Shield Yourself from Genetic Disease Risks

Introduction and genetic health concerns 0:00

Welcome back, everybody. So there's a topic that comes up when we're working on things clinically. And we have an amazing person here to talk to us about this today because we often hear like, oh, you know, my mom had this, my aunt has this, you know, and it's like, is it in my genetics? Is it coming? Is it happening? But the ability to conquer your genetic legacy and truly create your own future, we're here with somebody that can tell us how she did the same. So Iman, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me.

I'm super excited, too. I'm a big fan of your work and obviously the company, so I'm really excited to do this. Oh, thank you so much. You know, we so your story, I mean, it's sad to say, but your mother was taken from this planet a little early. Yeah. And and the fear typically is that, oh, no, I'm next, you know? Yeah. And you did you had issues, you had problems, and you started to go down that same path, and then all of a sudden, you took control. And it's like, no, I don't have to have that.

So tell us about your story. So I'm originally South Asians and Pakistani by descent. I was born in the States, grew up in Islamabad in Pakistan until I was 12, moved to London and lived in Dubai for a few years. And then I moved later to the States. I've now lived in America for about ten years and I really think of the last ten years have played the biggest impact when it comes to my health. And that comes down to the fact that when I moved away from living at home or in an environment that wasn't medicine was at the forefront of how we treat ourselves and how we lived and take this pill and take that pill.

I didn't have that much time to think. But moving to the States ten years ago and really taking space away and being like, okay, I'm on my own now, I can make my own decisions, I can do things on my own timeline. And I got very influenced. I was in, I was I loved working out. I had to work out a lot. And at the time since since my teenage years, I'd suffered from estrogen dominance, basically. In short, I'd had by by the time I went to the States, I'd had three major surgeries.

Iman's background and early health struggles 2:12

I had one of my ovaries was reconstructed because I had these reoccurring sets, kept getting reoccurring shows, and about 15 years ago, my mom had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. So they just basically pinned this down to saying, okay, this is a genetic issue. You guys have hormonal imbalances in the family and it could basically come up. And so I moved to the States and that's sort of resonate with me. And I'm just like, why is it that just our DNA and just because somebody in our family, like you said, has something, I should also be predisposition to that.

Like, what can I do about my health? And I remember getting into Dave Asprey. I picked up a couple of books, started reading about this man who healed himself from Mode and all these other genetic issues that he had and kind of reversed his aging process. And I was introduced to a functional medicine practitioner who said, No, you should not be on the contraceptive pills. You're further just regulating yourself by synthetic hormones. You need to start regulating your body. By this point, I'd had multiple, like I said, are variances.

I'd had three surgeries. I suffer from extremely bad migraines. They would lead me up into bed, into bed. I couldn't move for like days on end. And I had very stagnant energy and I was just exhausted, chronically exhausted. And at this point, I moved to the States and probably my early thirties I shouldn't be having all these issues. And this guy went to him, ran my functional blood work for the first time, realized I have I'm very too much candida in my body, a lot of heavy metals and nobody ever taught me about I wasn't properly detoxing my body not because I drank and things like that.

I just didn't. My drainage pathways were not open and I had hormonal imbalances that could be treated through functional medicine. And I will say hands down is the first time in my life that I took my health into my own hands. My family probably thought I was crazy because they live in London, so they're like, What is this stuff you're doing? You're crazy, you're doing peptides, you're doing this, you're doing that, you're crazy. And I started feeling better. Yeah. I can tell you to date, I don't remember the last time touch would much rather I have. I've had a migraine.

I don't remember the last time I've had an irregular cycle and I can't remember the last time I've had a test at all. Yeah, and this is crazy because you're like all of what you describe. There's so many young women that are told, like you said, go take a pill. Correct? Take the birth control pill. Right. And funny thing is, you're adding more estrogen. You know, you're having an estrogen issue in a solution to, say, take some more estrogen because a blanket statement, let's balance your hormones.

But is the imbalance. It's not even that question isn't even asked. Yeah. And this thing that seems so gray is actually very black and white. If you understand it at the genetic level, what you're told is genetic is not a genetic prescription for a problem. It's more like you're wired for your ancestral habits of being Asian. In this, I'm eating good, clean food with no environmental chemicals, etc. and all of a sudden you're in a different city with a different reality. So we took control. So then so when you're was it a doctor that told you to take a walk through?

