Ep 567: Aging Strong with Ayurveda with Dr. John Douillard

Introduction to Ayurveda and the episode theme 0:00

Hey, health junkies on this episode of the health fix podcast, I'm interviewing Dr. John Duyard. Holy cow, we're talking about a lot of things. But most importantly, are you Vedic medicine, which is an Indian type of medicine. We're going to dive into some fun stuff. We're going to talk about why weight gain happens over a certain age and why the belly fat and all that stuff actually could be more of a congested gut lymphatic system than actually a hormone problem altogether. Mind blown. So you're gonna love this podcast, especially if you are struggling through metabolism or weight and you kind of like, I've done all the things.

I don't know what to do next. And maybe you've thought about lymphatics system. Maybe you thought of working on your gut, but you aren't sure where to go. you're not interested in taking copious amounts of supplements and things of that nature and maybe you want to just work with food, this podcast will help you get some ideas. Now, does John talk about different supplements? Of course, there are certain herbs that can help to enhance the lymphatic system, enhance digestive system. Once you know what your constitution is, and what's happening, are you Vedic?

And he has a quiz just for that. You'll check my podcast notes out for at drjcrossnd.com. So who is this John Duyard guy? He is a chiropractor, but he ended up being trained in Ayurvedic medicine, fell in love with it, and here we are. He's a globally recognized Ayuri Vedic and sports medicine educator with 40 plus years of experience. That's allowed of the experience he is the host of Ayura Veda meets modern science podcasts and the author of seven health books, including the bestsellers eat wheat and The Three Season Diet.

He's on a mission to provide free Ayurvedic knowledge to the public. He created LifeSpa.com. We're going to talk about the website and all the resources. There are a ton of them on there, where he connects ancient Ayuri Vedic wisdom with modern science. And my goodness, he is a wealth of knowledge. there's a lot of really cool digestible information on his website. You know, the biggest thing I want you to be thinking about during this podcast is like balance. How can I restore balance instead of thinking about other things that you can use as band-aids to help with their overall health?

So let's introduce you to Dr. John Doodyard. Welcome to the Health Fix Podcast, where health junkies get their weekly fix of tips, tools and techniques to have limitless energy,

How John Duyard discovered Ayurveda 2:23

sharp minds and fit physiques for life. Dr. John Duyard, welcome to the Health Fix Podcast. Great to be here, Janine. Thank you so much. Hey, you know, I'm always interested when someone is really into something like Ayurveda because, let's face it, it's still in the West and in U.S. in particular. Folks are still kind of learning about it. Yoga was kind the big introduction to that type of medicine and bringing things in. Obviously, Ayureveda is different than just yoga. folks are starting to wake up a little bit more to it.

But chiropractic background, how did you end up falling into Ayurvedic medicine from there? Well, I mean, it was a long time ago. It was probably in early 1980s. I was taking a 500-hour acupuncture class and they just mentioned Ayureveda and for whatever reason it just kind of clicked. And I'm like, what? There's this ancient traditional system of medicine in India has been around for thousands of years and for some reason I was more attracted to that than Chinese medicine. I ended up going to a lecture a few months later of meditation and yoga and Ayurveda and afterwards I went up to the Indian Ayurevedic doctor there and I asked him, I said, And I was training for an Ironman.

I said, I'm training an ironman, and I wonder, according to Ayurveda, would this be good? What do you think? And he looked at me and was like, what is that? I say, well, an IRONMAN is like a two and a half mile swim in the ocean, a 112 mile bike, 26 mile run. He looked and he was, like why do do that. And I was like, no answer. No one ever asked me why I did it. I just did because I could kind of thing. And he looked at me like I an idiot. He said, do you meditate? And said yes. Thank God I had something positive to say.

Do you sleep while you mediate? I said deeply. It's a really deep sleep. Conk out. Great. Meditation is a completely different state than sleep. When you're sleeping, when you should be meditating, you are exhausted. Mediation is the state of being alert and resting at the same time. It's like the two opposites coexisting. And I'm going like, oh, I just conk out and go to sleep and he goes, You're exhausted down. I was like. Oh, and He said, this is whatever you were doing. . I don't think it's a good idea.

I were to meditate and stay awake, alert and still do all this training. Would it be okay? And he looked at me and said, yes, and he's just like, next, please, you know, just to get rid of me. And so that's what I did. I started going to meditation retreats. Started resting more, training less, meditating more. After a two week meditation, I just did yoga breathing, meditation yoga, breathing meditation every day, like three, three or four times rounds and rounds. I was like shot out of a cannon.

I got into this runner's high thing that lasted three months in my life. In my competitive world, I started competing and placing, you know, in many events. This was early on in the triathlon days in South Bay in California. And my internship, my clinic, it was just like, had a level of bandwidth and capacity that I never experienced in four years before I wasn't in school. You know chiropractic college. and I just was, like something happened to me lot of my friends who were triathletes learn how to meditate because they were like, whatever you're doing, are you on steroids?

They thought I was doing some drug and it was just that I getting this deep rest and I'm getting the recovery that i needed and that just got me so like blown away that When I wanted to know more about the runner's high and the zone, I started reading books like The Psychic Side of Sports by Michael Murphy years ago and all these books about these peak experiences. Then I had a chance in 1986 to go to India to study Ayurveda. At least I'd had six-week vacation and my sister was living there. She said, why don't you come?

You can stay at my place and you can go try to learn Ayureveda? I was like, cool. I'm on it. So I went. The second day I was there, they invited me to stay permanently, which I did for like a year and a half. That's where I met Deepak Chopra. And after a years and half, came back and kind of co-directed his center for eight years. I always started teaching medical doctors and that was his gig at that time. So I... started teaching medical doctors and it became really clear that the chiropractor teaching weird Ayurvedic medicine to medical Doctors needed a little help and the help was modern science.

So I started putting together the ancient wisdom in the modern Science way back in this was 1986 and I Started putting those together and that's what I've been doing ever since is taking this ancient Wisdom which is like phenomenal because There's so much science behind it that nobody even knows is out there. And from my perspective, if you can take something that was around as a medical practice for thousands of years and still around today and has modern science to back it up, gosh, I think we should at least look at that.

Because modern science alone, you know, right? Coffee can be good coffee, it can bad soy, wheat, dairy, You name it. I can give you science on both sides of that aisle.

Balance, digestion, and the root of disease 7:26

People don't know should I be a carnivore or a vegan? People are so confused. But if you have time-tested wisdom, 5,000 years old in modern of science, I think that's worth taking a look at. And that is what I do. I think that is fascinating to combine the two in terms of the research and the wisdom, because yeah, people are confused. I absolutely agree. My background, of course, Chinese medicine, but I find that there's a lot of overlap when you really get down to the nitty gritty between Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine.

And I kind of feel it. It probably evolved somewhat at the same time, just two different locations in, you know, the world. What it seems is there's so many people, some, so, many, people but so things are explained really well by the simple principles of these types of energetic and balance, balance methods. Sometimes it's almost too simple. I don't know if you've found that you're like, huh, hot or cold or hmm. some type of constitutional thing and, you know, explains a lot for bases of why someone might have some certain condition or why they're prone to something.

