525 How Seeking Holistic Health Saved My Life, Addicted To Wellness with Ashley James and David DeHaas

Jul 21, 2024

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Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness

https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

Get The Minerals Your Body Needs: TakeYourSupplements.com

https://takeyoursupplements.com

525: How Seeking Holistic Health Saved My Life, David DeHaas

https://learntruehealth.com/how-seeking-holistic-health-saved-my-life-david-dehaas

Grab Ashley James's book Addicted to Wellness and transform your health! Get it here: learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

When I was 19, my health hit rock bottom—I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and infertility, conditions I never imagined facing so young. This pivotal moment propelled me into the world of holistic health, a journey that led to incredible transformations not just for me but for countless others. Join me, Ashley James, as I chat with David DeHaas from the Whole Body Detox Show about my new book, "Addicted to Wellness," and the magic of holistic healing.

Highlights:

Healing Holistically With David DeHaas
From Illness to Wellness Journey
Early Interest in Holistic Health
Impact of Antibiotics on Lactobacillus Reuteri
Supporting Gut Health With Microbes
Addicted to Wellness Book Discussion
Functional Medicine and Holistic Healing
Content Creation Challenges and Collaboration

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today's a fun episode because I'm the one in the hot seat. David DeHaas from the Whole Body Detox Show interviews me on Episode 179 of his show. So I have taken that Episode 179 from the Whole Body Detox Show, David DeHaas being the host and I am placing it here so that y'all can listen to our interview. I was just jumping on his show and I was checking it out this morning and his latest interview, which he published earlier this month, was with Andy Wakefield.

I had Andy Wakefield on my show a few years ago. Be fun to have him back because Dr. Wakefield certainly has some more information and he's been in, I think, a few more documentaries since, so that'd be fun to have him back. I love when I get to come together with like-minded people like David DeHaas. David DeHaas has also been on my show. He runs an amazing detox clinic. I think it's in Idaho. Forgive me, I'm pretty sure it's like it's so close. Idaho is like next door to Washington state, but people actually fly in from out of state, from out of country. They fly in to do, he has a week long and I think he has like a 10 day or two week long detox where they feed you and they do a whole series of colonics and they rebuild your gut, and him and I have had some really interesting off air conversations about how people have come back from the brink and he's had some really interesting experiences with doctors. When doctors wake up when their own medicine fails them and I have a lot of those interviews. If you've been listening, over 500 interviews, I have a lot of holistic doctors who started out as medical doctors in the allopathic, drug-based medical field and then they themselves came up against some illness and their system of medicine couldn't help them and that's when their brain exploded and they went my gosh, we've been taught a lie. We've been taught this lie which is prevalent. We are all bathed in this lie and that is that the MD drug based medicine is the only legitimate medicine out there, that you should always go to an MD. That type of doctor and every other type of doctor is a quack, or every other type of doctor is a quote unquote, and I'm doing little air quotes, alternative, meaning something less than not helpful, something less than and , maybe those alternative doctors might like massage you or something, but they're not legitimate because they don't give you drugs and it's been a lie that they've been feeding us. It's PR marketing that they've been feeding us for over 100 years. I'm not going to go deep down this rabbit hole today, but you can. It's a pretty interesting rabbit hole to go down.

So these doctors wake up when they realize that their system of medicine doesn't have all the answers. Not every system does. That's the point. We should not give the power to any one system, and I'm pretty sure that applies to everything in life. Don't give all the power to one type of school system, to one type of food manufacturer, to one type of government. Don't give the power and all the control and all the attention to one system, because that's not how life works. We should have access to, and the freedom to have access to, many types of therapies and healing.

So MDs that wake up and go, wow, I need to go outside of my system of medicine to find the answers. Then they find holistic medicine or functional medicine and then they heal their body and then they become a born again holistic health expert and they jump on podcasts like mine. Well, David DeHaas, the host of the interview you're about to listen to, he's had several of these experiences where very prominent MDs come to him unable to eat almost anything. Their gut is totally destroyed, they have eliminated most foods in their diet because they no longer can tolerate food and they get transformed by going to his clinic. They do something like 10 days of colonics and juicing and all the other wonderful therapies to rebuild the microbiome at David DeHaas' clinic and they're able to then walk away after ten days or two weeks, able to eat almost anything and tolerate it, and it's so cool. It's so cool that we can do that level of intense healing. So, anyways, there's my plug for David's clinic and his podcast, the Whole Body Detox Show. You can also check out David DeHaas' episode on my podcast as well. I had him on a few years ago and it was wonderful to have him on. then it was great to reconnect when he saw that I had published my book recently this year and he said come on my show and let's talk about it. So this interview today is a great conversation about holistic health and we dive into some wonderful ways in which we can help support the body and healing itself.