Yeah. Yeah, I was. You're basically you're a gyno here in America. You're like, oh, just get on the pill. And that just didn't resonate with me. And I remember calling my mom and my mom's like, Why are you arguing with them? I was like, Because that can't be the solution. The solution can't just be like, take a pill. And now that I know so much more about the human body and how we work and stuff, if I'm already estrogen dominant, which is my issue, why are you giving me more synthetic estrogen? You know, why is that?

And then there's now data and research that shows taking the contraceptive pill does not prevent ovarian cancer, which is what my mother had. And that was an argument they made back then that, oh, if you take the pill, prevent ovarian cancer. It's like, why would synthetic hormones help me prevent a cancer and cause me just regularity? Why would I not want to regulate my own body in my cycle? Yeah, yeah. You know, it's sad, but I just saw an article in CNN a few weeks ago that was saying that women should consider cutting their fallopian tubes out to prevent ovarian cancer.

And it was it was spoken of like a breakthrough, like, wow, look at this amazing. We just figure it out. And in the article, it said, because of things like this, cancer

Functional medicine diagnosis and recovery 6:30

rates are coming down because of things. But then, you know, when you're reading an online article, you scroll and it suggests another article, right? So the next article that was suggested in this article that was saying cancer rates are down because we're cutting our fallopian tubes out, the suggested article was cancer rates are skyrocketing. And here's why. Yeah, it's. It's where I see, I see the American. One of the things that I'm really grateful to love in this country. But I also tell you, the American medical system is extremely broken.

You know, it's controlled by things outside of doctors are really maybe genuinely or not genuinely care about their patients. There's always an agenda at hand. And I also think that you just see it, you walk to your local. I went for a guided checkup last year and they're like, Why aren't you on a contraceptive pill? And I was like, Because I don't want to be on a contraceptive pill, but they're like, You're almost 40. Why not? I think because I don't take medication for anything. I'm good. Like I'm really good.

And you realize that they're just pushing the stuff on you because they get back payments or, you know, they get kind of like endorsed by certain brands. And so how much of these doctors or practitioners really care about their the health of their patients? And this is why I'm a huge advocate for functional doctors, because they're not getting payments from this company or that company to promote the product. They're really trying to treat you to get holes. You can function on your own. The whole premise should be you should be functioning wholeheartedly as a healthy individual in flow with yourself and every single aspect on your own.

And you should be on this medication, swapping it out to that medication. And that is why the functional route alternative medicine really spoke to me personally. Yeah. If you're going in to see somebody for support within you described if they're not treating your lifestyle and environment. Yeah right if there's a prescription run because it's not there fault they were trained correct. But the only way to fix this with what is this thing called and what pill do I prescribe for when that's not what's happening is not a disease, not a condition.

It's that the condition is your body not being able to tolerate the ten, 15 years of problems you've been experiencing that you're not allowing for. So you When did all this stuff you're now a new version of yourself. I met your person and you're just a firecracker full of energy. And it's like everybody wishes they could be like you, right? So this wasn't me ten years ago. You know, I didn't feel like this. I would never guess, like meeting you. I was like, no, this woman is, like, a little bit too much energy.

We need to sell right now. How did you so take us through like peptides and also if you probably that wasn't day one like. Oh no, no, no. The first thing this guy did was ran all my labs and he's like, listen, you're you have these, you know, you are hormonally imbalance. You're getting migraines because of that. You're also getting migraines because you're deficient in some minerals and supplements like baselines. Like I was efficient in vitamin D, I was like, I'm South-Asian, I'm dark skinned, I have tons of vitamin D.

He's like, No, you're heavily deficient in vitamin D, your body is not methylated correctly. I also had to detox heavily from heavy metals and Candida, do you know 75% of Americans have some form of Candida like a level of it and they don't even realize because of the poor diet. So I started eliminating gluten. I started eliminating any processed food. Nobody educated me at this point about the American standard diet and how bad it is for you and what was really going on with my body. They told me I was lactose intolerant as a child.