I love that. And that's why you don't have to memorize anything because Ayurveda and Chinese medicine are sort of like, Ayureveda means the science of life. So it's sort like really studying nature and understanding how seasons change and the microbes in the soil change, and we have a constitution that kind of employs some of those governing principles in nature, like winter, which is cold, we call it vata, you know, or air-based. And there's people who are really cold all the time. They have lot of winter qualities in their constitution, very fiery and competitive and driven and summer qualities, we call that pitta.

And they're the ones throwing off the covers, never wear a jacket or a hat. You know, in the Vata, winter types are always bundling up, right? So we are basically, you know we mimic and have those same governing principles inside of us that we see in our seasons, in the times of day that change. There's an incredible understanding of circadian rhythms now and seasonal changes and how we're so disconnected from those rhythms and Ayurveda and probably Chinese medicine too were systems to help get us back into rhythm.

So the body is going with the current versus against it. And we've done a bang up job going against in our culture. What I love about Chinese medicine and Ayurveda too, and this is kind of my take on what makes them different, is they are designed to help the the job, to restore function of the bodies so the can heal itself. That is a huge place to start. If that doesn't work, Well, then maybe we use some naturopathic or functional medicine approaches where we'll use a natural laxative or a bioidentical hormone or digestive enzymes to help do the job for the body to get it back into balance as a Natural Medicine.

And a medicine means get on it, get better, and get off, which has completely changed in our culture now. People are on medicines lifelong. which was really a bad idea. And then if that doesn't work, you can go to Western Medicine and they're going to give you a drug or surgery. You can do the job for you at any cost, but sometimes that's what we need as well. It's like three buffets, right? I think the buffet you want to start with is the one that is going get us to do job ourselves so we don't become dependent on a pill or a powder or drug, or anything like that down the road.

And that's kind of where I think you and I live is this kind Ayurvedic Chinese world where we're trying to get the body back into balance so it can function on its own. And, that means getting in harmony with nature, living downstream with the current, reset biological clocks with natures circadian rhythms. When that happens, a lot of good things happen. Absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that you mentioned and something that I keep trying to, you know, reiterate on the podcast and with my clients as well is the balance in the body.

Because I think we've kind of got even away from like, why do we get sick? You know, we've gone all these pathways of killing Lyme and going down mold and, you know you're going, down these rabbit holes of chronic illness. And unfortunately we have to think about like, where did this start? What was the imbalance in the first place? what's out of balance? And could we maybe put that balance back and then we're not dealing with all of these chronic issues that can happen. What's your take on all the long, viruses like Epstein-Barr and Lyne and all that kind of stuff.

what your thought process there? Well, from the Ayurvedic perspective, 85% of all disease starts in your digestive system, right? And there was a study done that showed if you don't digest your protein and your fats properly, okay, so what are those? Your proteins are the gluten, the dairy, nuts, seeds, beans, lectins, anti-nutrients, nitrates, goitrogens, oxalates, everything that everybody is telling us not to eat because they are hard to digest. If you do not digest them well, they will go incompletely digested into your intestinal tract.

If you don't digest the fats well, good fats and bad fats through 70 million tons of toxic chemicals dump in our atmosphere every year, according to the EPA. They filter down to air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat, right? So those are bad facts. We have to break them down and detoxify them. And we have the ability to do that, believe it or not, if digestion is strong. But if digestion is weak, the proteins and fats go into your intestinal tract, and this is a quote from the medical journal.

Those proteins in fats will be too big as a molecule, because they're not broken down, to get into you blood and nourish you or be detoxified properly and they'll get uptaken into the garbage can, which is the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system. Your lymphatic system, most of it, the lion's share of, it lines your intestinal tract and that's called your gut immunity. 70% of your immune response is right there. And the lymph is also trying to take out the trash, garbage, trying carry your system and deliver fat as baseline energy to every cell of the body.

So things like Epstein-Barr, chronic fatigue, you know, viruses penetrate through the respiratory mucosa or the intestal mcosa and if you don't have a good lymphic function around those tissues, then you're going to have an immune event because that's where your immune system lives. And if your system is compromised because you didn't digest properly because all the trash, undigested proteins that are clogging up the lymph and creating a big problem there, you're going to have a more vulnerable experience with immune events.

So when you take out all the hard to digest foods, because we don't digest them well, cause we have lousy digestion in America, that's why we're dependent on digestive enzymes to do the job for us, then the proteins and fats are going into your intestinal tract, into the lymph and create potentially a vulnerability in your gut immunity. What's really amazing is those harder to digest foods that everybody's saying, don't eat, because you feel bad when you eat them. And if you fell bad eating something, of course don´t eat it.

But that didn't solve the problem. All that did was take the issue, the symptomatic issue away. Let's now identify what part of your digestive system is broken and fix that because your digressive strength and your immune strength, and you're ability to detoxify are all linked together. They're the same system. So those hard to digest proteins provide a hormesis, a little bit of irritation on the lining of you gut. And that is why we have gut immunity, 70% of your immune response. And the gut, immunity is bi-directionally linked to respiratory immunity.

So there's our two places we become vulnerable to viral infections. If you take all those hard to digest foods that create just enough irritation to give us an immune, response, we've become, vulnerable in terms of immune event. There was an crazy study, real quick, with Amish kids. which were traditional farmers. The kids run around barefoot in the barns. They have cows as pets, and they have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. Their genetic cousins, who came from the same valley in Switzerland, came here called the Hutterites, they became sterile modern farmers, dairy farmers and those kids had the highest rates asthma, on planet, like it doesn't make any sense, right?

Same genetic pool. So they measured the dust in barn of the Amish kids And they found that the dust was creating just enough hormetic irritation of the respiratory mucosa to trigger an immune response against asthma. They have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. Point being, we take out the dairy, the nuts, seeds, grains, looms, nightshades, beans, rice, which we are hearing nothing, meat and vegetables, and that's all you should eat. It's like we're feeling better because we've taken everything hard to digest out of the diet but we become more vulnerable to the environmental pollutants, the toxins, we're not detoxifying well, not digesting well we are not delivering the nutrients well and our lymph system which is the most vulnerable piece of a puzzle and Ayurveda it's the system linked to longevity.

And if that system is compromised because you didn't digest your food well, you're going to pay those prices, as you said, Epstein-Barr, all that. And that's where it comes from. So yeah, treat the virus the best you can if you get one. But boy, go upstream and get to the upstream cause. That's the key. Such valuable information there. I think a lot of people have heard the treat-the-gut, and then it turns into do the AIP program or like you said carnivore or you know or go into just

Midlife metabolism, stress, and menstrual cycles 16:58

meat and veggies and I find that a lot of people when they do that they'll come back and go now I'm more sensitive. I can't eat. You know I go to a restaurant and now my system pops off and i've done this to myself because of course as a naturopath we're known for elimination diets and all that kind of stuff and one of the biggest places that I see this being a huge detriment is in midlife because Women are noticing like their metabolism is changing men too. And then it starts to become, what do I take out?

