Ep 574: Unlocking Your Metabolic Type for Energy, Weight & Hormone Balance with Martin Pytela

Podcast Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Welcome to the Health Fix Podcast, where health junkies get their weekly fix of tips, tools, and techniques to have limitless energy, sharp minds, fit physiques, or life. Hey health junkies, on this episode of the Health Fix Podcast, I'm interviewing Martin Patella. He's a functional medicine expert and metabolic typing coach who has dedicated his life to restoring vitality to you and the planet. After overcoming mercury toxicity through natural healing, he has been helping others reclaim their health.

Since 2011, He has coached over 12,000 clients and taught 60,000 plus students about metabolism, trauma, stress and gut health. Through his life enthusiast platform, he shares holistic tools to support healing, vitality and sustainability for people and the planet. Now, Martin and I dive into metabolic typing and he really talks about why women over 35, over 30 at any age really end up gaining weight and how to lose weight, but not in a manner of restricting calories not in a manner of really looking even at macros.

He's talking about how to pair food and what foods are good for you, which ones aren't. I've talked about this a little bit in the Chinese medicine realm in terms of our body types and he talks about the thyroid body type, the adrenal body, type the pituitary body. and how this plays into how we gain weight, how you can lose weight but also how can stress ourselves out just from food by not eating the right paired combinations of certain foods. Fascinating stuff here. And we even dive into the sympathetic versus parasympathetic responses that can happen related to our food pairings in our particular types of being.

It's all kind of tied into pH balance and things of that nature as well. This is a fascinating podcast, some concepts that I've never really talked about before with anyone on the podcast and we also are diving into kind of something much like Ayurvedic medicine where we talk about doshas or Chinese medicine, where you talk different like hot and cold and dampness and those kind of things that we talk about in Chinese medicine. And so we take it more to a digestible way to think about the body and why we may have certain issues and what may be out of balance causing us to gain weight, lose weight have, certain health conditions, behave certain ways, have depression, anxiety, and even not be able to get the buddy out a fight or flight mode by just eating the wrong foods and wrong paired combinations.

Fascinating. So let's introduce you to Martin Patela.

What Metabolic Typing Is 2:45

Martin, Patel. Welcome to the health fix podcast. It's an honor. We're gonna have some fun. I already am incredibly curious, of course, from when I was pitched to have you on the podcast about the metabolic typing, because I don't think a lot of people are aware of this. And you know, like you mentioned much on your website and what I see, you having been there and made the mistakes learning as a doc that we chase symptoms, but we're not looking at our physiology, our chemistry, what makes us and combinations make us.

So give us a little background on metabolic typing so that folks can kind of be up to speed as to like, What is this phenomenon here? Right. Yeah. We're talking about biological individuality here. we're talking about us humans being not all made from the same mold, in the sense as you can be left-handed or right- handed, you could have curly hair or straight, or you be light-skinned or quite a lot of melanin, are differences. And this has been noticed from antiquity. Back when in India you had people talking of doshas, the vatapita kafa.

In China they talk about the five elements, and in more modern times you have people talking about the ectomorph mesomorph, or you have people taking about blood type and how that affects the lectins, how it affects your ability to interact with foods, some will support you, and some not. All of that is mashed together into understanding the biological individuality. And importantly, They started out by measuring the venous blood pH, the alkalinity versus acidity. So when you take in some foods, what will happen to you after?

And you can see that with a glucometer. If you'll take a reading at the time you eat and then 30, 30 minutes later, you will see a certain path. And some of us will spike with glucose going up high and maybe crashing afterwards, whatever. So that's the glucose management. But there also is the other thing and that is to pH management and we should get into that. What that does and what that means and why that it is. Let's talk about it because I've never talked about pH balance on the podcast and I give people pH strips to test in the office, but I have never actually brought it on a podcast.

So let's dive into it. Yeah. And so over time people have been measuring pH of their saliva and of the urine. And the really smart ones also measure the pH of their poop. And so I'll start from there. Yeah. The feces is supposed to be quite acidic because your colon should be quiet acidic. So if you put a pH strip in your poop and if it's more alkaline, that's 6.5. than 6.5, which is actually acidic, you will have dysregulation in the colon, for sure. That's an alarm. In fact, there's a cascade of pH inside of your body, right?

Alkaline saliva, acidic stomach, alkaline small intestine, and acidic colon. And there are these internal processes that regulate. Urine, you will see the reflection of what your body is getting rid of. That's a dumping station. If you're dumping acid things, well, your dumping acidity. if your urine is alkaline well you are dumping alkalin minerals. It's only telling you what you have too much of that your bodies getting ready. People assign a lot of importance to it but I think it's just you measuring what's your doesn't want.

