510 Mastering Wellness 101: Bite-Sized Changes with Big Impact, Dr. Wendie Trubow Discusses Optimizing Your Health, Energy, Digestion, and Joy

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510: Mastering Wellness with Dr. Wendie Trubow

https://www.learntruehealth.com/mastering-wellness-with-dr-wendie-trubow/

Are you taking a backseat in your own health journey? This episode, featuring the brilliant Dr. Wendie Trubow, will inspire you to grab the wheel as she shares her knowledge on small daily habits that can make a big difference in your health. From the importance of thoroughly chewing our food to selecting a proper mattress for optimal sleep, Dr. Wendie walks us through the small but impactful changes we can make to achieve overall wellness. She also underscores the crucial role of maintaining a good sleep routine, and the often underrated impact of melatonin on our health.

However, our conversation with Dr. Wendie doesn’t stop at sleep and nutrition. We also delved into the role of regular exercise and sweating in our bodies’ detoxification process, and how even the busiest of us can incorporate this crucial step into our daily lives. We explore the underappreciated aspects of digestion and stress management in nutrient absorption and the potential consequences of neglecting these areas. Dr. Wendie also talks about her functional medicine approach and how telemedicine is revolutionizing the way care is provided.

In the final part of our discussion, we touch on the importance of self-love and its connection to our relationship with food. Dr. Wendie shares insights from her upcoming book and how she has navigated her own health journey through making healthier food choices. She also gifts us with her personal smoothie recipe, and the surprising ingredient she adds for prebiotic support. This episode is a treasure trove of practical tips and scientific knowledge that will give your health a major boost. So, take a seat, tune in, and empower yourself with the tools to take charge of your health today.

Highlights:

• Improving health through small daily changes
• Starting your journey to better health
• The importance of sleep and health talk
• The importance of melatonin in health
• Chewing and stress in digestion importance
• Controversy surrounding whole-food smoothies
• Importance of exercise and sweating
• Transforming health and environment through consumerism
• Perimenopause

Intro:

 

(0:00:000) Ashley James: Hello True Health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. We had an amazing episode with Dr. Wendie Trubow, who's coming back on the show. We had her in Episode 482, where she shared her personal story of recovering from mold and heavy metals and environmental toxins. She teaches about mycotoxins and how we can repair the gut in order to repair our immune system, in order to gain true health. That was Episode 482, and she comes back today to teach the foundations of health and where to start. If you're feeling unwell or if you're feeling good but you know that there's a better you you could have. You know that there's like man, I feel good but I'm not optimal then we're going to go through a checklist today of things that you can do to improve, to tweak, to biohack, to enhance your health tiny, tiny tweaks that make a huge difference when it comes to digestion, absorption of your nutrition and optimization of your immune system and increasing joy and happiness in your life. Basically, we're just going to go through and look through all the little things you do each day that make a huge difference. Recently, I heard someone talk about the little things that make the big difference. For example, if you skipped brushing your teeth today, there wouldn't be any substantial change to your dental health. If you went a week without brushing your teeth. Obviously you'd have bad breath and your teeth would kind of feel fuzzy, but no real substantial change to your dental health. Now you go five years without brushing your teeth and you're going to be screaming in pain in the dental chair and be very, very, very uncomfortable. That's the accumulation of little daily changes. 

Today, Dr. Wendie talks about those little things. Let's say, for example, she talks about chewing your food. We've all heard the saying chew, chew, chew your food, chew like twenty times and the average person only chews three times. I've actually counted and caught myself and went wow, I barely chewed three times before I swallowed that bite of food. We do not absorb all of our nutrition when we barely chew our food. If you could imagine, if you counted and became more conscious of chewing your food. Put down your fork, chew your food. Maybe 20 times per mouthful is too much for you, but try six chews instead of three. You've just doubled the amount of absorption and digestion from your food, going from three chews to six chews. Now try ten. Try ten chews and be mindful. You will find that you're optimizing your digestion. So we go through these little tweaks that you can make to your life that are going to make a huge difference a year from now if you do them every day. A huge difference even a week from now, if you do them every day, you will start to feel powerful changes in your life. 

Another thing we talk about in today's episode is sleep, and of course, everyone knows this. Everyone knows they should drink water, everyone knows they should get enough sleep. But if you're sleeping on a mattress that wasn't designed for your optimal sleep, then, no matter how good you are about going to bed on time, you're not getting optimal sleep. Recently I had an episode with Joey Woodward, Episode 504, where we talked about a mattress that was specifically designed as a medical device to not only prevent bed sores but to help the body heal bed sores up into stage four bed sores. They're used in hospitals today. This type of material that then they put into a completely organic, non-toxic mattress that's made by hand in the US. 

I have one. It was life-changing. Actually, my husband and I were just joking about it this morning because he was up in the night. He's doing a fast right now. God love him. He's on day four of a fast. There's somewhere around the first few days of a fast. One or two nights is kind of rough. It's just restless. The body's doing a lot of detoxing and usually when we detox we're feeling it. He doesn't have any symptoms other than he was just wide awake, probably four in the morning and he was up quite a bit. This morning he goes,”Man, I did not get great sleep last night.” I'm like, “Really, because when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night he was sound asleep.” But he says he was up half the night. He goes, you know, with our old mattress, every time I would have been awake, you would have felt it. That's so true. We don't with this mattress. We can sleep on it and he could be jumping on one side. I'm not going to feel it on the other. 

The most important thing about this mattress is you get the deepest restorative sleep. That is, of course, unless you're doing some kind of detox and fasting. Then your body's just going to do what it does but normally amazing sleep is had with the Organix mattress. I highly recommend checking it out. I do have some news, I just got this week and that's why I want to talk about it. If you listen to my episodes about the Intellibed Organix mattress, you're going to want to purchase one in the next five months. That is because the company was just bought by a different company. Unfortunately, the huge discount that I negotiated with the creator of this mattress that has been honored for the last few years, this great, great, great discount is going to be going away. That's sad, but you have five months. You have the next five months to purchase this mattress. 

This mattress lasts for over 25 years. There's people who even have had one for 30 years and still sleep it on it perfectly. It does not warp. It's amazing. It's really a fantastic investment as far as mattresses are concerned. You are saving money because it's like you're paying twice as much as a normal mattress, but it lasts four to five times longer than any mattress. You are saving money. Plus, you're getting way deeper sleep. That's going to restore your body. It feels like absolute heaven to lie on this. You can be in any position. You can lie on your back, you can lie on your sides. You'll be able to sleep soundly through the night, with no pain points at all, no stiffness. You will not wake up with any pain from sleeping positions, because it cradles your body perfectly, keeps your spine perfectly aligned, no matter how you sleep. I just cannot say enough about how much I love this and how I wish all of you had one. 

I want you to go to learntruehealth.com/bed That's where you can check out the webinar we did about the science around this mattress and the materials. You'll learn more. If you really want to geek out on understanding the studies and the science and everything that went into it, go to learntruehealth.com/bed, check it out. If you'd like to explore the fantastic listener discount and special, with all the goodies that they throw in and the discount and the free shipping and everything, go to learntruehealth.com/organix. That's learntruehealth.com/organix, O-R-G-A-N-I-X. Then you can always call them. They're wonderful. They're open seven days a week. When you call them, mention the Learn True Health podcast with coupon code LTH to be able to get the huge special. Their phone number is 866-647-5513. That's 866-647-5513. I'm going to have all this information in the show notes of today's podcast. Remember, you have five months from today, today's September 2023. You have five months in order to get this special. 

Now, their Organix company is working on a prototype right now to replace what they're using. They promise it's going to be amazing so that we'll have something in the future to offer. After five months, however, this specific technology and what I sleep on and what I recommend currently and what I love and it's 100% non-toxic, doesn't off gas, anything, doesn't smell weird and is super healthy and clean that is available only for the next five months. Until that, basically, the company that just purchased it is going to take over and stop all of the specials and discounts that was arranged with the owner originally. Check it out, get it for yourself. They also have an amazing money back policy. Really, there's no risk, just do it, just jump in. I know they also have financing, so just don't let anything stop you. 

If you know that your sleep is affected by your mattress, if you're in pain when you wake up, if you wake up several times a night to roll over because your shoulder or your hip hurt or your back hurts, just get it and try it. If you don't like it, return it, get your money back. I have had such great results with this that I really, really swear by it and I would love to see all of you getting such a deep, restorative sleep. As with our guest, Dr. Wendie Trubow. We talk about it in today's episode. 

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Continue to come back and learn and share. Share with your friends and family. Be sure to jump into the Facebook group, the Learn to Health Facebook group and also make sure you go to learntruehealth.com and join the newsletter. I send out newsletters when I'm talking about things that are really important, like if there's a huge special on something, or if I've published an article, or if there's something that we all need to know, like something to take action on that we all need to know. I make sure I keep you up to date. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. If you have any questions at all, please reach out to me. I'm here to help and here to support you. I'm also a health coach, so if you're ever looking to work with someone, I'm here to help. You can always find me by contacting me through Facebook or through my website, learntruehealth.com. Enjoy today's episode. 

(10:40.11) Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 510.

I am so excited for today's guest. We have back on the show, Dr. Wendie Trubow, and you can find the free, very exciting ebook that she's giving us by going to fivejourneys.com/promo. Dr. Trubow you were on the show in Episode 482, and now you're back, and we're gonna dive deeper into understanding how toxins and stress affect our hormones.

There's such a powerful need for us to focus on making sure we're being as toxin-free as possible, both from our outside world and the internal world that's going on inside us. We need to support our emunctory systems, our detox pathways, in order to maintain health in every system of our body and longevity and well into our old age to be as healthy as possible as long as possible. This is your mission and you're here for us today to dive deeper. So welcome back to the show.

(11:58.514) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Ashley, thank you so much. It's great to be here. Feel free to call me Wendie. You don't have to call me Dr. Trubow during the talk.