I wasn't lactose intolerant. I just at the time wasn't my gut wasn't working properly. So the first thing was, let's heal your gut. Let's get your body clean. Let's get rid of heavy metals. I did a heavy metal cleanse. I did a candidate cleanse which lasted 6 to 8 months to really get things out of my system. And then he started moving me on to supplementation and peptides. So explain peptides with a lot of people that understand. I know it's a gray area between like supplements and drugs. Yes. So I love peptides.

I'm a huge fan of peptides, essentially short chain amino acids which are compounded for different things and they can signal to your body like let's say you want to take a peptide for mental clarity, which is really about a lot of people post like long-covid with like brain cognition and, you know, kind of brain fog. You can take a peptide for gaining more muscle mass or having better gut health is supporting your mitochondria. So peptides are basically, you know, in a full spectrum of things, they're short chain amino acids.

And I recently had a surgery and on average I'll tell you this, I was let's say I had two surgery four weeks ago. My plastic surgeon basically told me that I recovered faster than anyone has ever seen and I was on peptides and supplementation specific for my body to heal and restore better than somebody who wouldn't have been. Yeah. And that's the potential of the human body is that it's not about what do I have and how do I treat it. It's like, how do I optimize to make it work? Me There's all these jobs in your body and you can allow them to do a better job by supplementing by yeah there's things amount manage gene expression and you can just be a superhuman.

Correct and that's what I did a live yesterday with Ben Greenfield that you're talking about like this peptide is such a gray area mainly because like the FDA approves things and then disapprove things. And why? Because at the end, these things are meant to make you healthier and better versions of yourself. If you're healthier and better version of yourself, then you don't need that much medication. So where is a pharmacist? I'm going to go then beyond that. So I think there's a lot of gray area nervousness, but there's a lot of studies coming out on two peptides.

They're peptide regulators now. There's so much going on in this area that I think in the next ten, 15 years this will be part of day to day health care and protocols because more and more people are opening up into it like any d need is incredible for a majority of people. Right. Depending on if you can process and kind of handle it like just what it does to your cells and energy levels and brain fog and mental clarity is incredible. So people who are dealing with chronic fatigue due to so many autoimmune conditions and it can be an incredible add on for them, but your average doctor doesn't know about that.

Yeah. Do you feel like now that you've been through this stuff and you need all this stuff, you tried, do you feel like you've come back to what you used to be or are you even beyond that? Like way beyond that, I look at old pictures of myself and just generally like I didn't even realize I'm a very even keeled person. Most of the time I'm going to even killed. When I was going through this stuff, I was feeling very emotionally disregulated. Like I have surges of like rage go through me and I'm like, Where the hell is this even coming from?

Peptides, optimization, and healing beyond symptoms 13:00

Like a complete up and down. And I'm pretty consistent now overall. And I realized it was because my farmlands were having such freak like luck when changes up and down country over a four week cycle with no control that I didn't feel like myself. Mm. And now you feel like so there's so the, the silver lining, the news for everybody. It's not only like how do I get rid of my problem, but there's a version of yourself that you haven't even met yet, racked, you know, that is so beyond what you even think you're capable of.

I think Healing My Body was the first step in healing like the rest of me. I think there was so much layered in and I think, you know, they always say your body keeps score. And I think that, you know, being South Asian and our kind of culture and our own things when I moved to America was a big time in my life because I was not only able to heal my body as able to heal my mind, my emotions, and I really went through this transition and my body was a starting point for me. So realizing I was going to fall really critically sick if I didn't take charge of this.

And looking at both my parents who passed away from one disease or another and being treated by Western medicine was it was an ending I didn't want for myself. So that was kind of my journey with taking charge of my health, my life and my mental well-being and being like, I just don't want this to be my end. So I'm going to start with that. And I think, like I said, the starting in this functional path in alternative medicine was really eye opening for me because they opened up other doors of possibility to who I could become and I find scratched the surface of what I what the potential I had of being who I could be.

