The EnergyMD Method to Increase Your Energy Naturally

Introduction to Energy MD 0:00

So there aren't too many doctors we get to speak to that have a superhero title. Doctor Evan Hirsch is the energy MD. Or do you have a cape with that on it? I know, I gotta get one. You gotta give me a hand because it's actually awesome. Because of for what you deal with. First of all, people are going to love what they're going to learn. In this talk. Because everyone says I have this problem. I have this problem this year, I will say, well, what does that do for you? Well, I have no energy, right?

And often people don't realize that itself is the problem. Right. As opposed to this co-factor. And yeah, there might be multiple things. The reality of how we live and what's going on. Everybody has multiple things. Unless you are really, truly taking care of yourself and the current context of how we live. Otherwise, energy in itself, can be a problem. First of all, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. How does somebody even know that, you know, fibromyalgia? I can't sleep at night. You know, stress.

Root, you know, an outcome of that is. Or poor energy or the energy itself is the problem. So, you know, as humans, we're incredibly adaptable. You know, we kind of, we start off down this path. We're doing physical education every day. And like, elementary school, middle school. Maybe we're playing some sports in high school. And then you hit college and things start to slow down, you know, on the weekends. If you go dancing, it's like the most movement that you've gotten all week. Right. And then slowly and then you start consuming more toxins as things go on.

And then eventually you're tired. Right. And whether it's because you're having a hard time sleeping or whether you're getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night and then you're crashing throughout the day, or maybe you feel like, yeah, I'm fine as long as I just consume caffeine all day. Right, right. There's a problem. And whether you're having a hard time sleeping or whether you've got low energy, the body is giving you a sign, right? And that's all these symptoms are. Is there a sign, a wake up sign, you know, to say, hey, there's there's something that you've got to pay attention to.

And so, you know, generally people just think that they're getting older. But the reality of the situation is if your energy is not where you want it to be, it's there's a problem that needs to be fixed. And the reason and the thing is, is that all these causes of fatigue that we're talking about today and low energy are also the causes of diseases of longevity. So whether you're you're you want to prevent heart attacks, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, cancer, autoimmune conditions like all the causes are the same.

And so that's why you need to pay attention. When your energy starts to flag that, it's time to do something about it. Yeah, because you see people at different ages with different energy levels. So people into their 80s or 90s now today riding their bicycle with the vibrancy of

Why Low Energy Is a Warning Sign 2:50

when they were 25 years old, they made different choices, perhaps, than people who don't feel that way. So what are those things? What are those causes that allows that person to thrive the way they are? Well, and it's always this combination of genetics plus environment, right. So it's kind of like, you know, genetics as you know, you know, loads the gun and the environment pulls the trigger. Right. So when we're looking at these causes, besides the genetics in terms of the, the other causes, I like to categorize them into deficiencies and toxicity.

So deficiencies are things that are not in the body or in your life that are supposed to be and toxicities or things that are in your body or in your life that aren't supposed to be. So when we look at the deficiencies, these are deficiencies in hormones. So whether that's adrenal gland dysfunction or thyroid or sex hormones, mitochondrial dysfunction, which is responsible for producing 70 to 90% of our energy and are found in every cell in the body except for red blood cells, whether it's vitamins or mineral deficiencies, whether it's neurotransmitter deficiencies or whether it's lifestyle habit deficiencies like not enough good food, not enough water, not enough movement, not enough sleep.

So those are the deficiencies. Any questions on those before I move in? Well, I was just thinking that, you know, when there's there's a lot and every single one makes sense. How does somebody know where to start? Is it just auditing themselves. You know. So cool thing is that 75% of these causes that we're talking about today in these, these 12 big categories, 75% of them can be determined by symptoms alone, right? So when we have people join our program or even right now, we've got our step. One of our four step process is actually free on our website.

You they can go in there. They can work through in an hour and they can know 75% of their of their causes just based off of their symptoms. And then you can actually use your money appropriately to get the lab tests that you really need. Right? Okay. That's cool. Okay. So there's many toxicities we're looking at or things like heavy metals, you know, 100,000 pounds of mercury are dumped into our oceans every year from coal plants. You know, so many of us have are walking around with mercury fillings.

You know, 80% of all conventional lipsticks have lead in them. You know, there's lots of lead and all of these older homes then chemicals, you know, 86,000 different chemicals were exposed to on a regular basis, 500 chemicals before you walk out of the house in the morning, if you're if you're commuting. But it just has to do with all the soaps and the plastics and all these things that we're exposed to. You know, one study, they found that babies coming out of the womb in the cord blood 287 different chemicals.

