only be managed with medication.

Well, I'm here to tell you that there is more than medication to help you, as you will learn through my powerful interviews with several functional medicine practitioners.

There are tools that will help empower you to take charge of your health. Join me today as I interview leading doctors, naturopathic specialists to uncover the most useful health insights for you.

This podcast has been launched in collaboration with Doctor Talks. Visit them today at Doctor talks.com. Backslash Calendar to learn more about their upcoming summits.

Hi everyone. This is Doctor Kelly Halderman and we're back with another edition of Doctor Talks series on thyroid. Today I have a very special guest. I'm really excited.

Doctor Thomas Hemingway is here with us today. Welcome, doctor Hemingway. Thank you, doctor Kelly. What a pleasure it is to be with you on the show. I've been looking forward to this. Yeah. Thank you so much.

You know, let's start off by, having you describe who you are, your background and your and your practice.

Doctor Hemingway's background and shift to prevention

It just I just actually, delved into all the all the above, and I'm just so impressed. So I want you to share with our audience your background and everything that you have going on.

I would love to. So my original training, and I'm a board certified physician, and I did my residency or specialty in emergency care. So the last 20 years I've been working in E.r.s and urgent cares and clinics.

And after about a year of Covid, I, you know, I kind of pivoted a little bit because I started to see not only people, you know, having outcomes that were undesired with Covid, but young people were were having heart disease for example, like, I'm turning 50 next year.

And so when I started to see a lot of my heart attack patients be much younger than I am, I really had to pause a little bit and think to myself, what are we doing in this country with respect to the prevention of disease?

Because in truth, of the top ten causes of death worldwide, seven out of ten are almost entirely preventable, which includes heart disease. And so I you know, I sort of grew up in a healthy family.

I my grandmother always told me, you know, that proverbial adage where an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure? And so I have always believed that.

And when I chose emergency care almost three decades ago, I, I just love that sort of help people in the acute throes of injury or illness. You know, I wanted to be that guy, the so-called jack of all trades that could help people in any situation, whether it be on an airplane or on a boat or whatever.

If something came up, I wanted to be that guy to help them out, you know, help them in a time of need. But as you know, I went through my career and I started noticing that we were literally seeing young people in their 30s and 40s have first time, you know, big heart attacks and even some have sudden death and die from heart attacks.

I just thought, my gosh, I have to do more. I, I, I love to help them when they come through the air, but there's something else that we should be doing.

I think as physicians, as health advocates, to really help people, to learn how to prevent these really common ailments that plague as a society. So I, I pivoted there and now my focus is on prevention over prescription and sort of that integrative whole person, functional medicine approach that, probably your viewers and listeners might be a little bit familiar with where you really dig deep into the root cause of illness and you try to prevent these diseases in the first place.

So that's what I'm all about. And that's what I've always loved that my entire life. But I've really pivoted in my career to focus on that the last couple of years.

Excellent, excellent. We we need more docs around like like you really with really weighing heavily on the preventative medicine, the preventative aspect.

Because like you said, a lot of the diseases that are, you know, we're facing a completely if we would reorganize our, our lifestyles and things that are manageable in our control.

I mean, I tried to during this podcast, I tried to really get that point across that it's, you know, we've learned a lot about genetics along the way, but really, the epigenetics, what we can control and how our genes express is just much more powerful.

And I feel like we're very aligned on that in really putting the the patient in the driver's seat and letting them know that they can they can they can take control of their health.

I think that's so important. And this brings me to your exciting new book that I said right before we began recording. I'm like, we please, can we talk about this?

And it's called preventable five Powerful Practices to Avoid Disease and Build Unshakable Health. I mean, absolutely, that word gives me goosebumps because that's what we need.

We need to be resilient. We need to be unshakable. So tell us about this book. Oh, I'd love to. First I just want to just echo what you said. The the actual data, now that we're familiar with really proves what you said, that the epi genetic component, which is basically everything we do or we don't do, or the environment that we're in that can actually turn on or off the genes that we were born with.