(12:05.650) Ashley James: Well, thank you, Wendie. Um, yeah, I'm really excited to dive in, uh, something we were talking about before we hit record, which is a question everyone has after listening to Episode 482, that the last episode that you were on and also listening to other episodes, great doctors are coming on, teaching us amazing things, opening our eyes. And then we're left after like a 90 minute interview going, where do I start? Where do I begin? 

I don't feel well. I'm not 100% healthy. I'm sick of the allopathic, drug-based, Western medical system that tells me to wait to get sick and then go to the doctor and get put on drug after drug after drug. That's not healthcare. That's disease management. That's symptom management. That's not actually correcting my body or helping me in any way. And I'm just getting worse and worse and worse and feeling sicker and sicker. So then they turn to Holistic Health podcast to see, well, what can I do? Because I'm just at my wit's end.

And all the doctors I've seen that are giving me drugs are making me feel worse, not better. This isn't help, this isn't restoring my body. They hear you talk and then they go, where do I start? What do I do? And I'd love to dive in. You have an amazing clinic. I know you've got sort of near Boston, right? You wanna tell us a little bit about your clinic for those local. Now you do telemedicine also. I don't know where to start and I just wanna see what Dr. Wendie.

(13:31.990) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Sure, so if you're at the point where you need to call the doctor, right? Like call the midwife. Interestingly, we were just parsing through the Massachusetts state laws the other day, it's really weird, if you live in Massachusetts you can establish care remotely if you live outside Massachusetts. You have to come in person to establish care. Now, that makes no sense to me because if you're remote you're remote. What difference does it make but technically we're not supposed to practice medicine across state lines. But if you establish care in Newton where our clinic is, then you can go back to having everything else be telemedicine. So it's a little goofy, but we're located in Massachusetts and we have an insurance-based medical functional medicine practice and it's a membership. So similar to joining your gym, except we're focused on how to get you to feel freaking amazing all the time. That's our goal.

(14:39.207) Ashley James: Nice, very cool. And your background, understanding gynecology and understanding women's hormone systems and understanding the body from the medical doctor's standpoint, but then you dove into studying functional medicine, and understanding how do we, instead of looking at what drug do I need to give this person, right? Cause that's a very MD approach. Let's find the problem and give it a drug.

Let's dive in and see what's going on in the body as a whole, and then help that body as a whole become healthier and healthier and healthier. And you uncover things that we didn't even know we had like leaky gut and mycotoxin exposure, right? So really, interesting things that have simple solutions once we figure out we have that problem, it's not simple when you're sitting there with brain fog and leaky gut going, why do I feel like crap every morning? But simple, once we can identify what it is and then move forward with making corrections. So someone could come, fly into Boston, then come to your clinic and see you in person to establish care and then have a beautiful vacation. Boston's gorgeous, especially in the summertime. Not so much in the winter, but  that's because I'm from the East Coast too.

I'm okay with not visiting snow in cities during winter. That's just my thing. But maybe you'd like it. Maybe it'd be beautiful to you. And then, you can go back home and continue to see Dr. Wendie and her team. So that's, that's one possibility. Another is Dr. Wendie, you've got a book coming out very next year. We're really excited about that. And you have a ton of information on your website, including the free book that you've given us at fivejourneys.com/promo. So lots of great information we can dive into. But where do we start? Let's talk to those listeners who are suffering, who have the brain fog, who have the hormone dysregulation, either it's sex hormones, stress hormones, or thyroid, and they're feeling like poop. But where do they start?

(16:51.889) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, I love this question, Ashley, because we really believe that most humans have the agency and the ability to get at least 60, 70, 80% of the way they are on their own. Like, you don't have to have me. But some people need me and some people don't. So let's talk to the people who are really self starters and wanna get things going and are like, okay, now what? So the really lovely thing is that functional medicine and our approach looks at that you're an entity unto yourself. So it's not like we're pulling off your thyroid and we're only dealing with your thyroid or we're addressing only your gut.

What's addressing one part of your body is going to address the other parts of your body because it's an ecosystem. So if you start to fix the ecosystem all of it gets better, right? The rising tide lifts all boats and so what you see is there are some foundational behaviors that are extremely impactful. Are they gonna get you a hundred percent of the way there? Probably not but on the other hand if you're teetering on the edge or if you're just a little bit dysfunctional it will go a long way. So let's dive into what those are. 

So you can't change your genes. So I'm gonna set that to the side. But what you can do is manage your thoughts because the way you think about things can serve as a toxin or a stressor. And so what you wanna focus on is that you manage your thoughts and you create thoughts. You have like 65,000 thoughts any given day. And most of them, when you're talking only to yourself, are really unkind. And those set off a cascade of stress hormones and gut dysfunction and liver dysfunction that then has you not absorbing your minerals in a state of sympathetic fight flight or freeze and not detoxing. So that's not ideal. We really wanna be in a parasympathetic state where the liver and gut and adrenals are balanced and you're able to deal with the toxins, including your hormones, because hormones can be a toxin, and then put them in your gut or your kidney, pee, poop or sweat them out and life goes on and it's a nice cycle.

So managing your thoughts so that you don't go down a stressful pathway is one critical thing to start with and it's free I'm really into like things that you have control over that are free. You might argue that you don't have control over your thoughts But I would say with practice you are able to change the way that you think to yourself, so I'll give an example, especially women but men can do it too when something doesn't go perfectly we have this habit of internalizing it, like, God, you're such a failure. God, such a screw up and there we go you messed up again you're never going to get it right obviously it didn't go right because you did it you know things that are just sort of generalizations about ourselves but honestly those things aren't true actually they're not intrinsically true. I can't knock on on that truth. I can knock on the table. I can't knock on that as a truth that doesn't hold up and yet we talk about it like it's true.

So starting to take those thoughts and convert them into ones that are kinder and actually more accurate. So instead of saying, oh, you're such a screw up, you could say something like, hmm, didn't go the way I hoped or I'm a work in progress or I worked really hard on that and that didn't go how I hoped it would. Or let me look and see what things I did that may have made that outcome not ideal so that I can not do them again in the future. These are all sort of openings as opposed to hammering you with what a failure you are. And the reason it makes a difference is the thoughts you have alter your adrenals. So let me pause there before we go into other stuff you can do. Comments, questions? 

(20:59.520) Ashley James: Yes, I love the focus on your thoughts and understanding that our mental body affects our physical body. Cause we think that our thoughts are innocent, right? That there's somehow separate from our body, but our unconscious mind is always listening to our thoughts and just based on our thoughts alone, we can trigger the autonomic nervous systems, fight or flight response just with our thoughts alone. You could hook yourself up to many machines that are measuring your stress response. And just by thinking about things you don't want, made up things you don't want to have happen in the future. We can see heart rate elevate, we can see blood pressure go up and your dilation of your eyes can change. And we can see all the indications that you're in a state of stress just by your thoughts alone, because your body is listening to your thoughts as if everything you're thinking about is happening right now. So if I'm like, I don't wanna miss my mortgage payment or I don't wanna get fired from my job or I don't wanna be homeless or whatever, I don't wanna be fat, I don't wanna be sick, I don't wanna be in pain, whatever it is that I don't want, your body cannot process a negative directly. So even if we think we're saying, well, I'm stating in a positive, I'm stating I don't want those things.

But like I could say to you, don't think of a red apple. Don't think of a green tree, right? Don't think of a blue sky. We're gonna think about, don't think of a green frog. We're gonna think about those things. So when I say I don't want, when we focus on when we don't wanna have happen, just like when we say negative things to ourselves, our body is perceiving those things as threats and going into a state of fight or flight. And so we're triggering this neurological response that turns off healing mechanisms. It's when we're in fight or flight, our body shunts resources towards immediate survival fighting and fleeing, and shunts resources away from digesting and creating healthy new tissue. And so the more we're in fight or flight, the less we're healing and restoring our body.

(23:14.691) Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Totally.

(23:16.297) Ashley James: Yeah, so I love that you're saying that number one, we have to check our stinkin' thinkin' and be more gracious and loving with ourself. Very early on, it might've been episode like 17 or 18 or 16, somewhere around there within the first twenty episodes of this show back seven years ago, I interviewed a mental health counselor that said, if you looked at your relationship you have with yourself, like the self-talk you have with yourself, as if it were two people talking, you'd call the cops on yourself.

We are so abusive to ourselves and we give it a free pass because we think it's not important, right? It's okay to talk to ourselves that way. But if we talked to other people the way we talk to ourselves, it would be perceived as incredibly abusive. So it's really good that way you're saying, just check in and you got to start treating yourself with that love and respect that you deserve. Because if you want your physical health to be healthy, you have to make sure that your mental self-talk is in alignment with your health goals. 

(24:18.357) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Totally. Train your brain.

Let's talk about the next thing you have control and agency over that nobody likes. Ready? Every human listening to this needs more sleep than they're getting. You knew it? The shoe dropped. Boom.

(24:41.2074) Ashley James: What is it? What is it? What is it about like ten-thirty at night when you know you should be in bed? It's just like, but I want to scroll. I want to have fun. I want to watch Netflix. Now it's time to do the dishes or something. No, no, no, no, no. Now's the time to be in bed. But what is it about needing that dopamine at night that is just it's so exciting?

The kids are asleep, it's late at night, now this is me time. How many moms have I heard who are sick and exhausted and have hormone problems? But it's like they won't go to bed earlier because that's their only me time, right? I had one client I asked her just switch it up instead, go to bed with when the kids go to bed and then wake up early and you'll still have your me time, but you'll have it in the morning for that and changed her entire life. She still had the same amount of me time but she was twice as productive and also felt amazing through the day.

(25:29.951) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, so I would say humans are pretty chronically underslept and the consequence of that is that you wouldn't fail to change the oil in your car or change the tires when they're bald or do upkeep on your car. You wouldn't ignore your car and expect it to perform optimally. And yet, getting less sleep than the body needs causes it to perform suboptimally. So I love that idea to go to sleep when the kids do, A. B, I'm a huge fan of get into a routine, right? So this is where no human is an island, because you're gonna need the buy-in of the people in your life. Like, I have teenagers, and they love to chat at ten o'clock at night. And I'm always like, I love chatting with my teenagers, because they're fun and they're funny, and I love connecting with them, and my oldest is going off to college, so it's particularly poignant that I only have, you know, another couple months of these interactions before she's out of the house. And yet, it doesn't work for me. Like, I need to go to bed at ten.

