Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach

Contact Dr. Vienna Lafrenz www.natural-therapeutics.com

The Windows to True Health: Iridology and Tongue Reading

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-windows-to-true-health-iridology-and-tongue-reading

Highlights:

What is Iridology
What to look for in the eyes
Benefits of fasting
What to check in the tongue
Heal the child from childhood trauma to heal the adult

Dr. Vienna Lafrenz is a wealth of information. She’s back on the show to share even more information to improve our health. Dr. Vienna talks about looking and checking our eyes and tongue as an indicator of how healthy we are. She also shares how she was able to change the taste of food by collecting saliva on the seeds before sowing.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. Dr. Vienna and I had such a great time going back and forth discussing some very interesting topics that you may not have learned about or dove into, or maybe you’ve heard of it but you really haven’t heard about it from this angle. So you’re going to learn more about how you can analyze your own body in order to help direct what you’re doing with your health. It’s all very, very, very interesting stuff.

As you’re listening to this interview and as you listen to all my interviews, if you think to yourself you would love to do what I do—you’d love to become a health coach—please check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Just google IIN and give them a call. You can also go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach, and there you get a free module from IIN that will allow you to see if it’s something that’s right for you.

Now, I’ve interviewed the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and I’ve also interviewed their most recent CEO. Both interviews are fascinating and I’ve had actually several graduates on and several of their professors or teachers on as well. So you can go back and listen to all my interviews with those folks. You can always search my website, learntruehealth.com, to find episodes.

What I have found fascinating about IIN is that about 50%—it was something like 54%, it was very close to 50%—of students that choose to do the year-long health coach training program have no intention of becoming a health coach but want to do it for their own personal growth. Going into it, I wanted to add this tool to my tool belt. I was already in the health coaching space, to begin with. I’ve been doing coaching for years, and I wanted to just continue to learn and grow as you as a listener continue to want to learn and grow that’s why you’re here. You’re here to listen, learn, and grow.

What I found through the program is I did receive a lot of personal growth. All the work that you learn to do with your clients you do with yourself as well as you go through the program, so that was very gratifying. That was very rewarding.

So if you’re someone who just really loves personal growth or you’ve just decided it’s the beginning of a new year and you go, I’m ready. I’m ready to take my life to the next level. I’m not satisfied with certain areas of my life. I want more joy and vitality in certain areas of my life, then you might want to just do the program for your own personal growth. You’ll be getting great tools in your tool belt for yourself, your communication skills. It’ll improve your relationships. It’ll improve your relationship with your own body, your health, your spirituality, and your level of joy and vitality. So go ahead, check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach and just get the free module. See if it’s right for you.

Now, I did negotiate with IIN that all my listeners get a fantastic deal, and I know that in the month of February they were running a special. They might still be running it so you can give them a call and check that out. But they give us always—they always give the Learn True Health listeners—an extra special deal, so make sure you mention my name Ashley James and Learn True Health podcast to get that special deal. They do have a payment plan. So if you’re someone like me, I did the payment plan. It’s like a credit card payment basically every month.

What was really interesting is when I enrolled, the woman who helped me enroll who, by the way, when you call them, everyone that answers the phone has been through the program as a health coach themselves and can really help you better understand the program and there’s no pressure. It’s not like a sales pitch. It’s just people genuinely wanting to help. What I thought was really interesting is they encourage you. They said the best graduates pay it off completely before they have finished the program because, for those who choose to be a health coach and want to do this as a career or add to their career in the health space, it’s a year-long program. After the first six months, you begin to take on clients. You can actually have it all paid off by the time you have graduated and have a successful health coach business up and running.

Now, if you do want to do IIN, you heard about it through me but you have questions or you’d love a bit of mentorship, I’m absolutely here for you. Please feel free to give me an email, ashley@learntruehealth.com, or you can reach out to me on Facebook. We have our great Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. Reach out to me. I’d love to support you in your success. The world needs more health coaches right now. The world needs more holistic-minded practitioners right now.

What’s great is IIN is a stepping stone. You can go with that. You can go into focusing on functional medicine in terms of hormones, fertility, more mental and emotional health. There are so many different avenues that you can go, sports medicine. There are health coaches now that are being hired by insurance companies, hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices, or you can work independently like me. So the sky’s the limit. That’s really exciting. So go check it out. IIN, google it, give them a call, see if it’s right for you. But definitely get the free module by going to learntruehealth.com/coach.

Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. I constantly hear from new listeners who say that their friends or family have turned them on to this. For new listeners, welcome. It’s very exciting.

Now we’re about to reach our—is it our four-year anniversary? Has that time just flown? I can’t believe it. We launched in March of 2016, and so we’re approaching our anniversary which is really exciting. We’ve helped millions of people through all the downloads. Help them to get better health, and that’s my goal is to help you to achieve the true health that you’re seeking.

If practitioners or doctors have told you what you have is genetic, what you have is because of your age, because of your sex, or because of whatever, and you’ll always have it, you have to be on some drug for the rest of your life. If you’ve just been put in a box and told that you’ll always be sick, you’ll always feel this way, please find a new practitioner. Keep listening to this podcast.

I was told that I’d never have kids. I was told that I would be diabetic for the rest of my life. I was told that I’d be sick for the rest of my life, and I finally broke away from all those MDs who kept me in a box, who wanted to just keep me medicated, who didn’t have answers for my true health. I went and I sought natural medicine. Through my journey of health, I was able to recover all those diseases, and now this is why I do what I do is to help you do the same.

So if you have any friends or family in your life who suffer needlessly and don’t want to suffer anymore, they want to put the work into their body to heal—even if they’ve been told they’ll always have that condition and they want to get to be as healthy as they can possibly be—keep listening, keep sharing. We’re going to get you there. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s a very supportive community to help everyone achieve true health.

[00:07:30] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 456. I am so excited for today’s returning guest. We have Dr. Vienna Lafrenz on. Vienna, you were on episode 450, so not too long ago. Many listeners have contacted you to work with you, and you have had some really great experiences with our listeners.

This is the common thing. So I’m letting all you guys know—all the listeners know—that I’ve had other guests reach out to me. I hear from many people, including Vienna, that the listeners of the Learn True Health podcast are just simply amazing, wonderful people. This is something I commonly hear. I’ve never heard a guest complain about when a listener contacting them, let’s just put it that way. We’re all in good company here.

Vienna, today we’re going to continue our discussion, which I’m really looking forward to because where we left it off last time was you were going to teach us how to assess our tongue. So we could look in the mirror and we can learn more about our health, and that’s really exciting. Also, get into a bit of your iridology.

Since we had you on the show, your clinic—you work with people remotely around the world but you also have a physical clinic. You moved to Republic, Washington and you’re in a beautiful space there. So if anyone lives near the Okanagan Valley or in the Okanagan Valley, they can come to see you in person, which is really exciting. Congratulations on the move of your clinic. Natural-therapeutics.com is Vienna’s website.

Now, just to preface, for the listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, Vienna lives on a mountain with six feet of snow in Washington and she’s on satellite internet. So sometimes it may sound like we’re talking over each other, that’s because there is a delay on the line. So we’re not trying to talk over each other, but we’re going to do our best. We had a wonderful discussion last time, and we’re going to continue that great discussion this time. Welcome back to the show.

[00:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, and I do have to say, the listeners that you have on your show are so amazing. They all have the same interest at heart, and that is to get their best health possible in the best means there is. It’s wonderful. They implement things, they follow through them. It’s wonderful.

[00:10:06] Ashley James: Right. Now, for listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, I urge you to go back. I mean, you can listen to them out of order. You could listen to this one and then go back to 450. But I have to tell you, there is a story about a woman who had parasites crawling out of her body, literally running away from this woman’s body because the type of work that Vienna does makes parasites not even want to be in your body. So if you geek out on that kind of stuff like I do, you’re going to want to definitely work with Vienna and absolutely listen to episode 450 as well.

Today we might get into some really cool stuff, probably not as gross as that, although I’m not grossed out by it. I think it’s awesome because if there’s something you can do naturally that has no negative side effects, it makes parasites not want to live in your body anymore, sign me up. Before we talk about tongue assessment, which I think is so interesting, since we had you on the show, you worked with several of our listeners. And without obviously disclosing their identities or their names, are there any stories of success that you want to share with us?

[00:11:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh, absolutely. So I have several actually. One in particular that really stands out is a person who had 20 years’ worth of chronic pain—daily, daily, daily pain. And with that, of course, the cognitive issues with it because as we know, the brain shrinks with as many years of pain that there is, which is reversible of course. But this person was having a ton of brain fog, memory losses, and forgetting people’s names, even for getting phone numbers of relatives and such. But the chronic pain was the biggest thing where there was no joy anymore. Basically waking up every morning thinking okay, what am I going to deal with today?

As we started working on the biofeedback, identifying some of the areas where the pain was coming from, and truly finding the source of where the pain was coming from—not just the symptoms, just the side effects, or the emotional component, but truly finding the root cause of where the pain came from—was actually a nerve. As we did the biofeedback on nerves and worked on different pathways, neuropathies, and things like that, the pain went away to the point where this person was originally going to go in for surgery. But because of COVID and the fear of going into hospitals right now or whatever, or even just the availability of getting surgery right now, they were so far down the list that basically said okay let’s just do it one more time. Let’s try one more thing and really good results. That’s one big thing. Also got them back into dancing, which was really fun and phenomenal.

The second thing would be digestion. Digestion is a big thing with many of my clients. Not understanding why their body is not responding very well to different types of diets, cleanses, detoxification, or things like that. And then seeing it manifest in the skin. So I’ve had about three to four of your listeners call me about digestive issues, and again finding the root cause behind what is causing this digestive issue including allergies—unbeknownst allergies or symptomologies of allergies that are showing up, and being able to implement some of the food back into their diets that they had been craving and missing for so long.

So really just finding out the digestive process and what’s going on, and of course, the constipation that goes with that. I had two that were maybe having a bowel movement once a week, which of course was a big concern for me. Once we got started, it’s now regular.

[00:14:16] Ashley James: Can you specify what regular is? Because people sometimes think once every three days is regular.

[00:14:21] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, exactly. And they say, oh, I’ve had this constitution my whole life. That is not regular. If you work in any kind of hospital or nursing home, if somebody doesn’t go for three days, that’s a sentinel event where there’s something wrong and they could land in the hospital. Regular means if you have three meals a day, you should be having about three bowel movements a day, and that has to do with the amount of transit time that it goes to the digestive process.

From the mouth to the anus is the transit time. And so if it’s taking two days to digest food, there’s something going on within the digestive system. It could be anything related to a virus, bacteria, slow peristalsis of the intestines that could be leading to that, even just toxicity. It could be parasites. It could be a lot of different things. Yeah, enzymes.

[00:15:15] Ashley James: Not enough fiber, lack of minerals.

[00:15:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, the types of foods, the chemicals that are in our foods. If there’s a lot of prefabricated foods that you’re eating where it’s not raw, live foods.

[00:15:32] Ashley James: I love that, pre-fabricated foods. I’ve never heard it put that way. That makes you think that there are microplastics in the food. It’s been pre-fabricated.

[00:15:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, isn’t there?

[00:15:47] Ashley James: Oh, absolutely. Just this week an article came out that said that for the first time ever, they’ve discovered microplastics in the placenta of babies. I mean, this is really sad. This is really sad. So the more factory food we eat, the more microplastics we’re consuming. There are microplastics in the ocean right now, so when we consume fish we’re consuming microplastics. Like you said, if you focus on foods that are whole, living, alive, like something I can identify—there’s an apple, there’s broccoli—you’re less likely to eat prefabricated foods with microplastics and chemicals. I love that saying. That’s great.

[00:16:33] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: They’re even finding plastic in white rice. It’s pretty crazy. So you just have to be really careful about the types of food you eat. If you think about it, we’re 99.99999% energy. So the foods that we consume should have a high level of energy in them.

[00:16:52] Ashley James: You just said something that I really, really want to touch on. You just said that we’re almost 100% energy. People go, well, over 70% water, what do you mean? Can you just elaborate? From the standpoint of physics, chemistry, and quantum physics, why are we almost 100% energy?

[00:17:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it. So, we’re 99.99% energy and 0.001% matter. So what that means is what do you think transports the lymphatics, the blood, the water? That we’re 75% to 85% water—what do you think transports that? Energy. So the heart can conducts energy to the blood, to the water, to the lymphatic system. It gets it to move. The environment that we’re in, our whole auric being surrounding us is all energy. The physical part is really just the sack that we reside in, which is a meat suit comprised of skin, comprised of bone. But even that has energy in it as well.

When you think about it, the whole body is comprised of energy—from the organs, how they emit energy, how they respond to energy, as well as the blood, the lymphatics, the brain. The brain, yes, has this spongy type of gelatinous fibers within the skull, but it is also energy as well. It needs energy to conduct all the neurons, the fibers, and the hormones that are going from one organ to another. It’s all being done by energy. If you think about the meridians, the chakras, those are all energy vessels that that move the energy from one location to another and can be so influenced from the outside world to the inside world to the emotions to everything—that it’s all energy.

[00:18:58] Ashley James: I was really surprised when you did the quantum biofeedback machine on me remotely back in February, so 2020. I was sick as a dog, in bed, gasping for air, with a fever, sore throat. I mean, you could say all the symptoms of COVID, although, at the time, I know a lot of people in the Seattle area that all had these same symptoms but no one knew what COVID was. My Naturopath diagnosed me with strep throat, although I think I’m just one of those people that will always test positive for strep throat no matter what. I’m a strep carrier. It’s like, okay, but strep throat doesn’t normally do all these other things.

So I’m lying in bed and I’m really suffering. You did quantum biofeedback with me, and I felt it so much so that within the three-hour session—I fell asleep during the session, I woke up and my suffering had ended. The fever broke. I could breathe again. It took me a few days to recover. It was a really bad sickness I was going through, but I was on all kinds of supplements and stuff like that for my Naturopath. What I just noticed is how quickly things turned around.