What do i need to remove? what Do I need To do? So I'd love to hear your, your thought process on moving into midlife, whether it's andropause, Whether it is menopause. Whether It's, you know, this transition and how to keep the metabolism going. How to Keep the lymphatic system going? Where do we start? Do we Start looking at what is our constitution? Give us the scoop. I mean, there's so much there because, you know, let's start from the beginning. And this is something that is a little bit controversial to talk about, but in Ayurvedic medicine and maybe in Chinese medicine, and this just happened to my daughter.

She's on, she's a college track runner, right. four degrees here, and she just started her period. And she was feeling like really, she went to her work, then she came back, I'm super tired, my period just starting. She said I want to go take a nap. I said great, that's perfect, just go rest. Then like four hours later, if she comes back she's all ready to to the track. What are you doing? She goes I am going to track, you're menstruating. Yeah, but I got to get to that track and you know, they're addicted.

She's really stubborn, so it's hard to sometimes, you know, tell her, I said, okay, go, whatever. And then she came back, that was yesterday, and then yesterday she went to work again, came and she said like, like I feel achy, it feels sick, feel so tired. I think I have West Nile virus is like happening in our little town here. It's like. You know, so in Ayurvedic medicine, the idea is that when you're menstruating, The energy is all going down and it's a time when the body is designed to be more introspective and to develop like intuition and women's intuition, and really pull back the bow and become more self-aware and during that period of time where the Body is going within.

It's a power surge. It is a really important time. And if you exercise or stimulate, then you're just taking the energy which is going down for really healthy reproductive function. Keeping the biological clocks for reproduction in sync with the serocradian rhythms. They're getting pulled up to go run on a track at 104 degrees. You know what I mean? body has to borrow from Peter to pay Paul to give the energy to go run the track and then that becomes depleted where if you let the body just take a little bit of time.

When I was years and years ago, Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King, who wrote the foreword to one of my books, they would come for ayurvedic detoxification when I had an Ayurveda detox clinic and Martena told me, she said whenever I would go to a tournament and I have my menstrual cycle, It ain't going to happen. I just know I don't have the juice to just win this tournament the way I would when I was not cycling. And it's just the thing. If you just respect that time, if you don' t have to go to the track for 104 degrees, don t go.

Don't schedule a marathon during that. Schedule lighter duty, read a book, go in within, meditate more. There are cycles in nature of rest and activity. Winter is a resting dormant cycle in And some are very active, longer days. We are part of those rhythms. So during the menstrual cycle, don't schedule extra stuff during that period of your month. Just see if you can dial it down a little bit and meditate more and read more, and rest more. Those kind of things. Simple because that sets up a rhythm of not barring Peter to pay Paul for a whole lifetime.

By the time you get to, right? The time you get to midlife where you start to transition. You're not going into that with no gas in your tank. So that's the first piece of the puzzle. And I get a lot of time, years ago when I first started talking about that, women would say, no, you're telling us that women aren't as good and not as strong. I just came back from Utah spending a week at a ranch. in the ancient, the Canyon of the Ancients, where in Pueblo ruins and all that, and talking to a lot of Navajo.

And that's a matriarchal society. I was like, I think that who should run this world? There's women, because they're not going to like... kill everybody. I mean, I just think it's so crazy. We have men running the show here. It's stupid. And so I am such a big fan of that. and I don't think that having a master cycle and taking a little time off is a weakness. i think It is pulling back the bow to become more self-aware so they can govern from deep within, from the science within versus all the stimulation that we kind of live and breathe by from outside world, if that makes any sense.

Makes perfect sense. It makes perfect since I'm kind of glad you're saying it because it's kind like, you know, when mom says something, we just need somebody outside to say, say it again, because the biggest thing I see, and, I am guilty of it myself being, into heavy weightlifting, running, biking, all the things too. I pushed myself for years. And living, We had kind briefly mentioned Colorado and living in Colorado, it is one of those things are anywhere where folks are very fit. You feel like you have to compete.

with everyone else, especially when I lived in Breckenridge. When I had a seven-month pregnant neighbor running past me faster, I'm like, Imma go in faster. You know, it's, you feel that drive. And I think a lot of people feel the drive to keep competing, keep going, do those things. Unfortunately, pay the price when we start going into perimenopause and menopaus because like you said, the tanks are depleted. The adrenals are depleated incredibly. And that's one side of it. For a lot of folks that aren't athletes or former athletes, other tank depletion is stress and stress on the body.

I'm very curious as to how in Ayurvedic medicine, meditation, we've got the other types of yoga, different body groups. What about in terms of food? What, about, in, terms, of other lifestyle things? what does are you veda say about the vagus nerve and those kind of things nervous system balancing what what kind Of stuff well i mean when you look at 85% of the imbalances caused by digestion and then you go okay what screws up digestion well it's stress you know they talked about thousands of years ago that the seat of The nervous, system, was your intestinal track and They said that 5,000 years ago.

And now research has shown that it produces like 95% of your serotonin, your gut does. All the neurotransmitters are produced here. They call it the second brain. There's neurons in your guts and your brain and all this research now come out that this intestinal tract with all the microbes that are doing most of the thinking and craving and desiring for us is in you gut. And that is going to live or die based on the quality, integrity, and strength of your digestive system, right? So that's where that rubber meets the road.

And then you take proteome breathing techniques, an Ayurvedic tool, You know, what people don't realize is that your diaphragm, the most important muscle in your body, you can't put a dumbbell on it and make it stronger. There was a recent study with elite athletes and 91% of them athletes did not have a diaphragme relaxing and contracting fully and therefore none of us do. And the diaphragms isn't just a breathing muscle, which is so critical. it's the number one pump for your entire lymphatic system.

Nobody knows that, they don't tell you that. I was coming out of a restaurant about a year ago, and as I'm coming into the restaurant, these elderly folks were coming outta the restaurants. They were like in their late 80s or 90s, And they were all very frail, mouths open, breathing really shallow, I really was helping them get out the the restaraunt. And I looked and I said, God. I wish someone would have told them that, and here's science behind what I'm going to say right now, that if someone told me they could breathe five minutes a day and prevent and even reverse the heartburn, the GERD and the reflux, because strengthening your diaphragm breathing techniques in Western medicine called maximum inspiratory breathing technique, which strengthen your diaphram, have been shown in about 15 studies to reverse your heart burn, Gerd, reflex and indigestion.

Does your doctor ever tell you that? There are studies that show you can breathe away your heartbeat? No. They just give you a pill which makes things worse really, ultimately. Studies show that when you breathe five minutes a day, strengthening your diaphragm can reverse your blood pressure just as good as the medication within three minutes. Study showed that that diaphragma you strengthen, it pumps the lymphatic system, the cerebral spinal fluid in and out of your brain and reverses and protects you from cognitive decline because the diaphragms is the pump of the brain, lymph and glymphatic systems which dump out three pounds of trash out your head, your every year.

And if this brain can't take the trash out, studies now show, and this is only since about 15 years ago, 17, 18 years I guess now, that they discovered this at the University of Virginia. But Ayurveda's been talking about brain lymphatic congestion for thousands of years. And they've linked it now congestion of the brain lymph, which is connected to your diaphragm, inability to breathe, to anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation, infection, autoimmunity, or sleep.