If you haven't seen my book yet, please check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness that's all one word learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness or you can just go to Amazon and type in Addicted to Wellness by Ashley James. It's a workbook. It's a lot of fun.

I have taken the accumulation of the last 12 years of working in this industry, in the holistic health field, working with thousands of clients. Before, I worked in the holistic health field, I worked with clients for 20 years. I can't believe that. You kind of like look back and you go, my gosh, like in my mind the 90’s were 10 years ago. I'm an 80s baby and it's just wild to think that I've been working with clients that long. I was working, as I want to call it, life coach. I was doing breakthrough sessions with people using neuro linguistic programming and timeline therapy. So I've been working with clients for a long time and this book is an accumulation of all my knowledge from 20 years of working with people and over 500 episodes talking in depth with holistic health experts.

The book I made it fun. I made it light and I made it impactful. So if you want to take your health to the next level, no matter where you are, this book meets you where you are and you will be able to, through a series of fun challenges, take your health to the next level. So Invite you to jump on it, to try it. Even if you have five minutes a day, even if you have 10 minutes a day, you can do this book. If you have a busy schedule, you can do this book.

I wanted to make it so that every single person could fit it into their life. So get it Addicted to Wellness. Get my book. It's a workbook, so you get to actually do things. That's where rubber meets the road. You get to experience health changes as you build up your body, and that's what we talk about today in today's episode, among other things. So enjoy today's episode. Please check out David DeHaas' podcast, the Whole Body Detox Show, and please share my podcast with those you care about. This is a grassroots movement. My goal is to help over a million people to get their health back, and I can't do it without your help. So you are part of that. You're the ripple that helps turn this ripple into a tidal wave to help as many people as possible to learn true health.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 525.

David DeHaas (0:08:34.737)

Good morning everyone. David DeHaas, your host of the Whole Body Detox show from Living Waters Wellness Center, where miracles begin by healing from within, and today I have a very kindred spirit on the show today Ms. Ashley James. Ms. Ashley James has a podcast of her own called Learn True Health. You've done what some over 516 plus episodes and growing, does a fantastic job, so you can check that out. She's an entrepreneur, podcaster, author and we're having on because she just wrote an amazing book called, Addicted to Wellness. Ashley is a bit like me. You went through a lot of a health journey. There's a picture of it right there. A journey, much like myself, and we had to figure out how to save our lives, and she did.

So we're here teaching others. Amazing! She's also a massage therapist, a Reiki master, trained in neuro holistic programming, timeline therapy, hypnosis, nutritional coach. She went after it and grabbed all the different things to put them in her toolbox or wellness toolbox so she can help others, which is awesome. Ashley James, welcome to the show.

Ashley James (0:09:44.683)

Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.

David DeHaas (0:09:46.763)

Everyone has their unique story, from sickness to wellness, and you've got one amazing story. So maybe give us a little bit of background and we'll get into your book here a little bit.

Ashley James (0:10:00.718)

It's like rags to riches to rags to riches. So when I was six, when I was really young, I didn't know any better and I thought this is just how life is, but I would always have a sore throat, I was always tired and I'd wake up in the morning unable to open my eyes because my eyes were crusted over and I'd have to peel away the crust in my eyes. They were sealed shut.

I just remember being really tired and the constant sore throats and that was my life until I was about six years old. then my mom, she had been put on antibiotics for the common cold, basically, and ended up staying on antibiotics for several months, because this is just in the 80s, what doctors did, and I guess some doctors to this day still do that.

So she ran her own business and didn't take the time like a weekend just to relax or a week just to like let her body recover. So she went to prescription after prescription to overcome an infection and gave herself a wicked case of candida. She finally discovered a naturopathic doctor who actually did colon hydrotherapy in his clinic. This is Dr. D'Adamo the original, not his son, but Dr. D'Adamo back in the eighties had a clinic in Toronto, Canada, where I'm from, and my mom went to him, got some colon hydrotherapy and also cleaned up her diet and she started to get better. So she intuitively said, well, if it's good for me, it's probably good for my daughter.