Trash. well or the best homeopathic you could ever put back in right depends yes yes you're in therapy all the way back to india is a feedback loop if you feed back into your body what it's dumping it''s going to actually self-correct i've read the books i''ve seen the info i haven't been able to conquer that yeah i have i Have cultural issues with it also Of course, when I take supplements, and I do, they affect the taste and smell of things. And I get a gag reflex. Yeah. Anyway, so let's not go there.

Fair enough. Okay, and so then there's the saliva, right? And your saliva will have the pH of your inner terrain first thing in the morning, like when you just wake up, the ph of you saliva would be close to the PH of what your lymphatic system is. So that's kind of important because in a human the midline, your blood, is always maintained in really narrow area between 7.3 and 7,4. on the pH scale,

pH Balance and Body Chemistry 7:30

which is slightly alkaline. And I think this is where the you gotta alkalize comes from. But you don't want to over alkalise. So let me just explain what really happens, Which is this. When you drift out of balance toward acidity, you wake up early, You will be highly energized, highly motivated, but impatient. and as you drifts further out toward acidicity you lose your social graces. You start interrupting others, and then it is easy to anger, elbows up, get out of my way, I'll do it myself. And then just being really harsh, like speaking to people unkindly, loss of social graces.

Then further on out comes rage. If it's externally expressed, it is raging. Road rage is a perfect example of being acidic, out of control. But if you have it inward directed, then you are self-loathing, and you're recriminating, you either reliving your past with regrets, or you catastrophizing your future with expectations of disasters and doom. Beyond that, further on out, lives schizophrenia, paranoia, crazy so you do not really want to be too acidic for sure now on the alkaline side if you over alkalize you start with emotional intelligence like you're more pleasant less confrontational you rise later in the morning rather than early and then you procrastinate and if then if push it on out you get despondent and you push on further further you end up in depression Just dark.

I'm not getting out of bed. i'm dealing with the world today. So you can see that pushing out into either extreme has its advantages and disadvantages. Absolutely. So now how, right? How do I get to being dysregulated with either over acid or over alkaline? That comes with the two models. We have two types, and this was discovered only recently. Bill Walcott came up with it in 1987. put out a book and is teaching it to people but for I don't know what reason it's just not been well understood or perhaps people are too lazy to bother because it is so helpful wouldn't it be clever for me to tell you well if you do such and such with your food you're going to make yourself nervous or you will not be able to sleep oh actually let me describe it this way people who drink alcohol go to a cocktail party and they will notice that one type will, with the more they drink, the louder they get and the confrontational they become.

They become mean drunks, they'll say awful things to one another and if they keep going they even pick a fight. And those are the oxidizers, we call that the OXIDIZER. they are made more acidic by carbohydrates. The other ones, become less controlled, more alkaline. You know the emotional intelligence? They will be more pleasant, but then they will start oversharing and then after that they'll regret over sharing and start crying about it. And then, they fall asleep. I've seen both directions. Okay, I think a lot of people have.

Exactly, right? And those are the autonomics. Carbohydrate makes you more alkaline. So, now we have the three macronutrients. Starch or carbohydrate, fat and protein. The fats and proteins are on one side and the carbs are in the other. counterbalance one another. Yes, yes. So we can ask, what happens when you take too much carbohydrate? Do you fall apart and go to sleep or do you activate and become ornery or bitchy? Yeah. Yeah, I'm activated and sometimes can end up bitchy for sure. Yeah. I'll give myself.

And that's the oxidizer model, right? And so we sort people out like you're left-handed or right- handed, you are oxidiser or you the autonomic. So if you, are overly activated, overly acidic, it's not good because you going to say things you will later regret or, or just be unkind at the time and not understand why you were so abrasive. You can control that with food. So for you, you as an oxidizer, the antidote is fats and proteins. For you to take a potato, which is a high carb, is okay only if you load it with fats.

It's butter and sour cream. bacon bits right that's what your genetics call for do not not eat carbs without fats yep i can totally see that for myself yes right yes and so when we speak to a client who is confused and wondering why am i so this or that once we map it we can easily offer guidance. Hey, okay. Now something, of course you intrigued me with one before we hit record was the gaining weight and losing weight. Most women over 35, if not over eight years old have, you know, obsessed over all of this.

How does this work pattern here?