Right. We're coming out of the womb now, what with all of these chemicals. It's awful, you know. And so then and then molds are another toxin that we see a lot of where, you know, half of all the buildings in first world countries have water damage, and most of those have mold. And most people don't think that they, you know, they might be listening to this like, nah, I don't have mold. I can tell you, you know, so many people that we see don't think that they have mold. But in fact, if they lived in a place that ever had a flood, a busted pipe, a roof leak in a home, or in a building that they worked or lived in, then for a significant amount of time, you know, a couple months to a couple of years, that can be, significant enough where you can move on to another house, but you're going to take that mold with you even if you've been exposed when you were five years old for six months.

So and that's just the accumulation of these over time. So that's heavy metals, chemicals, molds and then infections. You know, whether it's Lyme disease, Bartonella, bubka, some of these other co-infections like Epstein-Barr virus, the new pandemic virus, HBV six viruses, cytomegalovirus, parasites, bacteria, yeast, a lot of different infections that come out to play when you've got heavy metals, chemicals or molds that basically hijack the immune system. So then these infections come out and they start taking over and they start becoming opportunistic.

And then a lot of the symptoms that people are experiencing, they don't realize. And we'll get more into this later. They don't realize that some of these could actually be coming from

Main Causes of Fatigue and Disease 7:00

an infection. You know, the foot pain that they've got or the back pain they've got or the headaches that they've got. So that's heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections. And then there's allergies to foods and inhalants. There's negative emotional patterns. So you know something called ACS that people may be familiar with adverse childhood events. Or I like to call them adverse life events. Because if at any point in your life you've had mental, emotional stress, that has changed the way that you look at the world, that stress is then become chronic and consequently that will end up compromising your adrenals and your mitochondria and all these other in your immune system.

And that just contributes to all these things. And then the last one is electromagnetic field. So anything that you plug into a wall that has a battery that it can emit, wavelengths or frequencies, can damage DNA and affect negatively affect the immune system and increase inflammation. You know, and the interesting thing about what you're saying is if you talk to, say, a functional medicine doctor who truly reverses disease, you know, heals people as opposed to treating ongoing, you'll hear a lot of the same stuff, right, in terms of here's what you're designed for and here's how you actually live.

There's some disparity and gap that needs to be worked on, and nobody has reinterpreted for the purpose of your energy levels, which is the work you've done. You've said that this is also, by the way, affecting this. And we need we can use these same tools, same auditing, same removing and adding, you know, whether it's like you said, function versus load. To heal your energy levels. Right. So then for for most people that are working on their energy, at least we find and I don't know if you see the same, that it's usually a struggle.

Like it's it's not like there's a, there's a flip that gets switched so that there's a challenge of and often they get stuck or they get stuck in a certain place and like this is the reality of who I am and this is how much energy I have. So why is there that sort of a difficulty in getting them to a better place? Yeah. So there's 12 different causes that we've kind of talked about today. And then if you take it down to some causes it becomes 33. So we're just going to talk about the 12. Right. But the challenge is that everybody has different causes and everybody has a combination of causes.

Right. So you know somebody may have causes 246, eight and ten and somebody else might have causes three, five, seven, nine, whatever. Right. So it's just really important for people to determine which causes they have. Because if you don't know which causes you have, then you're shooting in the dark and you may be like, oh, you know, so-and-so got better taking b B12. And so I'm going to start taking B12 and then you don't feel anything, right. The other thing, too, is because there are so many causes and everybody has a combination of these causes, is that it's this mass effect where you may not feel anything if you pull out the gluten now.

So if we if we think about all these causes and let's say you have, you know, 20 nails in the bottom of your foot and each one of those is a cause, and you pull out the gluten now you don't notice anything. You'd be like, yeah, that whole gluten thing is, you know, whatever. You know, you you pull out the B12 nail, you know, because you started taking B12 and that B12 nails, you know? But the reality is, is that you've got to get this Mass Effect. You have to be fixing and working on all of these causes at a time in order for the body to work better, in order for you to start to remove the toxins and replace these deficiencies.

That makes a lot of sense, because even if you are working on something, that is absolutely what you need to work on, like you said, it's probably one of many things. You know, there's probably multiple spokes that lead to your problem. So then that takes us to, I guess, to the work you do. Because really, what you're saying is in the very beginning of this is even asking the right questions to begin with, getting rid of that trial and error. Right? Here's how you fix your energy. That whatever that is, is probably not going to work.

Right. It it's probably more to it than here is. There's one simple answer. So whether it's a supplement or thing multifactorial, always just like any chronic disease autoimmune condition that you just can't figure out, it's because there's no one single sole source, you know, especially again, if you go back to and consider what you said about how the reality of, you know what, the way we live. So you've done this work and you've worked with many people. You've written a book about it. I can see it behind you. Right.

So what are those that you mentioned earlier? There's like a four step process you go through. So what is that? Because that's that thing that takes you away from this trial and error. I'm going to go watch some YouTube videos and hopefully I figure this out to a precise strategy. So what is that exactly. So that's called the energy MD method that I've been working on for the last decade. And it is a four step process. And the first step is to find the causes. You know, that's really big picture.

