How to Take Control of Your Health—No Doctors Required!

Welcome to Living Well 0:00

Are you overwhelmed, frustrated, and just stuck not knowing how to move forward with your health issues? There's so much information. What's right? What's wrong? I have an answer for you. Let's go learn together. Welcome to the Living Well with Dr. Michelle show. I am so excited you're here. I talk to people every single day and they are frustrated, overwhelmed. They don't feel well and they feel completely stuck. with where they are from a health standpoint. They are not lacking in information.

There is so much information today on social media, websites, blogs, friends and family. Everyone you talk to has an opinion about how to get better, about how to live well. But that sometimes is the issue. How do you choose? And how do you know what's really going to work for you? Well, the bottom line is all of those things, no matter whether we call them Western medicine with prescriptions and doctors and some of the modern medicine marvels that we have today, or whether we call it traditional medicine with herbs and powders and movement practices like Tai Chi and yoga and deep breathing, which of them are correct?

We don't have to have that answer because what it comes down to is it's all about what do your cells need to be well. So I'm going to help you pave your way through these mountains of information on both sides with bite-size wellness tips that make sense, that you can do at home, in your own home, on your own time, in just a little bit of time. You're going to come and learn these at my home, in my kitchen, in my garden.

The CellWell Model and Cellular Wellness 2:06

We're going to really return to the earth and return to the things that we are able to do on our own. Because I am a huge believer that we do not outsource our wellness. We do not have to wait for a doctor or another health practitioner to tell us what we need to do to be well. Our cells give us the answer. We need to learn how to interpret the things they're telling us. We call these symptoms. And then we need to learn what to do about it. And that's what we're going to do together. I'm so excited you're here.

Let's get started learning how to live well. Every week we are going to also talk about a story of wellness. A person just like you who is struggling and has found answers. Today we're going to start with my story because that's really where all of this started for me. I was really struggling. I had complete brain fog. My brain just wasn't working anymore. My gut felt terrible. I had pain after every meal. and I had such numbness in my hands I couldn't blow dry my hair or sleep at night or do my job, which was dentistry.

I finally figured out that it was mercury poisoning from the fillings I was drilling out of people's teeth. In an attempt to get well, I started visiting doctor after doctor and trying thing after thing and nothing was helping. So I eventually started studying alternative therapies, trying to find some answers and ways to really turn the needle on my health problems. And that's where I found that reconnecting with the earth was so important. Embracing things like getting sunlight, touching the earth again, cold grounding, eating nutrient-rich foods, all of those things were really what helped me return to wellness.

And that's what I'm going to show you is that wellness doesn't start with medicine or even all the things that medicine brings. It starts with your own body and your own cells. So I'm going to show you how your body works, how your cells work, and how you on a daily basis can do things for yourselves so that you can stay well. That's the best thing is just to stay well and never get sick to begin with or if you are already struggling how to return to wellness. That's what this is going to be about and you're going to hear stories of people like you who have gone through this journey and have found that they too can keep themselves well.

So I can't wait to help you get to that point that I myself got to by embracing cellular wellness and all the things that the earth can bring. Every week I am going to be doing a something you should know segment and these are often going to come from a lot of our social media posts where people say I've never heard that before or why have I never been told that by a doctor? That is the kind of thing we're going to talk about in this segment. Today we're going to really dig into the Cellwell model.

What is the Cellwell model? Well, this is something you need to know. You need to know that we've been asking the wrong question. As I was digging through all of these mountains of information, all of these books, learning about different kinds of traditional medical philosophies, different ways that the body works and the way that people look at the body, I just got so confused. And I started really doubting myself because I have been trained in Western medicine. My father's a dentist, my grandfather's a doctor, and that's the way I was raised.

And I started thinking, has everything that I've ever been taught wrong? And where do I go from here? And what I realized is that that question is the wrong question. The debate is not between Eastern medicine and Western medicine, because really at the end of the day, our cells are what keep us well. So let me give you an example to help you understand this a little bit. When you cut your finger, you might put a bandaid on it, right? Does the bandaid do the healing? The answer is no. We all know that.

We tell our kids that. The kids think that, you know, yes, the bandaid heals, but it doesn't. Your cells are what literally knit the skin cells together so tightly that they don't separate again. And honestly, it's miraculous because they do it without you even telling them what to do. Isn't that amazing? So the question isn't Eastern or Western medicine because honestly, all medicines are just band-aids. They're just there to support ourselves in doing their job. The real question is, what do our cells need to do the work?