Yeah. How old were your parents when they passed? My mom died last year. My mom died at 63 after fighting ovarian cancer for 15 years, and my dad died two years prior to that. And no, sorry, my mother was 73 and my father was 85. Did you I'm sure you were making recommendations or did you have challenges with like. 100%? My mother was basically for 15 years on chemo and radiation and he was like, do you understand you're poisoning your body? Would you look at some alternative ways of doing this and stuff?

She's like, absolutely not. Mind you, this woman has is going through chemo and radiation. She has cancer. She's been told to have red meat every single day. And she is not necessarily eating grass fed organic meat. She's also eating seafood like prawns. There's that. She's having gluten, she's having chrysanthemum. Like, how is this correlating to your like your nutrition is not playing into you getting treated with chemo. Yeah you know and it's just compounding in your body. And then I think more than the disease, the, the cancer got really aggressive because she's treating it on one direction with radiation and chemo and the other direction.

She's not really fully taking care of herself. She's not getting enough sleep. She's not getting checked for deficiencies. Her body is not balancing out. So you're poisoning your body with all the stuff to get rid of this disease, but you're not balancing out the additional self care that you need. And that I think compounded and eventually her body just gave up. Yeah that's a challenge with cancers is people believe that it's it's it's there and you need to treat it medically meaning that what is the underlying root cause?

Why did it happen? That question doesn't get asked. And if you understood that for sure, acute response go get the medical treatment. It's you know let's let's put out the fire but if you're not dealing with imagine putting out the fire and feeling it from the other end at the same time. That some day. You know, it's absolutely ridiculous, you know, so. I thought she was chronically inflamed. And I tell her, you are chronically inflamed. And she's like, what do you mean? And she's like, My doctors.

And then my mom was South Asian, so she's like, What do you know? And I was like, I'm telling you, your body is chronically inflamed. And there you are, like you just said, firing it up with other things that are inflaming you. And there's no decompression for your body and cells to go into a state of repair because you're on this aggressive chemo or radiation protocol every two weeks, you're doing something, every three weeks you're doing something. And the breaks that she did have, she overexert it herself.

So her body was just running in a cycle. And I think the things that we know now, hormone irregularity, what your genes that you can turn on and off gene expressions, all of this stuff was our parents generation had no idea about this stuff. Epigenetics, they had no idea about this stuff. She was treated in a very old school way and her quality of life really decreased because of that. In the ultimate least, she passed away because of the disease. And this is the big child. It's funny that you said 15 years because this is the data that's now coming out that the average American gets their first chronic disease by the age of 55.

Yeah, they have to by 65 and they spend the last 15 years of their life in treatment. Yeah. That's now the norm. Yeah. And the ridiculous thing about saying that is that all of this is preventable and none of it is innate. It's not part of you. You know, I understand being born with a genetic condition. You have it, but it's there. You may find a treatment for it. Cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, all these things that are triggered from insulin response and inflammation. You don't have you develop over time.

And it's not just about, you know, okay, I'm going to fight this thing like you're giving up the last 15 years of your life, which you should enjoy the most.

Mother's cancer journey and questioning conventional care 18:30

And you do have that choice. And look at that in one family, there's your mom, and it's unfortunate to say, and then there's you who's taking a different route who may be one of those 15 years. Right. And I see that with my sister. So my sister and I are 15 years apart. She lives between London and Switzerland. She's kind of a little bit alternative medicine, but she still got a traditional medicine. And my sister has health issues that perpetually come up and I'm like, Why don't you look at this alternative way?

But they're still married to this old mindset of Western medicine and not being so much in fear. Yeah. That they're disease or their issues are outside their control, that they cannot self-heal. And that fear is what drives. These. People to that. So it's also like embracing that, the ability and having faith in your body's ability to heal itself. Yeah. When it comes to a question of faith. That's for sure, that when we're working with people clinically, I can't tell you how many people. We can't start healing until we teach them how they think and half of their problem is how they think.

If you fear, you fear because of belief, right? If you believe, well then you're telling your body that this is what's going to happen, correct? Your mitochondria are constantly responding to whatever communication, whether it's from your brain, whether it's from the environment, whether it's from a smell of food, whatever body body's constantly trying to respond and give you what you need. If you're constantly telling your body cancer is coming, right. That's where you're feeding it. Yeah. You're telling your body like, okay, well then let's get ready for this information sets and all that stuff.

