dieting

Dr. Cates: Welcome to the spa doctor podcast. I’m Dr Trevor cates. This time of year, people are continuing to talk about weight loss goals. Are you tired of the same approach or maybe you’re confused about why you’re not getting results. I hear this a lot, so I asked my guest today to come on and talk about how to reset your metabolism so you can finally achieve your weight and health goals. My guest is Dr Alan Christianson. He is a naturopathic endocrinologist who focuses on thyroid function, adrenal health and metabolism. He’s been actively practicing in Scottsdale, Arizona since 1996 and is the founding physician behind integrative health. He’s in New York Times best selling author. His books include the metabolism reset diet, the adrenal reset diet, and the complete idiot’s guide to thyroid disease. Dr Christianson regularly appears on national media like Dr Oz, The Doctors, and the today show. Dr Christianson has been on my podcast before and I’m really excited to have him back on and in this interview we’re focusing on dieting and weight loss. Ultimately the goal is to reset your metabolism, we’ll talk about why, but then the end result is to help you really drop that fat and regain health. You’ll want to watch until the very end of this interview because he shares lots of great information, but at the very end he bus at one weight loss of myth. That is actually what I was really surprised to hear him share. It makes a lot of sense and it helps clear up one of the big reasons why people struggle with their weight. So please enjoy this interview with Dr Alan Christianson. Alan is so great to have you back on my podcast.

Dr Christianson: Dr Trevor, Dr. Cates. It’s awesome to be with you.

Dr. Cates: Ya so course. Yes, and so last time you came on you were talking to us about thyroid and adrenal and but you’ve got something new that you, that you’re bringing forward because of what your patients were asking for, which is your what your patients. We’re asking you, and I know what this is because we’ve talked a little bit about it, is what a lot of people are asking, so it’s not just your patients, right? It’s a lot of people are concerned about their weight and their metabolism and so what kind of led you, maybe you could tell the story of what led you from your last book to kind of shifting focus and doing something a little bit different.

Dr Christianson: Awesome question. I survey my readers, my patients at least once a year and I’ll ask them some open ended questions and one of them is like, what is your biggest, your biggest goals? What are your biggest struggles right now? And it’s energy and weight, you know, that’s always the top two items. And so the message is what is the new approach for this? And the other part is how do they go together? You know, what’s, what’s the time. And I think most consumers have a sense that, you know, if I do some somewhere, the latest fad, extreme diet is sure I could drop a pound or two here, but I’m going to be miserable and I’ll have cravings and I’ll probably rebound. So the idea is how do you change body? And like for me, if I go way back to probably second, third grade, you know, I ate what I wanted and I played when I wanted it as much as I wanted and everything just seemed to work out, you know, I had a good way, my energy was stable enough but that changed. And I think many people struggle with that, you know, trying to get it right. You know, if you eat lots of food, you’ve got some energy but your weight’s not where you want it and if you starve yourself, you feel miserable and you’re exhausted. So yeah, I need those things back in line again.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. And so this is something that you noticed personally, but of course your patients were noticing this too. And maybe they were mentioning to you as one of their biggest complaints. And, and I, you know, I do think weight is, especially this time of year, a lot of time people are talking about weight, how to lose weight and it’s year after the holidays and all of that. Uh, so it’s, it’s great to have some more tools to help, right?

Dr Christianson: No, No one concern when you’re actually going to drill down with someone, the concern is weight. But when you think really hard, I’m actually thinking about waist, the importance of waist because you know, honestly, it’s weight was the sole concern. Here’s the quickest weight loss you’ll ever hear. Okay? So you go to the bottom of your scale and you’ve got a switch that says lbs slash kg flipped that switch, your weight will plummet. Go from pounds to kilograms to go down by a factor of two point two. But your health isn’t any different in your life isn’t any different. So it really is the waist part that matters. We get this in terms of our personal concerns about our appearance and how our bodies can move in or just our mobility, whatnot. But they were looking on the medical risks. No body weight, body mass index, their good predictors, but there’s water shortcomings. A lot of people are very tolerant short. They don’t really line up quite right, but, but waist is a huge predictor. It was like a lot of data saying that’s like the thing that matters the most.