I remember, at six years old, being in his clinic. I remember looking him in the face as he took a drop of my blood and figured out I was an O blood type, looked at my eyes for urology, looked in my ear, examined my throat because I had that constant sore throat. he looked at me and he said you are allergic to milk, yeast, wheat and sugar. Stay away from them. Now, even at the age of six I knew that were the ingredients. Those were the ingredients in my favorite chocolate bar, Coffee Crisp. If you're from Canada, you know Coffee Crisp. To this day I can still remember what it tastes like. It tastes like what it sounds. It's crunchy, it's chocolatey, it's coffee flavored. Who wouldn't love that? I said to him, when can I eat a Coffee Crisp? he said once every blue moon. At the time I thought a blue moon was every month.

So I got excited, but I soon found out it meant once in a very long while. We came home and my mom tore through the kitchen, got rid of all the processed food, all the wheat, all the dairy, all the sugar, and we ate basically paleo, like what Dr. D'Adamo coined the O blood type diet, and overnight my sore throat went away. My energy, I couldn't even say it came back. I had it for the first time and I no longer woke up feeling sick. I no longer woke up with sore throats, I no longer woke up with sleep in my eyes. I would wake up, jump out of bed and just go, go, go, go go, just twelve hours straight and then go right to sleep and I had amazing health. That was from six to thirteen.

At thirteen, I rebelled and I started eating like all my friends. My mom was really strict around food, and out of love, but also coming from fear and just as a parent now I see how important it is to teach children why that food is good or bad and not just restrict without knowledge. So I ran towards all the food I was allowed to eat, and I gave myself chronic infections, type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Did I mention type 2 diabetes, and infertility. By the time I was nineteen, I was infertile and the doctor said, after doing a battery of tests, that I'd never have kids. So I was so sick from thirteen to nineteen. I created all these illnesses in my body and I was just feeling so horrible.

David DeHaas (0:14:06.600)

Were you seeing Dr. D’Adamo then?

Ashley James (0:14:08.606)

No, my mom switched back to an MD and that MD ended up killing my mom and that was a big wake up call for me. I don't know why she didn't. I guess he got so famous. He ended up not being in the Toronto clinic and so she started seeing another naturopathic clinic and maybe didn't like that guy as much.

I really wish she had stuck with holistic medicine, because she'd still be here today and my life would have been very different. I wouldn't be sitting here with you. But this is my story. We have to learn from our past and also appreciate our story so that we can appreciate who we are, where we are now and then build the future we want. So let's learn from the past.

Processed foods are how I develop those illnesses, and eating clean and then lifestyle changes and finding the right supplements. So supplements are like the mortar but the bricks. You can't out-supplement a bad diet. You can't out-exercise a bad diet right. You can't give yourself enough colon hydrotherapy when you have a bad diet.

It all comes down to using your food as medicine. You're building your body. You're building every cell in your body with what you're eating. So I had to dial in how I ate. I had to go through emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically the transformation to be able to shed those illnesses. I did. I learned what I needed to do. There were many dark years where I would cry myself to sleep, where I was constantly hungry, just going on, the blood sugar swings, feeling out of control, and my liver was so inflamed that anytime I did go on a diet my liver would just stick out. It would be painful.

David DeHaas (0:16:00.329)

Oh wow, I was like that at one time I didn't know what was going on.

Ashley James (0:16:08.465)

I finally figured out that it was heavy metal toxicity, probably because my body had a really hard time detoxifying. I've been MTHFR and so I had to really support gentle liver detox, support my liver and in doing that. But every time I went to lose weight, I could taste heavy metals in my mouth and that and my eyes would burn. I could taste heavy metals in my mouth.

I think it's from the accumulation of secondhand smoke and drinking soda. I don't know, just any kind of exposure to heavy metals. We have so much exposure to heavy metals we don't even realize. If you also have a problem with detoxifying, then they get accumulated in the body. I had accumulated a lot and I’ve spent the last seven years working on detoxifying the heavy metals. I have a sauna, Sunlighten Sauna, which I absolutely adore and that we can sweat out the heavy metals gently. I have a PES, which is an ionic foot spa, a Platinum Energy System. I've had people on my show, Learn True Health Podcast discussing how they work, very gentle detox without having to do things like chelators. I do also love Chlorella, which there's only a handful of companies I'd recommend. One of them is EnergyBits, and I did have Catherine Arnston, the creator of EnergyBits, on my show as well. So those are really good episodes to check out. so just through these different modalities I was able to detox the heavy metals.

But before that, back in 2008, when I was at the peak of my illness, my husband and I watched a documentary and he wanted to help me, but we just didn't know. You get to this point where you're sick, of being sick, but all you know is MD medicine, all you know is go to the doctor, they maybe do blood work and then they give you a drug and that just wasn't cutting it. I was just getting sicker and sicker under the watch of the MD.