Similar to my son going through the same energy work, I could feel it. I was in the same room as him because we did it in person with you and I could feel it. What’s described to me is that the mom always has an energetic cord-like umbilical cord attached to our children. As he was getting the treatment, I could feel it. The second you turned on the machine, I didn’t know when you had turned it on. I don’t know how this machine works. I’m just sitting in the room and all of a sudden I felt like I was being electrocuted but in a good way. I don’t know how to describe it any other way other than like my body was buzzing in a very odd way. I’m like, “Okay, is it on now?” And you’re, “Yup, the program’s running. We’re doing it.” And I can feel it.

That we can do something with energy remotely, with an intelligence and an intention for healing on such a deep and specific level is phenomenal. It’s just amazing. And since learning more about it from you, I’ve heard from a few other practitioners who are deep into this kind of work and they all have a very similar experience.

We’re raised in society to believe that most people—it’s almost like atheism when it comes to the medical realm in terms of not believing that anything—if you can’t see it, if you can’t measure it in a lab with blood work, if you can’t see it on an ultrasound, an MRI, or blood work it doesn’t exist. MDs, if you go and tell them symptoms but they can’t find proof of those symptoms, a lot of times MDs will say you should go to a psychologist. It’s all in your head. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we can’t measure it, so it doesn’t exist. There’s this entire realm that’s missing.

Whether you get into spirituality, religion, or energy work, we can’t ignore the fact that we are almost 100% made up of energy and thus we would be affected by energy. To bring it back to your point—which is what you were saying is we’re made up of almost 100% energy—of course, the foods we eat would not just only affect our physical health, of course, they’d affect our energetic health as well. The energy transfers—the heart does, the brain does—because when we eat foods that are alive, that have energy in it as opposed to prefabricated factory foods, which are very low-frequency foods, it just makes so much sense, right?

So when we’re eating, we’re consuming energy. But more than just calories, we’re consuming the living energy of that plant, which is actually measurable. I’ve had episodes about that where there are scientists that can measure the frequency of plants versus dead meat, for example, and that we receive a lot more frequency and energy from plants.

So this idea that we can raise our vibration, that we can heal digestion, that we can heal emotional health and physical health by focusing on energy and frequency very specifically is in our diet but also with the therapies that you provide, it’s phenomenal, and this is something that’s so missing from the medical world because the medical world is blind to it. That’s really sad, but this is why we’re listening to you and this is why we’re here learning about this work, so I’m really excited.

If I sound out of breath, it’s because the baby is pushing on my diaphragm right now. I feel like I’m just running a marathon just talking. I’m 31 weeks pregnant and the baby has taken up the entire breadth of my diaphragm. I apologize if I sound out of breath, but I’m quite happy with the baby kicking my diaphragm at the moment.

How did you help? So was there was a listener who was having digestive problems and only having a bowel movement once a week, which is really scary. What happened after they worked with you?

[00:24:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay, one of the first things we always ask during our sessions is okay, tell me about your bowel movements, how are they looking? And of course, many are a little skeptical at first and not really open to talking about that as openly as I am. And then after a while, they get to be very open about it because now they can have something to look forward to. When I see that they started having bowel movements on a regular basis meaning at least first thing in the morning they may be having one or two bowel movements.

So this person went from one bowel movement a week to now three bowel movements in a day and takes the time to really look at it and say oh, wow, look at the color. Look at the texture, that it doesn’t sink. It’s right in the center. It’s one whole form. I mean, they really break it down for me, which is nice. That tells me that they’re integrating the information that they’re learning, and they actually see the value of their digestive process and how important it is to tell you exactly what’s going on based on how it looks. So that’s been fascinating.

Just the fact that they’re realizing that they don’t have to wait a week to have a bowel movement, that they’re having one every day, and then how good they feel. They feel lighter, they feel more energetic, they’re not as depleted. That’s the amazing part. But to go back to when you were talking about how you felt as a parent as the receiver while I was working on your son is one thing that also helps with the quantum biofeedback is the energy of the person receiving it—how open they are.

I have huge results with people who are empathic, that are very open to energy, that are very receptive to it, that also understand it. If you have somebody that’s very closed to situations, to information, very guarded, they may not do as well until they actually start to feel it. But there’s also an in vitro aspect of it to where as a mother, you could be a surrogate for your son while I’m working on him because of that perinatal connection that you make during the time that he was in your womb. That connection will never go away as I’m sure you’ve already seen that already. That’s why you responded so well is that you are an energetic person, an energetic being, and so your body just craves energy healing, which is exactly what this biofeedback does.

[00:27:31] Ashley James: I was really skeptical. I like to say on my show I’m the most open-minded skeptic. I guess I just don’t want to be sold snake oil. Does that make sense? But I also don’t want to close myself off from the amazing possibilities out there because, in my heart, I’ve always believed that our Creator—in whatever way you see God—is this amazing scientist.

I think science is our way of understanding God better because when you look at, when you really, really, really study, for example, single-cell organisms. Just really go and look at YouTube videos of single-cell protozoa swimming, and there are some videos where the microscopes go to the point where you can see the mechanics because these things are almost see-through. You could see the mechanics of their tails, and it’s like a machine. It’s an intricate complex machine, and yet it’s a single-cell organism that can propel itself through fluid and respond to stimulus. How in the world does this incredibly complex, intricate, and beautiful single-cell life form just happen? Because chemicals and explosions occurred billions of years ago. It’s just this idea. So for me, it’s never sat well this idea that everything happened randomly. I really feel that there’s so much to this world we don’t even understand.

The fact that we can use energy work to heal, and you can use it on children who don’t understand. My son didn’t know what was going on, so you can’t call it a placebo effect when he had results. You can’t call it a placebo effect when homeopathy helps newborn babies and pets. How is that a placebo effect? The reason why I bring up homeopathy is it sort of goes in the same category as energy medicine because it’s not molecular medicine, it’s energy medicine.

So we have these great results, and I had a two-part interview on frequency-specific microcurrent. That one is a good interview to go listen to. I asked the woman my first question and an hour later I get to ask her my second. It was the most amazing first hour because it was just her telling the story, which will blow your mind, and it’s all about how her very, very specific form of energy healing using frequency specific microcurrent, which is a machine you can find in a lot of physical therapy clinics. I’m sure you’ve worked with this as an occupational therapist, but done in a specific way.

When you’ve changed the frequencies. For example, when someone has nerve damage, you change the frequencies and it will stimulate the body to heal that nerve really fast, like super, super, super fast to the point where while people are on the table, they’ll stop having pain or Parkinson’s people will stop shaking. I mean, just really, really cool results. It’s energy and it’s frequency.

Yes, our bodies can heal when we figure out exactly what they need on an energy and frequency level. This is what’s so exciting is that so many people are walking around looking for the drug they need, looking for maybe the diet they need or the drug they need, and yet there’s this entire world that’s really, 90% of the healing is all these different forms of energy and frequency healing and medicine. We’re stuck only being sold on the 10% drug-based, physical-based medicine.

[00:31:40] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: See, if we took the time that we take in taking the drugs or the prescriptions, going to the doctors, getting them refilled, all that kind of stuff into the food preparation. What I mean by that is for the people like out here in Eastern Washington, everybody plants their own garden, we harvest our own food, and all that kind of stuff. If we have excess, we give it to people, we exchange. It’s about surviving out here, livelihood. So everybody plants their own gardens.

One thing we did this year that was quite different than the past was as we were cultivating our seeds and we were planting them into the garden, we would put the seed in our mouth and collect the saliva on the seed, and then we would plant that seed. So then what happens is our DNA is now going into that seed, and then the food is then now grown more nutritiously, more specific to what our innate needs are based on the saliva that was put on that seed. What we found was when we grew our garden, we had the most plentiful garden you wouldn’t believe. The cucumbers, the zucchini, the tomatoes, the peppers, and our lettuces were just amazing and quite nutritious. It had different flavors to them. My husband’s would taste a little different than mine. It was really, really interesting the difference in that.

You can actually have some fun with how you can influence the quality of your food, even the preparation that takes place. If you go to a restaurant, for example, and you see the cook in the back that’s cooking. He’s angry, he’s yelling at everybody, and all of that, I don’t think I’d want to eat that food because there’s a lot of anger, which is an emotion, which is energy put in that food. I’d much rather take it from somebody who’s singing in the background, who’s singing in the kitchen and having a wonderful day at work, and putting all that love into that food as it’s being prepared.

My husband does the same thing. When he cooks a meal, he puts this beautiful music on in the background. He puts some loving energy into each stroke of the knife or whatever he’s doing to make the food much more energetically loving to ourselves as we eat it. The environment is everything. But the food just tastes better when you put love in it. I’m sure you know that because you put a lot of love into your food.

[00:34:16] Ashley James: One of my favorite books as a young adult, as a teenager was Como para agua chocolate, which is Like Water for Chocolate. The movie didn’t do it justice, it’s a beautiful book. The author went on to write a sci-fi novel, which is even better, but it’s a sci-fi novel about healing, about emotional healing. About a society that when you’re sent to prison, they believe that you commit a crime because you really weren’t surrounded with enough love and understanding. The prison they send you to is a place where people surround you and give you love and understanding until you process why you did that crime and you really heal on an emotional level, and then you grieve for the victims. It’s very interesting. I don’t remember the name of that book, but a really interesting thing to get into.

But one thing about Como para agua chocolate is that this woman, when she would cry, her tears would go into the food and then everyone at the table would cry. When she was in love and her sweat fell into the food because it was hot and she was in love, all of a sudden, everyone was lusty and in love. It painted this picture in my mind as a young teenager about how the mood that we’re in can be contagious. And also, when you’re feeding people, there’s that energy exchange there that occurs.

Now, when you said that you held the seeds in your mouth, you’re not saying your literal DNA went into the literal DNA of the lettuce, but you’re saying your energy, the energetic DNA affected the lettuce on an energetic level, right? Because it’s not like that lettuce is now part human.

[00:35:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: No, no, no, no, no. Thank you for clarifying that. It’s similar to like—I think you had Viome on where they take a sample of your feces and then they make vitamins based on what your excrement is. So the same thing goes. The theory that I’ve formulated in my brain is that when you take the seed, then you stick it in your mouth, and your digestive enzymes from your saliva get onto that seed, then when you plant it in the earth the nutritious needs that your body is needing—whatever you’re lacking—will then grow into that vegetable.

We found that between the ones that were done by my husband and myself, it was the same seed but he had a different color than mine, it grew differently, or things like that. This is a little experiment that we did. We saw that—it was the same from the same batch of seeds in the package—produced a different vegetable—vibrancy, color, consistency.

[00:37:12] Ashley James: It’s so cool. I want to know what influenced your desire to do this experiment.

[00:37:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you think about how do you best describe how does biofeedback works with taking a saliva sample, hair sample, or something like that? Well, how else can you show the influence that could have? The digestive enzymes, the saliva, your own characteristics, your own constitution, how can that affect things? So I thought, well, what better way than to see how will my DNA, my saliva influence a growing thing? Now, I’m not going to swap saliva with my dog just to see if it would influence my dog. So I thought what better way than take an inanimate object that we think of as inanimate—this seed—then place it in the mouth, then plant it, and see what would make a difference.

When you’re sitting around a table talking with friends and then this idea comes up, it’s like, hey, I bet that would have an influence so we just tried. Lo and behold we saw a difference.

[00:38:20] Ashley James: They say kissing your baby and also giving a bit of your saliva to the baby, or kissing their cheek—I don’t know if it’s pheromones. I have actually no idea why it does this, but that changes breast milk. Also, their saliva on the nipple of the mother changes the breast milk will change the immune cells that the breast milk is making for the baby. It’s a biofeedback loop between the baby and the mother so that the mother’s body knows how to formulate breast milk to support the immunity of the baby at the time. I thought that was really interesting.

Now, the experiment I’d like you guys to do this year is I want you to do a batch where you don’t hold the seeds in your mouth. There needs to be a control. The lettuce over here just put in the ground, don’t do anything with it right, and then the lettuce over here is the one the seed you held in your mouth, maybe did a prayer, do some love to it, and your husband does the same, and then you guys compare. Because it’s all going to be in the same sunlight, same soil, all come from the same seed packet. It’d be interesting to see if you notice a really significant difference from the plant that received your energy signature before planting it versus the one that received nothing.

[00:40:01] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we actually did do that because we truly did want to make it an experiment. That’s what was so amazing for us why we were able to see such a huge difference in the crop was the one that we didn’t put any of our salivae on, it was lifeless almost. The color was different. It wasn’t as vibrant. We didn’t have as much of a harvest from it either. Once we would clip, it didn’t always come back as far as like in some of the lettuces and stuff, and also the reseeding of it. We didn’t see huge pollination. We didn’t see a lot of the seeds going to pollination. The yield was much smaller with those that we did not put our saliva on.

[00:40:56] Ashley James: That’s interesting.

[00:40:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Now, I’d be interested though to see how our food would influence other people that ate our food. Think about that. I mean, I’m not saying that our DNA is going to change theirs. This is another example and this kind of leads into the iridology piece is that when animals like cats, for example, I have two mama cats right now who are both producing little kittens. When one mama cat is feeding the other mama cat’s kittens, we noticed that the color of their iris would change.

[00:41:34] Ashley James: What?

[00:41:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, and what I mean by that is not that the background color, which is the main color, but speckles in the eyes would show up, or we’d see little lacunae that would show up in the iris that wasn’t there before. That’s when they start picking up the other mother’s genetic characteristics. It’s pretty cool the way you can see that happen.

You can also see if there’s something wrong with the animal-based on where color changes occur in the eye. If you start to see more dots or you see lines starting to appear—white lines or things like that—that’ll tell you that there’s inflammation in a particular area so let’s check that area out. It will tell you whether they’ve got some problems with their liver. Same thing with humans.

Animals have the same characteristics that humans do. Their eyes change when they have an injury. That’s actually how it came about was a little boy that was 11 years old found an owl that had broken its leg. He saw the there were some color changes in the eye of the owl as it was healing. It was kind of fascinating to see that happen. I see the same thing in my dog. I look at my dog’s eyes and I can say, oh yeah, she’s got some issues going on. We need to work on that. It’s pretty cool.