You know, when I was in medical school, everything was about the genes. You know, we were we were still sequencing the genome. That was, you know, well before we had even completed that.

The preventable health framework and food as medicine

And now that we have that and now that we realize that the things that we do affect whether the genes that we actually have get turned on or off, and that's literally 90% or more, some people say up to 95 or or more, whether we get diseases based on the stuff that's not in the DNA, the other stuff, the stuff that we do on a daily basis or the stuff that we don't do.

And so I love that you put that control back in the patient there in the driver's seat. And that's really true. And sometimes I feel like, you know, it's super empowering because literally you can be that person that controls your health care, your life.

Like you get to decide. It's also a little daunting, right? Like it's like crap. Now I just can't blame my parents. Like, I, I want to just say it's my parents fault.

They gave me these bad genes and I'm, you know, destined to have whatever, you know, diabetes, obesity, whatever it is. And we know that that's not really the case.

And so in the book, I describe, five really simple practices that we can focus on so that we can prevent the overwhelming majority of disease because heart disease, as most of us know, it's the number one killer, not only in the US but worldwide.

Right here at home, one person dies every 30s of heart disease. It's crazy. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people a year die of heart disease, which is almost completely preventable.

Diabetes in its complications. Type two diabetes is rising at this crazy asymptotic really, really sharp, rate. And it's it's almost entirely preventable.

You know, it's crazy. So, so I really wanted to focus this book on what we can do, right. What we can do each and every day. So the first thing that we can do is we can just use our food as medicine, because it can be the best possible medicine we could ever have, or it could be a slow poison.

And we get to pick that a couple of times every single day. But the cool thing about it is it doesn't have to be hard. I think too many people get way into the weeds about, you got to have this exact type and it's got to be organic.

This and it's got to be raised exactly in this way. And you know what? It's even simpler than that. I'm all for organic. I'm all for pasture raise, you know, free range stuff that that's been grown properly.

But if you just focus on literally eating real food, stuff that does not need a label, that you don't have to worry about that ingredient label because you know what it is.

Broccoli is broccoli. Lettuce is lettuce. You know, pasture raised chicken is chicken. And fish is hopefully it's wild caught fish. You just look at it. You know what it is.

You don't have to read the ingredients list. If we were to just focus on that and focus on all the things we could add to our daily like go to a farmer's market.

I live in Hawaii most of the year, and like if you go to a farmer's market there, you will see things you've never seen before, types of fruit that are just foreign looking and those that know that of men like dragon fruit and and all these kinds of little things like that, that just grow like crazy.

You look at them, you're like, what the heck is that thing? And it's amazingly tasty, right? Usually they're bright colored. All of these bright colored vegetables and fruits are to our benefit, and there's so many important things there.

But but literally, I like the approach of what we can add to our diet. So many people talk about what to take away. Take away. Yeah. And it's honestly it's simple.

There's only three things that you need to take away. You remember this today and you will change your life forever. Three things. And they are basically the highly processed grains.

You know, gluten is one of them. But the highly processed grains, the highly processed sugars, you know, like the high fructose corn sirup and those sorts of things.

And then the third is the seed oils, all of those bad oils that are manufactured and highly processed the canola, the cottonseed, the grapeseed, the soybeans, you know, sunflower, safflower.

There's 6 or 8 of them that we should just avoid. And we should focus on doing what the Mediterranean have done for millennia, which is using pure extra virgin olive oil or coconut oil like we do out in Hawaii or, or, avocado oil, for example.

Those are the ones that are safer and they're better because they're not process. If we just avoided those three things and added all the good stuff, like we would be golden for the food department, it's that stinking easy, I love it. Keep it simple, right?

I mean, it seems daunting, but if you go to the other side of the coin, it's like, that's very empowering right there. And it's pretty actionable to choose foods that don't have a pretty, you know, label that has some claim on it.

You know, the probably very misleading, like the word natural and such. It's it's really a marketing ploy, right? Super misleading. Super very misleading.

It's crazy. There's about 100 different words that describe sugar on the label. And it's like, oh my gosh, like, they're trying to confuse us. They're trying to make us think that it's okay.