Dr. Cates: Right. And so the, there’s a big, a big thing is that people oftentimes they get on the scale and they are looking at that. Is there a primary factor? I know that when I used to do weight loss programs, we did a body composition testing. I would do measurements and a lot more was involved in than just how much people weigh on the scale because we know that there was some risks associated with where that weight is, right? The weight distribution and all that. So when you explained a little bit about those health risks with being uh, with the fat and where it is and those sorts of things,

Dr Christianson: no. Awesome, awesome. Quite a long time. It seemed that have some relationship with mortality, just like how long math on diabetes risk, cardiovascular disease, risk of cancer risks, brain aging. A lot of other things as well, but those top ones especially and then also skin health, inflammation in the body, Collagen formation, you know tissue repair all the substance of time into this and there have been many people to where they would seem to have these diseases are risks even though they were not heavy and there was also many people were heavy per those skills but didn’t seem to get these risk factors. Didn’t seem to get these conditions and for a long time that was just an enigma and researchers thought, what’s up with this metabolic syndrome? Fatty liver conditions overlap with weight but not perfectly so, and then they got more refined, so we’re looking more at even just body composition. Just so now it’ll be emergent term is uber fat. It’s used in research. I don’t love any of the terms of this and all honesty. That’s. That’s one. There’s a term tofino within outside fat. Inside. There’s the term skinny fat. I don’t love any of those terms. Are there better ones that you’ve heard miss this thing. Now let’s next time we get some downtime, let’s make one out. We’re going to out some better terms, but that’s what they call now in the new stats. Now if you take people that are just too heavy per body mass index and overweight or obese, and then also those who had a good weight but not enough lean body mass, you put all those together per gender per age. That’s about 80 to 90 percent of the population. So it’s pretty much everyone’s struggling with this and, and the crazy thing, you know, none of us want to have a lot of visible fats or just aesthetic reasons. And I’ve, I’ve been there and I get what a stress that can be psychologically, but, but medically now we’re learning that there’s the, there’s the visceral fat is subcutaneous out that we have, but there’s also organ fat which gets around the liver, the pancreas. And the crazy thing is what’s this? Um, so that’s little airpod. That’s probably about 10 grams, you know, about two pounds for organ fat is the difference between being diabetic and nondiabetic know. So it’s, it’s a huge thing, like you said, where, where it is and how much there is, is a huge factor for our health, right?

Dr. Cates: And so now, um, if they’re, if they’re able to drop that fat, they’ll, the risk significantly decreases, right?

Dr Christianson: If they drop the proportionate amounts, and that’s where diets breakdown, because there’s a million ways you can drop a few pounds, but the problem is that either you’re losing as much muscle as your losing fat, or you’re going to rebound again, you’re going to come back up afterward. It’s if you can hold your breath, like there’s someone in our circles and actually has the record for breath hold and 22 minutes, believe it or not. Yeah, if I went like two minutes, I would be panting. I would breathe, breathe. I breathe really hard. And the same thing occurs for food intake, but it’s more gradual. You know, if you force your food intake down, you will rebound and hold your breath. But it’s a slower thing. So the trick is not so much just how to drop a few pounds, but how to selectively have fat loss from those critical areas and have that be something your body can maintain, install, have lean mass afterwards.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s a big thing too, that I noticed doing weight loss programs is that people before they come see me, they would say they tried weight loss programs and it ended up just losing muscle mass and on. Also I would monitor that lean versus fat body mass and I would definitely notice it if people, you know, did certain things or didn’t do certain things, they weren’t following the program properly that they would lose that lean body mass. And so they might be getting on the scale and say, Hey, I’ve lost five pounds, but in fact they’ve actually lost a lot of it was lean body mass, so definitely don’t want to be doing that. *So you have this metabolism reset diet that you now have. Who is this? Who is this really good for? Who did you create this for?

Dr Christianson: The easiest thing is for someone that wants to see substantial weight loss in terms of quantifying the idea about where waste becomes unhealthy. It’s drop dead simple. You know, so most of us know our height. It doesn’t change throughout adulthood and most of us have some idea, about our waist circumference a defined waist to height ratio in the definition they happened to be right around the belly button so that the protocol is wake up in the morning, roll out of bed, use the bathroom, don’t eat yet. No, no food, no liquids. Get a good old tape measure. I’m breathe in, breathe out, let it relax normally. Try and keep it in, but you let it, let it relax and then just check the inches around the belly button and compare that to an accurate height in the magic number is also drop dead simple. It’s point five, so you want your waist circumference to be less than half of what your height is. That’s all. So whenever it’s more than that, this is a good fit. And what happens is that a lot of the waist measurement that’s not just related to our skeletal mass and the stuff that we have to have in there is the variable expansion of the liver. So yeah, actual anatomical changes to the liver or the biggest thing that changes the size of waist circumference, and if it’s more than half of your height, this can be a good fit to help reverse that in a lasting way.