Breathing, the diaphragm, and lymphatic health 26:38

And that's just the short list. So it's like, wow, you know, We have to do this pranayama, we have learn how to breathe. We need to practice and keep strengthening the diaphragm because your rib cage has one job in life. Squeeze all the air out, right? And if your diaphragma gets weaker because we're sitting and slouching and pushing the ribcage into the diaphram, pushing it into a downward pre-contracted position so it really can't hardly ever while you're in your car, on your couch, in on the test at your computer, can't contract fully, it ain't gonna over time.

The rib cage will win this war and you'll start breathing really shallow and it just goes worse. It gets worse because the upper chest is the fight-or-flight receptor. So now we're telling the body with every breath, 20,000 breaths per day, your life's an emergency, right? Now that's like all we really need on top of all the incoming stress in our life. And then we do this crazy thing called over breathing, which research shows that people who shallow breathe, and most of us do, don't even know it.

75% of the oxygen they're breathing in, they breathe it right back out on you. We're so wasteful. And as a result of that, the option in your blood, when you put the thing on your finger, or the oximeter on their finger and they say, oh, you've got 98% saturation at Miss Jones, You're fine. But that's just how much, that because you're trying to jam all this oxygen, the body can't take anymore. And what happens is your oxygen goes high because your shallow breathing. You're breathing off all the CO2, so your oxygens goes higher, CO 2 goes low, and that.

is the perfect storm for anxiety, which is exactly why, when people have an anxiety attack, what do they do? Put a paper bag over their mouth, they re-breathe their carbon dioxide, CO2 levels come up, and they get calm. And because we have lost diaphragmatic function, we slowly are, in all the incoming stress in our culture, We keep telling the body life's an emergency. We breathe in a way that tells the life in emergency, And that incoming stressed, to answer your question, sorry to take so long, but the in coming stress, is exactly what causes all of the metabolic syndrome issues and even linked to digestive issues.

I wrote an article about this because I was so frustrated because they have all these, and you must have this too, right? So many healthy patients that come in and they go to the doctor and, they got high cholesterol, They got a high blood sugar. They need to go on a statin, all this stuff, Right? And I said, well, let's look and see, look at stress impacting those. So if you're under chronic stress, The rev, the stimulation, that go, go go. I was even thinking the other day, like, when in the history of the world did human beings go 60 miles an hour every day of their life?

Like, we're just moving through space and time faster than we ever did before. This on the car, they're driving. Go here, and go here. We all know it's just way too much incoming compared to like where I just came from in Utah. The stillness and the calm of these native people, you know? No, it is such a different culture. And so if you're under that kind of stress, what is your body going to do? It's going try to dump as much sugar in your blood to give you more energy to get up a tree to save your life.

Because if some emergency doesn't end, it's gonna put more cholesterol into your. Blood because cholesterol is what's used to make stress fighting hormone, which you desperately need because you tell your buddy life's an emergency. It is going raise your pressure, right? To get a up tree. Is going tell you any extra fuel I can find. I'm going put it under the mattress around my belly. So I have some reserve fuel in case this war never ends. I mean, that chronic stress has been directly linked to every aspect of all the epidemics of our time.

And then I said, well, what if we did meditation, looked at research on meditation like a stress reduction technique and study after study meditation lowers cholesterol, lowers, you know, abdominal obesity, and blood pressure, blood sugars. Yeah, it's not a deficiency in a pill or a powder or even an herb or definitely not as statin. It's we have to take steps to kind of dialing down the incoming and pull back the bow and become calm. I say pullback the boat. What I mean is that if you pull it back to bow when you're moving it like this all over like, this and you shoot it, you never going to find the arrow.

But if I pull back the bow and become and hold it perfectly still and then take action from that calm place, in Ayurveda this is called transformational. Like it's such an important place to start functioning from the inner experience of calm, that deep kind of reservoir of stillness and love and kindness inside of all of us. And that's really like the message. Yoga, breathing, meditation gives you access to that calm. So you're not just getting all your satisfaction from this outside world of I need, I'm happy if I get a new car, or I new dress, new this or new that, food or restaurants or movies and all this stuff from the outside stimulating us, which never does really.

Ayurveda in Chinese medicine is like, wait, there's a deeper side to this and if we make the lake really calm, you can see the bottom. And then you look and see what the body can become more self-aware, recognize problems as problems, and elicit a natural healing response. So that's why all this research shows, yeah, meditation, stress reduction is so critical, but tying that with a lifestyle that is going with the current, biological clocks and rhythms being in sync, man, that�s game-changing. thinking of a couple different things.

One, this is exactly kind of where I've come to with my practice. I have kind come full circle. You know, when I got out, it was like, yes, I'm going to do all of the restorative stuff. We're going work on breathing. And then I learned that society is very still looking for a magic pill or the one thing or one magical thing. I've kind of gotten to the point now, of course, I'm back to where my beginnings came from, just like what you're describing on it's a lifestyle. We have to recognize that Ayurvedic lifestyle, right?

Chinese medicine lifestyle—I don't care which way people go on any of these things, more that it is the recognition that this is a life style we incorporate these thing in. And there isn't going to be just one magical thing. You're mentioning meditation, you're mentioned breathing, we're putting things together. Now, the other big thing that folks are always asking me, and you already kind of alluded to it earlier, is Doc, what do I eat, right? And how do i eat? You had mentioned your cleanse and I saw the Colorado Ayurvedic cleanse on your website.

Do you feel like when someone's starting to work with balancing their body that a cleanse is something you want to start with first? Or do you wanna start the balancing foods and learning about your constitution and figuring out what works best for you in that department? That's a great question. That's a really great question. I think it depends on just where the individual is at. Sometimes people just feel really toxic and their digestion is sort of really weak and they can tell I'm bloated, I've got extra weight around my belly, indigestion, heartburn, and changing the lifestyle probably is not going to have the oomph required to really bring that back into balance where a cleanse might be something where I say, I just want to take two weeks and just reset, you know.

And that's what our Colorado Irrigated Cleanse is. We also have a four-day short home cleanse, which is a 4-Day, a really good way to get started, where you just do a for- day cleanse. That's an e-book that is free. All you have to do is type in the Short Home Cleanze on my website, and you get a free ebook, it tells you everything that you can do. It even gives you, we have obviously herbs that can take with it and a kit you could get. but would also give you herbs you can buy at your local grocery store or health food store.

So you don't have to buy anything from us. You get the e-book for free, so it's kind of really clean in that way. The Colorado Tent is a little bit more elaborate for sure. And there's an ebook that's a 14-day digestive reset, lymph cleanse, liver cleanse. Testinal skin repair, change your microbiome. It's the overhaul. That's why it takes two weeks for that to happen. way to go and some people are really ready for that and they really want to do that. And I've been doing that cleanse for decades and the results are phenomenal.

I mean people who can eat wheat can all of a sudden eat weed. The average person loses between 15 to 17 pounds. It's just like amazing reset because you're not just giving them a cleanse you're actually asking why they got toxic in the first place which is to actually reset every aspect of digestion and then the cleansing part they use the idea is that you take a little bit of ghee every morning or olive oil could be if you don't like ghee and you while you're eating a no-fat diet. And this is what's called lipophilic-mediated detox.