And so my husband is very on board with this. My teenagers, I do keep needing to say like, okay, how about you come up to the bathroom and you can chat with me while I get ready for bed instead of us chatting down in the basement, which then forty-five minutes goes by, right? That's one, get off the screens because not only are they messing, they're very addictive. And I believe that all of this causes us to want to eat more because it's all suggestive, it's riling us up.

And then even more than that, the blue light is messing with your melatonin, which means that your sleep quality is diminished. And so it's really important to establish a routine where you get off the screens by at least an hour before bed and then do things that you enjoy doing or restorative.

That doesn't include email, honestly. That does not include email. That does not include projects. That does not include working. It means you get off your screens and you start getting ready for bed. I take an hour to get ready for bed, partly because I futz around and then I go talk to my kids. And I'm not like concerted getting ready for bed. I'm distracted getting ready for bed. But essentially what happens physiologically around ten o'clock at night is that if you're not in bed and you're not on your way to bed, you get a second wind and you literally push out more cortisol from your adrenals.

So now your body's like, oh wait, wait no I'm awake, I don't need to go to sleep. Because your body thinks a lion's gonna eat ya. You just wanna look at Facebook or Instagram for a half hour, but it does have that impact of jacking up the system and having you release a second wind and then the challenge is you're not tired so you don't go to bed. So it's really important to block the light, get off the screens, have a routine and have buy-in from your partner so that they can get off the screens it's time for bed right, you have support.

(28:40.240) Ashley James: We have this go back and forth with my husband. Cause I'll be like why did you let us stay up so late? He's like, I'm taking your cue. He's like excited. He's fine with staying up late, but cause I'm the one that always has to go, okay, it's ten o'clock, we're getting in bed. Let's go. Come on. But if I don't, if I lose track of time, then he's like, oh good. I'm getting away with staying up late. And I feel like, why is it sometimes having a husband's like having a teenager? I tease him. He's very responsible about many things. Me too.  I'll catch myself be like, how is it twelve thirty at night? I'm supposed to be in bed hours ago. Same with my eight year old.

(29:19.786) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right, well you got your second wind.

(29:21.122) Ashley James: Exactly. Am I eight year old? I mean, I want to know when second wind happens for kids because that kid man, you have to start dinner at like between five and six and then bedtime has to start at seven for him to be asleep by ten. The entire evening is trying to get that kid to go to sleep. And it's just because he has energy. I don't feed him any sugar. He's incredibly healthy. He's physically active for at least half the day. He's a very healthy kid. But this kid does not shut off. Right. He have that, I'm kind of getting tired, so I have to like make it be this whole routine where it's like, okay, now we're winding down and now we're reading a book. Now we're, you know, getting in bed and cuddling and now we're reading a book and we're, you know, making sure all the lights are off. So it's just this big rigamarole to get him to sleep. And I'm just wondering, like, when does that happen? Is that more like for teenagers? Because kids don't seem like they ever turn off. But for me, I can feel that second wind. It's right around 10:30 like clockwork, if I'm awake at 10:30, I'm gonna be awake till twelve thirty or one because I got that extra boost of cortisol. I'll be tired at nine. My body will be like, oh wow, I could totally go to sleep now. But then if I'm awake at ten thirty, I could definitely, pull half an all nighter at least. 

(30:40.711) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Time to party. So here's the problem, Ashley. Humans, it's so funny that I would say this was the best positive impact from COVID, which was that, we have all these children, they go to all these activities, and we have all these carpools. And in COVID, we didn't have any of that. And I ended up getting approximately nine hours in bed every night because I didn't have to get up until later because I didn't have to drive any carpools. They were at school, at home for school. And my office is eight minutes away from my house. That includes walking in and walking out. So it's super close. And so I ended up getting about nine hours a night. I used to be proud, I get seven hours of sleep. Okay, I got seven hours in bed. So if you're listening to this, you need more sleep than you're getting. Seven hours in bed translates to approximately six and a quarter or six and a half hours of sleep. It's not enough time for you to hit the deep and the REM and the true restorative time in which the cells in your brain and the rest of your body get smaller so that the interstitial space drains so that your toxins drain into the glymph and the lymph so you get them out of your body instead of hanging out in your in the fatty tissue of your brain and your organs and your bones. You need that time. So aim for at least eight hours in bed with the lights off. That does not like in bed reading. No, it's in bed with the lights off where you're trying to sleep because you inevitably have awake times. You're not a hundred percent efficient. So every human needs more sleep and you have control over that. You need to get in bed by ten and knock it up till six, or nine, to five, whatever. 

(32:27.223) Ashley James: Love it. You just explained how our brain detoxes. And I've seen the studies that when people are chronically sleep deprived, so let's say getting six hours of sleep a night, or like you said, they're in bed for seven, but they're actually getting six or maybe six and a quarter. They're not going into the deep sleep. Or people who sleep with like dogs on their bed or noise outside, or they don't have the kind of curtains that can block the light. So their sleep becomes disrupted, they don't get the deep sleep. Their brain does not detox and we see in the studies that it accumulates these weird proteins and that they're seeing it, there's a relationship between that and dementia. That we need to let the brain detox drain, that it's like at the end of the night, you put all the dishes in the dishwasher and you turn it on. Well, what would happen if you forgot to hit the start button on the dishwasher. You come downstairs, there's no dishes. All the dishes are still dirty. And, but we do that every single day. That is our brain, right? You didn't hit the start button and let your body wash the brain and detox it by not getting enough sleep.

And another thing you said is really important is that the screens in the blue light before bed decreases melatonin production. And what they're seeing now in studies is that melatonin is even more important than all the other antioxidants the body makes, that melatonin is a master antioxidant that's helping our body prevent major disease. For a long time we thought it was just helping our sleep cues, helping our circadian rhythm. It actually is incredibly healthy for decreasing inflammation.

They've done studies around breast cancer and seeing that melatonin production and breast cancer lowers inflammatory breast cancer. And I'm sure you'd have even more information on that, but just maybe that you could share. But melatonin is incredibly important and we have to guard our protection of it very closely. What are some natural ways that we can increase melatonin production, like tart cherry juice is one way we can support it. I know you've talked about like blue blocking glasses or just getting off the screen. So are there any other ways that we can help increase healthy melatonin production?

(34:51.004) Dr. Wendie Trubow: I want to look at it how to preserve your melatonin. So the melatonin starts to increase right around, four or five o'clock in the afternoon. Your melatonin actually does start to increase. I always think about it naturally increases and so what we want to try to do is not diminish it. So for example if you wake up in the middle of the night and you have to use the bathroom or you're awake whatever don't turn the lights on because the light makes the melatonin goes away, right? So keep the lights off

Get off the screens. Wear blue light blocking glasses. Start to dim the lights because it signals the body oh yeah right the melatonin is higher I should be going to bed and the tart cherry juice is fantastic. We actually increase melatonin intake for people who have had any type of infection or particularly if they had COVID because melatonin is such a powerful antioxidant  So increasing it in times of major stressors for the body is fantastic, and then you can start to wean down after the big pump, big pump.

(36:00.899) Ashley James: When you say increase, you're talking about taking an exogenous melatonin?

(36:05.481) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes, yes.

(36:05.887) Ashley James: So what you're saying is not something you want to get on habitually for years and years, but is that even safe? Can we talk about that?

(36:14.700) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, sure. So it's interesting. It doesn't look like you'll necessarily suppress your melatonin unless you're doing the things that suppress it, like being on screens, being up, staying up. Chronic illness will suppress it, but just taking melatonin doesn't look like it in the short term will suppress it.

And there's a million forms, actually, that's really challenging. So you can take natural forms derived from the high melatonin-containing foods. I know there's a liquid, it's a much smaller dose because it's much more concentrated. And then there's also pill forms that you can take. So it kind of depends what, quote unquote, scene you're in and what you're looking for and whether you feel strongly that it come from food or not. So it's all over the map.

(37:04.224) Ashley James: What do you prefer for your patients and clients?

(37:07.900) Dr. Wendie Trubow: We tend to do the pills actually because it's, we have a very varied practice. And so we often do the, like a three milligram sustained release melatonin. And then anyone who's going through massive infection or some type of major immune challenge, we will increase them. Depends on the person. So I don't wanna give a number, but we'll increase them to higher numbers.

(37:37.636) Ashley James: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. And I've taken it and anything above three milligrams, like I'm not sleeping, like I'm sleeping, but it's like that weird lucid sleep where you feel like you've been awake all night and then I'm groggy all day. So there's a certain dose that can feel like you're drugged all day and then no matter what, you can't shake that feeling that you're groggy and you're asleep.

(38:01.161) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, and actually one of the solutions for that is to take it much earlier because the melatonin in our bodies is increasing around 4 to 5 p.m. And so instead of taking it at bedtime back it up by hours and take it. Well, we're recording it, you might not be listening at four in the afternoon but we're recording it four in the afternoon and that's actually when you want to take your melatonin to not only improve your sleep, but alleviate that groggy feeling.

(38:27.339)Ashley James: Oh wow, very interesting. Very interesting.

(38:29.751) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Alright, so that's the sleep. And we've only gotten two, there's a whole bunch more. Things that you can do on your own. So the next thing to do is really have an authentic conversation with yourself about your food. Because food is medicine and you are what you eat. So it's very difficult to be optimally healthy and feel freaking amazing when you eat inflammatory food that challenges the body. Because don't forget, even the best of intentioned humans who have a very quote unquote clean lifestyle, no matter what you do, you are still being exposed to a waterfall of toxins every day. Just look around. If you have a rug, unless it's wool,

you're getting exposed to some type of plastic. Your mouse, your computer, your phone, plastic and metal. The air you breathe can have various chemicals. The water you're drinking also chemicals. The food you're eating pesticides, herbicides, insecticides. So it's really important because you eat every day and you eat three to six times a day depending on who you are that you level up your food. Now perfection is the enemy of good and better. Okay you don't have to be perfect.