So yeah, I can tell you that a lot of people that we that get stuck where they've been in something for 15 years, 20 years, literally that. Becomes their story. Yeah, it's their narrative. And I think that this brings me to another point that that's really important to me and kind of how I see life and kind of help the body mind, soul connection, I think truly to live a happy, healthy and happy life. Your body, your mind, your soul, all have to be aligned. So you can't just be biohacking in fixing your physical body.

Where is your emotional health and where's your spiritual health? And I think that all three of those have to be interconnected in order to really have a healthy, fulfilling life and existence. Yeah. And I think the spiritual part is where there's the biggest disconnect. Correct. You know, and there's some I mean, yourself, myself born in religious sort of culture, more conservative. Then there's people where religion has been removed from the culture. Fine, you believe in what you believe in, but the spirituality can still be there.

How do you start that? Where do you start? I think spirituality is a very personal journey, right? It's the restoration of faith. First in yourself, your knowing that there's something else out there. You can call Allah, you can call it God, you can call it anything you want. Energy does not matter. But I think the journey to spirituality is one that comes before even healing of the body. And I had an experience, I think it was like five or six years ago when I started, I went down this kind of like healing of the body journey and then got reintroduced to spirituality and my faith in God or something out there was restored to such a capacity that I live now knowing that everything is in alignment for me and on the worst of days I know that I can get through certain things.

Or I have had like my mom passed away, you know, last summer, two years prior to that, my father passed away and I, you know, people always ask me, they're like, you know, your grieving process was very different and you've been able to still navigate. You're building this business, all that stuff. I said, yes, because I have so much faith in energy and the universe itself and something greater than myself that it's not just me on my own, that it's restored faith in my own abilities. And I know that everything is just part of a bigger process or what things are mapped out to be.

And you have to trust that, yeah, I'm not sitting here living in fear, being like, Oh my God, if I open the door like this, this will happen, or am I going to eat this? That will happen. I trust the process because I trust that there's something greater than me out there. And I think spirituality plays one of the biggest roles in the healing of the body in the mind. Yeah, what you just said, I think nails it because people who haven't tried yet, right? Yeah. And that when you think about, okay, I'm going to try and be spiritual or religious, whatever, connect.

What do you think? You think I'll go to sit there and pray and meditate and you're thinking about that, but you're not nobody thinks about the outcome. What the outcome is. You become invincible because when you give yourself up to a greater power and things just don't matter anymore. Yeah, the little things, the little nuances that are like problematic going yeah. And it allows you to like yourself heal then work on the mind, right? Yeah. All of a sudden you do have the power to know that none of that stuff matters.

And I can, I can deal with my mind. No. And then I can deal with that, that status. You can get to get to through spirituality. And I think there's a beautiful example in like I hadn't really experienced that till I had this, you know, came to this point that you were nothing yet you were everything. You were so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet you were everything because you're so connected through energy with the universe. And you see, Jodi spends I talked a lot about this in his work.

And then, you know, Sufi is from our part of the world. We talk about this that you are nothing yet you are everything. Because the universe is energy and God is energy and creativity is energy. So why would you not trust in your abilities and know that this is just part of your journey? This is not your final story? Yeah, that's amazing. And speaking of creativity, so you healed yourself. Yeah. And now you are a high powered business lady. But. Have you built an agency? So tell us a little bit about that, because I think that's very inspiring that you could have been in a very different position.

Yeah. And but where are you now? So tell us about what you're up to. So I moved to the States, I guess at ten years ago.

Mindset, spirituality, and body-mind-soul alignment 24:30

I went through a really bad divorce back in the day. My mother shipped me off to America. She said, You know what? You're going to go live in. I was living in London. I went to this diversion like, you're going to move to America. Because I was born in the States. I was like, I've never lived in America in my life. What do you mean? She said, I don't know. You're going to go figure this out. So she literally ships me off. She's like, Pick a state. And I'm like, I guess I'm going to go to Miami because I don't like the cold and you know, bless my mother had like I came from a very strong like the women in my family are very very, very matriarchal.