And that's the take home for everybody who's watching right now. So you got to figure out which causes you have. Right. And like I said in step one you can work through the workbook. And within an hour or so you're going to know 75% of your causes just based off of your symptoms. And hopefully people can see how powerful that is. And then you can take that and then you can figure out the treatment. So if you just simplify it, you know, you figure out what cause you have, and then you figure out what treatment is actually going to fix that, cause you go ahead and you plug that hole.

So in step two, and I should say big picture is that this process is really all about step four and removing the toxins, the heavy metals, the chemicals, the molds, the infections, etc. all that stuff is most important. However, we can't do that until we get to step four. Step two is replacing those deficiencies that we talked about. The adrenals, the mitochondria, the thyroid, the neurotransmitters, the vitamins and minerals, all that sort of stuff is going to make you stronger. It's going to enable you to then complete the program, because removing the toxins and stuff for is stressful.

It's just a reality. A lot of people, if they've seen like a Lyme doc or a mole doc or whatever, oftentimes they're feeling worse. And the reason why they're feeling worse is because they haven't done step two first and they haven't done step three. And so step two is we've got to boost these deficiencies that people have, in order to make them feel better, in order to kind of plug those holes and stop the leaking. Then in step three we have to open up these detoxification pathways. So detoxification is a buzzword.

But in actual medicine there are official detoxification pathways in the liver in the kidney, in the lymph, in the neural lymph which is in the brain. And the more toxins that you have been exposed to throughout your life, the more clogged these pathways are going to be. Right? And so the way that I like to look at this is like a funnel. So it's like you're changing your oil, you get like a funnel. And so if you look at the bottom of the funnel, if it's narrow and you try to start to detoxify and take some of these heavy metals and chemicals and dump them into these pathways, you're not going to be successful. Yeah.

So in step three we open up the bottom of the funnel. And basically your success is going to be determined by the rate at which you can get rid of these toxins. So it's kind of like you want to dump the amount of toxins that you can. Then you can get rid of out of the body in one smooth process. Otherwise you're going to feel worse going through that process. So body loves small changes.

How to Identify Your Root Causes 14:20

Slow and steady wins the race or things that we talk about all the time. And this is just another example of that. Yeah that's brilliant. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say and then and then. So step four is removing the toxins, the heavy metals, the chemicals, the molds and the infections. And this is where you spend most of your time, like the first couple of steps. It's going to take you a couple months, 2 or 3 months in order to introduce the supplements. And then and I'm an MD, but I operate online only.

And so I operate as a health coach in the online space. So everything that I'm doing is natural. It's supplements, vitamins, minerals, lifestyle, that sort of thing. And so but then in step four, that's really where it's going to take you six months, 12 months, 24 months, depending on the number of causes you have and the severity of each of those causes. And it just, you know, that just really depends on the individual. And what people have to appreciate is that they come to somebody like you, right?

And they're told this part takes a month. This phase takes two months. This phase takes six months. Like what? Why is it you did ten years of damage to cause where you're at, right to that. The threshold that you crossed a long time ago. Which is why you can't stay awake past 3 p.m.. So if it took you ten years of toxic exposure and we can get rid of it in six months, that sounds like a blessing to me. Yeah. And that's and that's a really good point. And, you know, now that we know that so many toxins were getting through the womb and the placenta and whatnot, you know, it's it's 30, 40, 50, 60 years that we've had these exposures, growing up.

But yeah, it's a it's a small exchange, but it's really hard for people to think about, hey, I trade one year of my life or actually just like it's essentially like doing an MBA in your health or not MBA, a master's degree in your health. And so you dedicate a year of your time to do this. You're going to feel so much better. And then you have the rest of your life. It was like when I was going into residency, I came out of medical school. I knew what I wanted to do. I didn't want to do conventional medicine, but I was like, you know what I do these three years?

I see thousands of patients. I'm going to have so much more knowledge. And I'm really glad that I did, because it's like it's like a drop in terms of, you know, the 9100 years that I'm going to live these three years, but it allows me to do so much more in my career. And it's just the same thing, you know, you mentioned the fact in the beginning about the number of chemicals. It was almost 300 found in newborns today, which is totally disturbing to even think that that's possible. But it makes perfect sense if you think about, you know, the way that the parent was living for the last sort of generation.

Are you finding that patients are coming to you younger and younger now because of the exposure? Absolutely. And now, especially with the pandemic virus and, and some of the complications of a number of the things that have been going on the last couple of years. Yeah, we're just seeing a lot more inflammation from a lot more toxins. And you know, with with something like long haulers from the pandemic virus, we're seeing, it's just a different infection. But it's the same sort of process, you know.

So you got to look at all these different causes because these are all these causes. They set the stage. Immune system is dysfunctional. All of it. All of a sudden you get the virus and then things take off because the immune system can't take care of. And that's why we're seeing 30%, 40%, 50% in some studies of people who get the virus, who end up with long haulers or persistent symptoms. So how does somebody know that they have versus anything else that they have a chronic infection? And that's what's driving what they feel.