Really, I want to stop and repeat that. You do not have to be perfect. You have to be better. Okay? So start where you are and level up. Think of food as a spectrum as opposed to a destination.

Right, like I've been in this game for 17 years and I still practice leveling up. And I still sometimes go, oh wow, that really snuck in and I don't wanna eat that way. Right, I have three teenagers and one pre-teen. You know, they're not like, hey, cook me up some hummus. They're like, let's make popcorn and let's have ice cream. And I'm like, I don't eat ice cream. I don't like, I actually never liked ice cream, even as a kid. I know that's like not American, but I don't like ice cream.

And probably because I had a dairy allergy as a kid and now I just don't like it and I don't eat sugar. Or I work hard not to eat sugar. So anyway, to have a good honest look at your food. Basically the goal is that you eat food that looks like itself and that's minimally processed and you can recognize. Now a lot of people will say to me, I made pancakes myself and I'm like, no, no, no, that's still kind of processed, right? Because you had to grind the flour. So there are a few ways that you can do it that are better, right, if you did eggs, you did a pancake with egg and banana. That's way better than taking flour and grinding it and then making it into a pancake. So I would say grain-free does, it is a higher level. So it's an improvement. But really look to what are the ways that you can make an improvement that are sustainable.

It's not about dieting, right? This isn't a temporary thing that you're gonna do for three weeks, get your beach body on and then you're gonna go back to it. No, this is like, how are you gonna eat to promote lifelong vitality? Because that's very different than eating for a diet. It's not a diet, it's lifelong vitality  It's different, right? It's like Michael Pollan's, Forks Over Knives. Fill your plate with cruciferous and green leafy vegetables. Eat some protein of your choice, whether that's vegan, beans and lentils or whether that's actually animal flesh and if it is animal flesh, make sure it's grass-fed, grass-finished. Chickens really aren't meant to be fed on grains. It increases their omega-6 content. And so, look to where you're getting your chickens from, see if you can, or your chicken meat, see if you can upgrade. It's very challenging and it's expensive. So you know, pick a battle that works in your family. You can get frozen vegetables, organic. They're much less expensive, but do your best to level up and do your best to minimize alcohol and do your best to cut down your sugar. If you did that you'd be like wow, I really did great work is it perfect? No, but remember we talked about you don't have to be perfect you just have to be better.

(42:50.424) Ashley James: I love that you say level up because I come from many years of playing video games in my youth and like level up, Super Mario, get that mushroom level up. And just thinking make it a game, make it fun, right? How can I level this meal, right? For next time how can thinking about making dinner, what can I do to level up my dinner? The other day, we went to the beach and we live really close to the Puget Sound. I grew up on the East coast, live on the West coast now. And so we just went, we're a few blocks away from the Puget Sound, went down to the beach and I cooked a bunch of food, put it in glass container Tupperware and brought it down and shared it with all my other friends. And as we're all eating, they're looking at, it's oil-free stir fry of vegetables, mushrooms and over brown rice with some seasoning.

And they're loving it and they're like, whoa. And they look at me and one of them says, so do you cook with frozen food or is this like fresh? And how do you do this? How do you get all these vegetables in? And I said, listen, my thing is good, better, best, right? So good might be canned beans or some kind of canned vegetable, right? Better is frozen, best is fresh and pick one and try to upgrade, right? So at least you're getting, if you had no vegetables in you and a can of vegetables comes along, at least you're getting some vegetables. I'd prefer fresh, obviously, but there's times when I stock up the freezer with organic vegetables just because there's times when I don't have the time to chop up, but I also am committed to not eating out. I'm committed to 100% of my meals being home cooked. I'll take them with me as I go out, but I'm committed to never eating at restaurants because that has caused a lot of my health issues. And even if I'm choosing healthy things at restaurants, it's still the lowest quality ingredients. They're not organic. They're using omega rich vegetable oils that are just are very pro-inflammatory. And I just don't wanna feed myself that. It's fun and my addiction brain wants it, wants to just like my addiction brain would love to go to a casino and gamble, or would love to stay up all night watching Netflix or just name some kind of a dopamine rich activity. There's no dopamine rich activities that are overstimulating the dopamine that are healthy, right? I look at my longterm goals and that takes patience and emotional intelligence and it takes putting aside the dopamine for now for the dopamine later for that. So I'm like, I'm gonna eat home cooked meals and I'm gonna choose frozen or fresh as much as possible. I get vegetables in and then I get to have that reward later on down the road. And every day I feel slowly better, better, better, better. So just look at the plate and go, level up. Like you said, good, better, best. How can I make this better? How can I make a better choice and know that whatever you put in your mouth is feeding every cell in your body. So, you know, if you're eating Chick-fillet, or McDonald's, hold that in your hand, in your mind, imagine it, and go, do I wanna feed these ingredients to every cell in my body, those cells that are keeping cancer at bay and reproducing to become healthy cells? Is this gonna actually make healthy cells or is this gonna make me feel miserable? Temporarily, you'll feel good for 15 minutes, probably less five minutes it takes about five minutes to eat a hamburger. And then that's days of the body having to deal with the effects of all the toxins and inflammation from that food.

(46:46.987) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, it's funny because I have celiac disease, which is the autoimmune end of the road for an allergy reaction to gluten, which is the wheat. It's what we make our bread with. And so I don't generally eat out because I'm often very reactive to the cross contamination. But I've noticed, it's so interesting you talk about the quality of the oils, because I've noticed that when I eat out, it's like once a quarter, right? We're talking about four times a year that I'll eat out. And I really focus on trying to stay close to the way I eat at home because I find that when I not only eat out but eat food that I wouldn't normally eat, I'm inevitably sick. I'm like, oh, that wasn't worth it. That was not worth it. So it's really important, you know, if you're going to eat out, choose foods that you would normally choose at home, right? So don't go whole hog. Go, go half hog.

And the next thing I would say is, it's really important. And these are all things that you have control over, right? Chew your food. My family has not yet taken this on. I took this on about a year ago after I was reading about, if you think about food, the average human chews a mouthful three times and then swallows. However, if you have food, it then needs to be broken down and digested and the minerals and nutrients absorbed.

And the more times you grind it or chew it, the better the surface area that your body will have to work on. And the greater the surface area, the more likelihood you'll be able to break it down, then the easier you'll be able to break it down. So you wanna chew your food 20 times, 30 times? Like chew it until it's, you just can't chew it anymore. And my family always teases me because I'm literally the last one at the table chewing. They're all done, they're done. They're like, bye, ma. I'm like, guys, I'm still eating. Because when you're joking about five minutes to eat a hamburger, I'm like, oh, it probably takes me 10 now, because every mouthful takes so long, right? So when you're eating, and this kind of morphs into the next thing that you have control over, which is manage your stress. And why that relates to food is that when you eat, you want to be in a state of parasympathetic activation. So before you eat, take a few deep breaths, signal the body that a lion is not about to eat you, chew your food, breathe while you're eating, connect with people while you're eating. Now that's not the only way to manage your stress, but it's one thing that really is very glaring is when you're looking at your health, if you are in a state of sympathetic activation, as we mentioned, you're not going to absorb your food because digestion gets shut down. So you want to see the body okay. Alright guys, get ready. It's time to get the stuff that makes you feel good. Right? But be conscious about it. That's one and then the other side of that is that you want to manage your stress every day not just around food but manage your stress so that you tilt the scales. Tilt the seesaw towards rest relaxation parasympathetic digestion absorption recovery as opposed to tilting it towards inflammation sympathetic overload and ultimately disease, because the body the body gets shut down and you don't go down the pathways of normal healthy behavior and what you wind up with is autoimmune disease, chronic disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, you name it and I'm gonna say okay attracts back to inflammation and toxins so you really want to manage your stress and that's either getting out and moving your body or meditation or walking meditation or Tai Chi whatever it is that for you is that thing you want to do it.

(50:51.601) Ashley James: Inflammation, I keep hearing people say, oh, inflammation is the cause of disease. I can't think of a disease inflammation isn't present in or at one point was present, but it's not the cause. It's definitely an accelerant and it is present, right? But our behaviors and our way we eat and the way we manage stress, the way we sleep, all these things go into whether we're increasing inflammation or increasing inflammation or helping the body regulate it healthfully. Decrease inflammation and then keep it in within homeostasis, right? Keep it in a healthy healthy levels. There's a naturopathic physician that was the Dean of Bastyr. I've had her on the show, amazing woman, Dr. Molly Niedermeier. She was my naturopath with my son when I was pregnant and was our pediatrician.

She had this saying, she'd go, Do you have sock syndrome? And I'm, what are you talking about? She goes, do you eat over the kitchen sink? She had this abbreviation. Where do you eat your meal? Cause she could catch her patients, most of them, if they're female of a certain age or managing the family, they're doing the cooking, they'd be sitting there and their meal is standing up over the kitchen sink or over the stove. Just that's where they're eating their meal or just standing in the kitchen.

They don't even sit down with the family because they're busy cooking the food and then feeding the kids and then, getting the laundry done and watching the kids and making sure they eat. And then they're just standing there, shoveling a few mouthfuls of food in their mouth over the kitchen sink before they go off to soccer practice or whatever. And she's, no, you actually have to sit down and turn off the stress response and chew your food and calm down. You do need to carve out time for yourself. You can't just sit, stand over the kitchen sink and eat your meals. And that was a big eye-opener for me, this concept that there's women who don't actually have any meals sitting down because they're so busy managing everyone else that they never think that in order to digest, they need to sit down, breathe and chew their food. And that just amazes me that we take for granted how our body functions and how to help our body function optimally because we're navigating and we're kind of the cruise directors of all these little people in our life. And for me, it's like the cruise director of my whole family, and my business. And I run a giant organization of 500 mom organization of local homeschoolers. So it's like I'm organizing and being this cruise director for everyone else. It's, no, I need to prioritize sitting down, digesting, taking care of myself. You are important. I can only speak for what it is to be a woman. I don't know what it is for man but I do see my husband sitting down and eating. So I think maybe men sit down and eat more than women, but based on my experience.