Oxidizer vs Autonomic Types 13:00

So part of the metabolic typing test that we offer is getting answers to two things. One is the answer to the pH balance, as in how will I become depressed or how I will become unpleasantly angry. The other one is How do I gain weight or lose weight? And we call that the endocrine dominance. And for that we have four for women, but they lose the fourth one after menopause anyway. Interesting. So they are, we called it thyroid, adrenal, pituitary, and in women we also have a gonadal or ovarian. All men are simple.

They are all testosterone drives. In women only some have the overpowering effect of the high estrogen, which we should mention. So that is triggered by spicy food like chilies and hot sauce and that sort of thing. And there are some women who really love hot food and when they overdo it, it stimulates the ovaries so that more estrogen is pushed, especially during the formative years, puberty. And so you end up with accentuated feminine characteristics. So you'll have wider hips and you have the free version of the Kardashian plastic surgery.

You'll get it for free. Just feed your girl a lot of hot foods when she's just growing up. Anyway, so you'll end up with, say, size two from waist up and size six from the waist down. This, I can see some patterns in just, you know, in cultures that feed a lot of spicy foods. Yeah, yeah, the hot African, hot Caribbean, whatever. Yep, those are them. and so they will end up with these wider hips the secondary feminine characteristics are accentuated okay okay so we got the hot folks what about us folks that don't like the spicy stuff like me i'm very boring well they are okay, so let's talk about the other ones so, we have the pituitary yeah Their temptation foods are usually creamy and they tend to grow into a body type that's kind of straight.

However, the fat distribution is even and in an overweight you will see the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Cabbage Patch Doll. where the ankle is thicker and that the fat distribution is like on the leg all the way up. And it's all over everywhere. Anyway, cabbage patch doll. If you, when you see one, you say, oh yeah, that's the pituitary type. anyway, their temptation foods are creamy, like whipping cream and yogurt and. That sort of thing, but their health food are actually the ancestral. organ meats, the high purine.

So liver, heart, tongue, red meat. That's their health food. Okay. so that's the pituitary and they're the smartest of the folks. Their head tends to be a larger to the proportion of, to body than you would expect. And they usually are the intellectuals. Right. The other one being adrenal type. The dominant gland is the adrenals. They tend to be very resilient. Their temptation foods will be savory. they will gain weight with fats and lose weight on salads and fruit. And they tend be the stocky farmer type or the weightlifter or gymnast.

the thing that comes to mind is like Simone Biles, if you remember what she looked like, shorter, easily building muscle mass, very explosive strength, huge endurance. In men, you will see them as linebackers on the football team. They tend to be built like a brick house, stocky, strong and huge, endurance, like you can give them a pick and a shovel and say, dig me a trench. They'll come back in 10 hours saying, I'm done. And they will not stop, right? Like they can just go. Okay. Oh, and their meal preferences.

So I should say in the pituitary, the people like to eat large breakfasts and very scant in. The adrenal types, those people usually enjoy zero breakfast and main meal as a dinner. They do best that way. A cup of coffee for breakfast, a little bit of something for lunch and a large dinner. And they will tell you, oh, I love steak and stuff, but that's what puts weight on them if they overdo it, right? So the typical football player, if he continues eating his dinners that he used when he was a young guy working out and putting out 4,000 calories, he'll just blow out into an oversize.

But they put weight here, shoulders, chest, they're massive. Their limbs are thick. The thyroid dominant, that's probably the one that is the least well served by the American nutritional advice. Because they are tempted by starchy foods. They are the ones looking for cookies after dinner. And their weight gain food is starch, and weight loss food, is protein. Or fat, actually, I should say. Fat more than protein, so the keto diet is a slim diet for the thyroid type, where you dial back the carbohydrates as hard as you can.

But that, for the thyroid type, is the temptation food. So they crave it the most. And they will be the, well, all the Victoria Secret models are the Thyroid types.

Endocrine Body Types and Weight Gain 18:30

Slender, longer limbs, wider hips, rather than not. That's the folks. They would be on the volleyball team, the basketball team. The sprinters, The quarterbacks. Those are all The Thyroids types, they are quick, but with limited endurance. So they need to take breaks between things. They can do a sprint, but the pituitary are the long distance runners. Adrenals are those weightlifters, the hard workers, to bulls of the world. I can put this all together for a lot of different people. You know, I'm thinking through different People.

And thinking to myself, of course, say, think I am more of an adrenal type since the weightlifting. Yeah. The parts of you that I see, i would expect that you would be somewhat thyroid, But mostly adrenal. Yeah. So I hear you say you can overlap a little bit between them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so if you could visualize a space that so you have the adrenal, thyroid, pituitary, whatever, and then you had your circle, it's going to be somewhere within that space. You'll have a preference. Like you look at me, this is a thyroid model.