Dr. Cates: Oh Wow. Okay, that’s great. And, and so how, how is this program different than some of the other diets out there? Like caloric restriction, intermittent fasting, the Keto Diet, how is it different?

Dr Christianson: I stumble across a program that was used was shown to clinically reverse type two diabetes. Now this was just a groundbreaking new idea. This just about 2006 and this protocol was pretty restrictive. It was not a lot of food. It was liquid calories, was not high quality calories, but it would reverse diabetes. And so in our clinic we sort of testing a program that used real food and used more of it, a fair amount more of it. And then also thought about protein sparing, you know, in terms of helping to keep the lean body mass, but also to keep the liver working. Right. So it turns out the liver has a need for essential amino acids that doesn’t go away even if we’re eating less food, so if you’re low on the food intake, you still got this need for amino acid to liberate to keep on working, and if it can’t, that’s part of what creates that for rebound cycle. So we’re evolved off of this first protocol and we were testing it primarily for reversing diabetes and also fatty liver syndrome and seeing it work really well, but also seeing just all the benefits that would come from dropping a bunch of inches off their waist and then also seeing many that didn’t really have diabetes. They weren’t rare having fatty liver but have to see some waist loss and so that how it evolved and emerged. The differences are that there’s not. It’s not about chloric restriction. Actually think more about fuel then about calories and I call this category fuel because we’ve gotten so wrapped up in carbs, fats, ketones. You know what’s good, what’s bad. What the ratio is. And remember when my mom would say, don’t worry about if you’re peas get in your grain, because it all goes in the same place, you know, so carbs, fats, ketones, once you’re talking about your liver, breaking things down for fuel, they’re identical, they’re all oxaloacetates. And the extent to which they provide to have your body is when they break down into oxaloacetate, no difference whatsoever. So I collected. We think about those as the fuel load. Now proteins different. You know, one thing I mentioned about was livers need from, you know, acids, it also next basal metabolic rate. It also maintains lean body mass, decreases hunger, but block you can make it into fuel and it’s horribly inefficient. So I think about it distinct. So with, rather than just decreasing calories, it’s intentionally decreasing fuel for window of time because you can mix and match any of those versions of fuel, if there’s too much, your body has stressed from that. And you know, Ketogenic diets, if they’re low fuel diet, so you’re getting a low amount of total fuel food, you can lose weight from that. Maybe a lot of muscle mass. But even if you’re on a ketogenic diet but you’re not at a fuel deficit , there’s no weight loss. There can be weight gain and once you match the fuel content, there is no longer an advantage there. So the pitfall about going way too low on just total calories is the loss of lean mass and then eventually the suppression of metabolism. So the trick here is focusing part on getting enough fuel but making it low enough to where the extra fuel stuck in the liver can get burned up and get broken down. And Yeah, the real goal is that a cool metabolic flexibility. Like, like the story I said when I was a kid where I ate what I wanted and energy with stable weight worked out and I see what’s going on. The kind of tight rope to where if they restrict their food enough the weight goes down, but they’re tired, they’ve got cravings and if they’re eating, you know, focusing on healthy food, eating what they want to follow in their appetite, they’re probably going to feel better. But the local down might even go up the wrong way. And the thing is, when you’re healthy, that shouldn’t happen. Know many just assumed that’s how things work, but that’s not how the body should function when it’s healthy.

Dr. Cates: Right? Absolutely. And I think that people so much, they go on these, these I guess Yoyo Diets, so they’ll do a diet for a little while and then stop and then try another one and just switch around. And I think a lot of times that’s doing more harm than good, right?

Dr Christianson: Oh yeah. No. And that’s, that’s the mindset they need to live their lives on a diet of what’s different about this too is now this is going to get it done, go out, make a transition, make a qualitative shift to your liver’s ability to regulate your metabolism and then afterwards you’re not the dieter anymore. You don’t have to live your life that way in an ongoing basis.