It's so it's it's hard to know in some ways. I mean, when it comes to long haulers or the pandemic virus, a lot of it has to do with the chronology. So, you know, if you've gotten if you got a new diagnosis of something or got weird symptoms or new symptoms since November 2019, it definitely has to be taken into account. There was one study that was done on 265,000 people who had the virus, and then six months later, they were, they were reassessed and 33 or 35% of them had a new mental health diagnosis.

Wow. Anxiety, depression or bipolar, right? We now know that 200 plus symptoms can be due to the pandemic virus.

The Energy MD Four-Step Method 18:40

These symptoms can persist. So a lot of people now, young people who had like palpitations and they're like, I got this one, I got the virus right. Or or headaches or abdominal pain. You know, there's just it's just amazing. So but a lot of this you can determine by your symptoms. So coming back to your original question, when we're looking at some of these infections, you know, even the CDC, the centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, when they're talking about Lyme, they'll say that it's a clinical diagnosis, that the Western blot test and that Eliza, these blood tests are actually for epidemiologic studies only.

And so when we look at these as clinical diagnoses, for example, we can put together a picture based off of some of the symptoms that are more specific for a particular infection. So if we look at Borrelia, which is also known as Lyme, you really can't have it unless you have two symptoms. You have to have symptoms that come and go where some days are better than others. And then you also have to have symptoms that move around the body. So this could be joint pain, muscle pain, nerve pain that one day is in like the left elbow.

And then the next day the next week, the next month is in the right ankle. Right. If you don't have those you can't have Borrelia. Go ahead. Just listening to you talk about Lyme, it just reminds me in the, in some of the research we've done around the genetics of Lyme and why people have different outcomes, we found, particularly in women that have some form of estrogen toxicity. In fact, forget about Lyme, they're often misdiagnosed and don't even have it. So do you find the same thing that, the impact of our current reality and what's happening in the body is a bigger load on women than it is on men?

Absolutely. Well, and yes, I have a chapter on my book, Why Men Don't Believe Women when it comes to molds right now. And we can talk about the genetics of that, you know, but that's that's kind of what we're seeing. And women are also more likely to ask for help, which is why we also see more women reaching out. But yeah, absolutely. And you would know the genetics better than I on a lot of why that is the case, but for sure. Yeah, it's it's funny because we see this in a lot of, a lot of what is solved in functional medicine, you know, and a lot of it has to do with, well, we're solving the wrong problem.

This is the beauty of what you do. You do a deep audit before you even start on what's the solution to. Let's figure out the problem first. And for some women it is their estrogen dominance or their estrogen toxicity, which is a cool factor to this other inflammatory load. And men don't have that cool factor to deal with. Some men are estrogen dominant, but even then the levels are very low compared to what a woman has to deal with. And that leads me to other thinking on other cool factors. And have you done much work around things like neurochemicals and stress?

And you know what the current reality of how we live and how that may lead to your energy levels being off? Absolutely. So, you know, one of the things that we focus on a lot in the program is that we have a mindset curriculum, and we create a daily energy mindset with everybody who goes through our program. And then we also have these, emotional intelligence coaches or trauma informed coaches to change the way that we are associating with some of the discomfort in our body and just improve our emotional intelligence.

Because what we're seeing is that, yes, the increase in chronic stress, whether it's from whether it's mental, emotional or physical, like all these toxins are going to cause dysfunction in the adrenal gland and all the other aspects of the body that regulate stress, and consequently that ends up negatively affecting the immune system and your detoxification pathways. And then you end up with whatever symptoms you end up with. And in our case, the people that we see, it's it's energy deficiency.

It's it's, all these weird symptoms that they get from these infections, like some of the ones I mentioned from, really. Or it could be pain on the bottom of the feet, or it can be spontaneous sweating or whatever. So, you know, when I think about the work you're doing and I'm picturing the patient, it's probably somebody that wants to be optimal and wants more and better. But if you think about the reality of the United States today, I think I heard the other day it's 88% of people are metabolically unhealthy that don't really care about what they eat and don't really think that it's a problem, and believe that the way they are and the way they feel is just how they are and how they feel.

So how do you get through to the people that aren't seeking your help and saying that? I think this is fixable, but they believe that this is just normal and that's why they're, you know, metabolically unhealthy. I think that it really has to do with how bad the pain is. If the if the pain isn't bad, if they're like, well, this is my life and this is how it is. And they don't realize what they're missing out on. Like, they can't get off the couch to play with their kid or their grandkid, or go for a date with their spouse because they're too tired or travel, you know, but if they're okay with it and acceptance and gratitude for where you're at and it's an amazing thing, then they're not going to make a change, right?