My wrist is not that thick, other hand around it. All right. So yeah, I can see how you... You're somewhat stronger built than I am, right? Like you have that Eastern European farmer stock in you, Right? I don't. Well, anyway, so that's the dominances. And so if you find a thyroid person who says I'm overweight, they will gain weight on the belly. It starts right around the Belly button and they start putting on a fat pad until they have a beer again. Yeah. And we've all seen it. And definitely at midlife, this is what happens.

Yeah. So that's the thyroid type, most of all. Okay. For example, their slimming herb is going to be red raspberry leaf. Red raspberry tea is the hormonal correction that will help them gain less around that. But most all, they need to control their urge to eat carbs. Yes, that's that. And I can see, you know, just to kind of bring it for full circle for folks who are listening, like this is why, Keto doesn't work for everybody. Carnivore doesn' work. For everybody, all these different things that work and we're not putting the customization here.

Yes. Exactly. as it stands. And the other interesting thing you mentioned, which I think a lot of people are stuck in fight or flight mode at this stage of life and how this ties in. Yeah. This is super important because it's the internal pH that regulates the autonomic nervous system. There are two branches to it. The fight-or-flight sympathetic or rest-repair-digest, the parasympathetic, and the sympathetic is on the acidic side and parasympathy is the alkaline side. So when you alkalize, you're shutting down your nervousness, your lowering your blood pressure, improving your ability to sleep, all of that.

Like you cannot go to a sleep stuck in a sympathetic. You'll be sitting there with eyes this wide, regardless of how tired you are. So you need to shift your pH out of acidic to alkaline in order to ship out into the parasympathetic in so you can actually go sleep. So if you're the oxidizer that requires fats, if your the autonomic that require starches. That's why a nightcap, a sherry after dinner, works for autonomics to put them to sleep. If you are an oxidiser and do it, you say let's go to town.

You're on fire. You ready to go? Yeah, that's party. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So, you know, a lot of people will be reaching for all the different herbal supplements out there to try to help sleep. And oftentimes it's more looking at pH foods. This is the important thing to understand what's important, right? The spiritual over emotional over mental over air over water. level six, we're at macronutrients, the calories, it's all comes in order. And so the macro nutrients, you need to manage those.

Because if you mismanage your macros nutrients that's the carb fat protein. If you miss manage that, no matter how you fiddle with the micro nutrients. You're not going to get it right 100% sense. I mean, I've worked with a lot of people that we just weren't able to get any, you know, they've tried 4,000 sleep supplements come in and then we're like, well, why don't we work on energetic? Now spiritual, going back to the higher level and coming all the way down, I'm guessing there are connections here as well in the metabolic typing.

I suppose, yes. Well, your emotions will be affected by your inner pH. If you're overly acidic, no amount of meditation is going to bring you back into centeredness. You're just going be sitting there stewing and hating the fact. that you're just can't calm down. I've heard that a couple of times. Now what's fascinating about this, because a lot of people will tell me, Martin, that they're like, I have done all the things to try to work on my nervous system. And I meditated on sound baths, but we're missing some components here.

You may be missing the absolute basics, which is your culture, the people who taught you to cook or eat may have it incorrect based on what you should be doing. It makes sense. I mean, most Americans have 12 meals, 14 if they're lucky that they rotate through. You mean like the ham cheese sandwich and peanut butter and jelly and those kinds of things? Taco Tuesday, pizza, fries. Yeah. And so it's one of those things where a lot of people struggle. So even within that, even if you go out to a fast food restaurant, You still can control the ratios of starch or carbohydrate, fat and protein.

You can still figure that out. Now, what's really important is that raw food is loaded with enzymes and is supporting your health. So yes, I would like you to be eating an organic salad rather than some crappy food, but raw uncooked vegetable stuff is awesome because it helps you stay healthy, surprise you with fiber and pigments and whatever else, right?

Stress, Fight-or-Flight, and Food Pairing 25:00

All important, but that is a zero on the fat versus carb. What are you going to do next? Are you gonna put rice with it or a piece of chicken? And are going try and go lean when you're supposed to go fat? One of the stupidest things that they have invented was low fat. It absolutely kills the thyroid dominant. And just does terrible disservice to them. That's why the keto diet craze is so popular, because you discover keto diet and say, oh my gosh, it's so easy. Okay, so let me just explain. So some of us are lucky and have an endocrine dominance that's a good match to the metabolic dominance.