[00:42:57] Ashley James: When you look at your clients when they’re with you in person do you see a big difference from the beginning of a session to the end of the session, or is that something that changes more gradually over time?

[00:43:11] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It doesn’t always happen that quickly. It’s usually gradual over time, and it depends on what it is that we’re working on. I’ve kind of switched my focus because usually when I’m talking to people and I’m talking to them live, face to face, I look at their tongue a lot because the tongue will tell me things. But now I’m also starting to look at the eye even more, and it really depends on the type of light I have to see the eye to see if I can actually see the little spots or the little lines in the eye that tell me something, or the rings, or even just discolorations that are occurring. Or if they’ve got some bloodshot eyes, that’ll tell me a little bit of what’s going on in the sclera.

People have caught on to the fact that I look at their tongue, and so now they kind of block their mouth when I’m talking to them. Well, now they have to block their eyes if they want me to not look at their eyes to tell them what’s going on. But I can look at their eye and say, are you having some digestive issues? They’ll say, well, yeah. How’d you know? Oh, you got this little speck here that’s telling me that you’ve got some digestive issues. Looks like you might have a little bit of heavy metal going because of these little rings that are showing up or things like that. It’s pretty cool.

[00:44:19] Ashley James: Now, iridology—I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t it a fairly old, widely studied, and it’s practical but it’s repeatable. It’s a science.

[00:44:41] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It is.

[00:44:41] Ashley James: How old is it? For those who’ve never heard of iridology, which is being able to basically to look in the different aspects of someone’s eye and see what organs and what systems need help. Can you tell us the history of it?

[00:45:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. It goes way back to the 1800s even. Even way before then, they even have pictures of drawings within cave dwellings and stuff like that of the eye. But back in the 1800s, the one that I was referring to earlier Dr. Von Peczely I believe was his name, was the 11-year-old boy that found the owl that had a marking on the owl’s eye that was depicted kind of by where the leg is, which is in the lower part of the eye. As the bird was starting to heal, he started noticing the change in the eye and the color of the eye change.

I don’t know if that was the main reason why he went back to medical school, but he went to medical school and became a doctor. As he started seeing more and more of his clients and more and more of his patients, he started seeing that the eyes were reflecting what was going on in the body. As the body was healing, the eye was healing. So he could actually see that significant change.

Now, whether it can change from the beginning of a session to an end of a session, typically not because basically, it depends on if it’s a congenital thing because you can actually see things that you’ve inherited from your parents, or if it’s something that is an acute, subacute, or chronic, or even a degenerative issue. But the beautiful thing it’s similar to biofeedback in that it can predict. It may not be something that you have right now, but it’s a precursor, so it’s leading up to it.

Just like biofeedback identifies things that are symptomatologies and energies that are leading to dis-ease, the same thing goes with the eyes is that it leads to dis-ease as well. It’s kind of like here’s something that’s coming on, and if you don’t do something about it now, this could end up being something that you’re going to have to deal with later that will take the quality of your life away. That was the first thing, but then there was Dr. Jensen who is an American iridologist who really brought the science and the use of it in the homes. He made it so that people would understand it.

And then there’s also another physician out there, Verghis, who actually put the behavior. So he made behavior iridology. What are some of the emotions that show up, the personalities that are showing up within the eyes? You can see if somebody’s an extrovert versus an introvert based on the amount of fibers that are showing up. You can tell if they’re a right-brain or left-brain person by the amount of activity in one eye versus the other. It’s really cool, so it helps you understand. If you’re interviewing somebody for a job, you can actually look at their eyes and say, is this somebody who is more of a creator person or more of a left-brained person that’s more focused on let’s just get the task done. You can actually hire somebody based on where their brain is activating and working the most.

[00:48:17] Ashley James: That’s really fascinating.

[00:48:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s quite fascinating.

[00:48:20] Ashley James: So I’m a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming, and as part of that, we really study how to understand people’s personalities in a passive way. Because if one were to choose to—let’s say they are a headhunter for Microsoft, for example. They’re the recruiter for Microsoft. It’s illegal to give personality tests in America and in several other countries. There are certain countries where it’s not illegal. I’m sure it’s a lot easier to do hiring in those countries, but in the United States, you’re not allowed to do a personality test because it could be considered discriminatory.

I mean, I’m not going to discriminate against an introvert or an extrovert. It’s like if you’re hiring an accountant that’s going to be in the basement never surrounded by anyone else, you really want to hire an introvert. They’re going to be a lot more focused and happy there. You don’t want to hire an extrovert accountant. They’re going to be miserable. So there are just certain personality traits that are best if you understand the job you’re hiring for it’s best. Or if you’re dating. If you’re examining potential mates, even meeting new friends, or hiring a babysitter or a nanny—certain things you want to know about that person.

In neuro-linguistic programming, we learn how to read people, gain rapport with them and read people, not in a malicious way at all. Although, Hollywood loves to paint the picture of NLP in a very malicious way because that sells movies, TV shows, or whatever. But neuro-linguistic programming is simply becoming so observant that you can understand more about human behavior and all the signs are right there for everyone to read. If you can look into someone’s eyes and you study your iridology, you have the ability to understand their health, also their emotional health, and also their behavioral tendencies. I think that is really powerful.

This is something that would interest me. For example, being a mom, and again I saw studies recently, some articles published about how they see the differences in brain patterns that women actually see a larger spectrum of color than men do. That is they believe because we can detect micro changes in the vasculature of our children such that we will see if they’re developing a fever if they’re developing a flush. The capillaries around their cheeks, are they more white, are they more dark? What’s going on? That is all playing a role in telling us are they in a state of stress, are they going into a sickness? We have to look at our children all the time and judge, especially young ones who can’t talk to us.

I don’t know why the scientists found out that moms can do it more than dads because I mean, all power to the stay-at-home dads, right? But for whatever reason, we have been designed to be able to see, adapted, or grew in a way to be able to see and detect even further more minute changes in the nuances of how the body is expressing itself. So reading eyes is something that I think moms who are like crunchy moms who are into holistic health would be really excited to study more about. And then also the tongue, and I really want to get into talking about the tongue too. It’s kind of hard to teach people iridology through an audio podcast, but maybe you could direct us to resources that the layperson could study.

[00:52:31] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Absolutely. For example, when you were talking about this whole connection with the child and things like that, why do you think that they say that moms have eyes in the back of their heads? Well, they do.

[00:52:45] Ashley James: I have freaked my son out so many times. My son’s almost six. Now, he was an early talker. When he was 18 months old he knew the alphabet backward and forwards. We would just do fun games with the alphabet, he picked it up, and he could say really complex words. He could say avocado before he was two. By the time he was two, he was talking full sentences. He’s always been really communicative, which makes sense given who his mom is. And also, we talk to him all the time. We talk to our son all the time like an adult. We don’t do baby talk. We talk to him all the time, engage with him all the time, and he’s very communicative.

So at a really young age, I’ll be in the kitchen, our son will be in the living room, my back is turned to him, and I’ll say, “Stop doing that. You know you’re not allowed to do that.” He’s like, “How did you know?”

[00:53:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Right. If you think about that, so you do actually have an eye on the back of your head because when you think about where the pineal gland is actually located in the brain. It is actually towards the back of the brain, and that is where your sense of intuition is. That’s also where all the hormones, the hypothalamus, the thalamus, and all that are coming through. So basically, I mean, not only are we emotional and hormonal beings but we’re also seers and feelers and key into that energy. That’s why that sense of intuition is so strong. When you feel somebody approach your child you say stranger danger, that this is not a good person. That was because we were designed that way. That’s one of the beautiful things about the differences between men and women is we were given that that intuition.

So, of course, we have the eyes in the back of our heads for that reason. That pineal gland is actively firing [inaudible 00:54:43] stranger danger, do not approach, stay away from my child kind of thing, and me as well.

But there are certain things that you can actually look for in the eye that can give you an idea of some things that would just be something to follow up with. For example, if you see rings in the eyes meaning circular rings on the outer of the iris towards where the sclera is, if you see a white ring around that, that typically, first of all, is one of the signs of old age. You’ll see that in some of the elderly, but it’s also circulation. So kind of looking at that. That’s also a condition of the skin. The aging of the skin is part of the aging process. Maybe too much sun, not enough hydration, that kind of thing. It’s all about melanin as well.

But what most people don’t realize is there are truly only two-colored eyes—there’s brown and there’s blue. I have green eyes so I’m like wait a minute, where do I fall in that. Well, there is a mixed color, and that’s called a biliary. That’s where the greens and the hazel’s come in. Typically, the hazel would be like a brown, but it has some discoloration around the pupil, which could be toxins, it could be genetic things that have come in, it could be that you have a very strong constitution. If you see some strings in the eyes that are emanating from the pupil, that’s usually your constitution. They liken it to different types of fabric.

For example, the strongest constitution person will look like satin, meaning that the color of the pupil is very tightly woven. The striations coming from the pupil are very tight, so they have a very strong constitution meaning their digestion is going to be very strong, that their body’s going to be strong, everything’s going to be strong. Then if they have a very loose-looking pupil, meaning that they’ve got openings and stuff like that, not only does that mean—and the previous person would be more of an introvert. If you think about that type woven, very tight with their time, tight with personality, things like that. They’d be more of an introvert.

Whereas the one with the eyes that have a lot of light coming in them, they have open areas that we call lacuna that make them look very like a flower. Those are very extroverted people that also are very much emotional type. They tend to be more of a right-side brain dominant. They tend to be more spontaneous and creative, but you also want to see if there are color changes within the color. So if you have a blue eye but then you have some brown specks in it, typically that means that there’s a psora, which means there are some toxins and stuff going on within that area.

So there are certain things that you can look for in the eye that might change as a result of things. If you hurt your ankle, you’re going to see a change in the bottom of your eye where the ankle is located, and you might actually see a speck. That spec might show that the body is trying to heal. You can actually see long-term phase versus acute. You can tell based on the color if it is an acute episode and if it’s going to convert it to long-term. You can actually stop it at the acute level before it even goes chronic. That’s the thing that I love the most about this is to be able to detect. It’s like a timescape. You can see, okay, you’re in the acute phase of this. If you change this now, it does not have to be a chronic disease later. That’s what I love the most.

If you see some white colors, let’s say you have a blue eye and you have some white striations in there, oftentimes that may mean there’s a kidney imbalance or there’s too much acid. It’s in the acute stage of the disease. It could also mean that you have a very hard life that we need to look at the psychological aspects of it. They may over rationalize things. They may have a hard time forgiving.

Yellow tends to mean that there is an adrenal imbalance. Oftentimes, the emotion associated with that would be fear, anger, or worry. So of course, if you think about that, it does influence the adrenals.

If there’s a bright orange color to it—so you can see some of that sometimes in the hazel eyes the bright orange—oftentimes that’s a pancreas imbalance. You’ll see that a lot with people who have diabetes, and oftentimes it’s a lack of grieving. They haven’t had a chance to grieve for something, whether it’s grieving for their loss of independence in their life, their ability to enjoy the food that they’ve wanted to, or even grieving of lifestyle, people who have left, or even childhood issues.

If you see dark orange, oftentimes, that would be a pancreas or gallbladder issue, or sometimes there’s something going on with the gallbladder. If you can actually catch this in advance, then you might be able to save your gallbladder at some point because it’s an early indication of something going. Usually, that’s a long-standing lack of joy that somebody’s had. So you might see some of this in some of your friends when you see some of these emotions showing up, and then you see some of the conditions like with traditional Chinese medicine, typically if I see something going with the pancreas and the gallbladder, I’ll also see hip issues or knee issues going on as well because it goes right along that gallbladder, or they might have headaches as well.

Then if there are reddish-brown specks in there, that could be a spleen or blood weakness. Typically you’ll see that in the tongue as well, and I can explain that when we go into that. But that’s typically irritability or depression that the person is having some issues with.

And then if you see some light or dark brown specks in there, that’s usually a liver imbalance and a sign of chronic disease. You can see the color spectrum. White, they’re in the acute phase. It’s more of a lymphatic thing. As the color gets deeper and deeper into the texture, then that’s the progression of the disease process. You can also just look at your own eyes and see some of those things as an indicator.

[01:01:14] Ashley James: The location matters though, right? Like you said, the lower part of the eye was the leg of the owl, for example. So you’re seeing these different colors in the eye, and the location also plays a role. I think studying it would be fascinating as a layperson, but I also think going to an iridologist and one that has been trained both in the physical but also the personality and the emotional to get a full sort of reading of what’s going on. I think that’d be a lot of fun.

And then doing the work like you said if, for example, heavy metals come up. I spent the last five years doing heavy metal detox and really noticing a huge difference in my labs. All of my labs improved, my liver improved, my blood sugar improved—all the functions of my body—my hormones improved. Everything improved because I was doing that, and of course eating an even healthier diet because I can’t say I was eating unhealthy before that. I’ve been pretty consistently eating as healthy as possible for the last 10 years. But in the last five, I’ve been really focusing on everything I can do to support the body and removing heavy metals.

Man, it would have been really interesting to get sort of a camera like a really close-up camera shot of my eyes five years ago versus now to see. I know I made these changes, but then to also have that confirmation to see that the changes took place over time in my eyes. That would be neat to go maybe once a year or something and get a picture of your eye and then see those changes as you do the work.

[01:03:05] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh yeah. You can see a change within a month. You can actually see it within a couple of days. So for example, I did a fun thing. The other piece of it is I’ve been having some of my clients who I’ve been seeing for biofeedback sending me pictures of their eyes, and they’ve been really, really good about that in that they can then send me an email of their eye, and they have to specify right and left—open that eyeball is as high as they can.

So typically, I’ll have them keep their eyeball open with their fingers while their spouse or whoever takes a picture of it, and then that way I can get a really good picture, of course with the flash off. so there’s no glare coming from it and making sure you’re not getting a glare from windows. But then I can actually blow that up and really look at it and then get a really good idea. There are over 90 areas of the eye that we look at. That’s why it’s very important you do go to an iridologist for that.