Dr. Cates: So can you give us an idea of sort of a, like a snapshot of a day in the life of doing your program

Dr Christianson: For sure. So there’s a couple of stages. It’s also not in distinct stages and there are some elements that are just basic platforms it the main setup is it’s 28 days and you’re looking at a shake for breakfast and lunch and then a meal. That’s the basic format. There are optional snacks which are available for those that they, especially the first few days that they want working totally fine, but the ingredients all shift throughout the 28 days in the first goal. Many people just can’t budge the scale way too, won’t move it on and when we get really nerdy, but what’s happening, there’s a lot of triglycerides trapped around their liver cells and that’s the main barrier. So the first week, the ingredients, the recipes, it’s all targeting that stage of it, getting those fat cells talent from around the liver cells. Then the next stage is about getting some of that glycogen back, so your liver has two fuels its glycogen and triglycerides and the paradox is that you need glycogen to burn triglycerides and people reach a state to where their livers are literally so full of triglycerides. There’s no more space for glycogen. It’s like you got two bags in one suitcase and one bag is so big, the other one won’t even fit and that’s what’s going on, so then we have to get the glycogen built back up again and we think also about the liver, how it’s working, so it’s almost time to get rid of junk and it’s got one type of reaction to where it’s taking bad things and breaking them up into smaller parts. Was this problem not going to work? It wasn’t an intentional breaking things. A little parts and you’ve got to cover that up to say if we get rid of it, you think about our phase one, phase two reactions, so that’s third step after we got the fat out from around the cells, when we built the glycogen is fixing those phase one, phase two ratios. I think about it like little guys down in the mine with the cool card. You know there’s some that are getting the cool off the wall and some that are filling the curt’s. You’ve got to have those things line up. You gotta have enough carbs. You’ve got to have the mining fast enough or what happens is we start breaking things down fast with them. We can package them up so we got to change that ratio and the last thing is then getting the fat out from inside the liver cells so each each 28 days is four distinct cycles that take the steps and the first step alone makes to someone that could not lose body fat, body fat again, but then the four step together make it to where you legally metabolic flexibility. Now you’re a non diameter and now appetite energy, they all sync up the way they should.

Dr. Cates: Okay, great. So sort of like a reset and a way to to then go back to I’m eating, but not having to be so restrictive. It’s not like you have to do the after the 28 days, you don’t keep following this diet. Right.

Dr Christianson: I got some ideas for maintenance, but by and large they’re eating healthy. It’s nothing that’s too weird or unusual. No, and that’s the beautiful thing is that your body can change and when it’s healthy, you shouldn’t be able to eat good healthy foods and you shouldn’t be able to do movement and activity per. What your intrinsic drive levels are and those things should sync up whether or not something is wrong.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, so then with the program you got to lead three people through what to eat, but do you also talk about exercise or other things that lifestyle changes to make that make an impact during that 28 days?

Dr Christianson: No. Awesome question. I’m. I’m such a standard exercise. If there was like a fountain of youth or a magic pill and I do encourage some during that 28 days, it’s rather limited. I do want the body to function well in a low fuel stayed and I still want the muscles to be stimulated and activated, so it’s a balancing act. There are some micro workouts in the program, so they’re brief, but they’re initiating things called the glue for receptors which makes the muscles hungry for fuel also, but they’re not prolonged. Prolonged exercise is beautiful, but during this window it ends up being more strain on the body’s fuel systems, so. So yeah, this is what works now to change things is not the same as what works to keep things stable, so it’s a distinct phase with less total exercise, and this is weird, but one of the biggest pitfalls people have is not doing the minimal amounts like doing too much and that often sets people back. I’ve had it happen whenever when someone is troubleshooting, it didn’t work well for them and it almost always comes up. They were still training pretty hard, are pretty intense and I love that. It’s beautiful. It’s so good for everything in the world, but not then not during that window. The body needs more rest and more resources to really reset and change itself again.

Dr. Cates: Okay, so with these different phases, what are. What is the feedback that the people, the patients that you find for this, what is the feedback then for these different phases? What are they noticing?

Dr Christianson: Noticing difference, big difference. With the exception of the first few days, you will notice the first few days as they’re transitioning, yeah, that the body has not yet been able to reflect great burden, stored fuel, and they can feel hungry, they can feel a bit edgy, but then the dramatic thing is the past is for them after about day two or three and then they’re surprised how well they’re functioning and that’s it. You notice that the calorie map is not perfect, but each pound is about is somewhere around 3,500 calories and if your body was using a couple of thousand calories per day, you shouldn’t need. You should be okay even if you’re eating less food because you can tap into that. So whenever your food intake goes down and you don’t feel okay, you’re getting strong cravings, your energy crashes, you get brain fog, that means your body has fuel, but it can’t tap into that. So that’s the trick is getting it to where your liver can be that hopper, that liaison to help transition fuel out of those stores. Back then ms dot regulations and you keep your body functioning grade.