And honestly, just go around the perimeter and avoid all the stuff in the middle, which is where all the labels are, and you'll be much better off. It's actually really, really simple, right?

I think with the the exposure of the seed oils, as of lately, I feel like that's really becoming very apparent. People get confused, like I can't memorize all these seed oils.

I'm like, if it's in a package, it probably has the seed oil in it, right? Just almost always just said, just just opt out. You don't have to memorize them.

Right? I'm not I'm not going to quiz you on that. But literally eating food food and it's whole state. Excellent. Excellent. Easy. That is what is definitely. Yeah.

And with the seed oils like honestly if you just remember the oils that are good for you which is basically there's only a couple olive oil right. Extra virgin olive oil, minimally processed.

Hopefully it's just pressed or they just squeeze it and that's how they get the oil. So olive oil coconut oil, same thing. If anybody's ever seen a coconut you can squeeze that flesh and you can get the juice and oil out of there.

So another healthy oil and then really avocado oil. Those are really the simplest three. And you can think of an avocado if you cut that thing open like it's kind of oily. Like if you try to hold on to that pit, it's going to slip right out of your hands.

You know, it's it's kind of an oily fruit. And so those are basically the, the three good oils. Everything else pretty much is no good. Right. That's super highly processed.

The reason they're no good is because they're very processed, which causes in the body extreme inflammation. And inflammation is basically at the root of every disease out there, from heart disease to cancer to diabetes to this thing that we're hearing about that almost all of us have, which is insulin resistance.

Almost nine out of ten of us have some version of this, and it's caused by inflammation. So we need to eat anti-inflammatory foods, which is basically real food, real, unprocessed food. It's that simple.

So so that's the first part of the book, the first practice. And the others are also equally simple. The second one, I'll just tell you guys, I'll give you a mnemonic.

Okay. You know, Doctor Kelly and I in medical, we love all the money for everything, which is kind of like an acronym to help you remember things. Yeah. Okay.

So so here's the mnemonic and it'll help you remember the five steps. So f are you ready? F msgs. So we all hate MSG. Anyway. Just add an s to the n and f msg so that that gives you the mnemonic F is food okay, M is movement, eat whatever that is for you.

You know, exercise is kind of like this. It sounds hard. We got to get a gym membership, but it's not true. All of us have two legs. Hopefully most of us do.

We're bipeds. We've been for millennia walking. If you just walked every day and didn't do any other exercise, you just walk, say, for ten minutes after you ate a meal, your health would dramatically improve.

Movement, sleep, and gut health

Also, your insulin resistance goes down and your your ability to process your your food goes up and you get to utilize the nutrients you've just eaten and you feel better.

So just walk for ten minutes after you eat. It can be that simple. I also love to incorporate any type of resistance training, which is, you know, any kind of weights, and that doesn't have to be daunting.

You can literally use your own body. So right now I'm standing while I talk to you and I'm doing some air squats. So you can do that. You can do jumping jacks, you can do whatever you want.

You can do burpees. My favorite. I don't know if if you're like, I like some burpees. Yes. Yeah, burpees are fun. Plank. The plank is my favorite because it's so efficient.

If I can hold a plank for a couple of minutes, I feel like my whole body has been worked out and it's such a simple thing to do. You don't have to have a gym membership, so any kind of movement that you can do and do consistently, do it daily, it doesn't have to be much.

Literally ten minutes of walking can check this box, but that is number two movement okay. So f m s the s the first s is sleep. So this is something probably I'm guessing Doctor Kelly and I share in common.

We we're in our medical training. We were basically sleep deprived for years maybe a decade. Yeah. And that's actually not a good thing. In fact, when I was in medical school, we didn't even know why we were supposed to sleep. Like, why do we need to?

We knew that if we didn't, we had all these bad side effects. We got cranky. We couldn't perform well. I'm both intellectual and also fine motor skills and all that kind of stuff, but we didn't know actually the reason why.

Now we know as of March was that 2000 and I want to say six or 8 or 10, I can't remember. But Doctor Jeffrey Iliff and that figured out of University of Rochester.