The beautiful thing is that you can actually see the changes from one aspect to another. So for example, before each full moon, I do a fast—three to four days before a fast and even before the new moon. So I’m usually doing a fast two times a month. So I’ll do my fast so. Before I do my fast I’ll do a picture of my eye and I’ll analyze it and take a look at it. And then I’ll do my fast and then after my fast I’ll look at that and go wow, look at that. You can actually see a difference within that time frame—that four days. You can see a difference in the eyes—the clarity, the color.

You might have had some people say like for me, I can be green eyes one day and blue eyes another day. Sometimes it depends on the color I wear, it sometimes depends on the mood I’m in. It’s kind of like I got motoring eyes or something like that. They could turn the little color so the yellow will come out more. But my eyes, when you look in the camera, are actually blue—a very pretty blue. But when you truly look at it with the naked eye they’re green, and that is because of the coloration that I have around the pupil.

[01:05:09] Ashley James: My dad was the same way. My dad had these hazel eyes that could be green, they could be blue, they could be brown. It was almost like golden brown, and they would change. I mean, the most change I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes my dad had that, and I thought that was fascinating, considering my mom was just pretty much always blue. I was like, what’s up with my dad? I thought that was really interesting.

Now, I love fasting. I’ve had several episodes on fasting, and some people who’ve never heard of therapeutic fasting think you’re crazy. Why wouldn’t you want to eat when you have access to perfectly good food? Episode 230 of my podcast, so I recommend listeners go back and check that out. Episode 230 talks about water-only fasting on a therapeutic level, and the results that you can get.

Back in 2012, a Japanese doctor discovered that the body goes through on day three of a water-only fast. It’s somewhere around hour 30 it kind of ramps up. The body digests pathological tissue, cancer—and I’m not saying this is a cure for cancer, although it has been documented and this is something that we talked about in episode 230. But the body will digest scar tissue to the point where people have seen scars go away during long fasts. Fibrous tissue, so women with fibroids, women with very thick breast tissue, women with fibroids around their uterus or their ovaries, they’ve seen a significant improvement.

It’s just fascinating because if you weren’t into health, you would probably never go—unless you had to for a colonoscopy or something—skip a meal, right? And yet, we are designed, we have a self-cleaning mechanism. It’s like you put your oven on the self-clean setting. Even my washing machine has a self-clean setting, and I just thought that was so funny our body has a self-cleaning setting. That if we don’t eat for three to five days, our body goes through this huge cycle of self-cleaning and breaking down pathological tissue. That is absolutely amazing. There are so many health benefits.

So you fast twice a month. Why do you choose to fast around the new moon and the full moon? What is your reasoning behind choosing the amount of days, like you said, about four days? Why do you choose the amount of time and the timing?

[01:07:50] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The number of days was really random—three to four days. First of all, I always like the number three, so that’s one of the main reasons. But I always choose the lunar cycle because that’s when many things are more active in the body. That’s when a lot of things will actually start to show up. For example, that’s when parasites are much more active in the bodies during a lunar cycle. So if I’m wanting to clean my body out of any kind of parasites that may be remaining because we do all have parasites, it’s just how active are they. Then what better time than the lunar cycle? So why not use mother earth to help us heal?

So the more in tune that we get to all of these different frequencies and vibrations of the world, of the earth, then our body responds so much better to it. Why not do these drastic changes during lunar cycles and during these full moon episodes because that’s when your body’s going to be much more receptive to it. And I’ve noticed the difference between a fast in between, during a full or a new moon, and it just heightens everything. It heightens the meditations, it heightens the interaction that you have with the world, your senses become much more interactive. When you’re cleaning your body out, then it opens up every sensory system within your body to become much more viable, much more vital. That fast during that time just speeds everything up. My meditations get deeper, everything gets deeper.

[01:09:26] Ashley James: Very cool.

[01:09:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So why not do a fast during that time?

[01:09:30] Ashley James: What’s really neat about even just a three to four-day fast, and the fact that you do it twice a month is fantastic. What’s really interesting is that people are often afraid that it lowers the metabolism, which slows down the metabolism. What studies have shown—they’ve repeated these studies—is that when we lower the caloric intake, let’s say you decided to go on a 1,200 calorie a day diet, and then you did that for three months, and then you went back to eating 2,000 calories, you would start to gain weight from the 2,000 calorie diet.

Let’s say you always ate 2,000 calories and you were always consistently the same weight. If you lowered your caloric intake significantly like to 1,500 or 1,200 calories, and then went back to eating 2,000 calories, which was seemingly healthy for you for years, all of a sudden now you’re gaining weight. What they find is that by eating a lower calorie diet, our metabolism slows. The body goes into a starvation mode and goes, okay, we’re in famine now. We need to conserve energy, and so we’re going to convert everything to fat to survive. We’re going to really sluggish slow it all down, make less heat.

This kind of flies in the face of all the diets out there. All the mainstream diets tell us to eat less. That creates more customers for more diet books because now we are in this perpetual cycle of, and I’ve been on over 30 diets in my life and I know. The more dieting you do, even healthy ones like the Mediterranean diet, so healthy. The Zone diet, and the doctors, all this stuff. All those diets out there cause the metabolism to slow.

Now, everyone gets results in their first month. You shift your way of eating and oh, I lost 15 pounds. Well good. Some of that was water weight from removing inflammation because maybe you stopped eating sugar, you stopped eating junk food, fast food, or whatever. You’ve changed your lifestyle. But in the long term, it slows the metabolism, which is really bad so that you can’t actually eat a healthful diet without the body going into fat-storing mode.

Now fasting—and I’m not talking about intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is something different. The jury’s still out about it. Some people have really negative effects from intermittent fasting, some people have really positive effects. When I work with clients that are pre-diabetic or diabetic, I do not get them to do intermittent fasting right away. It’s not the best for everyone because in some cases, it causes the body to go into a state of stress and actually maintain a higher state of glucose. Although, like I said, with some people, intermittent fasting is amazing for them. I don’t think it’s a good thing for everyone. I think it’s kind of a try it and see and notice how you feel and notice how your body responds kind of thing. But with the fasting that you’re talking about, which is a three- to four-day water-only fast, that—in a most fascinating way—speeds up the metabolism.

My husband did a 17-day fast last year. He does a few fasts every year. The metabolism will stay fairly high, and here you and I think well you’re not eating so wouldn’t the body conserve energy? Well, no. It actually does the opposite. The body goes, I really need to go find food. We got to go forage. We got to go walk miles and miles to find food. Let’s ramp up the metabolism, and so things actually ramp up. Now that you’re not having to spend all your energy digesting, now the body is spending all that energy healing.

It’s very exciting this idea of incorporating fasting, and I like that you mentioned doing it around a new moon and a full moon because you’re ramping up your own metabolism, but also you’re supporting a very healthy stimulus to your immune system, and at the same time, you’re starving the parasites. I think that’s really neat that you’ve adapted that. How long have you done this habit?

[01:13:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we’ve been doing this for, I would say, about nine months now, and we’ve been seeing a huge difference with it. First of all, it’s that interaction with mother nature. It’s really listening to her rhythm, responding to it, and allowing our body to succumb to that rhythm because when we do, that’s when true healing occurs and that’s when we really get a good response back from the fast itself. But it also gave you freedom. What I mean by freedom, how many of us are so stuck to the time that we eat? It’s 9:00 AM, it’s time that we’re supposed to be eating. At 6:00 PM we’re supposed to be having dinner. Based on how about how do you feel, do you even feel like you want to eat? Are you even hungry even, or is it more of a craving, is it more of something else?

[01:14:40] Ashley James: Or is it thirst.

[01:14:42] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, thirst is one of the biggest reasons. A lot of people think you have to drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated. I personally like to drink a 25-ounce glass of water first thing in the morning on my way to work and drink the whole thing, then I drink another one on my way home, and then I have some during the day. But then I really get a good flush and then it stays there because the biggest mistake most people make is they try to drink their water throughout the day and then they don’t get enough water in. Whereas if you start with a really nice big glass in the morning with some lemon in it, some apple cider vinegar, or something like that to really get that cellular structure to become more alkaline, then you’re doing much better that way.

But then, the other piece of it is the freedom that it gives you. So let’s say that you’re going on a trip somewhere and you’re on a plane. You’re thinking, there’s no way I’m going to eat this food. But you’re like, but I’m going to be hungry. When you go through a fast you realize I don’t have to eat because I actually have gone three or four days I’ve gone without eating anything.

The first time you do one you’re going to have a major headache. It’s going to feel like your head is about to explode. I keep thinking that’s all these toxins that I’m releasing. It’s parasites, it’s all these things are saying, let me out, let it out, and they’re wanting to come out. They do, they eliminate quite drastically. After that first or second day of the headache, which happens the first time you do the fast. When you do your second fast, the third fast, and the fourth fast, you don’t have those headaches anymore because your body’s saying, oh yeah. Okay, that’s what she’s doing. We’re in this. We know what to do now. She’s not going to starve us completely.

But think of the yogis that have gone 40, 45 days, 60 days, 7days without food. The body is very, very smart. I’ve heard of a lot of doctors actually saying that it’s actually healthy to have a little bit of fat on you. The reason for that is, for this reason, there’s a fat store in there that if there’s a disease, a virus, or something that comes into the body, it’s going to go after the fat first and not the organs. So when you see somebody who’s extremely thin, we’re talking like anorexic thin, they tend to—when they get sick—it starts to attack the organs more because there’s no fat to go for.

I always like it when I see my clients with a little bit of meat on them versus real thin because of that reason. The same thing goes with COVID. I’ve noticed with some of the COVID clients that I’ve been seeing through biofeedback, those that have a little bit of meat on them respond better to the biofeedback energetically, and they respond faster to the healing process. Whereas those that may be thinner, and I think part of that is because of the parasites. I think the parasites are greatly impacting or interacting within the person that is being exposed to COVID. That’s what’s making it change so much is the parasites within the body are making the characteristics of COVID change. That’s why they’re having a hard time keeping ahead of it, I believe.

Parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse. Do your foot spas that I know that Kellyann and the Platinum Energy System. I have one of those and I love it. That I do also at the end of my fast is I do a nice little foot spa too. That takes the dredges, the rest of the stuff out that that I didn’t quite complete with my fast. That was probably a long answer, wasn’t it?

[01:18:35] Ashley James: No, no, it was great. It’s all very interesting. Once you start getting into looking into parasites, you’re going down the rabbit hole chasing the white rabbit.

[01:18:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes.

[01:18:56] Ashley James: I’m going to mix up my metaphors, it’s like Dorothy going down the rabbit hole.

[01:19:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: She could be going there too.

[01:19:03] Ashley James: It just keeps going and going. I had a man on the show who’s married to a woman who is very famous, and I’ve also had her on the show. Of course, pregnancy brain, I’m not going to remember anyone’s names right now, I apologize. But she’s famous for the book she wrote in the ‘90s called Guess What Came to Dinner. She’s written a bunch, but she’s famous for parasite cleanses. I’m like 15 years old or 12 years old, my mom brings this book home. I’ve been into health stuff my whole life I just. I just decided to rebel. In my teen years, I decided to rebel and I paid for it in my 20s, basically, and I spent my entire adult life having to recuperate from all the damage I did to myself in my teen years rebelling against all the cool stuff that I was into and I still am.

We did a parasite cleanse with my family and we all got tested, and we had three parasites. We had two parasites from owning cats, and one parasite that we picked up from Mexico. This is in the ‘90s. Then we did a parasite cleanse and then we didn’t have them anymore. Reading the book, Guess What Came to Dinner, was like oh my gosh. And then to have her on the show I was just starstruck. I’m like you’ve been part of my whole life.

[01:20:25] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Are you talking about Hulda Clark?

[01:20:26] Ashley James: No, not Hulda Clark. She’s another amazing one. Anyways, her husband who I’ve also had on the show and he came on the show twice. His first time on the show—it was a two-parter—he shared that he about his cancer journey and how he was like in the middle of this weird chemotherapy that was killing him. He escaped the hospital in the middle of the night because he really realized that they will kill me in here. He escaped the hospital, and he’s like I’m just going to do something natural because I don’t want to go through this treatment anymore because the treatment’s killing me. And then he ended up completely healing his body using natural medicine, and it’s been his journey. That’s how he met his now wife who’s famous for parasite cleanses.

So he came on the show the second time to talk about—he has this YouTube channel where he interviews people who have overcome cancer naturally and what they did, and so that’s a big eye-opener. But one guy he interviewed got on an anti-parasitic over-the-counter medicine that you buy for animals. It’s been on the market forever.

[01:21:43] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Ivermectin.

[01:21:44] Ashley James: And his cancer went away. They’ve had over 60,000 people part of this—there’s a blog or a forum where they all gather online and they all share their experiences. He goes through and talks about five different reasons why it strips the coating on the tumors so that the immune system identifies it. I mean, it does like five different things. Again, you can’t say this is a cure-all because there are people out there who it didn’t work for. I’ve never ever, ever seen anything that was a 100% success rate when it comes to cancer, and I believe that’s because cancer is not just one thing.

When I interviewed the Italian doctor, Dr. Simoncini—for whatever reason I never forget his name. He’s fascinating. He was a surgeon, and he’s not a holistic doctor at all. So I always find it interesting when I interview doctors who’ve been kicked out of the mainstream realm for finding a cure and they’re not holistic doctors. Now they have to go around and hang out with all the holistic doctors because they’re the only ones that believe them.

So Dr. Simoncini, as a surgeon, cut open a tumor and said, “Why do tumors look like cottage cheese? Why do tumors look like candida overgrowth?” So he took a dying patient who was on their death bed anyway and they had a catheter set up to deliver chemotherapy right into the vasculature of the tumor.

So he made up a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and water, which is baking soda and water, and that is a very alkaline mixture right. He says, well, this is what you would do if you had a yeast infection. The person was going to die anyway. They’re on their deathbed. He pours it into the tumor and the person lives. The tumor melts away, and he freaks out. I said, “Well, okay. What’s your success rate?” Because he does it all the time. This is his full-time job is he goes around basically installing catheters into the vasculature of tumors then pouring these sodium bicarbonate solutions into the tumors. He says about 70% of the time. I mean, 70% is better than any. Think about it, there’s no chemotherapy, no radiation that gets 70% of all kinds of cancer.

