Symptoms like low energy, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and mood swings. And, you know, this could be anything from anger to anxiety, depression, disrupted sleep patterns, and digestive issues like bloating, constipation, indigestion, stomach pain, and food intolerances. I mean, you kind of name it, there are so many digestive issues these days. So those of you watching right now in this situation will probably feel like you’re deficient in something like maybe it’s antioxidants or maybe it’s hormones or maybe it’s B vitamins or magnesium or amino acids. Which are needed to make neurotransmitters, or maybe you feel deficient in minerals or deficient in enzymes. Something seems to be missing. And truth be told, you aren’t far from the truth. You just haven’t figured out what’s underneath your deficiencies, what’s actually causing them. So in today’s Quick Talk, we’re going to explore the four primary root causes of middle-age deficiency syndrome and how we can address them to regain our health, our vitality and live the life we always thought we would.
And before I talk about how to solve this, it’s really important to understand the actual impact that this syndrome has on your life. The middle-aged individuals I work with and you know, you might wonder what is middle-age exactly. Well, middle-age really starts around age 40 and goes from there. So middle-age is around age 40 to 70, maybe mid-seventies, right in there. And many of the middle-aged individuals that I work with in my virtual clinic, they often describe feeling like they’re running on empty or they aren’t as productive as they used to be. And their days are just not full. And they don’t feel, you know, they feel like they are forgetful or they have fatigue. They have mood swings and these symptoms lead to a diminished sense of well-being and hinder their daily lives. So can you imagine how frustrating it is to have this desire to live life to the fullest yet you’re feeling constantly weighted down by this kind of invisible burden. You can’t see it. You can only feel it. It’s a knowing and it’s a feeling in your body. And it actually impacts your ability to achieve all the things you want.
Meaningful relationships with your partner and family. It stops you from excelling at work or maybe building the business you always dreamed of. And if you’re one of my retired people, my retired clients tell me all the time that the middle-aged deficiency and inflammatory syndrome stop them from traveling, attending their grandkid’s sports events, or volunteering at church even. So, most of the people I know with the syndrome tell me they used to have big ambitions and dreams for their life, but they can no longer trust their health or their brain or their energy, or their digestive tract to keep up. So in a sense, their health has really crushed their ambition. Does that make sense? So there’s a good reason for all of this, and unfortunately, it isn’t dealt with well in most Western and functional medicine practices. So I’m going to talk about the four root causes here.
So the first root cause is chronic hidden infections. So this kind of middle-aged deficiency and inflammation syndrome is often triggered by infections like parasites or bacteria or fungus and viruses. And I’m not just talking about these living inside the gut, because oftentimes we think of gut bacteria or gut parasites, but these can actually be in any organ in any place in your body. And there are a few areas where they really like to hide. And, you know, we have some great talks on this summit where we go deep into infections. I want to encourage you to catch the talk with Christine Schaffner, where we go really deep into where the infections are hiding in your body. But basically, these microorganisms, they silently disrupt your bodies. You know, without any other way to say it, your delicate balance. Right. So when this gets disrupted, it leads to symptoms that we experience. And I just explained a bunch of those symptoms at the beginning of this talk. So recognizing and addressing these infections anywhere they’re at or in your body is crucial to your journey to recovery. Okay. So that’s the first thing, hidden infections.
The second thing and you’re going to hear me talk a lot about this on this summit, we’re bringing in many, many speakers on this topic but the second is toxins. And they play a huge role in middle-aged deficiency and inflammation syndrome. And I’m talking about things like heavy metals, mold, mycotoxins, and environmental chemicals that can accumulate in your body over time and affect your cellular energy production. They affect your gut health. They affect your hormone balance, your thyroid function, your metabolism, your adrenal function, and their overall well-being. And don’t forget also heavy metals. I mean, there’s a lot of toxins out there. So identifying and reducing your exposure to these toxins is essential for your symptom relief for what you’ve been experiencing.
The third thing is nutrient deficiencies. Now our bodies require essential vitamins, minerals, micronutrients, and macronutrients being your carbs, protein, and fat. We need all these things to function optimally and without them, we may experience, you know, a whole bunch of things like energy depletion and brain fog and digestive issues. All those symptoms that I’ve been talking about. Now many middle-aged people suffer from nutrient deficiencies because of several reasons. So some of the obvious reasons are poor dietary choices or soil depletion of nutrients or the food processing and cooking methods that destroy nutrients or living a fast-paced lifestyle and choosing prepared convenience foods instead of making whole foods at home. Even vegetarian and vegan diets that can be low in certain nutrients like protein B vitamins, iron, and calcium medications can hinder nutrient absorption and reduce nutrient absorption from inflammation and certain diseases like celiac disease and Crohn’s disease, for example.
But here are two reasons, and this is what I really want you to hear in this talk, that there are two reasons that many people are not aware of and that practitioners don’t always address in their programs and that’s the first two root causes I just explained, infections and toxins. Infections like parasites steal your nutrition from your own cells and toxins block your body’s ability to absorb nutrients into the cells. So what I just said is those first two buckets of problems, infections and toxins create nutrient deficiencies. In other words, that’s what’s happening. So while proper nutrition and targeted supplementation are really important for addressing nutrient deficiencies. Hopefully, you can see, if you seem to, if you’re feeling like you’re doing everything right, if you seem to be doing everything right and you’re still not getting better, you could have hidden infections and toxins that are stealing or blocking your nutrients. And these two things must be addressed for you to be successful. And fourth is stress and trauma. So bucket number four, the fourth bucket of root causes stress and trauma. Now, both can exacerbate middle-age deficiency syndrome or middle-age deficiency and inflammatory syndrome, anger, anxiety, and depression. They can further drain your energy, disrupt your sleep, and impact your digestion. And so managing stress and addressing emotional trauma is one of the keys to your recovery. And we’re bringing on people on this summit to talk about this very topic.