Dr. Cates: Okay. And that’s a lot of people give up is that second, third day, right. And, and you know, and programs where it’s a change, right? That’s that part of it’s mental too, right? I don’t know if I can do this. It’s a change. It’s not what I’m used to. Right. So, um, what. So when people hit that point, do you have any suggestions on how to ease through that time or don’t you know, just remember there’s a, there’s hope at the end here.

Dr Christianson: No, that’s the beauty of the snack foods. So we’ve got a ton of recipes and food suggestions to where you can get so tired you can feel, you can offset that, those, those feelings and dysfunction grade. And then typically after those couple of days people asked me to come in different to the snacks. They still walk them to the delay, but most find that now you take it or leave it.
Dr. Cates: Yeah. That’s great. I mean it’s, it is one of those things where people don’t like to feel deprived and so and I, and then you know, it sounds like they don’t have to.

Dr Christianson: It’s distinct is that many cases hunger has less to do with just overall food intake and then one with how well the body can tap into it’s fuel, but the others how stable the blood sugar is and so a lot of books getting blood sugar crashes and it’s not even a level of blood sugar. It’s the rate of change that often causes those symptoms. They may not get lower than 80, but if they drop from 180 over the course of two minutes, that can trigger a lot of brain fog, fatigue, muscle cramps or anxiety symptoms. So the program also relies heavily upon resistance storage. And that’s crazy exciting stuff. You know, they’re the slowest burning meals might take 90 minutes to peak and trough for glucose, whereas resistance storage takes about seven to nine hours. So now also the effects last for school 24 hours to some degree. So when you got that with your first job, I will switch you do with all those recipes, your blood sugar is dialed in and you’re not getting the cravings. Hangry is a common term. Now. I agree that a lot, but it completely breaks that cycle for people.

Dr. Cates: So I know there’s, there are so many myths out there about dieting and weight loss and I know we’ve, we’ve busted a few of them already, but what would you say are some of the top ones that maybe we haven’t covered or that you want to just reiterate of know those things that it’s just they’re out there and that people that you have to, you’ve had to say over and over again. That’s not true. This is actually the truth.

Dr Christianson: Yeah. What is a 20 year old understanding about how blood sugar works and how blood sugar effects body weight. Your back back 20 years back, we thought that blood glucose came from the diet that we eat food, we ate bread, beans, pasta, fruit, wherever. And You made that food into glucose and that was pretty much how your blood sugar came on board. And you know, I was managing diabetes back then and there was a lot of, lot of early proponents saying, Hey, this is the culprit. Why don’t we just stop consuming the things that have glucose? And it seemed really intuitive, but I would track a lot of people and I would use a 24 hour glucometer and that would track their glucose like every minute of the day for a week. And what I saw it way back when was that for most people when they went very low on their intake of foods that can make glucose, glucose became less stable. And at first I thought it had to be a flute and I saw that so commonly and now what we know now, they’ve done studies in which they can distinguish the sugar in your blood between two categories. There’s the sugar you make and the sugar that came from your food and we call that an endogenous or exogenous from inside or outside of the body. And what we’re seeing is that those that had struggles with body weight or blood sugar or metabolic syndrome, about 70 percent of the circulating blood glucose is not from food, it’s from what the body is producing and they’re now talking about the leaky liver hypothesis of diabetes and obesity. It’s what it’s been called. So your liver is supposed to store the extra fuel and then dish that out when your body needs it. But from modern life, low nutrients, environmental toxicants, all these factors, low amount amino acids, too much fuel, no poor quality fuel delivered gets overfilled and it starts to leak. Then when it starts to leak, any kind of food intake can cause your liver to dump out a lot of glucose, triglycerides or a lot of ketones. And that’s it. It’s got no room to store and process these things. And paradoxically it wasn’t the meal that caused that. It was the liver being so full that calms down.

Dr. Cates: That’s really interesting. And I think, I think back to how, you know, unfortunately we’re exposed to so many more toxins now than we used to, that people’s livers have become more burdened over time. And then maybe it used to be that, you know, you ate sugar and that’s what spike blood sugar. But now it’s become more complicated. I mean, I, I honestly, I feel like treating patients has become more complicated than it used to be before we had as many know before we’re got exposed to so many talks and ,.. So I’m sure you talked to about the importance of reducing toxic exposures and, and all the different things you can do to support your liver and of course doing your whole program is going to do that. But you know, toxins in our air, water, food, personal care products is who knows, partly why I created my skincare line because I was seeing so many more. My patients are struggling with their liver function and with, um, the need to do more detoxification.