They figured out this whole thing called the lymphatic system of the brain, which is like the way that the brain gets rid of all the the toxins, all the waste materials, all the stuff that builds up over the course of the day when we're leading our lives.

And at night we have basically garbage day, right? The trash gets taken away, all the toxins get flushed out, and it only effectively happens while we sleep.

So it's actually really, really, really important that we get our, you know, token eight hours of sleep. It's in a range of 7 to 9 is kind of the range, but if we shoot for eight, I think we're doing amazing.

And I can tell you in my personal life, my wife would be the first one to tell you when I was going through all my training and my first decade as a physician, I slept 4 to 5, maybe six hours on a good night.

I was kind of a cranky person. I wasn't fun to be around. And. And what's crazy too, is I actually started to get, you know, I was getting a little older.

I started to get routine blood work. My my fasting glucose was creeping up. I actually had insulin resistance. And I didn't know it because in as little as one night of sleep deprivation, you are already showing signs of insulin resistance.

But guess what? You get one night of great sleep that also correct. So it actually can improve so darn quickly. So sleep is imperative. I could talk an hour on that.

There's a bunch of strategies in the book on how to get a good night's sleep, but that's the s. Okay, so f m s and then G the G is for gut health. So when I was in medical school, nobody had ever said that word to me.

Gut health in fact, I took a class in what was called in those days, alternative medicine. Right. It was like the alternative stuff that we didn't do in traditional medicine was like, you know, going and getting a massage or doing pressure points or doing copying or doing acupuncture, you know, all these kinds of things.

But even then, they didn't even talk about gut health. Now, that was 20 plus years ago. But now I think most of you know what gut health is, is that we should take care of the little guys that live in us, that live on us, you know, within us.

I mean, there's literally more of them than there are of us, or at least there's many trillions and trillions. But the cool thing is they respond to the same good sort of lifestyle things that our body responds to.

In other words, if we eat good food, you're going to actually feed the right kind of bacteria that are helpful to your health. That will give you those positive neurochemicals like serotonin, for example.

Right? The happy hormones, over 90% of it is actually produced in the gut. Like who knew? Right? Right. It's it's crazy, but it's been well studied the entire of themselves.

So the GI tract, they have that serotonin produced in 90% of it in the body is made in the gut. So we need to get our gut healthy for so many reasons.

Because when it's not healthy, what does that lead to. It leads to inflammation. And getting it healthy starts with what we talked about at the very beginning a real food diet and lots of prebiotic fibers, which is just means the food for the gut, right?

The bacteria that live there, they got to eat something too. And so if we eat things like asparagus and broccoli and my favorite brussel sprouts, anything that has fiber in it, those guys go crazy and they love it.

And then they help us because they can produce vitamins for us. Who knew they actually produce vitamins that we can use? I didn't learn any of this in medical school, and it's so cool.

Oh my gosh. Have you found gut health to be important in your practice, Doctor Kelly yeah, absolutely. I think that, like your story in medical school, I mean, I was I was drinking Mountain Dew and eating.

I'm just trying to stay awake. And I'm not saying that's your diet, but I'm saying I had no respect for my gut. I had no respect for, you know, the microbiome wasn't even something that we even talked about at all.

It does feel like a million years ago. But now I think we have just so much research we have it gives people so much hope again, because it's something that they can take control of.

It's something that, you know, if they're having issues that functional medicine doctors are able to come in and start to give them good feedback, good protocols.

There's lots of really good testing out there, but I think, you know, gut health again, I think sleep and gut. Right? I mean, they're they're right up there with just being the most important foundational aspects of, of good health.

Yeah. No, gut health is fascinating. I mean, I could get into the nitty gritty on I mean, what's really cool is you can literally take. So here's a cool study email kind of bridge what we were talking about a little bit with that happy hormone, serotonin for example.

So if you look at the bacteria that make up somebodies, bacterial flora in their gut, their microbiota, if you will, there are actually distinctive patterns that can help you predict who would have, for example, anxiety or who would have depression or who would have symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, you could actually predict that based on the bacteria that's growing in their gut, like there's studies that show that.