There was a lot of strength in these women. You know, they're real warriors. And she's like, you're going to go figure this out. So I decide to choose Miami because I lived in the bay and I like the warmer weather. And so rather versus New York. And I came to Miami ten years ago. Miami wasn't what it is now like. It was nothing like this. And I come to the States and I meet a ton of agencies down here and I'm like, Wow, this is very different to living in Europe. It's a very different cultural mindset.

And I get hired at an agency down in Miami and start building, you know, my career. So I work for multiple agencies Miami. I work for a couple of agencies in New York. I started their Miami offices and started getting into the world of PR and marketing and built, you know, obviously a database client. I became really good at new business generation. That was my skill set. And then I started my agency in 2019. My husband convinced me as my my fiance at the time and he said, Listen, you should just do something on your own.

And I was like, I've done stuff in the past. It's a big you know, it's a really big undertaking. I don't know if I want the responsibility. He said, Why don't you start consulting? So November 2019, it was me and two interns. I started consulting and I end up landing some really big clients in Miami, some very, really big restaurant groups and hotels, and then 2020 rolls around and everything was about to lose everything. So looking at this guy being like, You gave me this idea, now what do you want me to do?

You work in finance and you're all good. And here I am. I don't know what to do with myself. And he said to me, he said, You need to have faith in your abilities. I said, okay, fine. 2020 Miami is probably one of the first states that opens up in America. And. We start going back to work ground me June. I got an office space. I had faith in my abilities like you told me to, and I started building the business again. And you know, it's been three years, you know, we're coming into our third year now.

I really say the agency kind of started 2020 because 2019 we were kind of consulting. And three years on, you know, we're a team of like 12 people full time. We have now a smaller office in New York based in Miami. We're opening an office in Dubai. And, you know, we're all female, we're all human creative agency. So we do everything across the board from PR, marketing, strategic partnerships, influencer marketing, content creation and brand management. And we really are focused on my background originally used to be fashion and a lot of luxury lifestyle and hospitality.

I'm personally more focused on modern wellness, whether it's sleep talk, health talk, biohacking practitioners, brands, and then a lot of my other kind of VP and all that kind of work in design hospitality still in more of the luxury sector. So it's really cool your story because there's two things. One thing is you built a business around the things that you love, which is health and wellness, right? So you you are just in it all day, all night. And the reason why I think you're thriving and good at it is because you love it.

You truly love, and you want these companies to do well. And the second thing is, it could have been a very different outcome if you didn't take charge of your health, 100% say no and have the courage to say, I will go beyond the doctor's office and do this myself. Correct. You know, you could have today still been struggling somewhere. And like, who knows, you probably wouldn't have been working right now. Who knows how? Because to get this stuff progresses, right? Absolutely. And I was already really sick, by the way, because I was a very sick child.

I didn't even remember this part to give to me throughout my under ten. I was sick every other day and what my mother would do is blessed. They didn't know any better. They would keep on giving me antibiotics. Fragile, ciprofloxacin, fragile superoxide. If you look at the research and the data on this stuff, it's like my mitochondria. My gut was completely destroyed by the time I became a teenager. By the time I went into my twenties and thirties, I was like a ticking time bomb. Yeah. And it's all down to the fact that I was really sickly as a child.

I am in probably touch with the best health I've ever been in in my thirties. I'm about to turn 40 at this age of my life. Probably like the the fittest, happiest, healthiest I've ever been. And that it tells you how resilient the body is and like somebody should give up because you were literally poisoned as a child. Yet your immune system is in your gut. You destroyed it after, you know, years and years of antibiotics. So funny, the thing that's supposed to heal you actually slowly kills you and kills your system, but you bounce back and here you are, irrespective of what you went through as a youngster.

Yeah, you're in the best health of your life. So just, you know, people should know that however bad you feel, right? If it's not an innate genetic problem. Right. Your body is designed to heal. Yeah. And I also think, you know, people really don't realize that anxiety and depression and a lot of these like disorders that we kind of say, oh, it's it's just part of the family. It's just normal. It's not normal. I think you can really take like a handle on your mental health and your emotional health.