[01:24:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Let’s talk about side effects.

[01:24:19] Ashley James: Yeah, don’t even get me started. I’ve talked to oncologists and there’s commonly, if you’ve had chemotherapy, you have a 2% chance of developing secondary cancer from the chemotherapy. Similar to radiation, and the statistics vary from treatment to treatment. That’s just one side effect. But my point is that if all tumors were candida, then why wouldn’t this work 100% of the time? That’s because I believe that—I mean, based on talking to all these doctors that that help patients no longer have cancer, no longer have tumors—it’s not always one thing. There are multiple reasons, and we have to look at all these different aspects. We have to look at parasites.

When interviewing Viome, I’ve had two people on the show talking about the Viome company, which I love. If anyone wants to get this stool test, it’s phenomenal. I did it and it’s so informative. It’s a few hundred dollars, and it’s a home test. You can do it at home and you mail it in, and you get a coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health—gives you a discount.

What I love about Viome is it’s going to give you the information you can’t get anywhere else because blood tests don’t show this. It’s showing the genetic expressions of the microbiome in your body and the chemicals they’re making from the food you eat because there’s a pharmacy in your gut. So it gives you this whole missing link of information. But what they said is there are new studies that just came out recently that show that tumors have their own unique microbiome. We can begin to detect tumors before they even become tumors because we can detect the microbiome of cancers.

That leads me to think, just wrap your brain around that, what if the microbiomes are creating the tumors or stimulating the tumors? What if there are parasitic personality traits that a certain kind of microbiome is like a parasite and then the body is reacting to it. I mean, there’s this whole world that opens up, and unfortunately, science progresses one death at a time. We have to really push for research in this regard, but the research dollars only go towards something that’s going to make people profit because the medical system’s a for-profit industry, which is super frustrating.

So if any listener out there wins the lottery, please figure out how to invest money into helping to get these answers solved when it comes to what truly is, what truly are these diseases? How come 70% of cancer just resolves itself after being treated with sodium bicarbonate solution, according to Dr. Simoncini.

[01:27:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it, don’t most diseases grow in an acid environment? And then if you add on top of that, I bet he would probably improve his rate of improvement or cure if he also addresses the emotional components of cancer and look at the traditional Chinese medicine aspects of what organs hold, what memories, or what emotions. Typically that’s the one that’s going to get the disease. That’s when you look at the whole person. That’s what I absolutely love about what I do in integrative medicine is I integrate the two sides of the world.

I integrate the medical side and the natural side and make them all make sense to the point where we can all work happily in the same play yard. But it’s addressing the whole person, not just the physical symptoms, the dis-ease, but also what got them there. They have shown that cancer actually starts growing seven years in advance before it’s even detected. If you can actually see the formation of it before it even starts, whether it’s through your emotions, the ones that you’re holding, the personality, the worry, all of that, that would actually help to reverse it in addition to any of the natural remedies. I love the idea of baking soda. I mean, that’s amazing. I take baking soda every night before I go to bed.

[01:28:55] Ashley James: I asked him about that. Why can’t we just drink it? The thing is that the body has a buffer system. Drinking baking soda is not really going to get the alkalinity and the concentration it’s needed for a tumor. If you’re on an empty stomach, it doesn’t hurt to drink some baking soda just like if you’re on an empty stomach or you’re about to eat food, it doesn’t hurt to drink some apple cider vinegar. When you first wake up in the morning, it’s very helpful to drink lemon juice because even though lemon is acidic, when the body interacts with it on a cellular level, it has an extra hydrogen molecule that binds to—there’s a chemical process. I heard it and it made sense to me, but then repeating it I feel like I’m not doing it justice.

In one of Ty Bollinger’s first docu-series where he goes down to—

[01:29:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The Truth About Cancer.

[01:29:48] Ashley James: Yeah, The Truth About Cancer. It’s like season five, basically. It was back in season two of The Truth About Cancer where he went to Mexico. I don’t think it’s in Tijuana. It’s Mexico, and he worked with the Gerson Clinic. They explained the process that happens in the body that when we drink certain juices like lemon juice—even though it’s acidic—putting it in the body actually has a process it goes through on a cellular level which then alkalizes. I found that fascinating.

We want to do it safely. You don’t want to alkalize your stomach acid when you’re trying to digest it. The first half of digestion in the stomach is acidic, and then right near the end, the body turns it more to neutral so that it can empty it into the small intestine. So when you take a digestive enzyme or apple cider vinegar, do it at the beginning, don’t do it at the end of a meal. Don’t eat and then an hour later, I forgot to take my digestive enzyme. I might as well take it now. Because if there’s hydrochloric acid in it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

You got to drink the apple cider vinegar in the beginning, or you take the hydrochloric acid digestive supplement in the beginning, not at the end. And then definitely don’t drink carbonated beverages during a meal. Any kind of fizzy beer, club soda, anything that’s carbonated that’s fizzy during a meal will lower stomach acid, will help to neutralize stomach acid, which is not a good thing during digestion. You certainly don’t want to drink baking soda during a meal either. But in between meals, go nuts. There’s my little safety rant for alkalizing, and I like to just get it from food as much as possible. Get your greens in, get your berries in. The body knows what to do with it when it comes to balancing out alkalinity.

[01:31:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I don’t know if you ever listened to Dr. Zach Bush, but I absolutely love the man. He talks a lot about getting the nutrition from your food versus supplements and versus the other things. He basically says the supplement industry has taken over the pharmacy in that there are so many supplements out there that people are so confused as far as what it is. What they should be taking and how much, and is there an overload.

I prefer to get your supplementation from your food because that is truly your life force. There’s a life force in that food. There’s a life force in the eating of it, the preparation of it, and the growing of it. But yes, there are times that you have to take supplements. It’s like you said, it’s not one of those end-all-be-all. You can’t just have this cookie cutter for everybody. It’s got to be very individualized. But the more we can get it from our food, the better. That’s why I really don’t like diets per se. Maybe it’s the word itself because the first three letters is die. For me, that’s kind of like do I really want to do that? Plus, does it really stick?

I’d much rather find a lifestyle plan, something that you can maintain your whole life versus just times that you want to fit into a dress, fit it into a pair of pants, or do something. You’re facing this life issue and now you got to drop the weight. How about you find something that is doable in your system that is like your ability to grow your own food or things like that that you can live with, that’s a long-term thing, that becomes a habit. That your body is growing with and fortifying with and so on, versus all these trendy little diets that keep showing up.

Let’s find it from the food and then take the pressure off. Because usually when you’re on a diet, there’s something that you’re having to eliminate. Usually, that thing that you’re having to eliminate is something that you really, really like. Now you’re going through this stress of not being able to ever have that ever, ever again, which you know you’re going to have again. But it’s that whole thing of the all or none. Like in ayurvedic, we talk about using different colors to enhance your food, to get the most nutrition from your food, and things like that. As well as the emotion that you put into it and the enzymes.

Why people have cravings is usually because we’re missing a taste in that food, whether it’s a sweet, a sour, or a salt. It’s missing. And so if you get all the flavors in your meal, you tend to not have the craving anymore because the taste buds have picked up that craving, that texture, that flavor, or that taste. All the taste buds on the tongue have been appeased. They’ve been relieved. They’re not saying, hey, I was left out so therefore I’m going to crave more of that, so the salt side. So then you start craving salty foods. So bring all those foods in. That was probably a tie into the tongue because I know we were really wanting to talk about the tongue.

[01:35:00] Ashley James: We’re going to get there. About diet, 10 years ago I went gluten-free—barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Now, once in a blue moon and I mean once in a blue moon, I will have something that has gluten in it. Not a huge detrimental thing happens if I have it once in a blue moon. I had such a profound change in my health in the first month of cutting it out. I’ve shared this on the show before, so I apologize to listeners for hearing me say this again.

I completely removed barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and my husband did at the same time. So there are 12 foods that we choose to cut out, and it was other things that are a little bit easier like no nitrates or nitrites. So if you’re going to have deli meat, you don’t have any nitrates or nitrites. No fried food, no oil in a bottle. So when you’re cooking you don’t cook with oil, and there’s a reason. I mean, I can go through and explain each one, and I have in the past in other episodes. But there are 12 foods that do harm to the body, and there are scientific reasons why.

You can be a vegetarian, you can be a paleo. I mean, you can be any lifestyle. You can be eating a diet from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and it’s just removing 12 things. And then there are of course things you can replace it with.

No barley, wheat, rye, and oats were the biggest shift for me. I lost 25 pounds of water weight. This wasn’t fat. This was all water weight. My rings, which were custom fit for me sort of flying off my fingers, same with my husband. He dropped water weight, which was inflammation, and his wedding ring started flying off his hand which was custom-made for him. We had been married at the time for several years so we never had that problem.

We decided to wait a few months. So we waited about six months to get our rings resized because what if it just bounces back? I didn’t want to [inaudible 01:37:10] it off it anymore. So six months of our rings flying off our fingers we were like okay. We got to a point where we had to tie elastic hair bands around our fingers to keep our rings on. When we realized, well, we’re not going back to eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats so we’re not going to gain all this water weight back from the inflammation of these foods. Our body isn’t going to all of a sudden bounce back so our rings are going to be fine.

So we went and got them resized, and that’s when we found out that my husband went down two whole ring sizes and I went down one and a half ring sizes. That was such a profound difference for me that I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. For me, there are so many others. If I want grains, there are so many replacements for grains.

Just last night my midwife—she’s amazing—made flourless brownies, and they are to die for. There are less than five ingredients, and they’re so good. The main ingredient is cooked chickpeas, and you would not know, but these are the most moist, dense, delicious brownies you’ve ever had, and there’s no flour in it. It’s high in fiber and protein. The first ingredient is chickpeas, the second ingredient is peanut butter, and you can have other nut butter if you want or seed butter. You can add either dates or maple syrup. You can do dark chocolate. Anyway, hers were delicious.

What’s so neat is that when you get creative in the kitchen, you don’t miss these things. But I like that you brought up that when people “diet,” they remove something suddenly from their life, and all of a sudden they’re missing that flavor profile. The fun that I’ve had the last 10 years as I’ve adjusted my diet because now I eat more whole food plant-based, as close to nature as possible. The fun for me has been how do I maintain that balance of flavors but find the healthiest version possible?

About five years ago, I went completely sugar-free like I did a sugar detox, and I had to read all the labels. I love hot sauce, I can’t tell you how many hot sauces out there have sugar in them. I absolutely love hot sauce, but it took me a long time to find a variety because I kind of get bored with hot sauce. I want a different hot sauce. I want to be able to choose different hot sauces, and so many of them have sugar in it. I found two, three, or four over time. I had to go to different stores to find one that had zero sugar and also zero of the other really gross ingredients that can be in processed foods. How did you put it, in prefabricated foods?

So I try to find the most natural artesian hot sauces with no sugar. But I really went to the extreme of absolutely no added sugar and my palate changed. I stopped craving sugar. I was always eating something with sugar in it, and I got to the point where I don’t want things that are that sweet. Even dates for me are too sweet, but I’ll go for some fruit. I’ll go for sweet potato, and that has an amazing sweet flavor. You can even make a chocolate mousse out of blending…

[01:40:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Avocado.

[01:40:38] Ashley James: Yes, you can do it out of avocado and raw cacao powder. But you can do it also out of—because I like to feed my son this because he’s allergic to avocado—I can feed him baked caramelized yams, take the skin off, blend it with raw cocoa powder. The sweetness of the yam—you don’t add any sweetness in. If you want to change the consistency you can add nut milk to it like coconut milk or something. But it tastes rich, chocolatey, velvety, and delicious. Then you feed it to your kid and you’re just sitting there laughing because you’re like, hahaha, I’m getting to eat something super healthy. They’re like, haha, my mom just fed me chocolate mousse. This is awesome.

You can have a lot of fun replacing those things as long as you acknowledge, like you said in Ayurveda, it’s about getting that balance of bitter, astringent, sweet, pungent, salty. There’s one more word that they incorporate in the flavors.

[01:41:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, I wasn’t sure which ones you already covered. One of the biggest ones that people always come to me about is I’m craving sweets. I usually recommend that they just get a bitter spray. You can buy that bitter you make your cocktails with, or you can get them at a health food store that may have a little flavor to them and you spray them on your tongue.

[01:42:06] Ashley James: Swedish Bitters.

[01:42:07] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, you spray it on your tongue and there goes your craving.

[01:42:13] Ashley James: And it’s really good for the liver.

[01:42:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, well that’s the part is why? What is it? What emotion is driving that craving? You got to get back into the motions as well, but also then what is lacking in the diet? What’s lacking in emotion? What’s lacking in that aspect? I’ve thought about creating on the bestseller list of creating this diet that’s called the love diet. That should solve this question.

[01:42:41] Ashley James: You should do it.

[01:42:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I should. The question is, is this loving to me? That’s always going to be the question. So there’s really no food that you’re going to have to look at, but it’s really just saying when you look at this food, is this loving to me? Meaning is it going to feed me, is it going to nourish me, is it going to make me more vital, is it going to regenerate my cells, is it going to be something that helps my mind become clearer, my thought become clearer, my breath, whatever? Is this loving to me? And if it’s not, then put it away and then identify why am I not wanting to be loving to myself by the food that food selection that I’m choosing, the amount of water, the type of beverage I’m choosing to drink?

Am I choosing a Pepsi over water, why? Is this Pepsi loving to me or is the water more loving to me? And some people may say well I get more enjoyment from the Pepsi. Well then let’s find out why are you getting enjoyment from that sugar. What’s missing?

[01:43:39] Ashley James: Well, enjoyment isn’t love, right? It’s kind of like going on Tinder, getting a date and having really, really empty sex. Sure, we can have a romp around for an evening. I remember before I met my husband feeling so empty. I mean, sure, sex is great with someone. But there’s not that connection that love, that intimacy that you have with your spouse. I end up feeling shame and guilt, and that’s the same thing.