And what's interesting is you could take somebody, for example, who has one of these really devastating mental health conditions like schizophrenia. You could take their poop, their stool, and you could put it in a mouse that didn't have any of that.

And within a couple of days, two weeks, that mouse that received their vehicle transplant would start showing the signs of schizophrenia. And it works vice versa.

So you could actually fix these problems by changing gut health as well. So it's super interesting even they tend to be behind our cravings. So if you ever have like what they call a sweet tooth, right?

And you're craving certain things that aren't that healthy, it's probably because your your gut is not balanced. You may have dysbiosis in the bacteria that wants to eat that highly processed food.

It actually send signals to your brain, says, hey, go ahead and grab that extra chip or 2 or 3 dozen or the extra Oreo, like it's not you having low willpower, low self-esteem.

It's none of that. It's actually your gut. The bacteria in your gut is telling you to eat that way. It's crazy because then they survive. So in order to be able to have the right, you know, populations in the right ratio, you got to eat the stuff that's good, right?

For the good bacteria, like the fibrous vegetables and fruits and things that have lots of fiber. And because then they feed the good guys, which then in turn help you.

And guess what? All those cravings, they actually go away. I could tell you that my own personal experience. I used to eat ice cream every single night, like that was my coping mechanism for a rough day in the ER at the hospital, I'd come home and I would literally sit in front of the TV and I would eat half a gallon of ice cream, like I would just eat a lot of ice cream.

And I did that for over a decade. And once I turned like, I don't know, 35 or closer to 40, I was like, gosh, this is not working out very well. I didn't I didn't feel great after I ate it.

My, my, literally my joints were aching and I started to have a little bit of a soft midsection. Oh my gosh, something is not right here. And I started to focus on my gut health and in changing some of the things that I was eating, eating real food instead of processed food.

And and actually those cravings went away completely. I don't crave ice cream ever anymore. I actually still like the taste of it. And so if it's my kid's birthday party, guess what?

I'm going to have a slice of cake. I'm not going to go for seconds, but I will have a slice of cake and I'll probably have a scoop of ice cream too, because I still like the flavor, but I just never crave it.

It's that craving, right? Like, really there's some. Yeah, it's that's there's two different things between enjoying and then like the craving of that and I, I do you know, I have that antidote as well.

Is that when it before I knew I was sensitive to gluten, I was just bread pastry. I mean, like, all the above. And it was probably my gut bacteria as well.

Just craving all that processed sugar with that came with it. And once it was like 21 days. And I feel like that's a kind of a good measure, you know, of of, again, switching your diet and really getting good probiotics, prebiotics from your food and that turn over.

It just completely changed my, you know, my desire. Again, I think that's it's just how lucky are we that when we actually optimize our health, our, our bodies will work for us?

We're just designed so marvelously in that aspect. They will. And it's a miraculous symbiotic relationship that we both benefit from. We benefit tremendously.

They benefit. I mean, it's a win win. And back to our original point where I love to encourage people to add things to their diet. Did you know that there are literally 6000 types of fermented foods worldwide?

Every culture that has ever existed has several sort of honed in foods that are their cultural, you know, fermented food. Like where I'm coming from in Hawaii.

We love kimchi over there. And it we borrowed it from the Koreans, but we just we love kimchi. I always have it in my refrigerator. My dad, he lived in Germany when he was a kid.

He loves sauerkraut, kraut. I personally don't like sauerkraut, but I like kimchi and I love to fur. And I love edamame. And I love, miso. And one of our favorite soups in Hawaii is miso.

And then tempeh and natto. Those are all fermented soybean products. And and so there's so many of them. In fact, in the last couple of years that I focus on this, I've tried so many different types, whether it be a recipe somebody else made for me with just certain vegetables that they pickled and fermented to, stuff that I found at different supermarkets and things.

It's been so much fun to add these things to my diet, and I've had tremendous benefits. So add rather than subtract. There literally thousands of these foods you can add to your diet.