Part of my journey with functional medicine and biohacking and all the stuff I used to wake up in a state of like, Oh my God, like this. I'd wake up with stress. Like stress like this. Heavy weight on my chest the last 5 to 6 years. I wake up excited every morning. I'm so happy to be alive. I'm grateful no matter what the day throws me. I'm just grateful to be in that moment and I'm grateful for the journey. But that comes from me being in alignment with myself mentally and spiritually and physically to be able to see.

It's all about perception, right? I'm able to see the world in a different aspect, and I think that that comes down to people don't realize they're taking a lot of the anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, not realizing, let's start with little things, let's start with where your gut is. Are you eating the right foods? Are you deficient in anything? Are you are you taking enough minerals like little things that make such a difference? A traditional doctor doesn't focus on that stuff. You go in somewhere in there like, oh, you're clinically depressed, here you go, take this pill.

They don't focus on the why they think that is a big reason. When people don't focus on the why, when they're treating you

Building a wellness-focused agency and daily maintenance 31:00

and if you're or if you're starting a business or you're dealing with something, the why is everything. That is everything. That's the reason. That's the thing that you need to get rid of. So now you're you've you're done with repair. You're this new version of yourself that. Yeah. So what is your daily routine? Look like in terms of here's a supplements I take, here's the things I do. You know now you're like this at maintenance phase. What? What. Yeah so I normally like I sleep number one for me good quality of sleep I make sure I get to 6 to 8 hours of sleep and REM sleep like a decent amount, at least like my deep sleep.

At least I track it with or an eight sleep. I love sleep trackers, you know, you're talking about an hour and a half to about 2 hours of deep sleep. REM Around 2 hours. I try to track that in terms of supplementation so that we're very active on the go lifestyle. I've really gone down the path of, for example, a lot of drainage kind of stuff going on with me because I don't drain correctly. That's one thing I realized over the years. So I take a lot of self-care products that I absolutely love, believe it or not.

Funny story. Last year I felt that I was anemic, went to the guy and said, Hey, could you run? You know, can you check? I feel like I'm anemic. Went to a general practitioner. They said, No, you're not anymore. I showed my bloodwork to a functional practitioner. Is that I'm on you're anemic. You're definitely neck. And it turns out I had parasites because I have four dogs and started a parasite protocol. And again this brings me back to you go to these people. Their rangers are basically meant for sick people.

So me being on average kind of borderline anemic didn't make a difference to them. But because I'm a high functioning individual, I normally have a lot of energy. Me being even less anemic made a difference to me. And so when you go to practice, you type your kind of boundaries on that stuff. And they tested me. They're like, No, you're definitely anemic. So Parasite protocol is very much a part of kind of what I'm doing right now. A lot of detoxing, a lot of parasites changing my my water quality.

Tap water in America is the most terrible thing for you. So drinking high quality water and vitamin D is a staple in my everyday routine. Because I'm vitamin D deficient, I really need to kind of have the additional vitamin D to maintain my levels. Yeah. And what you said about blood work is so true. That's one of the first eye openers for someone who transitions from pathway into functional medicine. Correct. That they realize how broken their training is and they have to relearn everything. You know, it's not there's no here is this line.

And if you're on this side line, you're sick. And if you're on this line, like, how how is it possible that it works that way? Right. It just blows my mind. And I think a big part of my agency, I'd say the reason I'm so passionate about modern wellness is because I want to give people the ability to of choice and to not live in fear. So standing behind brands and founders who are like yourself and other brands that really want to build confidence back in people, give them their health back, bring bring real community to the surface, bring real hard conversations to the service and help people heal is really what drives me and is really a purpose of mine is to connect the dots for those people.

Yeah. So what haven't you tried yet that you're going to be working on? What are the biomarkers that you wish you could do? I really want to do I was in therapy, so I want to own my entire kind of blood and find time to do that. So I was on therapy is definitely something I want to look into and I haven't done yet. I haven't experimented yet with Exosomes. I'm waiting a little bit. They said, you know, you're a lot younger, doing fine, so I'm going to wait a little bit for that. And stem cells. Yeah, okay.