(53:56.497) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Well, it's more about ownership. And I think the thing that I would say that I think is really powerful for all the women listening, and the men actually. So if you're the female, if you're the person who's responsible for this and you're eating while standing, this is what you're demonstrating. This is the role modeling you are doing. So what you're teaching your children is when you're a parent, don't take care of yourself.

So it's very important to model healthy behaviors around food because children really don't understand what to do unless they see it, right? So they learn to chew their food from you. They learn to sit and have civilized conversation at the dinner table. I mean, I have to acknowledge, I always get up during dinner, almost always. And I noticed that I sit closer to the kitchen and my husband sits as far away from the kitchen as he can get pretty much and so there's something to the seating and the responsibility but especially even if you're the man listening to this, if your partners in your life are doing this, you're role modeling for these kids and you're also not connecting. So there's tremendous value to being at the table connecting. And gosh, it's funny you say that Ashley, because I remember saying to a patient, wait what, you don't eat with your kids? She was home with her kids. In my family, what happens is we make lunch. We make lunch and we sit down and eat it together. I don't make it for them and then they eat while I'm cooking. That's ridiculous. Like that doesn't even make any sense to me. You know, you need part of the value of meals is connecting. And so it's really important to stop, make enough food for yourself and for them and sit down. If you've got to get up four times, I get it, because I get up too. But do your best, right? Better? Do your better.

(45:20.2) Ashley James: Yep. Good, better, best. Got to pick. Yep. Do, do your better and eventually you're going to be doing your best. Choose to level up. Choose an activity and do it. There's a million things we could do better. Don't feel like a failure, like you're doing it all wrong. Just choose one thing, baby steps, right? Like I committed to not eating out at restaurants. And I put a counter on a little app that counts the days since I've been at a restaurant. I found a Sobriety App, because I was like, what kind of app would just count days? Like super simple. I just don't want to have to like every time look at the calendar and be like, okay, it's been how many weeks? I just want something I can like log into it and it tell me how many days since. You can have maybe an accident app, like how many days since an accident? Or for me, I found a Sobriety App. So I'm counting the days since I've been at a restaurant or eating restaurant food and thus how many days I've been eating straight without any breaks. And I love it. So it's like this one health thing I can do for myself because there's a million things I can do for myself. This one thing, I chose one thing and I'm like, this is what I'm focusing on right now in this part of this year in my life is how many days can I go by eating 100% home cooked meals? And then it's like for me, good, better, best. It's like if I have to grab a can of food, I will. If I have to grab a frozen bag, I will. As long as it's whole food ingredients that I'm making from scratch. And it has been wonderful. I am so proud of myself and I feel so good. And the biggest thing was just committing. The biggest thing was just doing it. And then being okay with really simple meals, being okay with, okay, we're having potatoes for dinner. And then I'm gonna steam some broccoli because that's all I have the mental capacity for. That's fine, we all filled up on delicious potatoes and steamed broccoli. And then when I have more of a brain for it, I make bigger productions. I made this amazing salad that was like knock your socks off salad. And I'll recreate these delicious meals when I have more time, but sometimes just keeping it simple. Grabbing a smoothie. That's another thing I want to ask you about. So there's a lot of controversy around smoothies about making whole food smoothies. Cause like, oh, well you should be chewing your food. You shouldn't be drinking it. I'm like, I get it. But the good, better, best model allows for room for making a smoothie. As long as it's not a bunch of like potions and stuff. Like it's, you know, some people choose to do that. And that's, that's okay. But like, let's just take a bunch of real food and juice it or put it in a smoothie because it's fast. It helps break up the fiber a bit and then you're drinking it, so you're getting it in you. The best would be if you could sit down and chew everything, but what are your thoughts on making whole food smoothies?

(58:43.152) Dr. Wendie Trubow: I mean honestly Ashley, I feel like I don't really see a difference between the machine chewing it and me chewing it. It's chewed. I don't really care.

(58:52.898) Ashley James: Yeah, right. The mastication kickstart the digestion, right? So like, we do start digesting in our mouth and that kind of get kind of primes the pump gets the whole digestive system going. So if you could maybe make a chewing motion while you're also drinking your smoothie, you could just say, hey body, but you know people will inhale a burger and chew each bite once and we somehow manage to digest that. So I think we could streak a smoothie, get the nutrients from it because it's a good, better, best model. If you don't have time to cook, you definitely have time to blend something.

(59:29.606) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, 100%. I literally no problem with smoothies. I think I have them myself all the time, actually. My favorite is a blueberry arugula combo, which I know sounds weird. I actually like the sort of bitterness of the arugula. I like it. Obviously the oddball in my family, but I love it.

(59:53.684) Ashley James: We're twins, no, we're totally twins. So  what do you do? Water? Do you like almond milk? Like how do you make it? Tell us your smoothie recipe.

(1:00:02.556) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, so I actually do a blend. So I do a protein powder that's designed to support the liver. It gives the liver lots of minerals and nutrients. Remember, there's a test in Episode 482. Did I talk about my terrible genetics? So I have the worst genetics and the celiac layer means that I'm a terrible absorber. So a normal person might take two supplements, but because I'm a terrible absorber and I had this sort of hit for so many years, I take a lot of supplements because otherwise I drift too low in my mineral nutrient status. So I do a protein powder that has all these minerals and nutrients that support phase one and phase two in my liver. It's so yummy, Ashley. Okay. I add frozen blueberries, organic. I add baby fresh organic arugula leaves. I add cinnamon, I add cacao nibs, I add a powder that has glutamine in it. It's all designed to support gut function. And I add an extra boost of minerals and nutrients. And then I add water because I don't like it too sweet. I don't personally drink almond milk or oat milk because the oats are not 100% dedicated gluten free so I don't want to react. So I don't need almonds or almond milk or any almond products basically. So I just add water and then blend the daylights out of it and drink it.  It's cold.

(1:01:35.088) Ashley James: There's like rice milk, soy milk, cashew milk, macadamia.

(1:01:38.367) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, I used to do soy milk. It's just too sweet for me. It's too sweet. I don't like this. So I either had to choose the soy milk or the blueberries and I would rather have the blueberries than the soy milk because I just didn't like the flavor. It was like, I don't know, it felt like ice cream. And remember, I don't like ice creams. I didn't want to drink that.

(1:01:55.855) Ashley James: So someone who wants it to be sweet, they could choose a plant milk. Out of all the plant milks in the world, I would say never do oat milk because of gliadin, a protein similar to gluten. It's just also as humans we're not really meant to eat grains. 

(1:02:13.475) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, yeah, I don't do well with oats. I don't eat them because I don't do well with them. And I'm sure it's from the gliadin particle.

(1:02:20.757) Ashley James: Right, right. So I love it. I love it, yeah. Water, and then if someone wanted it sweeter, they could add a banana. Here's a fun thing. You probably know this, but some people might not. Get green bananas. Get the bananas when they're green. Chop them up with the skin on. Leave the peel on. Make sure they're organic and rinse them really well, and then chop them up, put them in a bag, and put them in the freezer. And you can blend. You have to have like a high-power blender, like a Vitamix. You can blend with the peel. You will not taste the peel. And that has a good prebiotic, you're feeding your good gut bugs.

(1:02:59.062) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Mm-hmm. That's such a great idea. I love that.

(1:03:01.452) Ashley James: Right? It thickens it up also and it doesn't make it too sweet because it's not ripe ripe. But it gives you some sweetness. So I was surprised. I was really surprised. My family was looking at me like I've three eyes. I'm taking the bananas, just putting them straight in the blender. And they're like, you didn't peel it. I was like, I know it's great. And you can't taste it. 

(1:03)21.611) Dr. Wendie Trubow: I gotta try that. A green banana, yes? Okay, I'll try that. I'll try that this weekend.

(1:03:28.250) Ashley James: You can blend it without freezing it. It's really hard to make smoothies with green bananas because the next day they're not green anymore. You've gotta get them when they're green. And that's why I like chopping them up. Another thing about buying green. So I go to Costco, I get some of my organic food from Costco, like the frozen blueberries. Actually my husband is a blueberry sommelier. He sampled all the blueberries. He's a huge blueberry eater.

And the best frozen organic blueberries are from Costco. 

(1:04:00.458) Dr. Wendie Trubow: They smell the best, actually. I've noticed that they smell fantastic.

(1:04:03.950) Ashley James: They do. They do, they're really fresh, they're juicy, they're great. Traditional Chinese Medicine says don't do this, but we'll eat them frozen like dessert. We'll just eat them like frozen. I get the frozen blueberries from there. I get the big bag of power greens that are organic. The thing is these are not grown in the ground, so there's not a lot of minerals. Like you can't say, oh, I'm get a bag of spinach because I want iron. Like all these things are grown hydroponically in the absence of nutrition. Green is good. The pigment itself is good. But anything grown hydroponically, if they're not adding minerals to the water, you're not getting it.

So that's the problem. We can accidentally get vitamins. We can bump into vitamins if you're eating fruits and vegetables, but it's really hard to bump into all 60 minerals that our body needs every day. So supplementing is a big deal. But I'll get the greens. And if I know I'm not gonna be consuming that in the next five days, 'cause  like all of a sudden you open your fridge and all the greens are bad cause you forgot about them. I blend them and put them in ice cube trays and freeze it. So this is my good, better, best thing, right? Like, as best as fresh. But I can take all the greens and then I can take a bunch of these trays and freeze it all and then put it in a freezer bag. And then I've got, on the go, I've already made my frozen greens. They're ready. I can grab a few of those ice cubes. I can grab some frozen blueberries and put some water and like you said, cacao nib, cinnamon, glutamate. And did you say glutamate or glutamine?