They have so much benefit. You don't have to, you know, run out to the, supplement store and look for a probiotic. I mean, sometimes those are important, but you can get a lot of it in food.

Food, both with the prebiotics in them, like these fermented foods, or by supplying the bacteria in your gut with those prebiotic fibers. So food first is my mantra, and it just makes a world of difference.

So the last s in the mnemonic so is f msg. So food movement sleep gut health. And the last one is stress optimization. And in the last couple of years we've been under tremendous stress as a society, as a world.

It's crazy like they used to report that in a given year, 50 to 60% of us would have at least one significantly stressful event. Now that number is above 90%.

And in fact, one of my favorite, research papers of all times came in the year 2012, and they took nearly 200,000 people and they had them rate their stress was at a mild level, was at a moderate level.

Stress optimization and breathwork

Was it a high level of stress? And then they followed them to see what their health was like, to see if they had bad, you know, health outcomes. Did they have a heart attack?

Did they get cancer? Did they get, you know, chronic disease? You know, what was really interesting about this is that a certain group had a 34, I think, 34.6% chance of increased risk of dying because they believed that the stress was bad for them and they were in that higher stress group.

There was another group within that high stress group that did not believe that the stress was actually bad for them, and they had a protective effect.

They had like a 30% less, less chance of dying, and they were in that same group of high stress. So it was really what happened between their ears that got to decide if the stress was something bad for them, or it could be viewed as a growth experience or something they could learn from, or something like in the last couple of years, we've all had to pivot in one way or another with what we're doing or what have you, because things have changed.

And if we've used that to grow from that, stress can be powerful, it can be beneficial. And we get to decide that. Back to the original point, right? The ball's in our court.

We can actually decide. So I talk for a chapter or two in a book about stress and how we can optimize it and how we can change it from a negative to a positive.

And then, you know, things like relaxation techniques, breathing is a huge one, for example. It's one of my favorites. You know, Wim Hof is kind of my idol.

Like if I could swim under the polar ice cap like he does for a couple of minutes and pop up like, that would be phenomenal. I can't quite do that. But I like to do different breath, techniques because it's simple and it's fast.

Like literally you could take five deep breaths in a row and, you know, just put your hand on your belly or put your hand on your heart or one in each place to do it slowly, and your whole state will change that quickly over five breaths.

It's like 30s when, when can't we incorporate that into our day? Right? So. Right. I mean, if we can't do that, like if we get we have problems, right?

Yeah, I, I think that people don't realize the impact of, of such, a little amount of time and how even when I have top box breathing, it's like, oh, how can that help?

You know, Doctor Halder and like, you know, and they'll actually commit to it. And they're like, I really feel better. Like my heavy on my aura, it went up and I'm like, yeah.

I mean really this is very impactful. These these little measures. You don't have to sit in a lotus position meditating for an hour a day there. There are studies that show I follow, Huberman, Doctor Huberman Labs.

And you're very famous right now for his, you know, just just displaying all the scientific literature and getting into it. And he does talk about, a lab out of New York and how they're studying just very small amounts of these, these breathing exercises and, and how they can they can benefit.

And so I'm, you know, I, I'm always like, why don't have one more minute in the day, but when you find that minute and you implement it every other minute in your day is is better and it's, you know, not so stressful to have to have, you know, every single second to, you know, to really get everything you need to because we're all very busy.

But I want to go back to something you just said about, Wim Hof. Are you do you use cold therapy? Is that something that you, endorse? Absolutely. I use it when I can.

I don't have a cold plunge in my house. I grew up doing a cold plunge every single morning. I didn't even know I was doing it because I was surfing in 53 degree water.

And back in those days, we didn't have very good wetsuits. But I can tell you, when I was done surfing like, my mind was sharp. My dad thought it was crazy because I literally got up at 5 a.m..

I went surfing before high school. I had my own car that I got through a paper out that I hadn't, and money I saved, and I literally every morning got up at five, went surfing in this 53 degree water.

And I was so sharp and so alert. And in fact, I remember the day. And I know it sounds crazy, but the day that I took the SAT test, which was, I don't know, 35 years ago or something, I literally surfed before that test.