They've got to the pain has to be really bad where they're they need to make a change or they realize all the things that they're missing out on that day, that they want to make that change. And so that's why, you know, so many of the people that we're working with are leaders in their communities and their families and their businesses and their governments because they want to take their lives to the next level. They know that the world needs them. They know that their kids need them, you know, and so and they have a bigger mission.

But it's really hard with, with people who don't have that kind of purpose. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because that community piece, I mean, everybody knows this. You're the some of the five closest people around you. So if you are in a community where everybody thinks the norm is, after I eat dinner, I can't get off the couch because what I eat was garbage. And this is normal energy levels for me. Maybe you're not going to seek help, because that pain level is what you're supposed to feel, right versus being amongst vibrant and thriving people and say, why can't I be like that person, you know, elevating the goal.

So and that may be part of healing is understanding that maybe your goal can be bigger. You know, you can aim for more iteratively, right. Step by step. Get there. These kind of tiny habits that people like doctor B.J. Fogg talk about. Right. So the there's something that you talk about, which is people come to you after they've been failed by whatever doctor or clinician, you know, because it's a unique perspective. You have so they kind of need your specialized focus and, you know, direction. So what are the what are the reasons that these people are sort of failing when they're working with these other people? And then they have to come to you.

So a lot of it has to do with those 12 different causes and the, the lack of knowledge around the fact that people have this combination. So unfortunately, most of the, you know, conventional, natural,

Toxins, Infections, and Chronic Illness 25:40

integrative and even functional medicine docs are really great at the deficiencies. Like they can boost your adrenals, they can take care of your mitochondria, they can give you bioidentical sex hormones if you need those. They can boost your neurotransmitters. But the challenge is, is that not enough of them are understanding around the environmental toxicities. So if they are knowledgeable in heavy metals, that's great. But most of the time they're not knowledgeable. And heavy metals and chemicals and molds and infections, you know, and a lot of the Lyme docs maybe they're not going to touch molds.

You know, or vice versa. Right. You know. And if they are a do they are are they also addressing negative emotional patterns. You know, do they have, emotional intelligence, trauma informed coaches on their staff, you know, so it's kind of like you can pull out all the causes, you know, those nails in the bottom of the foot that we talked about. But if you're pulling out half of them, it still hurts when you walk like you're going to hit a plateau. Yeah. And so it's just about making sure. And coming back to step one. Right.

It's just about making sure that you're addressing all of the causes that you have. So you leave no stone unturned. So you know that your likelihood of success is so much higher. This it sounds like even functional medicine is evolving into what medicine is, where things get siloed, which which which is the natural progression. Because as you specialize and this is what I'm good at, and then more people come to you for that thing, and this is all I do now. Right then there's the mole doctor, the breast cancer doctor.

Even though your functional nature, you end up solving one problem. So yeah, that's a greater community problem that really should be spoken of. Because what we don't want to happen is this beautiful promise of functional medicine gets broken because everyone gets so siloed and, you know, not sort of a great general like yourself that can look at all factors, right. So hopefully we don't lose that. Yeah, I totally agree. But the challenge is, is that these environmental toxins are really complicated.

And each one of them is very complicated. And then and then getting them all together and kind of the relationship that they have in context and especially the infections, infections are just such a huge part of what we do. And it's and it's it doesn't have a lot of awareness around it. Until now, we're starting to see with long haulers there's more awareness around, like what this one infection. We now know we're getting so much research about it. You know, that can cause 200 plus different symptoms in the body.

It's just starting to blow people's mind. You know, there's research from back in like, I think it's the 60s on schizophrenia where people took Doxy Cycling, which is an antibiotic, and they saw a 60% decrease in their symptoms. And then they went off with the antibiotic and the symptoms came back. Now, I'm not advocating for antibiotics, but it's just another example of how many of these diseases that we're walking around with are associated with an infection. You know, when you look at cancer, every single cancer has been found with an infection inside it.

Now, is that causal? I don't know. Did the infection caused that cancer? I don't know, but I do know that there is this relationship that we're seeing everywhere. And we're knowing that, you know, it's no longer I think we used to think it was like in this human form where 10% human cells and 90% bug cells, I think it's now we're 40% human cells and 60% bug cells. So there so we're catching up to them. Not really. It's just new research. But having that sort of understanding around how we have this symbiosis and how much of a role these infections are playing in our lives and how we have to keep them in check and maintain that relationship between the immune system and that and cultivating that symbiosis is so important.

So how does somebody like yourself do what we're saying that the functional medicine needs to do? Like how did you get this sort of worldly knowledge and that this breadth of knowledge from end to end, it's just figure it's being curious and it's figuring out the holes. So, you know, doctors are just like anybody else. You get comfortable in your wheelhouse. Right. And I'm definitely guilty of this as well. You know. So pushing myself and being like, okay, what's the next thing that I have to learn?