So that's where the cell well model came in. The cell well model talks about four different things that every cell needs.

Morning Digestion and the Warm Lemon Drink 7:11

Every cell needs supplies, every cell needs support, every cell needs security, and every cell needs signals. What do these things mean? Supplies, I think you can probably figure out. That's food, that's water, that's oxygen, that's the nutrients that make the cells go. A little harder to figure out. That's the environment the cells live in. That's sometimes the temperature that we give them. That's the cleansing ability that they have, being able to get rid of waste. That's all the support systems.

Security is protecting ourselves from things that come along that may damage them. And signals are the things that our cells require to be able to communicate effectively with each other. Because if our cells aren't communicating, all of our systems just go awry and nothing works well. So this is the CellWell model. Now the next question people ask is, which do I start with? Where do I go first, right? What do I do here? And that's where you are going to take something called the seasons assessment.

It's going to be on your phone. You're going to take the seasons assessment and what it is, is it's all based on symptoms or things that you are currently experiencing. because in modern medicine often our focus has been to quiet the symptom, right? If we have a headache, we take something that will take the pain away. instead of saying, why do I have a headache? What are my cells trying to tell me right now? So we're going to pay attention, finally, to what the cells are saying to those symptoms.

And that's what this assessment does, is it goes through all of your symptoms, and then it tells you a season. Now, what in the world is the season all about? So what I learned from studying all of these different Eastern medicine philosophies is that they used the earth to guide what the body needs, what the cells need. All of these medical traditions use the elements of the earth. Fire, water, air, plants and the earth itself to describe the way that our body works. They also use the seasons of the earth.

I'm going to add one, spring, summer, harvest, fall and winter. So when you take the assessment, it's going to tell you what season and what element your body is currently needing the most of or identifying with the most. That will then guide your first steps and what you need to do to be able to give yourselves what they need. After that, we reassess, we decide what needs to happen next, but the seasons and the symptoms walk you through what you need. So, this is what you need to know. Come back every week to find out how to make it work and put it into action.

I am excited to show you my kitchen. As you can see, it's probably a lot like some of your kitchens as well. And the reason we're here and we're going to be here every show is that Hippocrates was right when he said, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food, because food is medicine. As you go through the seasons assessment, you're gonna find your own personal season. You're gonna find out what your body needs right now. And using that cell well formula, does it need supplies, support, signals, security?

What does it need? Pretty much every cell is going to need supplies in some form, and a lot of those supplies are going to come from right here in the kitchen. So every episode we're going to talk about how does food help your cells be well? How does it supply things? How does it support? How does it provide what those cells need? And then I'm going to show you very simple things to do in your own kitchen, in your own home, using simple ingredients and simple techniques. Absolutely, I love to cook and I love to make amazing food.

But it doesn't have to be complex and it doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to have a lot of ingredients from all around the world. In fact, we're going to talk about why that's not even beneficial to do that. It's going to be using things that you commonly use that you can find in your grocery store. And you might learn a thing or two, but probably most of the techniques you already know, you just need to know how to utilize them to improve your wellness. So today there's a couple of things I want to introduce.

As you find your season, you're going to find out what systems need help the most. But every system can use a little boost in the morning. But there's something that's interesting. When I studied Ayurveda, what I found out is that it talked a lot about our digestive fire or the way the body works. And not only the digestive fire or how the stomach and the gut is absorbing, but when it's best at doing that absorption. And what I found out is that digestive fire is best for sitting in the morning.

And it's still strong midday. It actually kind of gets less and less as we go throughout the day. So when we think even about the seasons of the day and what should happen in the morning, what should happen midday, what should happen in the evening, we should be revving things up. from a digestive sense in the morning. We should be eating our biggest meal and the one that actually has the most nutrients and the most absorption needs in the midday. And then by the evening, we should be really slowing down on what we're consuming because the digestive fire or our body's ability to deal with it and digest it and utilize it is reduced.

So how do we rev up that digestive fire in the morning? Some people will start with a cold smoothie right off the bat. This actually isn't a great idea because that cold is going to be dumped right on top of that warming up digestion and it's going to cool it down,

Winter, the Garden, and Root Cellar Foods 13:02

which means you're not going to absorb as much from it. So what we're going to do is start out with a warm drink actually. We're going to use warm water. This is probably a little warmer than I would drink it. Warm water. We're going to put a half a lemon in. Why a lemon? Well, tastes good. That's one of the things, but that's actually not the main reason. The main reason is that lemon is full of vitamin C, which brings electrons. It's also full of antioxidants, which helps combat a lot of the stressful things that are happening to ourselves in the world today.