And and I don't want to brag, but I got 800 on the math, for example. Like that's a perfect score. And that was after my cold therapy. I mean, it's like, wow, you are you are way ahead of your time.

Like, you really. I didn't know what it was. And I didn't say I did a cold plunge today. I mean, I just went surfing in 50 degree water, but that's it is really beneficial.

You don't have to own a special fancy tank. I mean, I've done it with just putting ice from my refrigerator, a freezer. We actually have an ice maker because my kids go nuts over ice water.

We just love ice. So we can actually, you know, put a bunch of ice in a in a bathtub. And I'll do that for, you know, as long as I can handle, usually it's around 5 to 7 minutes.

But when you start, you would be surprised if you just work on what you just talked about, the breathing. Like you just kind of get in slowly and just take some deep breaths.

It's actually easier than you think. You would think it'd be really, really hard. Like, like when your, your, temperature gauge on your shower, it's not working or you don't have any warm water like in Hawaii.

We have a solar water, for. And so our shower, if it's a rainy day, we don't have warm water. And that's just that's just how it is. And so when you first jump in there and you feel that cold, are you you know, if you don't do that, instead of having that reaction, just kind of do some deep rest.

Let that cold water hit you, whether it be a cold shower or getting under it in a cold plunge. Either way, works right? It doesn't have to be a long time.

It can be 30s, whatever. It's beneficial. It's a good kind of stress. That's right. That's the for me, sis. Yeah. The hermetic effect of, good positive stress for a short duration.

I don't want you to get in that cold plunge and spend an hour in there. I'm just saying, 30s a minute, maybe 2 or 3 to five minutes, you know, just a couple of minutes.

And it has tremendous benefits. So I'm all about the cold plunge. I'm all about sauna. I don't personally own either one of those, but whenever I have a chance, I'm doing it.

So we were talking before we started the call as well, that I live in Minnesota, so I have some benefits, you know, six months out of the year that last year I started to go outside and drag my teenagers outside in our swimsuits, and we would sit in the snowbank, and it was kind of like, who can who can last the longest?

And we're super competitive. But it is. It was like, I don't own an ice bath, you know? I don't know that. But you could do it. You can get in your shower like you said, you can really, like, ease into it.

And I know that, just recently, now, the allopathic medicine is now recommending screening things for anxiety and all adults.

Cold therapy, practical habits, and closing resources

And I saw some literature about, polar plunges and cold therapies and really helping with people's anxiety and helping with mood. And I thought, that's wonderful.

Again, that's something that we can take into our own hands and, certainly, you know, like if you have an anxiety disorder or anything of that, please seek your, you know, license, health care providers.

Not what I'm saying. Don't go off your medicine or anything like that. But again, it's just like diet. It's things that we can do to help our overall body help.

You know, every system in our body of work better work more efficiently because we only, you know, unfortunately, we only get one body. And we need to absolutely take care of it.

And your acronym f msg. You know, my husband is a medical doctor, too, so I'm going to get off the call because, you know, the f the harmonics just take us right back to medical school, where, I mean, we learned what we learned from a fire hydrant.

Remember that that adage about learning from a fire heart and mnemonics were the way we got through it. And I and I love this because it's it's even easy to teach to like again my teenagers like keep hey guys, keep this in mind.

Like, let's not be on our our cell phones, you know, until 2:00 in the morning, because your sleep is going to be impacted and then your blood sugar and you'll be crabby and your skin's not going to let you know. Static.

Pull that out. Pull that card out, too. So everything is connected. I absolutely love the Monica. I love your approach. I am going to, get on the list to get a copy of the book because you have a gift, doctor.

I mean, we have making things really easy, and we and we're we just are so stressed out, right? We we need easy. And there's a lot of gloom and doom. Like, I had a podcast where we talked about detoxification and in the most, most of the content of it was we're swimming in a toxic soup and I'm almost sitting there like going like, I, I don't even know, like I give up like I but this is really this is a message of hope.