Western medicine coined that phrase because they use fats to chelate or attach to bad fats in your deep tissues and pull them out of your body. In studies show that when you do this, because you can ghee every day, it's been shown to reduce the PCBs, which are toxins forever chemicals banned in 1990s but still here today out of your body by 46% and they've reduced pesticides out if your deep tissues by 56% compared to the folks who didn't do the cleanse. So we have really good science shows not is going to get detoxify you get the stuff out your fat which is good like your brain tissue which has fat.

But more importantly, it's like, why did I get it? Why did my body not detoxify that on its own? Because your digestion broke down. So we do an upper digestive reset, lymph cleanse, liver cleanse. We do all that in intestinal skin repair. You fix the reason why so you don't just go back and get toxic again. Your reset function. That's what makes them different. That's awesome, because I'm not aware really of any detoxes that you fix things. It's really, you know, if we look online at like, it's like colon blows, basically, for lack of a better term, and really is that doing anything but depleting you?

Probably not. And in a lot of cases, that's kind of where I see people coming into me, especially with women, because, you know, they're going to hear 15 to 17 pounds, what you just get said in terms of weight loss. And a lotta people right now, as you already I'm sure are aware, are grasping for the GLP-1. injections to try to get the weight off. And while some people, you know, have I prescribed them? Yes, because some People, it's, It's necessary. But at the same time, we're looking at it. I'm looking At it in my head.

Also, I guess there's a little battle because I know that the body can heal itself, right? I know that, but some people are not at that stage. And just hearing you say that you could go through a cleanse, lose that weight, and be able to keep it off because the body's corrected and balanced, I mean, this is a gold mine for a lot of people to learn about right here. It's so logical, really. You remember we talked about, you talked in the very beginning, like you don't have to memorize, it's easy, its overly simple.

But isn't, when you think about cleansing, does it make any sense to just clean your intestinal tract out and never ask the question, why did that intestal tract get so toxic in Where did the good microbes go? And why did they leave? You know, there was this back in 2000, I think in 2004, 2004 when they created the first microbiome project, they gave us two warnings. And the 1st warning was eat dirt, kind of like don't sterilize everything, right? So it's talked about something called horizontal transfer of genetic material, which means that You know, like, we have, my wife and I have six kids, right?

So we've transferred our genetic material to our kids vertically. Horizontally means like I come to a room and sit next to you and all of a sudden you grab my genetic materials that you want to help do something. Well, inside your gut, if you have a bacteria that has the ability to get through the intestinal wall and a virus happens to come next that, it can borrow, transfer that genetic that it needs to go through your intestal lining. That's called the horizontal transfer of genetic The really cool thing, what they said was way back in 2004 when they first discovered this, they that why that happens isn't based on proximity that they just happen to bump up next to each other.

Oh, wow. I want that. No, it was ecology, the environment of the gut. And that's just like, I'm sure Chinese medicine as well. That's what we talk about. change the environment of the gut, let the good bugs flourish so they can fight the battle of a bad ghost and actually win that war. And they said that, interestingly, way back then, that the most horizontal transferogenic material that could be bad for us happens through farm animal exposure. Now we're looking at bird flu kind of taking over in a way that is really not being addressed right now very well in our country, and it's kind a real big deal.

This is all the warnings that were done way back then, and we just didn't listen to any of that. It's the ecology, ecology ecology. And this is what these cleanses are about is restoring function, healing the environment, changing the gut lining, supporting a healthy and more diverse microbiome.

Cleanses, detox, and resetting digestion 39:28

We've got research to prove that that can actually happen during these cleanse, which is pretty cool. Now, question I have, you know, talking about farm animals, taking about that, in this cleanse, is it taking out all of the meats? Is it going completely vegan throughout this cleansing? Are we taking it out? Yes and no. There's three phases to the Colorado cleanse. The first phase is a kind of a digestive reset where you really cleaned your diet. You do get off all the allergenic foods, which are like fish and nuts and dairy and wheat, not because they're bad, because are harder to digest.

And we want to take, we're going to let the body take the stress off the system and reboot it. Like when you have a car with a flat tire, you put a jack under it and then you can take a tire and put another one back on. That's what we're going to do during this cleanse. We're gonna make it easy on your digestion for two weeks and restore function and bring those foods back. However, during the middle of the cleanse, when you're actually doing the ghee, and you do like ghee every morning, there's three dietary plans.

There's a just rice and beans or what's called kitri only, which is a special type of Ayurvedic superfood that you would eat that's been eaten for thousands of years. It was baby food. They would give it for elderly folks when they were in the hospital. And now in America, people can't even eat rice and beans. This is how far, this rice, and you know, you take rice beans out of the diet of planet, a lot of people die. I mean, still to this day, the vast majority of our planet lives on rice. So many folks can't eat rice and beans anymore.

It's amazing. So the Ayurvedic one has got spices in it to make it really digestible. And then that's the first plan. Then the second plan is that with vegetables, cooked vegetables. If that is even still hard for you to do for seven days, then we have rice, beans, vegetables soup, salad, fruit, and even lean meat if you need it. but no added fat because the goal is you have all your fat in the morning, the ghee in morning that flips you into fat metabolism because you got to digest what you just ate and if you eat fat during the day you're just gonna digest the fat that you ate but if have no fat it'll keep you in fat burning all day long and you start pulling the fact out of your fast cells reset your ability to burn fat all sudden you get calm and within three days your appetite goes away like I don't even really feel like i need to eat today.

You're in that kind of fasted fat-burning state but you are eating and it's very similar to the Dr. Valtro Longo's fasting mimicking diet where he showed that this kind of protocol increases stem cell activation, which is kind really cool as well. So it's well studied, well understood, thousands of years, it was created thousands years ago, and now there's all this really amazing science to back it up. Fascinating. You know, I never would have thought about eating fat just in the morning and then not the rest of the day and seeing how that has an impact on the body.

So I think that'll be interesting for a lot of folks to look into. The Bulletproof Coffee, that whole thing is sort of based on that put butter in your coffee, right? That slows down the delivery of caffeine so you actually feel stable throughout the days so that you can eat less and calorie restrict more easily. You know, I think all these concepts, we've kind of maybe Americanized them a little bit, because we'll think like, okay, that's a great way to get the day started. But but then people will be I mean, let's face it, you probably heard it too, then from there, people are like well, fats are good.

So I'm going to eat a lot of nuts and seeds. And I've talked about myself even I am part squirrel, and I m convinced. And so, you know, then you eat all like macadamia nuts, right? We pound that and then we eat some like grass-fed beef that's not a lean cut, and it compounds throughout the day. And I think a lot of people are thinking that way because they're thinking, this is a way to do it. Or the other thing that a lotta folks will do is do the bulletproof coffee. and not eat till later in the evening and then pound a bunch of food.