(1:05:48.181) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Glutamine, yep.

(1:05)49.257) Ashley James: I'm sorry, glutamine, very different. And whatever other, turmeric, you could put whatever other kind of good herbs and things like that in there. And then blend it, add water and blend. So yeah, I like smoothies if you're like, I really wanna eat healthy, but I have no time, or I don't know how to cook. I'm like, well, everyone knows how to hit the blender, so.

(1:06:11.599) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, I got a portable blender for when I travel or, you know, I go to conferences and present. So I actually got a blender. It's a pound and a half. It's the booger now I'm blanking on. It's a pound and a half blend jet and it's super light and cute. So I use that. No, it was heavy.

(1:06:28.368) Ashley James: So not the NutriBullet?

(1:06:30.044) Dr. Wendie Trubow: No. It was heavy. It was heavy for travel. It's not heavy for kind of being around, but it was too heavy for the travel.

(1:06:39.970) Ashley James: Oh yeah, it is kind of heavy, isn't it? And you find it does the job. Cool. Thanks for that. That's so great. Awesome. All right. Well, we definitely talked about foods. What is what's the next thing we got to examine?

(1:06:50.453) Dr. Wendie Trubow: I'm sorry I didn't just list them out, right? But the next thing you have control and agency over is your movement.

So when you look at detoxification, and by the way, we go over all this in the book too. Like the book really is a roadmap. Dirty Girl, Ditch the Toxins Look Great and Feel Freaking Amazing. It's a roadmap for how do you walk through and start taking control of all these things. So the movement, right? So you wanna sweat, sweating's good.

I can't tell you how many people walk in my office and sit down and I'm like, so do you move your body? And I'm like, yeah, I never sweat, though. And I'm like, oh man, I can already tell you you're a bad detoxor because you're not sweating. So sweating's good, and and if you're smelly, it means you're getting rid of your toxins. Have at it. So you need to move your body regularly and you need to be sweaty. Now there's a nuance here because for optimal health and what I'll call peak health, feeling freaking amazing, you need to both do cardio which will make you sweat and helps burn calories but you also need to do weights, which will build your muscle, improve your sugar, the level of the glucose, because there's more muscle to uptake the glucose. It'll protect your bones. So you need a blend. It's not like, oh, I do one or the other. You really do need a blend of building muscle and training the heart to be resilient. But you need to move your body, because if you're not sweating, you're not detoxing. And it's really important to sweat. Your skin is your largest detox organ. So it's crtiical.

(1:08:31.825) Ashley James: Yes, I've talked about this in the past on the show, but for many years, every time I went to lose weight, I would become incredibly sick. It was laughable. It was to the point where it was like, am I self-sabotaging? Do I have a demonic possession? Like, what is going on? Like every time I go to lose weight, I'd feel burning around my eyes. I'd get like a sore throat. I'd have all the flu symptoms. You know the feeling around your head, like I'm about to get a head cold. And then my body would smell like garbage and sorry to be so graphic, but number two, when I went to the bathroom, I could smell burning rubber and I could taste heavy metals in my mouth, especially in the morning when I'd wake up, it was like an ashtray was in my mouth. And that was every time I lost more than 25 pounds quickly, right? This was a long time ago back when I did not know all the cool stuff I know now, but back in my 20s I would like I'm gonna do the Atkins diet. This is before ketogenic was the thing. I'm gonna do Atkins or I'm gonna do the South Beach or whatever. I mean, I do the zone, I've done over 30 diets. Right around the between 20 and 25 pounds, this sickness would kick in and it would get worse and worse and worse and worse until I had to stop dieting. It didn't matter what diet. I did vegan I did raw foods I every everything but if it was fast weight loss, I'd get really sick and it wasn't until I started doing my interviews. I don't know which episode it was exactly but somewhere in the first two years of doing this show because I'd reversed type 2 diabetes chronic adrenal fatigue chronic infections infertility and PCOS. I'd reversed all those things but I still had this problem. I'm like, what is going on? And then it hit me. I'm like, I don't detox and I don't sweat. I didn't sweat when I worked out. I don't detox and I have a heavy metal problem. And my liver would get inflamed. That's another thing. My liver would get all stupid inflamed and it would like stick out. Like you could actually like push on it and see it. It was like pushing out. And I got an ultrasound. My doctor wanted me to do a biopsy. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. The ultrasound said, it's not fatty liver. It's not cirrhosed. It's just angry and inflamed and my lab work showed it too. What is going on? And then it clicked. I need to focus on heavy metal detox. So I got a sunlight and sauna. I ended up doing a lot of research on saunas. I interviewed Connie Zach, the co-founder of Sunlighten. I got a Sunlighten sauna. I sweat every single day. And then I did just everything you could possibly imagine holistically to support getting rid of heavy metals.

And now when I go to the gym, I cannot believe how much I sweat and I feel amazing. I've been doing a heavy metal detox and supporting my emunctory system for several years now. And now I sweat. And so when you say, if you don't sweat, you're a bad detoxer, yeah, and you're probably toxic like I was. And we've got to support the emunctory. Like if you don't sweat, you need to sweat. Like we need to get you in the sauna and get you fully nutralized and clean up your diet, and there's lots of things we can do, but that means that's a good indicator that there's something wrong. We've got to help your body break a sweat so you can get rid of those toxins. So  it is so important. It's so, so important. So moving your body. So for people who are like, I can't do the gym. What do you say? Like just go for a walk, find something you love to do. Like how do you help people or I'm too busy. I'm too busy. I have four kids and a career, whatever, like people are too busy. How do you help them move their body?

(1:12:25.994) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Look, I'm hemming and hawing because I get it. Look, I have four kids and a husband. You know, we were talking about, it's like your fifth kid or your fifth something. So there's a lot of people, my mother-in-law's local, my mom is local. I have two brothers who are local. Like, we have a lot of family. We have four businesses. We're starting another one. Like, there's a lot pulling on us. And really, from the bottom of my heart, get it. When people say I feel really pulled in a lot of directions. I'm like, hey sister, I feel you. So I'll offer a couple things one, I've dedicated my life to making a profound impact on the people around me and helping people transform their health and feel freaking amazing and so there is zero integrity in touting it for others, but not doing it for myself. And so, one of the things that I really started to look at is, okay, how can I carve it in? So one thing I literally did was I put it in my schedule. Right? Because other people have control in my schedule. They can book me, they can decide I'm going somewhere, but if I'm booked, they won't do that. So all they see is that I'm available or not available. So I actually put time to work out in my schedule so that nobody can essentially hijack the time for me to sweat.

And then I literally just did this this morning. So I had an hour blocked to move my body this morning. However, I had a podcast literally scheduled at the end of that block, which means I can't go for an hour, especially because I did my face, but I had to do my makeup. And so I was like driving to my office going, okay, do I go for a walk? Do I not go for a walk? And I remembered, I read this study that everything is better than nothing. So if you can do 10 minutes of exercise, it's better than nothing.

And so this is what the conversation I'm having with myself today. So I was like, okay, self, you're going to go park in the parking lot. You're going to go for a walk. I have 15 minutes for travel. I have a half hour for a walk. I have 15 minutes for travel. This is like, I'm down to the minute, right? It's literally that sort of regimented. Today, I had not that. I had a half hour for everything, including the travel, so I was like, okay, I'm going to go for a walk.

So I went for the fastest walk I could around the office park where I work. And then I drove across the street and went into my office. And so what I'll say to people is there's lots of opportunities to move your body that you might not even think about. Like park farther away in the parking lot. Always use the stairs. Go for a walk at lunch. If you say to me, I have too much work, my response, is your employer is not gonna pay your medical bills, so set some boundaries and go for a walk. Because, if you literally can't go for a walk, you need a new job. 

(1:15:48.213) Ashley James: Yeah, we need to take a page out of the Zennials. Is it the Generation Z? They want like a four hour work week. I'm like, you know what? They're onto something. They're okay with telling their boss. I'm generalizing an entire generation. I'm sure not all individuals, but comparing it to, for example, to the other generations, right, so let's say, the baby boomers. Man, I watched my parents, they both owned their own businesses. My dad had his own business, my mom had hers, and they both worked themselves into early graves. My mom, she exercised like crazy, but she never turned off the stress response. She was go, go, go, go, go, and she died at 55. And she was the healthiest person I knew. That was a big wake-up call. And my dad died six years later. 

The only time they took a break was Christmas or one week during the summer. But even then, my mom would bring work with her. My dad would still be on the phone. They never shut off. Now they love their work and this is what it takes to own a business, right? What is the saying? I work a hundred hours a week, so I have to work 40 hours a week. And so being a business owner, it can take a lot more. It's like another baby you have, another child.

But if you die, like my mom at 55, like what's the point? What is the point of working your butt off to make a successful business? She just retired and then died. Just died a few months after retirement. What is the point of life? She thought she was gonna live to be 90. You know, what's the point? So stop, examine your life, and set those boundaries because you deserve to have health in the long run.

People that I look up to are like Dr. Esselstyn, who had on the show, he wrote the book, How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease. He's in his 80s and he's still skiing, downhill skiing at Vail every year. He's still incredibly active. And that's, I wanna be that, but in order to be that in our 80s, we have to be able to do squats now. We have to be able to, like you said, walk around the park. My biggest thing is if you can't exercise because you're whatever too busy, throw on a Zumba, go, YouTube is on our TVs now, we all have smart TVs, go put on a Zumba, find your favorite 90s or dance mix from the 2000s, or find some kind of Zumba class and do it with your kids, or just do it, or just dance around the house and do a cardio laundry, right? And cardio cleaning the house. No one's watching, right, unless it's your family, but getting your body moving and moving in a way that brings you joy is the most important because if you're like angry or upset or of self-talk the whole time like oh, I'm so weak. I can't believe it, oh, I'm I feel horrible and you're kind of like griping to yourself while you're exercising like that Remember the first part of this interview like that is harming your body, right? And that's like body shaming and all that negative self-talk is actually just counteracting all the good exercise so you gotta move your body in a way that brings you joy. 