This is a message of empowerment, of what we can do. Again, like all of the the topics we talked about, I think that you did a brilliant job of of making it simple, simple, simple.

And that's what we really, really need right now to to optimize our health is actionable, simple steps. So thank you. Yeah. No thank you. And I that's always my goal is to make things simple.

Just what could you do today. Can you take five deep breaths today. It'll take you less than one minute. I bet you can do that. While you do it, put your hand over your abdomen and the other hand over your heart and just feel your body take slow, deep breaths.

Just do it five times in a row. It may change everything for that moment. Or go out for a walk today for 5 or 10 minutes after your next meal. See how you feel after that.

Super simple. Tonight, set a little bedtime alarm. Say, hey, I'm going to go to sleep at this time, and I'm going to, you know, try to sleep 7 or 8 hours.

Maybe you haven't done that for years. I know for me it was years. Right. But you can, you know, you can work up to that. Or another simple trick at the other end of that is we didn't talk about this, but food is the most important of all of these probably.

But the second is the timing of our food. So food quality and the sourcing are super important. But the timing. So if you don't eat for a couple of hours before you go to bed, just try to eat your dinner, you know, 2 to 3 hours before you hit the hay, so to speak.

And then when you first wake up in the morning, don't eat right away. Maybe give yourself a full glass of water. Or if you like to have a tea or coffee, that's fine too.

Just don't put sugar and cream and all that stuff in it and just do it plain with basically, essentially no calories and wait an hour or two before you eat your breakfast.

And then guess what? You just did an intermittent fast. You did a 12, maybe 13, 14 hours and you didn't even have to try. Like it's not, you know, simple things, but they actually have big effects, some of them immediate and and compounded.

Just ridiculous positive effects in your life. I mean, I'm turning 50 next year and I'm as active and energetic as I ever was. I got teenagers and I got four of them that are boys, and I can I can keep up with them in any sport.

I mean, it's it's crazy to even say it. And I don't mean to be boastful, but like, they'll tell you, I can go up behind me and put up my little pull up bar across our doorway and I can do 30 pull ups, you know, and they can't even do that many.

And it's like, I'm turning 50. I'm the old guy here, you know? So these things, they're so simple. They're so actionable. And almost all of them I described in the book don't cost a cent it's just about simple daily choices.

Eat a little bit better of weight. Those three things that we talked about in the processed foods get a good night's sleep. Move your body every day, focus on your gut health, and then optimize your stress.

So simple. And it's free. Yes. Very good. And you know, you're obviously walking the walk. And it's a very good example, especially for those teenagers.

I know for mine too, I'm constantly trying to make sure I'm keeping up with with them and, you know, all these things that, we can do for ourselves. It's absolutely wonderful that we have this ability.

So where can people find more information about you, doctor? Yeah. So the easiest two places are either on my website, which is Thomas hemingway.com. It's just my name, Thomas and and Hemingway, just like Ernest spelled his last name with 1 a.m.

Thomas hemingway.com or on Instagram. It's at Dr. for doctor Thomas Hemingway. So just my name again is pretty darn simple. Most of the platforms that's what it is I think Facebook.

It's Thomas Hemingway MD as well as LinkedIn. The only one that's different is Twitter I think is Doc Hemingway. I don't use Twitter that much. And and my usual one, Doctor Thomas Hemingway, wasn't available, but, Instagram doctor Thomas Hemingway or my website, Thomas hemingway.com I put out daily content usually it's a little bit funny or upbeat.

Inspirational. It's all simple, actionable stuff. I have a podcast as well that's called the Unshakable Health Podcast. I do 1 or 2 episodes a week. It's a lot of fun. I think you'll find a lot of value there.

So yeah, it would be privileged to have you follow me and, yeah, listen to my show and reach out to me. That would be fantastic. Awesome. Well, I certainly well, well, thank you so much for your time and your generosity.

I really appreciate it. It's been a true pleasure. Thank you, Doctor Kelly and aloha. Aloha. Thank.

Thomas Hemingway, MD

Prevention! 5 Powerful Practices To Avoid Disease & Optimize Thyroid Health