Some not so much, right? So if I'm an oxidizer, I am made more peaceful with fats. If I´m thyroid dominant, now I will be peaceful skinning. But if i'm the autonomic dominant I'll be nervous skin. I have to walk a much narrower path between Just enough starches to keep me calm, but not so many that I would get fat from. Which comes down to people kind of sleuthing that out and going, okay, Martin, how do we sleuth this out? Cause most people are going to think it's based on macros and your actual grams of these things.

But I'm guessing you're going tell me it is based upon the pairing. Yeah. It's the ratios. The total quantity is less important than it was the combination. The ratios, for sure. Yeah. Okay. So let's do a hypothetical, especially since the thyroid type of personality or type is not the personality, but the thyroid type, is underserved. Let's, let do, a little case study on someone. let say that we've got somebody who, you know, maybe they were a model or a volleyball player when they younger. Now they've had some kids, the weight's coming on the belly.

Where do they start in terms of looking at diet and how do we start working on it? Look at me, I'll give you me as a study, right? Okay. I was, 30 something, 32, four, five, and I decided to go the healthiest route. My cholesterol went through the roof and i was putting on weight like crazy because I. Over eating starches and under eating fats and proteins. So I had a horrible cholesterol levels and. So I had to admit that I have to give up this dream of being a yoga vegetarian. And I was going to have, to be eating fats.

So my salad now had an whole ounce of olive oil on it and a piece of fish or a pieces of chicken with it, which served me just fine. and so the weight came off, but only then, only when I admitted that the addiction to starchy foods is wrong. That's how it worked. It didn't take long. As soon as I switched, it came off within three, four months. Wow, that's pretty quick. What I'm thinking about, because I read up on you a little bit on your history with the mercury poisoning and things of that nature, a lot of people right now are convinced they have to detox their bodies and kill all the microbiome imbalances and and clear all of the heavy metals and etc, etc.

before they can achieve other balance. Yeah, this is a difficult point, for sure. Because of course, you're trying to fix the bicycle while you are riding it, in that sense. And so the toxicity is terrible thing. the industrial age toxins are disrupting all function. Especially mercury is awful because it destroys our connective tissue. So you'll have back pain and migraine and plantar fasciitis or carpal tunnel syndrome or all kinds of physical dysregulations or health problems, most of which are caused by the presence of mercury.

It will also give you the neurological trouble like the they will call it MS multiple sclerosis, that's highly associated with mercury in the body. So you get that out and the symptoms go away. Go figure. So definitely something that I hear often, you know, kind of tied into this, like you're, and you were mentioning, get into the personalized detox, getting into personalized nutrition here and then build layers. I'd love to hear kind how you are consulting folks. How does it work on your end? Yeah.

You said, what comes before what? I say, well, there are these four things. toxicity, malnutrition, stagnation, and trauma. Trauma being the emotional dysregulation that we store in our soft tissues, the traumatic events. And they could be minor, but when you stack a pile of them on, it will still cause you trouble. The stagnations that's from being sedentary and not physically engaged enough, not enough stress on your body. By that, I mean positive exercise type of stress. And the malnutrition that's eating the industrial food-like objects that this modern food industry is presenting us with, there are five things that you should never eat.

Refined sugar, refined flour, refined plant seed oils, refine salt or minerals, and pasteurized dairy. Those are no good for anyone. And yet, those are the ones that were presented because when you treat food that way, you end up with longer shelf life, which means that it's going to be cheaper. So that incentivizes the manufacturer to do it that they will have to throw away less and incentivizes the consumer to buy it that way because it's cheaper. But it is the wrong thing. It malnourishes you.

So that's the malnutrition. And the last one is toxicity, which is again industrial age. That's heavy metals, that is plastics like phthalates and PFOAs and BPAs and all of that stuff that comes with plastic utensils,

Toxicity, Trauma, and Root Causes 31:00

plastic containers, hot food, a hot drink. in plastic stuff all of that is oh yeah and in the fragrances you know the glades and all that volatile organic stuff that just dysregulates they are endocrine disruptors like you wouldn't know so all bad right so I have these four things that I had just named and so when you say to me well which one is the important one my query to you is which is That's the point. You cannot move it with one of them missing. you cannot. Move it. With one. Of them flat and so on, right?