One of the midwives that I'm really good friends with, she has like lost half her body weight by doing soccer. She found adult soccer, like not professional, just like adults that are just like regular, like you and me joined a club, they get together, they kick around a ball, they run around, and she has a blast. She made a bunch of friends and she just loves it. Now that's  probably the worst thing ever. I would hate to chase a ball around, but dodge ball, if I could find a just a bunch of adults that wanna play dodge ball, I would do that. That sounds like a lot of fun. So you gotta find something fun and be able to repeat it and do it every day. 20 minutes of Zumba a day or go for that walk or park a few blocks away. That is gonna be healthier in the long run than going to the gym twice a week and then being angry at yourself and having negative self-talk the whole time.

(1:20:11.669: Dr. Wendie Trubow: Couldn't have said it better and totally agree. No question.

(1:20:16.205) Ashley James: Man, if everyone who's listening has now checked all these things off, they're already feeling better. You start doing this within a month, you're already going to be feeling better. I have a I have a feeling that hydration is somewhere in this list, though. I feel like we might be getting towards hydration.

(1:20:31.741) Dr. Wendie Trubow: I have to acknowledge that hydration for me is such an assumed that I didn't really think about it. But yes, I mean, absolutely drink.

So here's the nuance. Because we started this conversation about where do you start with toxins and what can you do? So the goal is that you give your body what it needs so that it can get rid of the toxins that you're exposed to. If the cells are dehydrated, that makes the cell wall unstable. It makes you not able to flush out the toxins. So yeah, kind of assume like drink liquid and preferably organic and filtered, and filter your water to the very highest ability that you have. So whatever your budget allows for, that's the level at which you want to filter your water and your air. 

Okay and then the next thing I would say Ashley is probably the biggest one that you can really clearly see an impact on, although all of these are really impactful. It would be to anytime you're running out of a beauty product, essentially a beauty product, something that you use to clean your house, something you're using to do your laundry, essentially anything you purchase. We've already talked about leveling up your food, anything you purchase that you're putting on your body. Anytime you buy something new, you want to check it in the environmental working group. I use their app on my phone, EWG. You can also use Think Dirty. These are great apps and they rate the product and you can figure out oh, if I wanna detox, is this in line or not in line? 

Again, It's not a moral conversation It's just like is this gonna get me where I want to go or not So anytime you're buying something new if it's not highly rated, and I go for the green one two three in a pinch, that's the rate. There's the top rated items, if it's not highly rated then you're gonna want to level up and look for something that is highly-rated. And if you think about if you do that every time you're running out of something, over the course of the year you're going to essentially transform the products that you're putting on your body, on your clothes, cleaning your house. You're going to transform a lot of layers of your health just from transforming what you're purchasing. And especially when you think about not only are these things bad for us, they're bad for the earth.

It can feel sort of woo-woo to be like, oh, I want to be good to the earth. But really, if you have children, you want to make sure that the earth is healthy and not a polluted place so that they don't wind up with tons of chronic disease, autoimmune disease, and an even shorter lifespan. We're the most developed nation and we have the worst lifespan. We're like the worst of the developed nations because of all the toxins in the way we live. And so that's fixable, right? But we also want to keep in mind, what are we leaving? Well, not only what inheritance are we leaving for our children and their children?

(1:23:38.765) Ashley James: Well, we can think about generations, but actually what the products we're using are affecting our health right now and also in the near future. Because for example, bathe in tap water from a municipal water source, they're recycling what gets flushed down the toilet or whatever, they're recycling the water. And if you're using Tide and other harsh chemicals, you're using whatever Mr. Clean or whatever all those things that, if you look on the back of, and it has some kind of like, this contains something that could cause cancer. Those go into our water supply and in some level are gonna come back to haunt us in our lifetime, not just our children. We are destroying the planet by thinking that, oh, it's okay. I'm just using this one bottle and I'm just cleaning and then it magically goes down the toilet or it magically goes down the sink and it just disappears poof and then all of a sudden it becomes non-toxic and it doesn't hurt anyone. No, it actually does. It doesn't. These are what we call forever chemicals, right? They're forever harming us in our lifetime and in our children's lifetime and all the animals, everything right now. We're killing the soil with the way we're doing agriculture. We're killing the soil and it is having an impact now on weather. I had a whole episode on this, it's really interesting, but we talk about how we have these droughts, right? And then we have these floods, and we can link it back to how we do agriculture and that we remove the top layer of soil, which means that the soil isn't retaining, it doesn't absorb the moisture, and then release it slowly. And so we end up having these big droughts, and then when it does rain, we have these deluges and we have these floods. 

And we're seeing it globally because this is how modern farming is. And now we're seeing how wrong it is. Oh, laissez-faire, it's fine. They sell it in the grocery store and therefore it's okay for me. Most of the chemicals sold in the grocery stores or sold in Home Depot or whatever is sold, sold on our shelves in the United States are illegal in the European Union. And that's why we have to do our due diligence and we have to be very conscious consumers. I like to say I become a detective. I'm like Sherlock Holmes whenever I read all the ingredients, I have to read all the labels. And I still have my eyesight so I can do that. I don't need readers. But my husband kind of gave up on that. And he's like, Oh, you're taking too long. I'm like, Well, here, read the labels with me. He's like, No, because he's like, I didn't bring my readers to read all these ingredients with you. But like you said, we can we can go on environmental working group and look. And just the other day, my husband wanted to kill some moss that was on the concrete outside. And  he was like, oh, let's buy this can of da da da. I'm like, I look on the back of the can, I'm like, are you kidding me? This stuff can kill you, cause this cancer. And if you inhale it, you're going to the hospital. So how is this even legal? You know, you need to wear like a special gas mask if you're gonna use this material. Why don't we just use, and I looked it up, boron, which is borax, boron, vinegar, and hot water, and a scrub brush will kill the moss naturally and safely and healthfully and not hurt anyone. I love using borax as a cleaner, because you can use it as a scrub, and I scrub the sink with it, and it descales, I wash my kettle with it, and we know it's not gonna kill us, it's just a mineral. So there's so many things we can do, which is some vinegar, some baking soda, and some boron. We can really change our habits around cleaning with these natural ingredients that are Grandma used to use. Got to go back to what grandma did. She was so smart and resourceful. And then we're not introducing this into our air, into our water, harming ourselves now and our skin will absorb. When you clean, your skin absorbs it. 

I have a friend who did the Platinum Energy System foot detox and it pulled out. I talk about this in a previous episode, but I sat her down, she put her feet in it and a half an hour later, the water smelled like Febreze and bleach. And it was very, very strong scent. Like the whole room started smelling like it. And I looked at her, I'm like, what's going on? This machine is like a rife machine that pulls toxins out of you through your feet. And she's like, I didn't even notice about her. She goes, 15 years ago, I was a maid and I used all the same chemicals were smelling in this water I used and I didn't use gloves. It stayed in her. It's just crazy. VOCs (Volatile Organic Compound) don't matter. Here's the thing. We go, oh, but it's low VOC. VOC has nothing to do with it. VOC is how a molecule will interact in our ozone layer. It has nothing to do with your health. Acetone, if you go to a salon and you're smelling acetone, within 15 minutes, if you're just smelt it, within 15 minutes  your liver is detoxifying it. It got into your body. If you smell a chemical, if you smell a perfume, it is now in your lymph system. Your body has to deal with it. If you're peeling an orange, that's high VOC. That's not bad for you. Low VOC has nothing to do with whether it's healthy or not healthy. So we have to know that these artificial chemicals, if you're smelling them or if they get on your skin, they're inside your body and your liver has to process it. And then that causes us to need to use up our nutrients in order to detox it.

So I'm a big, big believer in what you're talking about, that we should one at a time replace these products. Actually, I'm not as forgiving as you. I say, throw them all out. It's all trash. Everything under your kitchen sink, everything under your bathroom sink is horrible because, and here's the interesting part, everything in a container in a bottle is off gassing. I can't remember what episode it was, but it was like episode 50. It was a long time ago. This woman had a machine that she'd put in your home.

And it was like an air filter, but it would capture all the molecules that you're inhaling. And then she would analyze it, put it through a computer, analyze it. And she could tell you the brands of cleaners under your kitchen sink. She'd be like, okay, so you have the Mr. Clean, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because even though it's under your kitchen sink and you've had it for years in your kitchen sink or under your bathroom sink, it's off gassing and your body is, in small amounts, but your body is still inhaling it and absorbing it even though it's in a bottle under your kitchen sink. So I say, get it out. She even went so far as to say, if you have a garage that's attached to your home, because she can detect chemicals that are hanging out in your garage. If it's attached to your home, it doesn't have like a hundred solid vapor bearers. She says, don't even buy a home that has a garage attached. You should have a separate garage if you're gonna store bottles that are with chemicals.

(1:30:42.282) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Don't have those chemicals. So you don't have to worry about storing them right? Let me go back to this because we didn't talk about this and this is a perfect place to really have people think about is that the chemicals developed in the United States never had to be vetted before they got released on the market. So when we think about, oh, it's probably safe because it's on the market, no, it's on the market because it was never tested. And the Environmental Protection Agency has very little ability to test products unless a company self-reports. And what company is going to do that, right? Because that's their livelihood. And so the EPA tests items that companies self-report, you do not have to prove that it's safe. You should be able to show, but when it hits the market that you don't think it's gonna harm someone. But that's a very different standard, right? That's like, I don't think I'm pregnant, but you could be. So it's very important to remember that even though people have good intentions that doesn't always get represented the way we want it to. And so the chemicals that you're being exposed to, the greenwashing, which makes you think that it's healthy for you, it's not. And so it is up to you to do the footwork. And part of the reason I say go one, two reasons I say go one item at a time. One is it's extremely expensive for people. But two, really the bigger thing is it's overwhelming. People get stuck in, oh my God, what do I do first? Well, first you do what you're running out of.