Yeah, I could go to McDonald’s and sure I’m in the moment—by the way, McDonald’s is disgusting. Once you start eating super healthy, you can’t go back to those foods. I could find some kind of like pizza or whatever, some kind of gluten-free pizza. I could find something that is delicious at the moment or some kind of fried egg roll. At the moment it’s delicious—yum, but then I might feel gross, my digestion slows, maybe I don’t get to poop three times a day. I feel sluggish, I get brain fog. It’s kind of abusive. It’s not loving. It’s kind of abusive to go and have a bunch of empty dates, have a bunch of them sexcapades, and then just feel empty and shame. It’s kind of similar. Or go drinking every night. You’re getting that fulfillment at the moment, but is it really loving yourself? Is it an act of love for you? And no, it’s not. It’s a form of abuse. I think you’ve got to write that book.

[01:45:22] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you’re asking people to love you, if you don’t love you either like if you don’t love yourself, then how can they love you? How do they even know how to love you if you don’t even know how to love yourself? If we really start with loving ourselves first, then we teach other people how to love us too. That’s really what it’s about is teaching people how to love us. Sometimes that’s setting the boundaries, that’s setting limits. That’s saying no, that’s not acceptable in my love field, let’s say.

When you eat the foods that are loving to you, you become much more loving. If you make decisions that are much more loving to you, then you are much more loving to yourself and then you exude that out in the energy kind of like we started this conversation about in the very beginning was about energy. When we exude love for ourselves that love exudes out. What else do we attract? We attract love back, so we get more loving people in our relationships. We can get more loving people in our atmosphere, in our gang, in our crew, in our team, in our tribe—whatever you want to call it. More loving things come to us. More loving opportunities come to us when we’re more loving for ourselves.

When we’re more self-destructive, we get more self-destructive things, more self-destructive friends, more self-destructive ideas or things. So you go down that forbidden path. Well, I’m just going to have 1 bite that then leads to 20 more bites that lead to the whole cake being eaten, and then you go down that deep dark despair. They even show it in movies where somebody has a heart broken, so what do they do? They go to the store and buy all this chocolate, they sit in their own little pajamas, they eat, cry, and do all that stuff, and then they feel horrible the next day when they’ve recovered their heart.

So let’s just tune into the love of our heart and what’s loving for ourselves, eat things that are loving for us, and get rid of those that aren’t. One of the things that I like to show people, especially in biofeedback, is how to do muscle testing on themselves and see, is this food, is this medication, or is this supplement healthy for you? When you get to teach them how to do that, I see people in the grocery store now that are out there muscle testing themselves on food before they buy it, and I love it. It’s like, yes. I love it when I see that happening. I see their bodies swaying. I’m like, oh, yeah that’s a good one, and then it makes them have better choices.

When some people are saying I don’t think my medication’s working for me anymore. I think I may be taking too much or something like that. Then I’ll say, well, let’s take out your prescription and how much you’re supposed to take. Now, what does your body say? I’m not saying this is for everybody, and it should always be under your care of a physician as far as whether you’re coming off your medications. But it’s just letting you know intuition-wise how in tune are you with your body. If your body’s saying I think I’m getting weaker on this stuff. I don’t think I need as much possibly. Maybe I can start titrating myself down, then I say then go to your doctor and start talking to them about can I start taking myself off of this? If so, what would be the best route to do it because I really feel like I’m not needing as much anymore or something like that.

[01:48:39] Ashley James: Oh, man, I can’t tell you that’s phenomenal how many times clients have come to me with really weird symptoms, and I say okay give me the list of meds you’re on. Not all my clients are on meds, but sometimes they come to me on meds and then I just have them sit on Google with me and we go through. Again, I’m not the prescribing doctor, I’m definitely not a doctor, and I don’t tell people they have to get off their meds but I ask them most of the time. I’ve only ever had one client say, no, I believe in medication and I want to be on it. I’m like, okay, this is your choice. But I want you to know the fullest of the side effects.

So my question to them as I ask, do you want to be so healthy your body no longer needs this medicine? Now, that doesn’t always apply. There are some cases where people like for example, type 1 diabetics will require some amount of insulin. It doesn’t mean they have to be on the amount of insulin they’re on now because I know a type 1 diabetic who cut it down by 75% by changing a few things in his diet, not major. Just a few things, minor things.

He did cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats as well, and he started taking a type of mineral supplement that did include chromium, vanadium, and other minerals because that helps to resensitize the insulin. Basically, insulin receptors don’t respond if there’s a chromium deficiency, and this was discovered in the ‘50s. That a doctor in California—I forget which university but in the ‘50s, and you could look at this on Wiki. A doctor could turn type 1 diabetes on and off in lab rats by starving them of chromium or by giving them chromium. So chromium is good, but it’s not the only thing. There are other things like B6 is incredibly important. There’s a whole process that B6 goes through when it comes to blood sugar regulation.

So there are multiple nutrients, and there’s this whole world of how people have been able to completely rid themselves of type 2 diabetes with diet alone, which is 100% doable, documented, written about, and I’ve had interviews about. But as far as type 1 is concerned, people can get so healthy that they can lower their amounts, and of course they know they’ve been taught how to measure themselves. But if you’re on an anti-anxiety, antidepressant, something to that regard, a high blood pressure med, a water pill, or a cholesterol med, and then you change your diet to be healthier, you do all these other healthier things, and not have your medications checked. It’s kind of like, but your body is getting healthier. What if you could have a reduced amount or completely have yourself taken off of it?

So that’s the goal. That the goal is to get so healthy that your body no longer requires that intervention or would require a minimal amount of intervention. What I do is if I have a client with a bunch of symptoms who are on medication, I will have them go on Google with me and we look at not the shortlist but the full list of side effects and we go down the list. They will start freaking out because they will go, oh my gosh. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients have epiphanies because they thought their bodies were breaking down further into the disease they were diagnosed into when it was the many of the side effects of the meds they were put on.

If your doctor isn’t willing to help to work with you either to find a different drug, to find a lower dose, or to get you so healthy you no longer need it. If your doctor’s not willing to work with you to get you healthier, to get you to not have symptoms and side effects, you can fire your doctor and hire a new one. They work for you. Don’t ever let the hubris of a doctor and their ego scare you into following their advice. Find one that is supportive of your health goals to be the healthiest person possible.

It drives me nuts when people give over their personal power to a doctor. I know there are really good MDs out there who really, really, really want you to be healthy. They’ll take advanced courses, they’ll become functional medicine practitioners, they’ll go take extracurricular courses, and they want to help you either get on a different drug, get on a lower dose, or get you so healthy you no longer need it.

That’s why I said there are so many good doctors like that out there that if you are stuck with a doctor who’s like nope we’re going to keep you on these meds no matter what. We’re not changing them no matter what because there many doctors out there that say diet doesn’t matter. You still have to be on this cholesterol med. It doesn’t matter that you’re eating a whole food plant-based diet and your cholesterol is lower. We’re going to just keep driving it down lower even still. Because cholesterol medication bruises the liver and stops the production of about 30% of our cholesterol, which is required. The liver makes it because the body needs it. Lots of books out there about that.

[01:53:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The liver is so key to emotion. In traditional Chinese medicine, the liver is where happiness is, so happy liver happy life. If you think about it, the liver is what filters everything. When you see someone who is not the happiest type of person, that’s pretty negative, angry, and very reactive, typically I’d want to say we got to work on some liver stuff here. Do a liver cleanse or something like that because the liver is processing everything from environmental toxins, to internal toxins, to our own emotional toxins. I mean, I feel like liver is one of the most important organs we have in the body.

[01:54:42] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you and I could talk for hours and you get me all riled up. You get me on my soapbox so I get so excited. I want to talk about the tongue, man. Something happened to me it must have been about a year ago or so. It feels really recent but then when I think about it I’m like that was like over a year ago. Where all of a sudden, my tongue—and my tongue when my Naturopath says stick out your tongue or I go to acupuncture and they’re like stick out your tongue, I kind of stick it out with pride. I’m kind of like, oh I know I’m so healthy and you’re going to look at my tongue and you’re going to be like impressed.

Well, all of a sudden, just over a year ago, my tongue did the weirdest thing out of nowhere and it had cracks in it like lines running down it like it split open. I had a geographic tongue and it really hurt for three days. I was kind of freaking out.

But I have a friend who’s very much into energy medicine. He did energy work with me and he said this is an energetic problem. I’m not going to get too much into the details, I might freak people out, but basically, he helped me to resolve that, and then gradually my tongue healed. But super weird that it just came on suddenly and all of a sudden I had really, really deep fissures in my tongue out of nowhere. It felt more of an energetic problem and then we resolved energetically. But everywhere I looked online was like well people think it might be a virus, people think it might be a nutrient deficiency, but we don’t really know.

So you can read the tongue and weird obvious things like once people stick out their tongue and if there are cracks down the middle, geographic tongue, or if there’s tongue separates and it looks like the Grand Canyon on their tongue, that means something. Let’s talk about the more obvious because the people who look at their tongue and they’re like well, my tongue just looks like a tongue. There are no lines, there are no bumps, it just looks like a tongue. I’m sure you could probably point out things for them, but the more overt like if you look at your tongue and it’s doing this weird thing over here, tell us about that first.

[01:57:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So first of all, I want to touch on that geographic tongue because in the geographic tongue, there are actually two different types. There’s one that’s a surface geographic and then there’s the one with the deep fissures like you’re talking about. The deep fissures is definitely an energetic issue that needs to be resolved, but there’s also a geographic tongue where on the surface of the tongue you’ll actually see where the papilla are. On the actual surface, you’ll actually see the geography of the mapping of the tongue. So the tongue is mapped geographically based on where the organs are.

So for example, the tip of the tongue is where the heart is, then right behind that tip is where the lung is, then on the sides of the tongue is where the liver and gallbladder resolves, then right down the center is the stomach and the spleen, and then right towards the back of the tongue is where the kidney, bladder, and the intestines are located. So when you’re looking at the tongue, similar to the eye, you’re looking at geography. If you see any changes within that aspect or that area of the tongue, then you go, ah, we’ve got to look further into that.

So when we’re looking at the tongue, we’re looking at the color first and foremost. The color tells us so many different things whether there’s inflammation, if there’s blood deficiency, if there’s too much cold, too much heat in the body, you’re looking at the color. So one of the first things I look at is if it’s a deep red tongue like it looks like a raw steak, then that’s a lot of inflammation in the body. That person is dealing with some pain issues, they’re dealing with a lot of maybe inflammation of the organs. That there’s some great illness going on there.

If it’s a pale tongue, then that means they’re very deficient in blood or in the yang aspect of things. They tend to be a little cooler, circulation tends to be their hands are cold, their feet are cold. If there’s a purplish color to the tongue—and a lot of people will say, well I don’t see the purple, because it’s very subtle—purple is a stagnation of blood meaning there’s an injury somewhere. Typically, when I see purple, it’s affecting the muscles and the joints, pain in the muscles and the joints. If it’s blue, then the person’s really, really cold. They’ve got a lot of coolness in the body itself, and so that means the organs are also running cold.

I look at the color first. I always look for a coating as well. it’s normal to have a little bit of coating, but the coating is also based on what is the color of the coating and the consistency. So how thick is it? So if it’s really thick, then that means there are pathogenic issues going on? They probably have some candida, some yeast, parasites, those kinds of things. If there’s an absence of coating, that means that they’re they’ve got a yin deficiency so they don’t have enough heat in the body. If there is a white then there’s cold present, so that means there might be coming down with something.

One of the things I used to do with my kids was if they didn’t feel like they wanted to go to school and they wouldn’t want to act like they were sick, I’d always say let me see your tongue. If that tongue didn’t have any coating they’re going to school. They can’t pull, they just can’t.

[02:00:26] Ashley James: Did you look at their eyes too?

[02:00:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Of course.

[02:00:30] Ashley James: You’re like let me look at your eyes, let me look at your tongue. No. Do you have a test today? You’re going to school.

[02:00:35] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I was looking to see which direction they went because if they were having to create something, they were going up into the right brain. If they were telling me the truth they’re going to the left. That would tell me if they’re lying, so I look at that.

But also the moisture of the tongue. So if it’s really wet, then that means that there’s a lot of internal damp going. If they’re dehydrated it’s going to be really dry, too much heat going on in the body. So for example, if I see the tip of the tongue and it’s really red, then there’s heat in the heart. So that’s a really good way to look at that. I’m trying to think of what that state would be, but too much heat in the heart would be like a heart condition of some sort, not where you have congestive heart failure that would be the tongue on the tip would be wet and it would be of a different color not heat. I look at that.

The crease down the center of the tongue typically means there’s something going on with the spine, so they’ve had a long-term spinal issue. So if I see that deep crease down the center I ask them, so tell me about your back. What’s going on with that? And they’re like, how do you know about my back? Then I’ll say, well, you got that deep crease going on, so they’ll tell me. But if there are more lines in the middle of the tongue, that means it’s a new thing. It’s more of an acute episode. If it’s a decrease and it’s been a long-term thing, I tend to see a deep crease on someone who has scoliosis, for example.

If I see bite marks on the outside of the tongue where the liver and the gallbladder are located, and typically I mean by that is where the ridge of the outside the tongue is, if I see bite marks there, either that’s a spleen deficiency where the blood is not coursing through the body as well, so there’s usually a pain issue or something going on with the blood. They need a blood cleanse of some sort, or they’ve got some pathogens going on.

But typically, if it looks like they’re biting their tongue, that means they’re not absorbing their food. So either they’re not eating their food enough—chewing it enough, or they’re needing a digestive enzyme. Their body’s not developing that enzyme. It could also mean they’re having difficulty processing protein like meat proteins, for example. So then their body is not being able to bring up enough of the digestive enzyme to break down that particular type of protein, so we may need to look at that instead.

The best way that I do this is when I’m doing my biofeedback with somebody and I’m doing my first session with them I’ll say, okay, let me look at your tongue, and then they stick their tongue out. So I cue people that the best way to see what the health and status is of yourself is first thing in the morning before you drink any water whatsoever or drink anything, go look at your tongue—

[02:03:45] Ashley James: Or brush your teeth.

