dr. trevor cates

Naughty Nutrition with Kaayla Daniel

March 15, 2018 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

Today we’re talking about some specific foods that are good or bad for skin that have been somewhat controversial or new to the market.

My guest is Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD who is known as the Naughty Nutritionist®. She is an author, speaker and has appeared on Dr. Oz, PBS Healing Quest & other shows, and been a speaker at Paleo f(x), Ancestral Health and other conferences. She received the Integrity in Science Award from the Weston A. Price Foundation in 2005, the Health Freedom Fighter Award from Freedom Law School in 2009, and the BadAss Award from the Paleo-Primal-Price (Hunt Gather Grow) Foundation in 2015.

In today’s interview, I talk with Kaayla Daniel about foods for the skin with a focus on bone broth, soy, dairy products and camel’s milk, with specific tips on each of these.

So please enjoy this interview…

To learn more about Kaayla, you can visit her website here.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Trevor: Hi there, I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. Today we’re talking about some specific foods that are good or bad for your skin. And some of these have actually been somewhat controversial, and some are new to the market. My guest is Dr. Kaayla Daniel and she is known as the Naughty Nutritionist. She is an author, speaker, researcher and has appeared on Dr. Oz, PBS and other shows that you may have seen. She’s also received some awards; The Integrity in Science Award, from Weston A. Price Foundation, the Freedom Fighter Award and the Bad-Ass Award from the Paleo-Primal-Price Foundation. And today’s interview is talking about the foods for the skin that are particularly good, and some that are actually not good. So, we’re gonna be talking about foods like, bone broth, soy, dairy products and camel’s milk. Can you guess which ones are maybe the good ones? Which ones maybe aren’t so good? But we’re gonna be talking about specific tips on each of those good ones, so you know how to get them in your diet. So please enjoy this interview.

Trevor: Kaayla, it’s so great to have you on my podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Kaayla: Thank you!

Trevor: Alright, so I know you’re known as the Naughty Nutritionist. Love that name. And you were on my Glowing Skin Summit, I interviewed you a while back. And so let’s talk about some of the foods that are good for our skin. Things that people should be getting in their diet, and then some of the things that maybe are considered health foods but aren’t particularly good for our skin. So what do you think are some of those tops ones? And I know I’ve got my ideas, and I think we’ve got some overlapping opinions on this, so we’ll see.

Kaayla: Well my number one Superfood, and of course I have to bring a little mischief in here, but the Superfood is bone broth. And can’t emphasize that enough. And now that it’s winter, it’s the perfect time for soups, for stews, for gravy, for all the ways we can incorporate bone broth into our diet and yes, I do love the real thing, just like grandma used to make.

Trevor: Good, yes. It’s definitely a great one because of all the great collagen in bone broth. So let’s talk about how to make it, because sometimes it’s a daunting thing for people, maybe they’re just thinking, “Oh I need to go pick that up at the store.” But it’s actually really easy to make, and I think the nutritional content of a home-made bone broth is … I just don’t know that you can match that.

Kaayla: Well, I call it a fast food because the time it takes to make it is actually very little. But it is going to cook for hours and hours, but it’s not like we have a stockpot on the stove. We can put it in a Crock-Pot or Insta-pot, or any of those things. We can go to work in the morning, come home, and guess what? It’s all done. Or go to sleep at night and in the morning it’s all done. So it really is a fast food. But as with a lot of real food cooking it’s a habit. So the first time you do it, it might seem a little daunting, but basically just throw in a bunch of bones and good joint bones, and plenty of them, and onions and celery, a little apple cider vinegar, use good quality water, and you really can’t go wrong. Now, when people do find their bone broth doesn’t taste too good, the general reason they’ve got no flavor, is maybe they add too little bones in a gallon of water. So you really do need a substantial of the bones to fill your pot up and cover it with the water.

Kaayla: And if there’s meat on those bones you’re going to get some very rich flavor in there. So I often talk about how, yes you can make bone broth with wilted celery and dead onions and the carcass with no meat on it, but it’s going to be kind of weak. So the more quality you have with your ingredients, the fresher, the better, the more flavorful.

Trevor: Okay, great. And how much apple cider vinegar should people use, do you think?

Kaayla: You can just splash it in. It’s gonna depend on how much you’re making. I’m usually throwing in a tablespoon or two. If you’re using a really big stockpot, more than that. And some people like to cook enough for a month, and then do freezing. I tend to have a Crock-Pot going most of the time. So small batches, but I keep it going.

Trevor: Yeah. And the apple cider vinegar is to help pull the nutrients out of the bones and vegetables, right?