I'd remembered when I was six, I went to holistic medicine. I had to go back before my rebellious era and remember what I had learned when I was very young from the naturopath. When we watched this documentary, it was about eating whole foods, avoiding processed foods, and eating organic. They had interviewed the original CEO of Whole Foods and he said vote with your fork, shop the perimeter of the grocery store, eat organic.

We did that. We didn't give up dairy yet, we didn't give up meat yet. We just shopped the perimeter so we stopped going down the aisles and we chose only organic. So some would call that like the pseudo paleo diet. You're just eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds. We were doing meat and dairy, but we chose organic and dairy, but we chose organic.

In that one month of primarily cutting up processed food and eating organic, my chronic infections went away. I still felt like crap, but I no longer needed constant antibiotics and I thought, wow, we did one change and one of my major problems went away. So what's the next step? We just took these baby steps where we did one change, kind of like a challenge, okay, for the next few days we're going to do this, for the next week or next month we're going to do this. We did one challenge of another and some things didn't work and some things did, but that's how we figured it out and we eventually cut out all dairy.

Dairy is the hardest, because we're actually chemically addicted to dairy, many people know this. For those who don’t, mother's milk, cow milk for a calf, goat milk for a kid, in order to make the infant want to drink it, put forth the effort to find the nipple and suckle. God in his infinite wisdom made breast milk addictive. Then we take milk from another species, we concentrate it into cheese. The thing that triggers the brain, the addiction in the brain, is in cheese, in concentrated form. So we are addicted to dairy and that's the hardest thing out of all the animal products to kick is cheese and dairy.

So we decided to go dairy free, reluctantly, and overnight my husband's adult acne went away within three days. He had cystic acne covered his entire back. It was really gross. It was constantly exploding and painful and he was ashamed and never went shirtless because of it and he had pitting all over his back, his face, but it was mostly in his back and in his chest too. A hundred percent of his acne, within three days of removing dairy, went away. He had never in his entire life not drunk dairy or eaten cheese. So that’s a little challenge.

David DeHaas (0:21:39.233)

We were supposed to have raw milk and of course there was Hershey's chocolate which was advertised heavily on the tv and I love my milk with my Hershey's chocolate. So you got pus with sugar and I always had acne, I had allergies, I had all this stuff and no wonder I had all these allergies. No wonder I had all this problem. My mother took me to what I call a drill, fill and build dentist, from age five on he's got two more cavities, Mrs. DeHaas.

Ashley James (0:22:10.520)

Oh, you mean, you have a boat payment, Mr. Dentist.

David DeHaas (0:22:14.396)

Yes, and here, have a lollipop on the way out. Some more sugar. Food is even worse today. It's really bad chemicals, just pure chemicals.

Ashley James (0:22:34.067)

We go down the cereal aisle. My mom was super strict about cereal in our household. There couldn't be any sugar in it and we had options like there were a lot of options for zero added sugar. I challenge you to find a zero added sugar cereal. I can only find one that's gluten free, also, because we don't eat barley and oats in our home. My son is actually allergic to them, but that's what Dr. D'Adamo told me: Don't eat those.

What I've seen with my mentors, I've been trained by several naturopathic doctors and they say 100% of their clients benefit from removing those grains because we're not cows. We don't have the stomach processing power to process, just like eating dairy. Eating cheese is not necessarily healthy for you, but we feel good eating it because we're addicted. So we keep doing it and we're habituated to the damage. You have to remove it for a while before you go. Oh wow, my migraines are gone. Oh wow, my stiff joints are gone. Oh wow, my vision's getting better. You start to see things clear up, the inflammation goes away and things you thought were completely unrelated, like, oh, my dry eye is gone, completely unrelated, but that's a sign of inflammation and you remove that food that is constantly insulting the body.

David DeHaas (0:23:56.078)

When you went to Peter D’Adamo, did he offer colonics? Did he offer them to you as a child?

Ashley James (0:24:02.368)

No, I was a child, no, he didn't offer. I’m really actually was interested in it. My mom would tell me stories because she'd come home from her colonics and I'd be super interested. I have actually interested in holistic health since I was six. My mom had a newsletter from Dr. D'Adamo and I would sit on my mom's bed and she would read it to me and I remember in the 80’s she read me an article he wrote about probiotics and I was fascinated. Acidophilus was like the only thing they knew about back then. I was super fascinated. She read another one about antioxidants and oxidative stress. I imagine the bullet pierces, the loose molecule bouncing through the body just like harming the DNA. He wrote this beautiful article about it and I was just fascinated. I was fascinated about how the body works in health, from that holistic standpoint.