Like you need to maintain it well enough that all four of these things are functioning. And so when you say, well, what do I do first? Well, you, your run in circles or a spiral, fixing all of it all the time, You can always upgrade any one You detoxify, you get better food, exercise more, move more and you do emotional healing by clearing the stuff that you picked up along the way. The stuff you pick up is a very fascinating subject, especially for a lot of people because I do believe that that's heavily involved in why we hold on to certain things, why, and definitely the food choices and weight gain for lot people is related to that trauma.

and things we pick up. What kind of things are you working with, folks, in terms of your protocols for working on trauma? Right. Yeah. So there are these two types of memories, right? There are the memories that are conscious, that you control. And then there the programs that aren't stored in the surface of the brain folds, they're actually stored on the inside. They're also stored inside the soft tissues of our body, the water of remembers things. That's the nature's memory device. So talk therapy doesn't help you.

Because when you do talk-therapy you talk about something and by doing that you're reliving the experience. Let's just say that, you were assaulted and you are now traumatized and afraid to go out. Well, if you talked to me about it you just gonna re-traumatize yourself by remembering the whole thing. That's not help. So we need to find some way to reach your unconscious, the part of you that's storing the fear without dealing with the memory of it. And there are methods like EFT, emotion freedom technique, or it's also known as tapping or body talk, quantum healing, neuro-linguistic programming, even hypnosis and other related things and body work.

of many sorts, kinesiology, those sort of things. Those are the ones that work out the stored emotional concepts. They don't have a picture content to it. they just have the emotion content. And that can be released. Makes sense. How do you approach the lymphatic system as it connects into parasympathetic-sympathy? Yeah, that's the other underappreciated world, right? Yes. So one, it only moves when you move. There's no vascular driver in the lymphatic system. It only move when your move, so up-down movements.

They're these channels, they start at the feet and run through the lymphatic nodes, lymph nodes. And the Lymph nodes are always on the inside of joints. So for example, the Inside of my elbow up here, there's one. Inside my armpit, There is one inside my groin, It's hard to show here on my podcast. the back of your knee, the top of you ankle, and just below your belly button. Those are the places where the lymph gathers. And so when you move, I'm just showing it to you here, i'm pumping this thing by compressing, decompressing.

So we can volitionally pump it, right? So the pumping would be something, let's just demonstrate it up here. This here just above your clavicle is the most important point of the Lymphatic System. because the part that's pumping from below up ends up up here. This is where the lymphatic system connects with the cardiovascular system. Anyway, so the pumping, it's like dancing waltz. One, two, three, one, and two three. And this is the popping and you don't punch it. You just press, release, press release.

So that is what a skilled lymphotic massage will do. The other things that you want to do is you walk, run, jump, bounce. You also want possibly do skin brushing, dry skin, brushing. That'll move things along. Is there any connection with the lymphatic system and the different types of metabolic types, like between thyroid or adrenal or whatnot? Is anyone that's more bogged down? I think the pituitary have the biggest issues with it. They tend to swell, they tend be puffy. That's as much as I know about it That okay.

It's just something that I'm very fascinated with lymphatic because it's one of the things that Yeah, it's so important, right? Like if you allow it to fester, you will notice that you get smelly. Smelly feet, smellly groin, smelling armpits. That's a sign of sluggishness and decay, like you're like a swamp. You're putrefying. Wow. but completely, completely real. You know, and I think a lot of people, we think that we're supposed to stink in certain areas, but the less stinky we may be means the better lymph movement is what I'm gathering.

Okay. Now I'm imagining that your intake for clients is quite extensive in terms of asking questions. Actually, you know, it's not that horrendous. We present this thing called the metabolic typing test, which really is a quiz. It's about 120 multiple choice questions done online where we'll ask you things like when I eat high protein breakfast, I feel. Or, my ears are more pink than the rest of my face, or my shoulders are narrow relative to my hips. Stuff like that. So some of it is the physiology, and some some is just the response to what you eat and when you ate it.

Okay, so I mean, I'm fascinating. Just even 120 questions. That's a lot more than you'll get in an average doctor's office. Let's put it that way. For sure. And in terms of longevity, this is a hot topic. A lot of folks are thinking of rethinking aging. Longevity, there's this concept of all the fancy biohacking tools and whatnot. But it seems, and this is my opinion, I'm curious on yours.

Lymphatic Health and the Metabolic Typing Quiz 38:00

It seems that we've maybe gone a little bit beyond the basics. We've forgotten the basic and went to the fantasy stuff like the IV therapies and all those things. Okay, well, I guess what you want to compare is the time versus the function, right? Like we talk about how long can I keep good health versus time, some people will go a decent level and then finally at the end they hit the wall and let me die at 96 in my snowboarding accident. Absolutely. I'll be fine with that. Yes. As opposed to my last 20 years were spent in a wheelchair looking at a TV screen that I couldn't comprehend while drooling.