And it's unfortunate. It's hard to do in the USA not far. You're in Miami, you just hop over to Costa Rica and you can. Get the thing or Mexico. That's what I'm going to do. So that stuff that I really want to start getting into, it's like I think nowadays what I've really learned is aging is an option and how you age is an option and how you get sick is an option. So rather than treating yourself when you're sick, start treating yourself ahead of time and start looking at the little nuances in your health.

There are always signs. Your body's always giving you signs and triggers, right? Serving attention to those so you never get to that point that a 55 year deal being your first chronic disease at 60 or developing your second in my 70 or 50 years of treatment, you have an option now. There's enough education, enough data, there's enough research, and there are some good people out there who want to help you. You know. And that is what people need to start looking at. And I think the only thing that stops people as start to look at costs like, oh, my insurance doesn't cover this.

And in it just you have to choose. It's either cost now or it's cost and giving up your life savings because you're going to be paying for hospital bills for a lot more money. You know. I always tell people have a few less fancy meals. Cut back and cut back. You know, I don't drink. So but a lot of people are so heavy drinkers, I'm like, cut back on how much alcohol you're consuming. Cut down on these expensive dinners. You're going out, too, and put that money away into working with a functional partnership.

And by the way, there are very there are a lot of folks, in fact, designers out there who are very cost effective as well. I have friends who are registered dietitians and nutritionists and stuff and they are great baseline to start with. So you don't have to jump to peptides right away because they can be a bit more expensive. But you can start with really great supplementation, functional blood work panels that are like three, four or $500. And a lot of that, by the way, good insurance covers those panels.

Oh, really? I have an insurance. Yeah. I've always done all my functional blood work under my insurance. Always. Well, the max I paid is like $50 or $80. And I'm telling you, multiple labs are run through insurance. Oh, that's good. Yeah, because a lot of people don't even think about that. When you're working with a functional practitioner, you often think that everything you're doing is outside of that world. But that's when I can. Go to them and say, Listen, I have insurance. I'm going to keep costs down.

They're like, okay, let's in in America, all across America, you have Quest, which is a really well-known big lab. It's well-organized. And a lot of these doctors will give you a script for that, and you take it there. And that's said. Hmm. Okay. Well, we hope that day will come for peptides and stem cells and everything else. So actually, you know. I'm really looking forward to, you know, and I think there's a big movement. I think as people are getting more conscious about their way, they're living their lives on any level, whether it's how they interact with people, how they're living in community, how they're taking care of their personal health.

I think there is going to be a shift more towards wanting more of that in your day to day. And I'm hoping that insurance companies move towards that. Yeah. Or somebody comes up with an amazing insurance company that does cover that and we all migrate towards there. Let's do it. Let's build it together. Right. That that would be amazing thing. We're all needs that.

Future therapies, prevention, and closing remarks 37:30

So before we go first, I want to thank you for taking the time. I know how busy you are and this is really inspiring because it's the true. You're saying we're showing people that the option is real, right? The option, yeah. You can decide if you are going to be sick or not. When it comes to chronic illness and you made choices and here you are. Right? So proof is in the pudding. You're sitting in front of us showing us that you did it. Anybody can do it. Right. But before we go, are you open to if people want to connect with you just to learn more about what you're doing or hear your story or where do they find you on social media so.

They can find an Instagram? It's @Iman__Hasan They can find me on Instagram. They can also email me. We have our website linked up in the in our in our page as well. My Instagram has the website. They can contact me from there. I'm very communicative. People do me all the time. I have multiple conversations with people all the time. So I'm approachable. Yeah, I can promise you that when the conversation starts, I won't end. You know, I. It's like our before our dinner. Yeah. And getting. All right. Well, thank you so much. This is awesome.

And thank you for being open and sharing your story. You know, it's not easy for a lot of people do that, but it inspires and it shows everybody what's possible. So thank you. And I appreciate you giving me the platform of inviting me on this to allow other women, especially South Asian women. Yes, there is so much with our health which is unique to us that we need to start paying attention to. And so much of what we're told growing up that we can change. And I really hope if there are any South Asian women, women from our part of the world, I say watching this, they take into consideration that they really can champion their own lives and they can really be their own heroes if they allow themselves to be.

You're amazing. Thank you. So much. Take care Kashif.