David DeHaas (0:24:59.600)

Think about this, in 1992, Newsweek, on its cover I was selling nutritional supplements and they were just starting to talk about free radicals. People would say, DeHaas, you're just a free radical yourself, that's a rock band, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean they just dismissed it like that's stupid. What are you talking about, free radicals? What's an oxidant? Of course now it's common knowledge. Most people do know what an antioxidant is, but it is very interesting how, in 40 years, 30 years, basically, we finally got to accept this.

Ashley James (0:25:35.297)

The mainstream will catch up very slowly.

David DeHaas (0:25:39.903)

The community, basically slamming it, saying, there's nothing to that, you don't want those vitamins, that's just a waste. That was crazy!

Ashley James (0:25:47.096)

The same doctors only a few years before were recommending camel cigarettes. So we just have to remember how far we've come since our grandparents or since our parents' generation. The American Medical Association was fine with recommending camel cigarettes. So just got to like, take their advice with a grain of salt and then question everything, question everything.

One thing that Dr. D'Adamo did in his colonics that I haven't seen done anywhere else is he added a cactus enzyme that would break down the biofilm, and I was always fascinated about that and I haven't seen anyone else do that. So my mom told me I was like I'd ask her what they add to the water? One of her friends was from Japan, because there's a little viewing window to see what's coming out of you and they watched a giant worm come out of her, I guess from eating sushi or something.

David DeHaas (0:26:46.611)

Yes, all the time, all the time. Wild Hookworms, liver flukes. We got a whole manual down here. A book of pictures of clients have snapped the picture when they're doing their colonic and as they've seen the bugs, or at home in the toilet a lot of time it comes out, we loosen them up and they go home and they poop. It’s fascinating.

You go do a test. If you go to a doctor and get a test, 98% of the time it's going to be negative because they only test for five. The bugs don't want to come out on a poop and say hey, here I am. They've buried themselves in the coastal lining and they're attached. You got to go after them with all things zippers, herbs, our pulse frequency machine and then the colonics to flush them out.

Ashley James (0:27:32.817)

I wonder why they don't show up on colonic or colonoscopies, or do they?

David DeHaas (0:27:41.224)

I don’t know. I've never done a colonoscopy.

Ashley James (0:27:45.179)

Right and nor should you. There's a lot of people that die doing just regular colonoscopies. You turn that camera the wrong way, they're piercing your colon. Also the anesthesia, you could die from the anesthesia there's complications.

David DeHaas (0:28:04.451)

We've had clients come back and say, my friend, they did it, they pierced it or I don't know why, but they can't get it totally sterilized and they got a bug from a foreign country from the equipment and it killed it.

That was a my gosh story number of years ago, not four years ago, I guess not too long ago, anyway, yes, so there are some risks with that, but we do have clients now that come and do colonics, colon hydrotherapy before they go do colonoscopy, because it's just so much easier than sitting on a toilet all night drinking the toxic goop that they give you so that's good

So you went on your healing path. Of course you said you're taking antibiotics constantly. Oh, that's so bad for the gut.

Ashley James (0:29:00.895)

It is. Actually, Dr. Joel Fuhrman has a really good book. I had him on my show and he talked about this one fact that's in his book. I'm going to remember the name of it it's fast food genocide. Within the first few chapters of the book he talks about the cancer rates go up with every dose of antibiotics.

David DeHaas (0:29:26.646)

Yes, we had a doctor here who went through our 10-day healing retreat. She has 10 straight years of antibiotics. She can only drink what I'm drinking today during this interview, cucumber juice. It tastes great too, but that's all she could eat. When she got done with the 10-day healing retreat, she could actually eat. She said, David, I ate a steak. Last night it tasted so good.

She’s doing colonics, a lot of colonics. In fact, when she moved to Boise, she told her husband I'll only move to a city that's got a good colon hydrotherapist. So they scouted out cities, they scouted us out first, but how sad.

I mean so many people have been like that, like you, they've been on constant antibiotics. My dad recently had a kidney infection like kidney stone last year and he had a stroke and he had some things going on and they just started giving him antibiotics.

I said and of course I'm not there, I'm five hours away and of course now what he's pooping? He's got diarrhea all the time. When I finally just got that changed around. Now we've got a constipation issue but he was like he was shitting his. I mean, he was just David. I crap my pants all the time.

He's so upset and he's afraid to go out in public, so he doesn't. and hasn't been out in public for a while and about six months and because of that he said, hey, I was able to fart today and I didn't poop my pants.

Good win dad.

Ashley James (0:31:05.431)