Kaayla: Yes. And I think it helps with that, but you’ll also notice that you’ll get some of the gelatin even if you forget the apple cider vinegar, or if you roast a chicken there’ll be gelatin underneath it. So, if you roasted the chicken and then you eat it and then you’re gonna use the bones to make broth, some of that gelatin you’ve already achieved. So, in that case you might want to add some gelatin powder later to make it jiggly.

Trevor: And so some people will say to scoop off the stuff on the top after you make bone broth. What do you think? Do you skim anything off the top, or do you leave it all in there?

Kaayla: Well, some of that stuff on the top will be the fat. And gourmet cooks will take that off because of flavor. Flavor issues and appearance issues. So it’s not that the fat’s evil, but if you’re a gourmet chef your broth’s gonna taste better if you take it off. And ideally we’re all gonna be using, say if we’re making chicken broth, it’s gonna be chickens that are free-range and running around and cavorting with roosters and so-forth, but when people end up having to use, for whatever reason, say a supermarket chicken, you’re gonna get a whole lot more scuz at the top from the toxicity. So, especially important for those people to be skimming off. And you’ll just notice a difference with the quality of your chickens in terms of how much there is to take off, in terms of, what I would loosely call the skuz that rises to the top as you’re cooking it.

Trevor: And then also some people say that you should cook the bones first before you put ’em in the water. Now what do you think, as far as roasting large bones, the bone marrow first before putting ’em in the water? Or just putting ’em in raw? What do you think?

Kaayla: Well I do both. Now I typically will roast, say, the oxtails of the bone marrow bones. And of course if you’re doing the marrow bones you may wanna be scooping it out, I mean that’s an absolute primal, gusty delight if you wanna do that. But one of the ways we get marrow into our diet is just through soup, because there even is a little marrow say, in chicken bones, poultry bones. Not very much, you’re not gonna have anything you can scoop out, but one of the ways to get it in your diet is through the broth. So, that’s an option. Now, I mentioned before that if you roast a chicken that you can make the broth with the roasted carcass, and that will give you a broth that has a different flavor than say, if you take chicken feet and just … Now the chicken feet are a very inexpensive way to get a very rich and golden, wonderful, simple broth. Chicken you’re going to get all the flavors of whatever you used when you roasted the chicken, say if it’s lemon and thyme or it’s some sort of barbecue or whatever, you’re gonna have barbecue broth.

Kaayla: Those flavors can all be delicious. You can’t really go wrong. But it’s gonna be a variation. But in terms of making, say, the beef broth, or oxtail soup or stew, the roasting will enrich the flavor substantially.

Trevor: Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well so I wanted to point that out. But as far as the nutritional content, it’s gonna be the same, right? It’s just the flavor of it, correct?

Kaayla: Yeah, people have said, “Well, if I’m roasting the chicken, I’m gonna lose some nutrition in the broth.” Well, yes, but you also ate the chicken, so you’re getting it regardless, right?

Trevor: Yeah. It’s all gonna get in your body eventually. I love this idea of not wasting, too. You make a chicken and why throw it out? Same thing with turkey on Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving, is after where it’s making the bone broth from the turkey carcass and the leftover turkey that’s there.

Kaayla: Well we can get a lot of good nutrition that way. And many people who are new to real foods, and organic, and pasture-raised, grass-fed et cetera are very concerned about the cost. Especially if it’s a big family, the greater cost. But if we’re using all parts of the animal, if we’re doing nose to tail eating, it’s not so bad. People often are leaning towards the steaks and chops, but if we also include the organ meats and the cheaper cuts, and of course use the carcass for the bone broth it becomes a lot more economical.

Trevor: Okay. And what about fish bones? Do you often make broth with fish bones?

Kaayla: I don’t do that as often, but I live in Albuquerque, so there’s not a whole lot of fresh, good seafood local. But I will, and that can be delicious. But more often, my seafood chowders will be with say, frozen seafood and maybe I’ll have the chicken broth that I’ve made myself as the base.

Trevor: Right. But it is an option for people who maybe they’re pescatarian. They’re choosing to eat fish as their source of animal protein. That is an option, correct?

Kaayla: Absolutely, and with the fish you’re going to get some of the thyroid hormones, you’re gonna get some of the brain hormones, many things you’re gonna get from the fish carcass that you’re probably not going to get from say, chicken bones, or beef bones or venison.

Trevor: Interesting. And then I guess we’ve got some other options for great foods for skin health. What are some of your other favorite ones?