We're then going to add a quarter teaspoon of salt. The salt has As you know, what salt is, it is mineral, full of minerals, and those minerals are what actually bring the electrons to our cells and power up every single cell. We're then gonna add a little apple cider vinegar. If desired, this is optional, you don't have to. Apple cider vinegar also helps with digestion. And if you really wanna rev things up, you can add just a pinch of cayenne pepper. So this is going to waken your digestive system up in the morning.

It's not gonna cool it down. It's gonna add electrons through the vitamin C, through the minerals here in the salt. You can even strengthen your digesting even more and rev it up with a little cayenne pepper, bringing even more heat. This is a great way to start your day. You're gonna feel great. You're gonna be able to digest and absorb food better. This is the kind of thing I'm going to be teaching and talking about every single week. Simple to do, makes sense. When should you do this? Literally every day.

So join me next week. We're going to be back in the kitchen. Now, welcome to the garden. You know, in today's day and age, not a lot of people are fortunate enough to have a garden like this, or it's not something that they really want to do. Because we're not in our gardens very often, we often have not paid attention to what the earth is doing. And I ask people things like, well, do you eat seasonally? Do you eat foods that are coming on right now in the garden and they'll look at me and they'll say, well, I don't know what's growing in the garden right now.

I don't have a garden and I've never grown one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what's growing in the garden in different seasons. And why does that matter? Well, like we talked about, your own body has a season and the earth gives us a lot of cues. It gives us cues about what we should be doing in certain seasons. but also it gives us cues as to what our bodies in general want as they go through the seasons of the earth as well. There's so much we can learn from just the earth beneath our feet.

So let's talk right now about the season that my greenhouse is in. It's dead of winter. It looks like nothing's happening. There are a few little scraggly onions over there, which is interesting to me, but that's it. that's not true because the real key and secret is right down here in the soil. So we've already spread compost on the soil this season and what that compost is doing is underneath here you can see it looks different. There's moisture, there's water, and if we get even a little bit deeper what we'll find is all of these what are called mycelium networks, all of these root systems.

This is what brings nutrients deep, deep in the earth to the shallower soil. My seed gets planted in this soil and all of those nutrients are what help that plant to grow. This soil is resting right now. It's resting, it's regenerating, it's rebuilding itself so that it can grow again in the spring. Something that I think in our modern world we've forgotten is that spring does not last forever and we can't continually be growing and having new things and new ideas and new businesses and new plans for everything because we run out of resources.

The soil would too. If there was never a time for it to rest and regenerate and rebuild, the plants wouldn't grow next year. So the earth is giving us a cue as to what we should be doing in a winter season as well. So if you've tested and winter is the season for you to start in, winter is all about water. It's about kidneys and the urinary system. And a lot of it has to do with resting and allowing the body to regenerate. So that's what we're gonna be doing in the garden is learning, first of all, what is the garden doing in each season?

But then how does it relate to you? And how does it relate to your health? I think you're going to love it whether you have a garden or not. The earth also gives us cues as to what we should be eating right now. As you saw in the garden, not a lot is growing right now. So what should we be eating in winter if your body is in a winter season? And even just in general in a winter season, what helps to support us? Well, it's foods like this. This is my root cellar. Not a lot of people have a root cellar these days.

I know that I'm very fortunate to have that, but I'm going to show you what the root cellar has so that when you go to the grocery store, you can find those things and even tips and tricks for keeping them in your own home. Asian pears. Apples off of my tree. These are stored and still in here. In fact, we had a delicious salad with this Asian pear last night. That's something that should be eaten this time of year. Potatoes. potatoes, onions, squash, root vegetables, carrots, beets. These are all things that are very good for your body to regenerate during a winter season.

So if that's your season now, or just even now, if you're going through a winter in the world, these are the kinds of things that your body needs when it's cold. And remember, we're not about energy. We're not about rebuilding and starting something new. Right now is about regenerating and refreshing and renewing. And these complex carbohydrate foods do exactly that. Thank you so much for joining me today. I have loved sharing these little tidbits, little wellness tips and tricks, and that's what we're going to be doing every single episode.

You know, honestly, wellness isn't some amazing program that you subscribe to and join. It's choices and steps that you take every single day, and consistency is so important. So we're gonna do this together. We're going to be in your kitchen, in your home, recipes, tips, tricks, things to do to make wellness just a part of your life. So let's get started. I'll see you again next time.