It's practical, right? You can get your head around, okay, I'm running out of that. Cool. I want to level up. Let me take a second to talk about tea. You want to make sure you're buying organic tea in bags that are not made of plastic. There is plastic in tea bags unless it specifically says it does not. Okay? So you're like happy, oh, look at me. I'm drinking tea instead of coffee. Coffee's moldy. I didn't want to do that. Okay, great. You're now getting a dose of plastic with your tea. 

Get rid of the cake cups in the Keurig because you're forcing hot water through plastic. This makes no sense because you're trying to detox, you're trying to do a good job, and then you load up. So there's a lot of pieces here. 

(1:33:01.293) Ashley James: Right. Good, better, best. Choose, choose everything out of all these categories, choose something and do better. Do a good, then do better, then do best. Instead of getting overwhelmed. Cause when we see too much, Oh, I have too much, just too much, just too much to get overwhelmed. Just choose what you can do. And just ask yourself that fun question, make it a game that gives you a little bit of dopamine. What can I level up today? What, what can I do to level up and choose one from each category or just choose one from one category that we've talked about and go with it. I gotta say, one of my friends formulates 100% all natural organic skincare. And it's actually really affordable because she is just so kindhearted. She crafts it herself in her kitchen after she gets the kids to sleep and she sells it online now. Finally, she's been selling it for years locally. It's emmiesremedies.com and she's giving her listeners a crazy big discount. It's LTH is the coupon code, emmiesremedies.com. And I love it. You could eat this if you wanted to, but you know, it wouldn't taste good, but you could if you wanted to eat her face cream. And in the next year, she's been formulating and she tests this. She doesn't test on animals, she tests on humans. So she's been tested. She has a ton of girlfriends that will try out all her stuff. And so once it does come to market, it's been fully tested and used for several years.

But she is slowly launching her entire skincare line online, but so far it's just the face cream that can also be used as a body cream. It's delicious, I love it. And it is all natural. So that's emmiesremedies.com. LTH as in Learn to Health is the coupon code. And just yeah, there's so much information out there when it comes to replacing our skincare products and everything under our sink and everything on our counter. Everything on the bathroom counter, under the kitchen sink, under the bathroom sink, all that stuff, we can find natural solutions for that are not only good for the environment and like not harmful for us, but there's also ones that have ingredients that are good for us, right? In addition to that. So we can find stuff that actually helps our body, helps the microbiome of our skin, helps our stress levels, like, you know, using essential oils responsibly. We can, it's using a type of herbal medicine. We can use that and we can make our own natural cleaners or our own cosmetics. And we can have an experience where we're increasing our health while we're also replacing all the junk that's harming us.

(1:35:39.792) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, and I think there's so many things that people can do but the things that we've talked about are the top things that people people can really take control over and and do without needing any kind of functional medicine person now if you did all that and you're like, oh man I think there's room for improvement that's when you want to see if seasoned functional medicine person because you're most likely dealing with toxins at that point.

(1:36:08.398) Ashley James: Yes, but take the time to do each one. It's so important because like you said, you could get 70% of the way there feeling good. And that kind of saves you money in a sense, instead of like you go see Dr. Wendie day one, she's gonna tell you to do all this anyway. So instead of paying her to tell you to do this, go do this, see how far you can get, and then get the help, get the testing, narrow it down.

As far as diet, because diet is so big and some people are like, well, I heard the carnivore diets really good and I hear raw vegans really good. And I hear the West Beach, whatever diet is really good. Like you said, that long-term lifestyle, what's a way, instead of grabbing onto an ideology or like a diet dogma, what's a way that we can know by listening to our body or maybe looking at lab work that we're on the right path, do you have some kind of hints for people to be able to dial in foods that are healing for them instead of gravitating towards foods that maybe are dopamine increasing but not good for us?

(1:37:28.780) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, I think, I mean, this is like a minefield. So let's say there's no.

I despise the word diet and implies temporary. And it literally, think about it, D-I-E. Don't get to the T, you die. So I'm a huge anti-diet human. I really only believe in doing things that are sustainable and work for you. And then I'm gonna say that there's no one eating program that's gonna work for everyone. So what I'm gonna say is generally, right? Big broad brushstrokes, humans do better when they eat food that is less processed, avoids seed oils, minimizes sugar, and that the products look like what they started as. That would be a good guidepost. And then within that you can be vegan, you can eat dairy or not, you can eat flesh or not, but there's a lot of room to swing out and that essentially at the end of your meal you want to ask yourself do I feel good in my body? Does this food feel good in me?

Is it kind to me? Is it mutual? Right? Look, I used to love French bread, but I got celiac. It is not a mutual love affair. Right? It's a one way street here. And so don't engage in relationships that are a one way street. Make sure your food loves you as much as you love it. And don't eat it if it doesn't, because it's not worth it.

(1:38:44.241) Ashley James: Love it. Yeah, those processed foods, it's like an abusive relationship. You love it, but it does not love you back. It hurts you. So get rid of it.

(1:38:54.397) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Exactly. Yeah, have it be mutual love affair. And within that, there's a lot of room to have differences.

(1:39:01.672) Ashley James: Yes, exactly. It's been so great having you on the show again. Remember listeners can go to fivejourneys.com/promo and get the download of the How to Feel Frickin and Fantastic Ebook that you're giving us for free and we want to stay in touch because, your big book is being released, you want to tell us just a little bit about your book that's coming out, is it early next year that it's coming out?

(1:39:30.714) Dr. Wendie Trubow: We haven't set a date yet. It's probably about this time next year.

So apparently all of our books are so far based on my messes. And so I hit perimenopause like hitting a brick wall. It was really unpleasant. And one day I was sitting in the car. It was the dead of summer. The car was off. My kids were in the car, hence the reason I wasn't swearing. And the sun is baking us. And we're waiting for my husband to get in the car. I don't know what he's doing. He pokes his head in the car and he asks me something. Actually, to this day I have no idea what he asked me because I was like the exorcist. I looked over at him and I went, do you value your life? Turn on the car. And he was like, okay. So he turned on the car. We get going, I get the air blasting, I'm cooling off and I looked at him and I'm like, Perimenopause, bitch. I'm so sweaty and bitchy. And then I was like, I guess I'm not the only one experiencing this. I think we need to write that book. That's our next book. And so the first book is Dirty Girl, which is based on my hot mess toxic breakdowns. And then the second book is about transitioning into menopause. I think our third book is going to be either about constipation or about male sexual performance, ability to get erections. We're going to go down one of those two paths. And neither of those is personal. It's more just what's on our mind. But that's the book that's coming. It's really a roadmap for navigating the perimenopause into menopause powerfully, gracefully, and with your relationships, your job, and your life intact, and not only intact, but thriving. How do you thrive that process as you go into this new phase and become your next self.

(1:41:21.387) Ashley James: Love it. Yeah. Well, I know that ED's (Erectile Dysfunction) going to be big, but I have to say constipation. If you're constipated, like everything's wrong. It's kind of like LA when there's traffic backed up or any. Name a city. Look at the highway. If the highway isn't moving, it's just gridlock like that. All the ulterior, everything that feeds into that backs up. And then there's just honking and fumes and like toxins building up, especially like think about maybe Mexico city where there's, it's kind of like a bowl or Las Vegas, it's in a bowl. There's no wind. And then if there was a ton of traffic just sitting there, all the fumes from the cars are just sitting there gathering and gathering and gathering. It's getting more and more and more toxic. And that's what constipation is.

Constipation is your body reabsorbing the toxins the liver just got rid of us absorbing everything's going wrong. We're getting that build up of all the toxins from the bad bacteria. It's the constipation feeds into the candida culture of the gut that you don't want and so it's just like everything gets backed up everything gets toxic everything gets crabby.

Then we've got brain fog, then we've got hormone disruption, and it's just like every system in the body starts failing. All the red lights in the dashboard are going. It is bad news. Like constipation, which people, they don't think it's as serious as it is. It is a big deal. So that's my vote. If I could cast a vote, I would say do the constipation one because once you get the gut corrected and get poop going three times a day, you wanna poop three times a day, well-formed poops that you don't have to strain and they're so good and clean. It's like you don't even need to wipe. Like you go to wipe and there is nothing stuck to your butt. Like that, if you can have that three times a day, everything feels like you said, you could get 70% better just by correcting these things. If you have perfect poops, 70% of everything going on in your health is gonna get better. It's amazing. So for me, my vote is for the constipation one for sure, but also I don't have ED problems in my life, so.

(1:43:36.338) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right? I only like the title because we would call it Rise Up. That's why I want to write it because it's such a fun thing. Rise Up! All about men's ability to get erections. But no.

Yeah, I can see constipation being the big thing. So the next book is Sweaty and Bitchy, From Sex to Brain Function, Master Menopause and Feel Freaking Amazing. So that's 2024, probably around May 2024, when it takes about a year to launch a book. So we've already got it written, now we just need to edit it and make the PR plan. So about a year.

(1:44:15.302) Ashley James: So cool. Well, we'll definitely have you back on the show to talk about more about your book. Every single book, just come back, just come back every time. Love to have you. You're such a blessing and thank you so much for your wealth of knowledge. You have such a big heart and you're alongside us, having these experiences, being human. I know I've interviewed these doctors who are like, they put themselves on a pedestal like nothing's wrong with them. They're perfect. And they have perfect health and they're all telling us what to do. And you're right there with us. You're sweating. No. We're all human. We can learn from your experiences, which is beautiful. So thank you for sharing them.

(1:44:54.591) Dr. Wendie Trubow: Hey, my pleasure. I hope that this was valuable for someone, right? That it makes a difference and give them the tools to take the next step and have a transformation.

(1:45:02.327) Ashley James: Absolutely. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and check out the show notes in today's podcast, cause we have all the links, for Dr. Wendie Trubow, including her social media. And you can jump on social media and tell her how much this helped you today.

(1:45:17.883) Wendie Trubow: Thank you, Ashley. This was great.

 

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Dirty Girl: Ditch the Toxins, Look Great, and Feel Freaking Amazing!