Yeah, no one wants that. Nobody does. And yet, so that's the metabolic decline, right? Like if we dysregulate at the Metabolic level, we will toxify, malnourish, stagnate and traumatize ourselves into this subsistence rather than we exist, but we don't thrive at that level. So you're asking, how do I not do that? How do maintain or attain the longest possible? And I would say it's the opposite, right? Detoxify, nourish well, don't stagnate, exercise, stress your body in a healthy way and get rid of your emotional garbage.

Well said, well said. All the things that I definitely want for folks, myself included, to work with over time. And it sounds like you're definitely doing that over at Life Enthusiast. Yeah. So then there are, of course, there's this wonderful story, the professor in front of a class with a large jar, filling the jar with golf balls and asking the students, is this jar full? And they say, looks full, he holds out a bunch of marbles and shakes a whole bunch marables into that jar and says, well, okay, is this full?

Well, now he pulls a lot of BBs, pea-sized stuff and pours it in that and it still finds space among the golf balls and the marble because there still is some space. And then finally some sand and finally two cups of coffee. What's the wisdom here? you have to start with the golf ball. And that's what we talk about here when we say macronutrients. What are the most important? Yeah, you don't need to major in minors getting yourself into the weeds wondering whether you should take NAD or NMN or this or that or whatever.

Should I take more zinc or more copper? Yep, they're not unimportant. But if you screw up the macrons, the micronutrians will not even get you anywhere. Yeah. No, I agree. I Agree. And on that same lines, it seems that, you know, when we're looking at reversal of symptoms, reversal, of, degradation of health and putting ourselves back into balance, It's also key to go back to basics again. Yes. Start there. Yeah. Understand what's off and then fix it. Sure. With your naturopathic education and understanding and all of that, right?

Like there are these basics of life versus death. Chemicals are dead foods, eat something that's been processed by a plant. Think of it. Rocks need to be treated by the microbes that are taking them apart so that the plant takes it from the mineral form into the phosphate form. That's how it ends up in a That's how you end up eating it and being able to actually use it because it needs to be chelated before you can actually utilize it. So eating rocks as a human is not very effective because you need to have the microbes that are going to do the work for you.

Yeah. It's, I think we've got really far out of what we're taking health, let's put it this way. We've taken health and the naturopathic medicine, you know, like curriculum and turned it into the modern medicine. And unfortunately, a lot of myself included, and I'll call myself out too. and we tried to fit into to the Western model and ended up treating a lotta symptoms and not going back and going, how do we work? on the basics. And this is where, of course, I'm coming back to a lot of folks are coming to this.

But I really want to, you know, this was why I wanted to have you on because of the highlight of where we've got to look at the step to the foundation. Yeah, yeah. You just said the magical words, which is this difference between cause and symptom. between strategic and opportunistic. Which is this? The pharmaceutical industry, which is dominant in our culture because they own the media, they on the Internet, the Senate, and the government. They control the whole thing. And their way of thinking is to find a symptom and apply a treatment to the symptom.

In our world, we talk about biological individuality, treating the person, not the illness. I don't care about your labs, I take care of your symptoms. Yet the labs are not irrelevant, they are important. because they show us where you're out of balance. But I don't want to treat your numbers. I want treat you and help you have better health. And so what we seek is the treatment of the root cause. Asking why is that? My headache is never caused by deficiency etc. This is true. This is true. So expand that into every possible thing.

Your blood pressure issue is not a deficiency in a beta channel blocker or whatever the prescription is that you think you need. Yeah. And I would venture to say that we're also, and this is what happens in my industry, is your blood-pressure issue isn't a efficiency of Hawthorneberry. you know, or Indian snakes. Very well put, yeah. Because we also have that kind of thing going on. And I don't, you, know this is my opinion. I'm curious on yours.

Longevity, Basics, and Personalized Nutrition 44:00

Right now we're very heavy in hormone replacement therapy and it seems to be the panacea for every single thing. Sure. While I do recommend in certain cases, I find that sometimes it's not the end all be all, it is not magic. It's icing on the cake. Yeah. Well, so the two major ones or the three major As the perimenopause arrives, the progesterone level starts falling and you start losing your cool and your less stable and, your sleep is less easy to come by and so on, right? So yeah, you need to figure out how to naturally support all of that.

Most of it is liver function, gut function. Whatever else, when you support that, you will see that the hormonal levels stabilize and improve. And do you figure, because this is kind of where I see what you're doing with the metabolic typing. A lot of us compensate, especially in perimenopause for the symptoms of the progesterone dropping, we change our diet. Some people compensate by changing their diet because they're gaining weight, but sometimes I feel it's a coping mechanism where a lot people go towards more fat.