It's kind of like the one meal a day, gorge yourself situation, which seems to not work out so well for a lot of women in particular. I'm guessing you've seen that too. Yeah. So there's study after study, after a study. Now, there is no question that breakfast is a very important meal of the day to kickstart your metabolism. Studies show that people have a breakfast and lunch or a lunch and a dinner. Same food, same calories. People who have the breakfast lunch lose significantly more weight. Their metabolic health, your blood pressure, blood sugar, all that is significantly better than people who eat the food in the second half of the day.

And that's, there's just no question about that. Although I get it, if you breakfast, then you can have more, it's more socially acceptable you know, have a dinner together with your family and that makes it a little bit easier than skipping, you, know then basically just eating breakfast and lunch and having no dinner. But the word dinner came from the words supper or supplemental. It always meant sup, a very small early meal just to take the edge off so you can get to bed and burn fat throughout the night.

The idea of the carnivore diet and all these extreme diets, you know, I wrote a book called The Three Season Diet, which is eating according to nature. And there's three harvests in nature, there is a spring harvest, a summer harvest and a fall harvest for winter eating. Winter takes a break. So there are three active seasons we interact with and what you can do is go to my website. There's grocery lists for winter, summer, and spring. Circle the food on this you like. Eat more of the foods on that you liked.

The ones with the asterisks are the superfood for that season. You can eat whatever you want, but try to get medicinal doses of what nature is intending for you to have during this season, why? Because The bugs in the soil in spring are different than the bugs of the summer. And that means the foods that we eat have the right bugs for the season. Studies have shown this, that the bug in winter will boost your immunity. That's what they do so you don't get the flu. The bugs in the spring will decongest you so don get allergies.

Bugs that are on the foods in summer will dissipate heat so that you can handle the heat of the summer better. What we do is take the food and we spray pesticides or insecticides and sterilize them. And then when we eat them, they don't have a microbiome. And if I took the microbiom out of you or me, we would be totally different, really a mess, right? So we do the same thing with our herbs. We take our herb, so we say, oh, I'm going to take curcumin, which is the more potent version of turmeric, and I am going soak it in alcohol and sterilize it and take one of the 300 constituents out and then I take that as a medicine.

Well, that is a medication and medicines have side effects. Guaranteed, well studied. So what I related was say, well, why don't we use all 300 of the constituents of The Turmeric Plant and take it in its whole form with all its natural occurring microbes in it. And now you have the intelligence of plant, its microbiome, and the biochemistry of a plant and you put them together, you'll have something that will help restore function of us so we don�t end up, using something that does a job for us and then creates a dependency and it aids in side effects.

And that's the beauty of a whole herb, since you're getting an inoculation of the right bugs or the rights condition or even the write season. You can take the herb seasonally as well. Now you are not overruling the body's intelligence. Your restoring function so you can get on, get better, good off and really be healthy. Inoculate our gut with the ripe bugs because the problem is I buy organic spinach, and it comes in a little plastic container that was probably grown on a conveyor belt somewhere, or left thrown.

It's just so processed, even though it's organic, in the same soil again and again. You think, OK, it wasn't sprayed, but how many microbes are really in this? There was a study with them in Utah, in Arizona, and they went into a museum and took mummies that were a thousand years old and measured their microbiome. They could figure out how to do that. And they then compared it to modern humans. Us modern human had such a lack of microbial diversity that the Stanford study concluded that this is an extinction event.

So our lack of microbial diversity and that's why we have a whole herb line. I take my herbs like regularly seasonally because I want the bugs and I'll tell you a story about turmeric. We import our herbs organic from organic farms from India and we So we tested the turmeric. It was fine. We mix 16 parts turmeric, one part black pepper. That increases the absorption of the tumeric by 2,000%. So when you take your turmeric and make your spicing at home, 16 to one turmeric to blackpepper. Crazy absorption benefit.

So, we did that. And then we had it. Then we make the capsule. and then, We have to get everything tested again after the product is done. This is according to FDA standards. Not everybody does this. Is very important that you know that when we buy herbs, the GMP FDA laboratory certification needs to be there because they were tested twice. Then my guy calls me up and he goes, we made the capsules, We retested and the microbes are off the charts. goes it's still within the legal limit and there's all these amazingly good bacteria because your product is a probiotic and including in addition to the turmeric that you want to get delivered.

And I go that's the beauty of Ayurveda when you combine herbs the way they did for thousands of years and how they knew all this I have no idea. You create something that is not just you know, concumen which is going to actually maybe help cure your breast cancer and colon cancer which is really cool but studies show it'll block stem cells and it can be toxic. I mean there's study after study showing their side effects to that but it's a medicine so it could do something really important for you as a medicines and that's why medicines are so cool.

But you get on that, get better, and get off. You don't stay on there forever. The turmeric, 16 to 1 turmeric with all the good bugs in there, you can take that. for the rest of your life. You know what I mean? I would probably take it spring and fall because that's when they're harvested. So you take at the right season, get the bug at right time, and it becomes even way more cool to keep inoculating your gut and getting your body more in line with the natural cycles of nature. That's neat. I guess I thought about it, but I didn't think about in terms of herbs encapsulated and being probiotic.

Benefit, you know, I think about in terms of the food I grow and getting my beneficial bacteria from them and things of that nature but that's that a whole nother level because you Know probiotics. I'm gonna be honest that it's kind of controversial as to are they doing the things? I kind of feel like I'd rather have my beneficial bacteria from the foods I eat versus the bugs taking dead bugs, really. Well, there's so much more diversity. You take foods, herbs or plants that come out of the ground.

Every plant, every herb has a different affinity for a kind species of bugs.

Seasonal eating, doshas, and the quiz 50:18

So every plant is on microbiome. And the food we eat is sort of like the same again and again. Those herbs, in my mind, when I take You know, Mungista and Bromian, different herbs like Bacopa for my brains, like my brain stays good. They have bugs in it that are inoculating my gut with a level of diversity that I'm just not gonna get in the foods that we eat, you know what I mean? And that's kind of, I think, a really cool side benefit is keeping that diversity alive and well. Huge. It's so huge.

Now, one of the last things I kind of want to go through, and then of course, we got to talk about LifeSpot and the quiz. And this will lead into the Quiz nicely, because a lot of people will say to me, I've read the books on Ayurvedic medicine, or I read books in Chinese medicine. It is so complicated. I can't juggle what I need, what i need for my body, when. Of course you've got your quiz that helps us to figure out like, where am I possibly out of balance? Where is my constitution at? And of course I took the quiz before this because I wanted to be able to use myself as the guinea pig for folks here so that you guys can all kind of hear what, what was up.

Cause I did the Ayurvedic body quiz on John's website there at lifespan.com and it talks about the winter, the summer and the spring. So Vata, Pitta and Kapha. And maybe some of you folks have heard about that and what I found. was that I was kind of across the board, but I have the predominant is summer, the Pitta, and I had some Kapha, I'm much less on the Vata. Dr. John, give us a little breakdown as to like, we see the quiz, and use it as a platform to be like, okay, I've got, so a number 23 was my score for the pitta.