What am I missing about? You know, they say, you know, by your patients and by your clients, you'll be taught because people will bring this to me. What do you think about that? I'd be like, I don't know. Let's go figure it out. Let's see whether it's something that's applicable. Let's and let's give people the biggest bang for the buck to make the biggest shifts in their lives. That's awesome. I know that. So you do do directly work with patients. I know you do a lot of advocacy and your books are out there teaching people.

So how does somebody listening and say that this is wow. This is what I've been waiting for. How do I how do I work with you so they can come join us at energy for leaders.com. We have a free Facebook group, called the energy MD Facebook Group. A lot of the stuff also we're we're migrating away from fixture fatigue and into energy. MD so that's relatively new branding for us. So they may see fixture fatigue in different places, but you can reach out and get on a free call with us to see whether or not we're a good fit to work together.

We do have you can click on the work with Us tab and you can see what we have to offer right now. We do have step one of the program for $0 so people can jump in there and just based off of their symptoms, in an hour or so, they're going to know 75% of their causes. And then whether they work with us or not, they're going to be so much more ready for that next step in the process to resolve their their issues. That's really cool. One one question for you. I've been thinking, like, everything we've been talking about has been more the sort of the typical functional medicine clients like that person that isn't maybe sick, but, again, the energy just isn't where it should be.

Then there's a person who we haven't spoken of yet, which is, you know, in clinic, therapeutically being treated for something. Maybe it's cancer, maybe it's call it Alzheimer's, who knows what it is. But they have a chronic disease. And the outcome of that is low energy. Can that person get help? Yes. And it depends on the amount of damage. Like if the cancer if that person also had chemotherapy, you know, and they damaged organs or you know, whatever to an appreciable degree, it definitely makes it harder.

But you bring up a very good point, because all of these causes that we're looking at are also all the causes of every other illness out there, right? You know, this is kind of like a complete functional medicine, environmental medicine, integral medicine paradigm, you know, so that, you know, because it's the same these are all the toxins we're exposed to. It's the same causes, but they're just the effect of these toxins and of these causes on the body are just manifesting in different ways in the body.

Yeah. And this is as you've been talking, I've been thinking the same thing that if someone were to go through, say, beginning to end a program with you, it's kind of like, okay, I came to you for my energy, but there's 3 or 4 of the things I didn't even know I was going to fix, because if you get the system firing properly, all those folks kind of go away anyway. And have you had outcomes like that or, you know, kind of success stories where, hey, guess what? This is also gone. Absolutely. Well.

And what ends up happening in the process is, you know, we replace those deficiencies that we talked about, but then once we get rid of the toxins, you have to wean off of the the things that you've been using to replace the deficiencies. Because those are Band-Aids, they're natural Band-Aids.

Why Women Often Carry a Higher Load 33:00

But boosting the adrenals, the mitochondria, thyroid, all these things, they're that we're using their natural but they're still Band-Aids. So but when we get once we get rid of the toxins and the adrenals come back on board and they don't have the chronic stressors, mitochondria is back on board. The thyroid is back on board. Then you don't need as much if any of those supplements. And one of my favorite things to do is to reverse thyroid disease, because thyroid really is this combination of low thyroid resulting from autoimmunity to the thyroid.

And autoimmunity is just reaction of the immune system to a toxin in the body, causing inflammation. So you get rid of the toxin, immune system stops attacking the thyroid, thyroid comes back online, and then all of a sudden people like, oh my gosh, I'm hypothyroid. I've got all these symptoms of too much thyroid. And it's like, oh, it's because we need to wean you down right off of the thyroid you're currently taking because you don't need it anymore, because the thyroid is is now a lot more functional.

And what do you think of people that are, living the stimulant lifestyle, meaning like I go to the gym regularly and I see people scooping their pre-workout into their mouth, and I see, like, I can't go to the gym without my coffee. So is that, a need or is that a mask? And if you're masking things, are you is there damage being done that you don't know about? Absolutely. So they're just wiping the adrenal gland with those things, whether it's caffeine or some of those pre-workout concoctions, is that unfortunately they're they they are a bandaid.

And they are going to work for a period of time until they don't, you know, you're going to get to those people are going to get to a point where they can't function without the caffeine, and so they're going to keep ratcheting up the caffeine, and then the caffeine no longer works. And then they have to go to a different stimulant or whatever because they're not addressing the causes. Which are these things that we've talked about today and they won't get success until they address them. So what's going to happen to this entire pre-workout generation that, you know, well, the thing is, is that they're not going to blame it on that because they're just going to end up being that 50 year old who's too tired to do anything.

And they just think it's them getting older. Unfortunately, there there's not that awareness. Unfortunately, our FDA is doing us a disservice by not putting things out there. So people have this understanding around, hey, these are things you have to look for. These are things that are actually problematic. This is actually how the body works. These are the things you should be avoiding. So unfortunately, now is just, as you said, commonplace to end up on the couch next to somebody and be like, I'm tired.