So now that you know the four root causes of this midlife deficiency and inflammation syndrome, how do you solve this problem? And this is the key. Well, the solution is actually it’s linear and structured. So this isn’t a guessing game. It isn’t all over the place. It’s actually a blueprint. There’s a blueprint, a linear, structured way to do this. It’s not complicated, but most practitioners are only doing part of the process or missing these important steps completely. So I’m going to go through these steps really quickly. So, the first and foremost, the first thing to do is to support your mitochondria energy production. You may have been a participant in my last two summits, which were both about mitochondrial energy production. This is absolutely critical to the healing process. If you miss this piece in your healing journey, it’s unlikely that you will get results that last or permanent results or get results at all. So to combat low energy levels you must focus on supporting your mitochondria. To heal your body you must focus on supporting your mitochondria.
Even if your energy feels okay you need more of it to heal. So I want you to remember and think of it as your mitochondria being the energy powerhouses of your cells. And like I just mentioned, healing takes all that extra energy. Digesting food takes energy. Making hormones and neurotransmitters takes energy. Even falling asleep and staying asleep takes energy. Now, the second thing is to open up your internal drainage pathways. Think of this like priming the pipes and clearing the pipes for all the good things to come next. So clearing internal drainage pathways is also essential for detoxification and your body’s ability to take the garbage out. The third step is to repair and restore your gut health. Now, this is an absolutely crucial step to addressing all of your symptoms. You’ve probably heard that your gut is your second brain and that most of your immune system actually lives in your gut. In fact, every process in your body is interconnected with your gut health, so it makes sense that this step should be early on in your recovery process. But be sure to take note of the first two steps ahead of it.
I just mentioned, supporting your mitochondria energy production and opening the internal drainage pathways before you start any major gut protocol. By that, I mean moving parasites, moving bacteria, moving fungus. You got to have this, you have to have these pieces in place because your body’s going to need more energy and your drainage pathways are going to be stressed while you do this so you must support them. Now, the fourth step is to lower stress and to clear your lifetime accumulation of traumas. Now, over and over again, I see people getting stuck at this step. I mean, personally, me, I spent four and a half, almost five years in transformational leadership, working on the childhood traumas. And there’s big traumas and little traumas, not everybody has giant traumas. Not everybody has been, you know, molested, raped, or beaten but there are little things, there are small things that create trauma in us as well.
It could be a moment, a fearful moment where you thought, you know, you were abandoned by accident. You weren’t, your parents were there, but you didn’t know it or maybe somebody at school said something horribly mean to you, and from that moment on you had a self-limiting belief about yourself that you weren’t good enough or weren’t smart enough. Or maybe there were traumatic things that occurred, you know, that you witnessed. Maybe you saw your parents fighting, maybe you saw, I mean, we could go on and on here but this is so critical to clear. And I spent many, many years working on this so I could shift those childhood experiences that shaped some of my own self-limiting beliefs. The self-limiting belief that I wasn’t smart enough, that was a big one. I mean, you may have heard me tell stories about this before, but I had like this lifelong thing that I wasn’t smart enough. So, I mean, that’s a whole story that I could go down a rabbit hole sharing with you and how I finally resolved that. But it’s crazy how we get stuck in these cycles and these, it’s kind of almost like this paradigm that we get stuck in.
So here’s the thing, I see it happen all the time with my clients, and most of the time it’s people just don’t want to face the stressors. They don’t want to have hard conversations with loved ones or cut toxic people out or cut jobs, you know, or habits out of their lives that are no longer serving them. So there’s really not a quick fix for the step, but there are ways to ease yourself through it and to feel good while you do it. So I’m bringing on people to talk about that at the summit. Now, the final step is to detoxify your body from heavy metals, mold, mycotoxins, infections beyond your gut, and environmental chemicals. It’s important to work with a healthcare professional experienced in detoxification protocols and execute them in the right order and only when you’ve done the foundational steps of supporting mitochondrial energy production, opening the drainage pathways, and restoring gut health. The final step is, this final step of detoxification is vital for symptom relief and reversal of middle-age deficiency and inflammation syndrome.
Now, in the conclusion of this short talk, MADS, middle-age deficiency and inflammation syndrome, it’s a condition that affects countless individuals as they approach middle age. By addressing the four root causes, chronic hidden infections, toxins, nutrient deficiencies, stress, and traumas we can take significant steps towards reclaiming our radiant health, your radiant health, and living the life that you always wanted to. So remember, the recovery is a journey, not a destination, always. It requires patience, it requires persistence, and often professional guidance. And I always tell my clients perfectionism is not possible. So remember that, write that down. It may be the most important thing you hear on this whole entire summit. Perfection is not possible. So seek out health care practitioners, and experienced functional medicine to tailor this personalized plan that suits your unique needs. I really wanted to put this talk first because I really, really, really want you to get it and understand the four root causes and the steps to healing your body.
There’s so much out there that you are going to hear and you’re going to hear a lot on this summit. And there are so many things you could be doing to support your health but those four foundational steps that I just outlined are absolutely critical. So go back and listen to this again if you didn’t catch it. I will be talking about this throughout with every interview. Throughout this summit, I’m bringing in these concepts. So, I can’t wait to see you throughout the next several days as we do this together. Enjoy the lineup of speakers that I have for you today. Until next time. Take good care. Bye, now.