I'm 17 for kaffir and I am seven for vada. When someone looks at a quiz, how do we incorporate that information with the eating seasonal and help to keep the balance within the body? Right, and this is great. When I first started reading the books I was like, I have no idea what they're talking about. I totally get it, you know? Then when I finally learned it I'm like oh my god, this was so simple. Okay, we have winter, summer, spring. The three growing seasons, that's why I called the book The Three Season Diet.

By the way, people thought that I didn't know that there were four seasons, so nobody read that book. So what I did, you don't have to buy the book, go to my website, and we have something called the Three Season Diet Eating Guide, where we put recipes and grocery lists for every month of the year for free. You can just go on my web site for a free, there's 1,500 articles on all your health topics there so you can get all that stuff for we have these three seasons, winter, spring, and summer. Winter is called vata.

So let's just call it winter for now. You don't have very much winter. so you're not very cold, right? If you had a lot of winter you'd be cold all the time. And like you said, you are a park squirrel. and if you were a squirrel, what would you eat in the winter time to not get cold and freeze to death? Nuts and seeds. That would help insulate you from the coldness and dryness. What is harvested in The winter time is going to give you the antidote to the extreme of that season. So winter is cold and dry.

What does nature harvest? Nuts in the season, if you were living off the land, you'd have to hunt. You'd eat more animal protein and animal fat and you would answer into the quality of the cold. And you wouldn't be eating cold, frozen smoothies because they don't exist in winter. They would also make a cold person colder, right? So it's pretty simple. If you have a lot of vata, then the one season you probably need to really eat on the straight and narrow, take the winter grocery list and eat more of the foods on this list would be winter, if you're a winter vatata if your winter numbers are high.

But yours are not. Yours are low. So you can sort of take a little bit of time off. It's not that urgent for you. Summer is pitta, fire. You have a lot of that. And so you're a hot body type. If you are eating hot spicy food, Mexican food acidic food coffee, beer, wine, cheese, all these fermented foods, kombucha, all this stuff a lot in the summer months. You're an odd person in a hot season doing hot stuff, eating hot food, you can overheat and inflame. So nature said, I had a plan for that, but they didn't listen, which was foods in the antidote to the extreme heat of that season, cooling fruits and vegetables.

So, and what's kind of cool is that the bugs in your gut in the spring are predominantly, when you eat seasonally, according to The Hunter-Gatherer Tribes, they have what are called actinobacteria, which are really good at getting their energy and their fuel from fat and fiber and protein. Come summer, the Bugs in Your Gut change, According to Hunter Gatherer's Tribs. and they have what are called bacteria deeds. So they're going to take all that starch from the wheat that's harvested at the end of the summer and the grains and fruits and deliver that as energy.

Nature is going give us the cooling foods in the Summer, the warming foods of Winter and in Spring. There ain't a lot coming out of the ground in the spring. It's an austere time of year. The deer are going to dig up some deer roots, clean all the villi of your ancestral track. it's a calorie-restricted time. Your body is going be forced to make energy on its own from the reserve fat reserves, so you're going to go into ketogenesis quite naturally during that time of the year, and you'd probably have to hunt a little bit so it'd be a bit higher protein, a higher fat, or you just do fasting, which is why all the religions do their fasting in the spring.

Vision quests were done in spring because this is the time when there wasn't a lot of food to be had. It is a naturally occurring time to detoxify and calorie restrict. and force the body into a natural state of fat metabolism. And one of the simplest ways to do that is just eat significantly less carbohydrates, because if you tried to find pizza or pasta in the spring, coming out of ground, you're not gonna find it. So that's a time where you just naturally go into low-carb diet. Summer is a higher- carb diet, and winter is higher protein, higher fat diet Simple.

All the dyes everybody's completing, arguing over, exist in nature for three or four months of the year along the way. So we changed, which is what every human did for millions of years to stay on this planet, is we ate according to what came out of ground. Makes sense. It makes perfect sense. And I love, you know, the explanation. It does simplify quite a bit more for folks because yes, it's the, I think it is the words and that you put it to the winter, spring and then summer. I really think that it helps folks to really get that and be like, okay, understand.

So yeah, now I have to watch my spice that I add to my summer foods. That's fine. Actually, don't like spicy stuff, so I'll be good. I'll be good. And once my garden goes a little bit more, I just got to watch the tomatoes because that's the acidic thing. Or you could just take this peel the skin and peel to skin. Skin is the more acidic part of that tomato. So if you're really pitta, you really want to dive into the details, the inner side of the tomato can actually be cooling for you versus the outside skin, yeah.

That's cool. I mean, I know that we can dive into the other things about the doshas and go in very deep and this would be like a five hour call because I love to pick people's brains about all the Dosh's, but usually the biggest question and the best place to start is the gut and so many folks start to struggle with their metabolism as they get older. And I think this is what we're overlooking that that huge connection gut lymphatic system. and how we move that much better. Beyond breathing and beyond yoga, are there any other types of Ayurvedic secrets that women or men could use to help with lymphatic drainage as a whole?

Is there anything else Ayubeda explains, baths, herbs, things of that nature? Well, you're so right. The word for lymphatic is rasa. And the study of rasa is called rasayana in an Ayurveda. One of the major branches of Ayureveda is specifically for longevity. It's called Rasayama, which is the Study of Rasa, the Studies of Lymph. So the whole thing is about lymph. The first thing you need to understand, and that's how the body takes the trash out, right? So if your house has a toilet that is clogged, you can't put anything else in it, So you can't put new stuff in until you take care of the waste coming out.

So the limiting factor to our health and longevity is our ability to move waste out of our body effectively. And that, of course, bowel movements are important, sweating is important. Skin, but also critically, is your lymphatic system, and nobody really talks about that. There's many ways to do that hydration is a key piece of that puzzle. Lymph is like your river, if that river is dry, you're going to be in trouble. So staying hydrated is really important and sometimes making sure you're taking that with a little bit of salt or some electrolytes does matter because water alone, gallons of it, isn't going to hydrate you.

You do want to add something to make it more, help it penetrate the cell. better. Movement and exercise. Lymph is pumped by muscular contraction. It has nothing to do with your heart. So if you're not moving, and that's why so many of the longevity experts say exercise, exercise exercise because it's actually moving your lymph which is helping kick the trash out. And that is the critical limiting factor that nobody really talks about the why. But that one of major reasons why it works so well. Then of course there are Ayurvedic herbs like manjista.

phenomenal herb for a lymphatic decongestion agent. We have a whole lymph kit you can get that treats every aspect of your lymphic system from starting in your intestinal tract to the brain lymphotic system with an herb called Brahmi or what's called Centella asiatica. So there's herbs called Red Root, which is an American herb. that is really good for the lymph nodes, which are the, lymph vessels are carrying all the trash out of your cells. They go into lymph node where the white blood cells clean everything up, make sure there's no bad stuff headed back to your heart and therefore your liver, and they can get congested as well.

So there are herbs that have been studied to detoxify the length nodes and the vessels, the brain lymphatic system, It's kind of really cool. And of course you have what's called the skin associated lymph as well, which is when you get rashes or hives or eczema, that is your body using your skin as an exit ramp for impurities because the regular lymphatic pathways are congested. So your skin through eczema will be sort of like, hey, I'm going to dump it out through psoriasis or whatever. And that means there's an underlying congestion in the lymphatic system, migraine headaches or another vasodilation.