What about you? Yeah. I'm tired. Let's just watch TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So you're coming from a place where I need a little bit more energy, so I have a better outcome. And you put your adrenals through so much hell that your natural state is far less energy than default. What it should be. Exactly. That is the consequence. Wow. And how long does that take? That's a good question. You know, it's different for everybody, you know, based off of their genetics and how they process caffeine. Right.

But and it depends on the number of other toxins that they have in their body. So that's kind of the big thing too, is that, you know, if if somebody came out of the womb with 300 different chemicals and then they were fed, a lot of tuna fish growing up like I was. So they got a lot of mercury, a lot of, cheese sandwiches and gluten. So I got a lot of dairy and Casey or I, dairy and gluten. And then maybe you lived in a moldy environment, and then maybe you, you had some sort of exposure to plastics, hot plastics in the summer and just drinking out of those water bottles, you know, and then you're also living this sort of, you know, pre-workout lifestyle, and you're and you're doing her MREs, which is wonderful in one part where you're basically stressing out the human body to make more muscle and to make yourself stronger, but it's still stressing the body, right?

You have these other stressors. Then at some point, those stressors overwhelm the body and you get symptoms or you're you're hijacking the immune system, and then all of a sudden some infection which has been transported, most likely from mom through the placenta, all of a sudden becomes opportunistic when you have a breakup or you have like, let's say, a car accident or something like that, and you end up in chronic pain, not necessarily because of the accident itself, but because you allowed an infection to come out that ends up causing chronic pain in the body or other weird symptoms.

So for someone listening today, that's like, oh, wow, I made a big mistake.

Stimulants, Adrenals, and Daily Energy Hacks 37:20

I would only work out for three years. Is there a test that I can go do to check their adrenal levels and see where they're at? There is. But adrenals is actually one of those things where you can tell it, tell the function based off of your symptoms. Now, you know, you have to be off of caffeine and any sort of stimulant in order to be able to determine this. But, you know, one of the biggest ones is people going from a sitting to a standing position and getting lightheaded. Right. The adrenal gland is responsible for producing aldosterone, which regulates our our salt balance.

And they cause the reabsorption of salt from the kidneys so that you don't lose your salt. And that increases the pressure inside the blood vessels and increases the flow to the brain when you stand up. And that's called orthostatic hypotension or low blood pressure. When you stand up for pots. Pots is one way that people are looking at it and describing it these days. So that's, that's that's Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I, I do know that when I think about I don't drink coffee, I never have, not because of any good reason other than I never understood it, you know, it was hot and it tasted bad.

So good I couldn't be. But. Yeah, but I there's people that I work with that they can't function without it. So is there something that they can replace it with that doesn't create the load on the system? Absolutely. So, you know, one of the things and I actually I did this when I, when I entered residency because I started learning more about this, where I went from all the caffeine that I was drinking in medical school to just staying really hydrated. Right. And so if you stay hydrated where you're drinking around two and a half to three liters a day, I mean, there's calculations that you can do, but most people need about that amount.

And you're putting, sea salt to taste in this water. Because that's, that's one of the ways that you can really support the adrenals. And I didn't go into all the symptoms I just talked about, you know, the that lightheadedness orthostatic. But we can do that if you want to. But that can really help people, have better energy during the day, better for better focus. Consequently, that would end up leading to better sleep, less crashes throughout the day. Lots of benefits. That's interesting because I had a friend that produces a supplement of all things for pickleball players.

So he specializes in supporting the sort of, you know, performance of pickleball players. And he sent me an adrenal product, and I tried it and it was salty. And I thought there was something wrong with it. But you're saying that that's one of the key elements that will drive, adrenal function. Absolutely. So, you know, it takes the burden off the adrenal. So if adrenals are producing aldosterone, aldosterone is not reabsorb. And the salt from the kidneys, you're peeing out, salt. Right. You know, and, reminds me of what you said when we were off camera where you, you well, you said you don't urinate.

Yeah. You drink a lot of water, you don't urinate. And so there could be a salt salt balance issue there. Right. But when you have, when you're taking the salt that ends up changing the osmotic gradient, it increases the salt inside the blood vessel. Consequently pulling water in there increases your blood pressure so that it can go to your head. And the other parts of the body and the adrenal gland can actually take a break. So that's the way that it works. What's very interesting, the, the other area where I see people sort of tripping up is when it comes to school and sleep, you know, even work and sleep, you know, people have to struggle and study all night.

Obviously if you're not sleeping, you're not going to feel right. But is there a hack? Is there anything somebody can do who just doesn't have a choice or just didn't get proper sleep the night before to have a better day? Yeah, absolutely. And so and this is also what I recommend when people go to festivals, Burning Man, EDM or like stuff like that is that is that it's I recommend that people take adrenal and mitochondrial support every three hours until six hours before they're going to bed. So normally this would be you wake up in the morning and you start taking it maybe 8:00 in the morning every three hours until 4:00 or so.