Or more carb or more savory like food. And that creates more of a disease in the body too. Yeah, yeah, the self amplifying loop. Right. Then then you have more control over and this is why we're here to help kind of plant the seed and folks because this this Is exactly what I was hoping that that we would talk about today is really get that idea out there of like you mentioned the different foods the Different types of folks and then how that impacts, right? And of course, I mean, we do have tools, right?

Like, for example, speak of stress, stress is what happens out there, your sensory inputs and your brain interprets it and you react and if you'll react, you fire off your adrenals and they release cortisol and cortisol will flood or release glucose out of storage. And if you're sedentary and just sitting there stewing with your stress spinning, the only solution your body has is to send in insulin and convert it into belly fat. So that's the natural consequence. You have now tools. Do you work it off by physical activity or do you take a herbal supplement as we have?

We have something called cortisol ease. which will naturally diminish the circulating cortisol, which would drop the glucose level, the requirement for the insulin, and will prevent this stress-induced belly fat. There's patterns. There are patterns everywhere. We just have to open up and, and see them. And I'm a fan of having people take notes on themselves. Do you recommend folks to take note and kind of chart? Yeah. Yeah, with the metabolic typing test, you get something called the DCR daily check record, which has three slots on it.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner. and in it you will have questions such as after I ate, I was hungry within an hour, or I stable, satiated, not, nervous, calm, sad, joyful, whatever. Whole bunch of questions. Not long, it takes you about a minute to tick the 10 boxes. And with that you'll be able to essentially diarize of i ate this like a burger fries and a tiny salad or i had a huge stir fry with chicken and rice or whatever it is that you did and the response how your body and you come back to me with like 14 of these sheets and we just blitz through it And before you know it, you have very clear pattern about what will work and what won't.

That's, that's good stuff. Good stuff for folks. Gosh, Martin, so many fascinating things here, especially, looking at the metabolic typing. And I think folks are going to be fascinated to look into that further. So let's tell them a little bit more about life enthusiast, how they can take their quiz, get to know you get, to no more help. Well, the website is life-enthusiast.com. You'll find links to all of it. There are lots of podcasts with information explaining this in even greater detail. there is the metabolic typing test itself.

Currently we charge $97 for it It will probably take you an hour or so to do, and then it will take about an our with me to understand how to implement all of that in your life. We also do a guided tour for people who like to it in a group. Full retrain, re-educate. It's sort of like going to an exercise class as opposed to doing it alone. So that's there. And plus, of course, we have a lot of supplementation. Life Enthusiast as such is about a 35 year old business, 25 of them online. What we do is find and source products that are still made by companies owned by the inventors.

Life Enthusiast and Final Takeaways 49:00

There's something really weird that happens, is when a person creates a product that they're passionate about, they usually invest themselves into the result, as in the physical benefit, the outcome. Once that business gets bought by some investment company, they start managing the business for the bottom line as opposed to the impact on the customer. And there's just subtle, maybe not so subtle drift toward mediocre results. So we still hunt down products that are made by these small businesses where you will actually get real decent.

It's huge. Because if anyone wants to do the research on who owns some of the top supplement companies, you're going to find it's Big Pharma. That's behind a lot of it. Actually, it's a big tobacco and food. You see, what happened is Philip Morris, when they saw the writing on the wall, they went out and bought Kraft and Heinz. I'm just making it up. That's what happened is the tobacco when they realized that they could addict people to food, they went and bought food and then they made food addictive.

And now the result is this incredible disaster, obesity and heart disease and cancer, all of that. Those, those are all the logical outcomes. of addicting people to the wrong stuff. I so appreciate you to, you know, such a bright light in the world of mostly hopeless zero benefits. You deliver so much. All you have to do is just go on your website and read the testimonials, right? We didn't hit on that. I'll just throw in just a little tidbit. The thyroid type, especially fast oxidizer, needs to have about 10, if not 20 times more iodine in circulation in order to function well.

And a deficiency of iodide is causing deficiency in the mucosal barriers which will cause you problem in planting your egg in your tubes and it will also diminish your chance of carrying your pregnancy to term. So if you have the thyroid type on not enough iodine eating wheat, you'll have a disaster waiting to happen. You will lose seven out of ten pregnancies trying to live a life like that without understanding, right? Just a little thing like. Know thyself. That is so huge. And I see this often with women, so such an important thing.

Thanks for sharing that. I'm sure you have other little tidbits too like this and we'll have to send folks over to your website and take the quiz and get in connection with you so they can learn more. Such good stuff. Thank you.