[02:03:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And then scrape your tongue. Yeah, or even brush your teeth. Always look at your tongue first before you do anything, and that’ll tell you exactly what’s going on—how much bacteria you’re developing throughout the night as you’re sleeping. What the color is, just how much of a coating you have. And then before they drink any water I ask them to scrape their tongue.

What I mean by that is not with a toothbrush where they scrape it back and forth while they’re brushing their teeth because then they’re just pushing the bacteria or whatever is on the tongue deeper into the papilla kind of like when you had those creases and those crevices. Imagine if you were to take a toothbrush and scrape your tongue that way, it would push it deeper down into those crevices and then you’re going to get a great outgrowth of bacteria.

So I basically recommend that they scrape it. You can get those tongue scrapers. There’s a metal one, bamboo, or you can even get the plastic ones. I say just grab a spoon, a big old tablespoon from your drawer and just use that and then you just scrape it and then rinse—scrape, rinse, scrape, rinse, and keep scraping until no more of this stuff comes off. Whether you floss your teeth or you brush your teeth first and then floss, but then you floss and then do an oil pulling. The oil pulling will do the last little bit of pulling out all the rest of that bacteria that you might have missed and that’ll help a lot. So I usually recommend doing that.

[02:05:13] Ashley James: Explain oil pulling for those who don’t know how to.

[02:05:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So oil pulling, you just take a coconut oil—whether it’s the fractionated coconut oil or the solid oil. You just take a teaspoon or a tablespoon of it, then you stick it in your mouth, and you swish it around. It’s going to melt because your mouth is very warm. It’s going to melt it and then you swish it for five minutes. Most people, if they can’t tolerate five minutes, just two minutes then and then you spit it out. I want to caution people, do not spit it down your drain because it will congeal and then you’ll get a clogged drain. I don’t want husbands or spouses mad at me because they got a clogged drain now because of the oils going into the drain.

So typically, spit it in a garbage can or something that you’re going to dispose of, and that’s the best way to do an oil pulling.

[02:06:07] Ashley James: What about sesame oil? I’ve heard use sesame oil, so why coconut oil?

[02:06:12] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I like coconut oil because people like the flavor of coconut oil, and if you like it you’re going to do it. Whereas sesame can be very seasoned or a taste that most people have a tendency to try to acquire, but either oil would be good. I also use MCT oil, that medium-chain triglyceride. That’s also a very good oil to use as well.

[02:06:38] Ashley James: It’s not like that coconut oil has more anti-microbial properties than another kind of oil, it’s just a matter of taste?

[02:06:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. First of all, it’s availability. I try to make suggestions based on availability for most people. Taste and acquireness of taste because if they’re not going to like it they’re not going to do it, and how readily do they have it. So yes, I do like coconut oil for that reason—the anti-micro microbial, which is why the MCT works so well, why it’s so good for pulling the bacteria and the virus stuff out. But the sesame, yeah. I have sesame oil and I use it myself. I use it actually on my skin quite a bit, it’s wonderful. I love the taste. I also put it on my popcorn too.

[02:07:30] Ashley James: If they had any oil, I mean any plant-based oil, not canola oil. You throw that canola oil out. If you have oil in your house, you just throw that out. But if you have olive oil, any kind of oil as long as you like the flavor you’re swishing it around your mouth. And of course, saliva comes in also so your mouth is now full of saliva and a little bit of oil. Your mouth feels so clean after you do oil pulling, it’s really interesting. It really does.

[02:08:03] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And I also encourage the use of bentonite clay, and I like bentonite clay especially with the brushing aspect of it. So most people don’t really like the flavor of bentonite clay because it’s clay. So I usually suggest that if they have a fluoride-free, aspartame, or sugar-free type of toothpaste that they really like, then go ahead and put the toothpaste on the toothbrush and then dab it into your bentonite clay. And the bentonite clay goes further into pulling out that bacteria.

If somebody has gingivitis or really bad cavitation or things like that in their teeth, which if most people understood the dental aspect of your teeth, they’re all associated with an organ. Each tooth is associated with an organ. So if you have an infection going in one of your teeth, it’s probably affecting that organ or it may be coming from that organ.

The eyes, the tongue, everything about us is so fascinating. There’s always a map to something, and so the teeth are the same thing. So if you have an infection in the teeth, bacteria, or gingivitis then you’re going to have a lot of health issues. That’s where you find a lot of hidden things that aren’t being tested in the medical field. That’s why 85% of the people that come to me say I’ve gone to every specialist there is and nobody’s been able to find anything wrong with me except saying I need a psych eval, kind of like what you mentioned. I always go to the teeth, I always want to look at the teeth. That’s the second or third thing I look at is the teeth too.

[02:09:44] Ashley James: Eyes, tongue, teeth.

[02:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: But the bentonite pulls it up. Well, ears, everything else.

[02:09:48] Ashley James: Poop.

[02:09:49] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, poop, you name it. Nothing is left untouched or looked at.

[02:09:57] Ashley James: I mean, once someone when someone’s gone to you they’re like what do MD? You go to an MD, they might see you for 15 minutes if you’re lucky. They barely look in your eyes ever, and it’s like how much information are they actually gathering? Well, they’re not trained to. And again, there are good MDs out there—the ones that really go for extracurricular courses and stuff—but traditional MD training, you don’t really look in someone’s eyes, tongue, mouth, ears, discuss their poop.

But as a doctor, you’re supposed to be a detective. Only looking at the objective versus also considering the subjective, and only looking at labs. That’s just one piece of that picture. You’re missing out on so much. So I really do love that you’re incorporating many different medicine modalities from around the world that show us windows into our health, not just physical but energetic, emotional, and showing us that they’re more than just a meat sack. It’s quite interesting.

[02:11:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I love learning. I’m kind of a nerd.

[02:11:22] Ashley James: You’re in good company.

[02:11:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I got a look at that. Yes, in fact, that’s what I find with most of your listeners is that they’re very learned. Many of them are like oh hey like I’ve learned a lot from some of my… and that’s the thing about healthcare. That’s the thing about being an integrative doctor is that when you stop learning, you should stop practicing because we should always be open to learning something.

[02:11:46] Ashley James: Right, same with teachers. I think if teachers stop learning they should stop teaching. We should always be expanding and always be excited. If you’re burnt out in your field you’re not serving. If you’re in a field where you service people, which there are very few fields where you don’t in some capacity service someone or service someone’s needs. But if you really are burnt out and you’re not growing as a person in that field, if you’re not growing and interested, you’re doing your customers a huge disservice and also yourself because being stagnant is akin to being in purgatory. Being stagnant, everything gets clogged up.

Find what you’re passionate about and then dive into it and it’ll radiate. When you’re passionate and you’re absorbing information, you want to help others. But like you said, you surround yourself with those like-minded people. When I cut out sugar and fast food, I noticed that I wasn’t surrounding myself with people that love to go to bars, drink alcohol, eat fast food, and eat sugar.

There were even some moms that our son was hanging out with, there’s a bunch of kids, and there were some moms who were really excited. We’re going to go to McDonald’s next. I’m like, okay, have fun. Bye. She was all excited, and she was a nice person don’t get me wrong, but she wanted to go to McDonald’s like every day and she did every day with her kids. She wanted all the other moms to meet there so that all the kids can play in the play area.

My husband, he’s so great. He goes, our son will never enter McDonald’s because I don’t want him breathing in the heterocyclic amines from the fried food. I look at my husband and I’m like I love you. I love you so much. I was even willing to go. Okay, well maybe we’ll just let him play in the play area, which is disgusting by the way. The McDonald’s player is disgusting. I mean, you want a kid to be a kid and just have fun. My husband’s like, no. He’s not even going to breathe in that poisonous air. What are you talking about?

So you just end up surrounding yourself with people. Over time, I just found these crunchy moms that some of them are more crunchy than me if you can believe it. I had one mom reading labels more than I read labels. I didn’t think that was possible. It’s just raise your standards, find people that are in line with your health goals, and surround yourself with those people. So I just noticed that over the last few years, my friend base has really changed in a good way. I don’t throw people away, it’s just people that naturally will gravitate away from and gravitate towards depending on your focus.

Going back to the things you were talking about when you talk about loving your body like truly, you look at that food, is this loving me? Not is this giving me instant gratification and pleasure, but is this loving me? Because if there’s a component of like well I’m going to have great pleasure eating it and then there’s going to be a period of shame and guilt afterward, that’s not love. That’s not loving you. That’s not nourishing you. That is creating healthy boundaries. That is learning how to create healthy boundaries within oneself. And when you learn to love yourself as authentically as you have illustrated, we find it easier to then inform others of our boundaries as to how we want to be treated.

This is getting into the idea of that there are no villains or victims. Coming from the standpoint of if you believe there are no villains or victims because we choose based on all of our conscious and unconscious choices, we choose how to tell people how to treat us. We are the ones that choose to be in social situations. Now, this is not like a black or white situation. This is just an exercise in thinking to give us new access to information. So if we come at life from a standpoint of I am empowered in my life, I am responsible for my life and my choices, then what we do is we say to ourselves in this life that I have—sorry, my kids playing in the background it’s distracting me. I’m trying to focus here. The pregnancy brain has taken over. I’m surprised I made it this long.

[02:16:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: A sparkly thing.

[02:16:40] Ashley James: He’s playing with the jack in the box and I’m just like, ahh.

[02:16:48] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s kind of funny that you were talking about McDonald’s, you know jack-in-the-box.

[02:16:52] Ashley James: Oh, right, right, right. Well no, the old toy. He’s playing within the background. It’s so funny my brain just goes oh. In terms of enforcing boundaries, this is what’s so exciting about enforcing boundaries, and if people want to get into this deeper, go look into non-violent communication and you can find hours of videos on Youtube. The man who invented this passed away, but his family created a foundation. You could pay something like $12 or $20 a month or whatever to gain access to thousands of hours of his training. There’s a lot of great lessons you can learn, but the focus is this. If you identify as a victim, you give up your personal power because you’ve given up your ability to say I am at cause in my world, I enforce my boundaries, and I teach people how to treat me.

So when we decide to not identify as a victim but instead go okay, things have happened to me and I get to now choose how to train people how to treat me. I am in control in that I will teach them how to treat me. That is a measure of self-respect and love that will come more naturally when we start to do things like you said—choosing foods and even routines in our life like going to bed at 9:00 PM versus midnight is an act of self-love. It creates a discipline that is enforcing a boundary that says I love myself so much this is my personal boundary.

And so then if you decide that your bedtime is always 9:00 PM. You get into bed, you read for an hour, and you go to sleep. And then someone wants to go drinking with you or do a behavior that would keep you up late at night, then you get to decide, am I going to teach these people in my life that this is my boundary and for them to respect it. And then you teach them and you show them this is my self-love. Over time, it gets easier and easier. But at first, people will abreact, will push against you, and try to bulldoze your boundaries.

[02:19:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Or shame you.

[02:19:17] Ashley James: Every form of manipulation, right? So when we go into health stuff and then we have friends and family that don’t understand it, then they really try to get us to go eat and behave the old way. That’s why I love it if we keep coming at it from how Dr. Vienna said everything you put in your mouth and every health choice you make, ask yourself, is this authentically loving me? And that will help open you up to understand boundary setting on a whole new level when it comes to your health. Then you have to teach people gradually over time how to treat you in this new way where they will respect the boundaries of your self-love instead of trying to manipulate, hurt you, or have you stumble or fall.

They’re all doing that unconsciously too. They’re not like hahaha, how am I going to make her get off her diet? It’s largely unconscious, but our friends and family will try to bulldoze our boundaries at first. This is why I like nonviolent communication because they teach you step by step how to, in a loving way, hold a boundary in place and not let toxic behaviors continue.

I just wanted to incorporate that into what you said.

[02:20:34] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, and I agree with all of that. You summarize it very nicely. When did we start making time so important? Okay, you didn’t develop to develop this illness overnight, so then why are you expecting recovery overnight. So allow yourself the time to heal, the time to develop that habit, the time to develop that good behavior because oftentimes, what happens is January 1st, everybody’s starting on this new year’s resolution, which I don’t believe in. Every day should be a resolution. But you start this new year’s resolution. Oh, I’m going to not eat sugar for however long, and then two days in you eat sugar. Then you go through the shaming of yourself, your psyche, everything. See, I can’t hold myself to anything. I’m just weak. No, you start out with I’m strong, doing the I ams. It’s a very powerful two-letter word—I am—and really working on that.

But then it’s also really thoroughly enjoying the process, thoroughly enjoying it and finding out what’s the root cause behind that emotion. So many times, in the two-hour sessions that I have with people because really, that is about what it takes for people to just even open up is you find out the past hurts, the childhood hurts, the childhood traumas that made you the adult you are today. And so when you could go into those childhood traumas and you can heal that child, then guess what, the adult heals too.

When the adult is healed, then that adult makes better choices, then they start to love themselves more, and then they become better parents because then they see, oh my gosh, I told myself I was never going to be like my parents and here I am, I’m becoming like my parents. Not like their parents were bad either, it’s just the way in which we were perceived or the way in which we were taken. But I see a lot of those childhood traumas that affect the choices they make today.

So when we could go back and heal that, and that’s where I feel true healing comes in, where the true aha moment comes in. Because when you ask the question were you a child that got to be heard, or were you the child that could be seen and not heard? When they tell me I was the one that could be seen but not heard, oftentimes there’s that thyroid, there’s the immune system going on where they have a thyroid issue because of that or they don’t have a voice.

So they tend to be a victim because then they choose partners that are similar to that to where there’s comfort because back when that emotional intelligence was being developed in that childhood, that’s what they lean into as an adult. Therefore, that influences every decision they make, the friends they hang out with, the choices they make as far as the companion they want to be with for the rest of their lives.

It’s not until you actually start to heal yourself to where you actually start to find that root issue that is making you destroy who you are internally, externally, emotionally, psychologically—all of that. Once you find that thing—that one thing—then you can actually build on it, and that’s where the true healing starts to begin and you start to see it physically. When people start to rebuke and when they start to sabotage possibly, it’s because they see this person who has made all of this wonderful effort.