Dr Christianson: The struggles with liver function. There’s a thing called fatty liver disease. I just read some numbers recently saying now that with you, if you screen to screen people between age 20 and age 70, if you screened them, the ultrasound provided the syndrome, you’ll see that about 46 percent of it habit to a pretty market degree now or wrinkle is that ultrasound is not definitive. There’s a lot of people that have fatty liver that it doesn’t show up for an ultrasound, so it really is things like biopsy that more definitive, but we never did that for a screening tool, so we know that close to half of adults how rather progressed fatty liver disease already and many more, how bad have you been screened for it and that’s. That’s this manifestation that I’m talking about where the liver is overloaded with fuel and that’s where it’s gotten more than five percent triglycerides by your weight. Now it’s getting gummed up. Then there’s a vicious cycle, so when someone’s struggling with their weight, if they’re above that point five and weight is not stable, energy is fluctuating. It’s pretty solid case that they’ve got some level of this fatty liver syndrome and that’s what this is about, is really identifying the reversing all of it.

Dr. Cates: Okay. Okay. I’ve got your book, it just came in the mail. I can’t wait to just. I’ve been looking through it and I’m, I’m, I’m so excited to read it. So will you tell everybody where they can get a copy where they can find it?

Dr Christianson: For sure. So easiest thing. Dr Christianson, Dr Christianson.Com. We’ve got links to all the places you can get that. Any bookstore will have it, you know, online retailers will have some links for directly and we’ll share some special links with you as well so they can get some bonus recipes and content. And we’re also doing a free seven day challenge. So it talked about how you can get in that first seven days, you can get past that barrier to where if you couldn’t lose weight. You can, again, you can clear the fat around the liver cells and we’ll give you a link you can share to where anyone can do that for free with a book or not. You can walk to that challenge and how that transformation and get the big leg up on regaining their metabolism again.

Dr. Cates: Great. Okay. So we’ll definitely have that link up below the podcast interview on, on my website and I think it’s great. I mean if you’re in your offering this for free for people

Dr Christianson: Yep, it’ll be a group event actually I’ll be doing it live cured and I will be showing daily recipes and talking to people I think a lot of fun with it, but it’s going to be a lot of fun

Dr. Cates: And it’s such a great thing to do that as a group. Do it live, do it, um, and have that support because with, with making a change really any change, especially when it comes around, you know, weight make changes in your diet, it’s easier to do it with I think with a group where you, you know, you have a timeline and a structure to it because it’s easy to just push you off and say, okay, I’m going to do that next month, next month. So I’m glad you’re doing this and have a set date on that. Great. Well, well yeah, go ahead.

Dr Christianson: Well, just one last thing about putting if off. I had many people do it while on Vacations, traveling. It’s actually really easy during those times because there’s less food that you’re managing and it’s all click together and simplified. So. So yeah, there’s no, there’s no wrong time for it.

Dr. Cates: Okay. That’s another myth that um, that is a good one to bring up is that you have to wait for the perfect time when you were, because that’s just an excuse to keep putting it off. So I’m glad you brought that up because it’s so true. There’s an, you know, there’s never going to be the perfect time. Really just start it, just do it. Um. Okay. Well Allen, Dr Christianson, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the information that everybody go out and get this book. And thanks again for all your information today. I appreciate it.

Dr Christianson: Yeah, thanks so much for sharing, sharing this out and I was always happy to see you. Trevor,

Dr. Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr Alan Christianson and to find out more about where to get his book, how to get it, how to get that free gift that he mentioned and see if you’re, if it’s still available, just go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. And while you’re there, I invite you to join the spa doctor community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. And I also invite you to take the skin quiz. If you haven’t done already, just go to the skin quiz.com. It’s free. Takes just a few moments. Find out what your skin is trying to tell you about your overall health and you maybe even find out why, how skin ties into metabolism and find out what’s unique to you because when you address those root causes and helps you with your weight, helps you with your skin, and helps you with your sleep. So many of these things are connected and tied together. When we talk about ways to lose weight and we do those things, we start incorporating those and we have a healthier body. It also shows up on her skin. I also invite you to join me on social media, on Instagram, facebook, pinterest, twitter, Youtube, and join the conversation and I’ll see you next time on the The Spa Dr. podcast.