If you're going to be going to bed at 10:00, because that'll give you like six hours before you go to bed. Now, if you're going to be up longer than that, you just keep taking it every three hours. Let's say you're going to go to bed at 3:00 in the morning. You stop at 9:00, and that six hours seems to be a nice washout period where you've created this nice circadian rhythm for yourself, where basically you've got this energy and then it's coming down and allow you to sleep well. Sounds like it could be a hack for something like jetlag as well.

It's kind to reset the clock. Yeah, that's really cool. Actually, I'm about to fly, so I'm going to try that and tell you how it goes. There you go. Yeah, please. That's awesome. I mean, everything you've been saying is so on point and so easy. That's the thing about it that it's the what it takes to get to this problem is years and years and years of years of killing yourself slowly. Right. Do you? It's like, you know, but the fix doesn't take that long if you start doing the right stuff. From what I'm hearing from you, if you focus on the right things, first of all, you've made this sort of audit and review available so that people can focus on the right things, because that's such a big challenge with so many options on why you don't have energy, right?

And even it's never limited to one thing. It's usually multiple things. So understanding that and then knowing what to do about it and the what to do apart apart doesn't seem all that difficult. There's tweaks and things, you know, maybe some supplements, maybe some changes in lifestyle. You know, it's just the doing it part is the challenge, right? The doing it and the having the support along the way. Because, you know, make no mistake about it, there are bumps in the road, especially when you're dealing with infections.

It's kind of this balance when we talked about the funnel and step three and you're starting to remove these toxins, you got to make sure that that funnels open. And if you feel worse you may have to stop. You may have to open that funnel again. And then you can start down that path again. And and and yes, I agree that it's a short amount of time relatively, but it's still too long for most people.

Practical First Steps for Better Energy 43:20

So they do have to get their head around six months, 12 months, 24 months, like there's going to be a process. You just have to take a step every single day. You know, one of the things we talk about is, is asking yourself more empowering questions. Most people are asking themselves disempowering questions like, why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to the world? You know, why are things bad or whatever it is? And you need to be asking yourself better questions like what can I do today to love myself even more?

And you're gonna actually get a better answer from your brain. Or, you know, what can I do today to increase my health even more? And every single day you just take a baby step and we've got, like, a checklist where people just go through this process. If you get stuck, you reach out for help. We've got the one on ones, we've got the group components so that people feel supported in every aspect. So that we know that they're going to be successful, that this is awesome. You know, I'm I'm going to test this stuff out on myself, by the way.

It's not sort of chronic for me, but there are days where just doesn't add up. And I know there's something I've worked on a lot when it comes to my mind and body, but, there's still there's always room for improvement. And I think I'll probably find it through your process. It sounds like it. Because there's days where it just doesn't make sense, or I just feel like I'm not the same person. Right. So, hopefully I want to fix that, and I'll be one of your case studies. I love it. Yeah, and that's the curiosity, you know, that leaders like you have is like, you know, you know, all these different aspects of my life.

How can I be better at and, you know, being a better dad, being a better business owner, you know, being a better partner, you know, all these things. If you're looking at improving your life, you know, which obviously you are. And so you're seeing that and you're saying, hey, what can I do here in order to make my life better in this aspect? Yeah. Well, this this was awesome. I would ask you one last thing. There's so much you offered, but for the somebody that's just, like, starting tomorrow, what's one, two, three, two, three things they should do just to get going.

So definitely check out the free step one course. But something that's practical that that has nothing to do with that I would say is, you know, drink more water. You know, get that 2.5l of water and you're not going to get it tomorrow. If you haven't been drinking much, you gotta kind of build up to it over time. Put a pinch of sea salt in there. Start going to bed closer to 930, 10:00. You know, just some of these lifestyle habits can make a huge difference for folks. Most of the people that we see are doing those things and that, you know, they've got all these other causes that we have to work on.

But for somebody who's starting off, you got to look at these lifestyle habits. You gotta make sure you're moving as much as you can without feeling worse. If you're feeling worse, you're not getting your gold. What I call the Goldilocks dose of movement, you know, and movement should be fun. You know, like turn on air supply and do some dancing around the kitchen. You're right. Yeah. You know, so it's it's it's some of these things that, that you just want to be doing for movement and for food.

You want to, be eliminating gluten, dairy and sugars and eating more meat and vegetables. But I would say, you know, if you just want to go simple. Oh, and then there's the mindset stuff. Gosh, there's so many things. If you just want to go simple, I would say living gratitude just three gratitudes a day. They can be the same three gratitudes every day and drink more water. This is awesome. So Doctor Hirsch aka energy MD. Thank you for your time. This is going to help a lot of people. It was great that you were able to give us a time.

And thank you again for joining us. Thanks so much for having me on.