Your body's trying to get trash out of the brain lymphic system. So it's all really quite beautiful, really, quite simple. It sounds complicated, but it is really treating your lymphatic system with dehydration, exercise, movement, green foods, berries, anything that will stain your white shirt, red, black, or blue, like a pomegranate or a beet or berry, that's going to have antioxidants in it that work specifically through your system and green things. So green and red and black and blue things and then some of those herbs, hydration movement.

And don't forget that if you don' have good digestion, right? If you can't eat wheat, dairy, nuts, seeds, grains, beans and eat oxalates and you feel terrible, which is crazy because the world lived on oxolates for millions and millions of years and all of a sudden people can eat them. That's not an oxolate problem. It's like the oxylates are the cause of this. You say broken down digestive system and what we do in America is well, If you don't feel good eating that, don' eat it and then go further and further towards a diet that feels better for you.

The carnivore diet we think is the macho man diet, right? You got to be tough and strong and eat the bone and all that.

Lymph support, herbs, and LifeSpa resources 1:02:08

Well, it turns out that there's no anti-nutrients on meat. It's the easiest thing for us to eat. This is medicine food in Ayurveda. Plants produce chemicals to ward off predators, and those are proteins that are anti-nutrients, so the bugs don't eat them. Plantes are much harder for us to digest. This is the macho man diet, really, plant-based diet. So if you can't the diet that our ancestors lived on for millions of years, then you've got an underlying broken digestive problem, which is going to continue to wreak havoc you know, behind the scenes, and I'm gonna find myself feeling really good on eating, you now, red meat and maybe white rice and some vegetables.

And that is a really lacking, diverse diet in terms of your microbiome, right? So it's just step by step. We have an article called the Digestive Health Quiz, where it asks you questions about every aspect of you digestion. So you can say, it is my lymph, or it my liver, my gallbladder, is is stomach acid being too high or too low. And that's also my book, I wrote a book called Eat Wheat. Everybody should eat wheat. It was more like people are blaming wheat on everything. And there's so much science.

I have 611 studies in that book proving that wheat can be a medicine for you, and it has been for millions of years. They found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans. three and a half million years ago. So it's not the wheat. It's our inability to break things down. And glyphosate too, we can actually break it down with a strong digestion, not in massive quantities. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in, but if you have a broken down digestive system, you can't avoid the toxins, the chemicals, environmental pollutants, and the glyophosates even if tried.

Again, if we got to go back to fixing your digestion because that gives you the resiliency and ability to detoxify the environment that we and break down the heart of digest foods. You don't have to go bubble wrap your diet and start taking stuff out of your die, eating a more, a, uh, more kind of, um, restricted diet, which in the long run will actually create problems, feel better in. It's like people go on a vegan diet. They feel great. Then they go, God, I, it's not working for me. I need something else.

And I'm very big. Um, big fan of a plant based diet with 10 to 15% animal protein. to make sure you don't need B12 and you're omega-3 fatty acids and all that. You can get that from that little bit of animal protein without taking it. And I do, as we get older, I believe we need more protein, but I'm also very squirrel-like. I like getting them from the nuts and the seeds in a more natural form. Yeah. You know, I think at the end of the day, it's just kind of feeling out what feels best to you. And yes, i'm not a fan of eliminating things in long terms.

Let's call it that. In long-terms. and seeing when we can get it back, because we know if we tolerate it, bringing it in the gut is better. Gosh, so many things and we gotta talk about your website so folks can see all the resources there at LifeSpa.com because you have, like you said, 1,100 articles in there. I was kind of perusing and like, man, there's a lot of info here and a lotta good free resources. You've already mentioned the different shopping lists for the Different Seasons too, which can be incredibly helpful for folks.

Tell us a little bit more about how they can work more in depth with you and your group and how they can interact with your website beyond taking the quiz. Yeah, well, the Quiz is a great place to start because it's kind of fun and interactive. And there's other quizzes. There's a lymph quiz, you can take that lymph Quiz and just type it in the search bar. Now you'll find out how well your lymph's doing. there is the Digestive Health Quiz. You know, there was a Skin Type Quiz as well. So you could find what your skin type is and what Ayurveda says to do about supporting the function of your putting stuff on it to make it look pretty temporarily.

So there's a lot of that. But there is also the search bar. You can just type in your health concern, constipation, or indigestion, whatever it might be, a heartburn or whatever. And then our numerous articles will come up and then you can kind of read that the idea is that we try to put as much knowledge out there as for free as possible so people can become self-sufficient. That's the goal at LifeSpot. It's always been my goal. That's been our business model. There's e-books also that are there.

You can go, there's digestive ebooks, lymphatic e books that can take a deeper dive. Instead of looking at article after article, you can get more of that way. We have a podcast as well, so that's something you could look at for deeper information. Of course, we have an Ayurvedic store, and I formulated Ayurevedica herbs for I've been doing this for 41 years now. And so we have an Ayurvedic pharmacy that are all the whole herbs that we talked about and the benefit of that. You can check that out at LifeSpot.com and there's a store of link there as well.

We have a newsletter and people can sign up for that and then you can find out that's like the main thing actually. You can find out about like courses we're producing and new articles that are coming out and all the new stuff that's coming because I'm constantly digging into the ancient wisdom and modern science and there's so much unbelievably more information that just keeps coming which I thought at some point there'd be like nothing to write about but Ayurveda is incredibly vast so it's pretty cool.

That's what I love about it. And I saw that you also have some events too, and one in the Bahamas I think next year, some things there too so folks can interact with you in person as well. Yeah, for sure. You can go on the website and just look at our events page and see everything that's coming up, courses on teaching and events and so on. For sure! Very cool, very cool. Gosh, Dr. John, so much information here. Yeah, absolutely. And don't forget that the breathing is, the diaphragm is the pump for your lymphatic system and cellulite is a lymphic congestive issue linked to digestion and lymph.

So, none of this is going to work unless we all start to learn how to breathe. There's article after article, there's one article called the best diaphragmatic breathing exercises I would refer you all to, and there are three videos there. And there's one called lateral breathing. There's a one call strengthen your lungs. Now get tuned into all those breathing techniques because that's the one thing that if we don't do it, our rib cage is going to get tighter. And it does happen as we age and everything else will work better.

That's like the kingpin. And then the other stuff is like, you know, tweaking your individual weak link. But the diaphragm is the critical piece of the puzzle. So we will make sure we highlight all of those different things. I'll be diving into them since I work with a lot of women that are trying to, get the bodies looking a little bit better, and myself, including, always trying to improve. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your knowledge. This is just great stuff. And so folks, go over to LifeSpa.com.

Check out all Dr. John Duyard's stuff there. Hey, we look forward to seeing what's coming next from you and different trainings, then we'll make sure that we update things over time. Thanks again for come on. Dr Janine, thanks so for having me. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. Hey fellow health junkie, thanks for listening to the health fix podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please help support me to get the word out about the podcast, subscribe, rate and review and just get that word. Thanks again for