I have this one friend of mine. She has lost over 100 pounds and she’s done it the right way—with healthy food, with exercise, with walking, and you could just see the total vitality that is emanating from her. You can see this vitality of wanting to exercise. Everybody says, well if you just get off the couch you could lose some weight. Do you know how much it takes to have an extra 40 pounds on you, and then to have the motivation to lift those 40 pounds to go exercise? Yet you got to have that internal motivation, and that internal motivation is the love of life.

I saw this friend of mine who doesn’t allow himself to eat sugar very often, but when he does, he thoroughly enjoys the moment. Anybody who is around him gets to see him thoroughly enjoying it just from his facial expressions. When he takes that bite of that—he might only just take one bite of a cheesecake, for example, but the facial expression. Your mouth is almost drooling just watching him because he’s thoroughly enjoying that moment.

So if you’re giving yourself a moment to have that one bite of that one thing that you said I could never have again, but you take such sheer pleasure in enjoying it—let all your taste buds break down every ingredient of that food, of that I item, then you don’t need more because now you’re fully engulfed, almost an orgasmic experience that you’re having right now with that food because you’re allowing yourself to truly enjoy it. That’s how every meal should be taken.

We tend to dilute it with beverages, with entertainment, with conversation, with our phone in front of us, our TV on, or something like that takes away that pleasure. But if you just take that one little plate of food, you take a bite of it, you close your eyes, and you let your taste buds taste every little taste or every little essence that’s in that food, you won’t need as much food to finish. You’ll be very nourished, you’ll feel gratified after your meal, and it would be one of the best meals you’ve ever had because you went in full-blown with every sensory perception there is in there.

[02:26:38] Ashley James: I love it.

[02:26:39] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So thoroughly enjoy it.

[02:26:40] Ashley James: And make it be an act of self-love the fact that you’re not binging. Even like you said, people will eat and they’re not even conscious of the food that they’re eating. They’re just looking at their phone, watching TV, or whatever, and they’re not even experiencing it. They’re not enjoying it. When you do really, really, really enjoy it, you don’t have to just blindly overeat. You can really get the satisfaction out of each bite, and slowing down to chew your food—like really chew 20 times kind of thing with each bite—really helps digestion. We talked about this last time that you and your husband do. But there’s this amount of being conscious.

Sometimes people go unconscious around their finances, or they go unconscious around their budget. They go unconscious around food. Wherever we go unconscious in life, we don’t really have healthy strategies, I’ve got to tell you. Look at an area of your life that’s been in your blind spot that you’ve really been unconscious of, that you’ve been neglecting, and look if you have healthy strategies holding that part of your life up, or are you kind of like being a teenager where it’s just instant gratification, looking for pleasure, and not really worrying about the consequences.

So it does take that emotional quotient, that delayed gratification and being conscious of that one area of your life. Shine light on it not to grow shame and guilt, but shine light on it and build healthy habits around that area. I’ve got lots of episodes on building healthy habits, and of course, listeners can go to learntruehealth.com, use the search function there, and type in healthy habits. I’ve got several episodes all about doing that. Like you said, don’t rush it. What’s this idea that we have to do it right away? It has to all be done right away. Start. Start and get conscious.

If it’s something like getting conscious about how much water you drink. Getting conscious about the foods you’re putting in your mouth and staying conscious during a meal. Getting conscious while you’re moving your body in a way that brings you joy. Getting conscious about things around your body, your health, and your emotional state, and getting conscious about your eyes, your tongue, and those kinds of habits that you pointed out. How we can manage our oral health in a way that’s going to bring even more vitality.

But getting conscious allows us to make really positive changes in a much more rapid fashion, and then also bringing that learning about how to enforce healthy boundaries with others. Because once you start making changes, sometimes other people in our life don’t like it. It’s like crab in the bucket. I don’t know what it is. I want to protect you as the listeners in a healthy way to be able to not allow the people that love you to squish your efforts. Tall poppy syndrome I think it’s called in Australia.

When you’re just sprouting, when you’re just like a little baby sprout in the garden, it’s so easy to squash the plant as opposed to at the end of the season, when the plant’s huge now and it’s hard to squash it. So that habit is very delicate at first right, so protect that habit as you grow it and don’t let others around you squash it. Continue to protect it and also teach others that these new healthy habits are your self-love. Watch it flourish and watch it grow.

Dr. Vienna, Lafrenz, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. You and I could go on for hours and hours, as we often do. Your website is natural-therapeutics.com, and of course, links to everything that Vienna does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[02:30:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to the listeners who have reached out to me in the past from the last podcast because we’ve developed some wonderful friendships from that, and I’ve learned a lot from them as well. The way that this iridology piece would work is they would send me a picture of their eyes and then I would spend some time analyzing it, and then we’d sit down and actually go through it together.

Don’t be afraid of your tongue, not only with the appearance but also what comes off of it. Speaking our truth and like you were saying, standing up for ourselves and making sure that people are aware. I think truly, the consciousness, when we become more aware of our environment, aware of our feelings—developing our awareness actually adds to the consciousness piece. And so that heightened awareness of what is driving this craving? What is driving this mood? What is driving this reaction? And what is driving the reaction from another?

So if you have someone who’s close to you that might be trying to sabotage you, what is driving that? Maybe they’re envious of the fact that you can stick to something so strong as cutting out sugar and they want to do it themselves. Oftentimes it’s a mirror that they’re looking into, and so you can help others. That’s what I like.

[02:32:19] Ashley James: I’ve seen this so many times. I had a boyfriend who we were together for like five years. I started to do a lot of personal growth work and that really threatened him. He tried to sabotage me every step of the way, it was really interesting. It finally came out, I finally sat down with him. I’m like listen, we need to talk. What is up with your inappropriate behavior around my choices? These are healthy choices I’m making. What are you doing? I pulled it out of him and he said to me I’m afraid you’re going to leave me because you’re going to grow so much that we’re not going to see eye to eye. It was all of his insecurities that came forward, and I think that’s really common.

I like watching the show My 600-lb Life, not because of the health advice. Please, please, do not watch that show for health advice. It’s awful health advice. My 600-lb Life, you’re following people who are morbidly obese, and then they do things like gastric bypass surgery and eating a very bad diet like low-fat yogurts that have sugar in them. I mean, it’s just really weird. But they’re eating less than 1200 calories a day.

Oftentimes, they go through periods where they fail and then they go to counseling. I watch that show, they follow them for a year, and then they have another show where you follow them for a second or third year. The ones who make it, every single time—you watch a few seasons of this you start seeing a pattern—there’s going to be one or more enablers because these people were over 600 pounds someone had to bring them food. Someone had to keep bringing them the food. The enablers, if it’s a husband or a boyfriend, most of the time end up leaving the person one once they’ve achieved their goal weight or when they’re on their weight achieving their goal weight because they couldn’t handle the person getting healthy, getting their life back, and not being dependent on them.

I know it’s a really overt example because it’s oftentimes it’s covert in our life, but it’s very overt when you watch that show. And then for those who watch that show, if you do watch the show, please read the book or listen to the audio version of the book by Dr. Garth Davis called Probenazole. He is a weight loss surgeon who saw that he was gaining weight and losing his health on the same diet he had all of his 600-pound patients on.

He had to go back to the drawing board because he realized that everything he was doing was wrong and really not helping people in the long run. So his book is all about the actual science of eating healthy for health, for reversing disease. Now he doesn’t have to cut people’s stomachs out because he has a program that is about nourishing the body based on science. So I love his book Probenazole, and I highly recommend listening to it.

I like watching My 600-lb Life because you see the psychological changes that occur when someone is making major, very overt changes, and how they learn how to enforce boundaries and love themselves, and how other people sometimes end up moving away from them or moving towards them based on whether they were there to actually support or whether they couldn’t handle it.

It’s a very interesting thing when we start to make these changes in our life, know that some people are threatened by it, and that’s because they’re afraid you’re going to leave them or they’re afraid that they’re not going to be needed anymore. It’s all insecurities. The thing is if we live through fear, fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s best to get it out in the open and come from love, which is what you teach.

[02:36:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: When I was working as an occupational therapist, I specialized in people with size. What I found in many cases is the enablers didn’t know any other way to express love, and that was to feed them, to provide them the pizza, to do all those other things. They didn’t know any other way. So then that’s when it comes down to let’s have a conversation about what other ways you can show love because you don’t always want to discourage the relationship to end.

In many cases, when you see such a loving relationship, you don’t want to encourage them to leave their partners or things like that, but how about let’s work with a partner too. I’m not saying that that’s what you’re saying. What I’m saying is let’s get everybody involved and let’s show a different way of love.

So if this person is on this path of wanting to eat healthily, then let me show you another way you can demonstrate love. How about giving them a foot massage, a little reflexology, back massage, or just a little effleurage where you’re doing a little bit of soft mobilization which also circulates the fat and gets us the cellulite to disperse as well. Let’s show other ways. Whether through essential oils or other means. When you can give them that other avenue, then they can be part of the solution versus part of the problem. Then they also then can say, oh, so there are strategies to get around this. Once they learn how to love that person, they’ll start to learn how to love themselves, and so then it’s a wonderful thing.

[02:38:01] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show again. And of course, listeners can work with you. You help people gain profound results, and I feel that you’re affordable considering everything you offer, so I highly recommend listeners all around the world can work with you remotely. And of course, if they’re in the Okanagan Valley in Washington, they can go to Republic and see you in person as well, which would be fun. Natural-therapeutics.com is Dr. Vienna Lafrenz’s website.

Well, we’re going to have to have you on the show again at some point and hear about how your garden goes this year with your experiments that you’ll do this time. Maybe sharing your food with others and seeing how it affects others, that would be very interesting.

Man, I’d love to study the microbiome of different plants and the contrast that the microbiome has based on whether you held the seeds in your mouth or not. I think that would be really interesting, or the frequency. There are machines you can hook up the plants to and see is there a different frequency of energy or is there a different sugar content? Is there a different nutrient value? It’s all grown in the same soil, same sunlight, same amount of water, but what other changes can we see, and what are the changes can we see in other people?

[02:39:26] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Also, the ones that were my seed for example, if I went through a depression or something like that, would it affect my plant? I bet it would. I think that’d be fascinating.

[02:39:38] Ashley James: Right. Fun.

[02:39:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So if I stop growing will my plants stop growing?

[02:39:47] Ashley James: I like to see the chain of custody. I like to think about the chain of custody of my food. The farmers, were they treated well? Was it a local farm, family farmers? Were they people who were happy with their job, or were they working in really poor conditions? Then there’s the distribution center, how those people had to handle your food. And then it goes to the grocer, unless you can source it straight from the farmer, which would be awesome. All the grocers that work there for minimum wage, are they treated well? How’s their level of happiness, and how long does it sit on the shelf? What country did it come from? How long did it have to fly?

So it’s the environment, how many weeks has it been since that apple was picked or months because apples can be stored in a way that it’s been months? How long has it been out of the soil basically dying slowly, and how many hands came across it? This is just talking about whole foods. Imagine if it’s these factory manipulated pseudo food, how many hands and how many chemicals had to go into that food? So if we can get the closest to the source as possible and be the one that influences the plant on that level, I mean that is such a cool experience to have even if you’re just growing microgreens inside your apartment, you know what I mean?

It’s such a cool experience to have to be able to influence directly, grow directly, nourish your body, and have zero chains of custody. You, you’re the chain of custody, that’s it. That is such a cool experience for your body to go through.

[02:41:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I noticed a big change when I moved off-grid for several reasons because when you’re talking about the chain of custody, when you’re looking at electricity when you’re looking at the water when it’s coming into your house, where did it go through? What chain of custody did it go through? How many households did that electricity go through? How many households did the water go through? How many different way lines did it go through to get to your house? So based on that, how much anger, how much frustration, how much toxins, pollutants, and all that is going into the water, into the electricity?

Here, in my house, I have a well that’s 800 feet down. I know exactly the source of where that water is. So there’s my custody right there, it’s right from the well itself. There are no other pipes it’s gone through, through the city, or anything like that. It’s come straight from the earth. So that water is so healing.

[02:42:45] Ashley James: There are no pharmaceuticals in your water. And because your water actually is so deep and under pressure, it’s likely that it’s structured water. I’ve had an interview about structured water.

[02:42:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s got minerals, absolutely fabulous minerals.

[02:42:57] Ashley James: So good. I love well water, I just love it.

[02:42:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So when people come to my clinic, they don’t get water from the city, they get water from my house. I take in a gallon jug of water every day with my freshwater that people get to drink when they come to my clinic because I want them to have my live water. It’s fabulous water. The same with electricity. I know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from my solar panel. It’s fabulous. It feels good. That’s another topic.

[02:43:22] Ashley James: Well it is, it totally is. I have a whole interview, I have several actually but one specifically of I think it’s like a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He talks about how most houses have dirty energy because of the grid. It’s not aligned correctly, and the transformer in your neighborhood is not aligned correctly. If a home is not wired correctly, it actually goes back as a feedback loop and affects the rest of the grid. So it’s very rare to have a house that doesn’t have dirty electricity. It’s very rare to have a clean where the electricity is at a frequency that is normal and healthy and within healthy ranges.

His clientele, he goes and he helps. There are certain things he can do with someone’s house, and sometimes it takes replacing a transformer. But most of the time, there are things he can do within that home in the wiring to make the electricity clean.

There’s so much when it comes to health, and we always like to go down these rabbit holes. But basically, get back to nature as much as possible. One thing at a time. I don’t want to overwhelm people. One thing at a time. Choose something to do today to love yourself and keep doing it.

[02:44:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yup, and what’s the trigger.

[02:44:38] Ashley James: Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming to the show. As always, it’s been such a pleasure.

[02:44:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, Ashley. I always love our conversations. Like you said, they always go down a rabbit hole but that rabbit hole’s wide and big.

[02:44:54] Ashley James: And we all fit in it together.

[02:44:57] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Lots of topics, lots of topics. So thank you.

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Recommended Reading by Dr. Vienna Lafrenz

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza

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