Kaayla: Well, in general: quality ingredients, organic pastured. The less toxicity, the better. Because I think that’s A-1 for beautiful skin, is the less toxicity we put in, the better our skin’s going to look. So it’s an inside-out proposition. Gotta pay attention to the outside-in part as well, with quality, organic skin-care products too. But a lot of people are really busy with the outside, and we wanna think inside too. So, yes organic, plenty of vegetables. So, if you’re on paleo diet, quality meats plus plenty of vegetables. With the ketogenic diet, you still have those vegetables, quality meats and fats. Plenty of fats. For so long people were on the low-fat diets and your skin wants good fats for nourishment. So, whether we’re talking Ayurvedic medicine, or Chinese medicine, or just our own common sense, including plenty of the genuine fats mother nature gave us.

Trevor: Great. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that. And how do you feel about soy products?

Kaayla: Well, I did a hope book on the dangers of soy foods, and we have more than seventy years of studies linking soy to malnutrition, thyroid problems, immune problems, on and on. Even contributing to causing and accelerating the growth of cancer, even causing some forms of heart disease, so soy really is not a health food. Now, I don’t have studies about soy and skin, but if soy is damaging the thyroid, which often happens, a very common side effect from excessive soy consumption, the skin’s going to be affected. Think dryness, for example, low thyroid and how dry people get from that. Low energy, dryness, constipation, all of that’s gonna show up in the skin.

Trevor: Okay, great. And how about dairy products?

Kaayla: Dairy products. Very interesting question. There are people who say never eat dairy, that dairy is only designed for a nursing calf, et cetera, that we should have no dairy. And then there’s people who feel they really thrive. They talk about peaches and cream complexions. So for some people dairy, if it’s fresh, raw dairy from healthy cows, and if they tolerate dairy well, can be a health food for those people. Other people don’t do well on any dairy products, and something I’ve been researching the last year or so: camel’s milk. And camel’s milk, not everybody finds camel’s milk locally. But I think that’s going to be a growing trend because it’s absolutely delicious. And there’s research coming in supporting that it can be tolerated by many people who can’t tolerate any other kind of dairy. People who can’t tolerate cow’s milk, even the A2 cow’s milk that some people can tolerate. Raw cow’s milk, even sheep’s milk or goat’s milk. Some of those people just thrive on camel’s milk.

Kaayla: And it can heal so many diseases, with the gut healing the immune healing, so it’s not only giving nourishment to many people who are having trouble tolerating any foods, but that camel’s milk can actually heal some of the problems. So, that’s the really exciting research. And the way I would put it is, camels have evolved to thrive in some of the harshest conditions ever on the planet. The deserts. And they survive and they thrive. So what could be more perfect for people trying to survive in our really toxic, difficult, modern world?

Trevor: Yes, interesting. And so I know that dairy products definitely, I’ve certainly found with my experience too, to be one of the biggest trigger foods for skin issues. And it’s not true for everyone, like you said. But it does seem to be one of the top trigger foods for a lot of people, especially those with chronic skin issues, and other health issues too. And so I know I have had people that don’t do well on cow’s milk products, sometimes they do okay on goat’s or sheep’s milk products like the yogurt, or cheeses, and they’ve tolerated those a little bit better. But then again some people can’t do any of that.

Trevor: So this idea of a camel’s milk is kind of a new thing that’s just come to our attention. That’s become more available to us here in the U.S. and so I don’t actually have any personal experience with the camel’s milk, but I’ve been interested in it because I’ve heard about it. In going to some of the conferences I’ve seen camel’s milk products out there. I know someone that’s working on a camel’s milk formula for infants, and some interesting things that are coming out with camel’s milk. So, I’m curious to learn more about it and see how this unfolds.

Trevor: Any other things that you can explain about the camel’s milk and how it’s different, and why some people tend to be tolerating it more? One of the things that comes to my mind is, it’s new to us. A lot of times we just, with dairy products, with cow’s milk in particular, it’s been in so many of our food products, that we’ve just become sensitive to it because we’ve been exposed to it so much. And that many of us were exposed to cow’s milk maybe too early in our life, when we were infants, so it created gut issues early on. But perhaps camel’s milk is, I don’t know what could be different about it, but it sounds like maybe it is.

Kaayla: Well, I think you’re making a very good point that just about all of us were from a very early age, exposed to pasteurized, commercial cow’s milk, and if you become super sensitive to that, even the better forms, such as the raw cow’s milk, may be something you’re still reactive to. Hopefully not, but it can very well happen. So the camel’s milk is different enough so the body’s not reacting. And having some of the healing capacity of say, breast milk, and we were evolved to thrive on breast milk, but our world is so toxic now that even some babies are not tolerating their own mama’s breast milk. And that’s just very, very sad.

Trevor: Yeah, so it seems to be helping people with allergies as well? Camel’s milk, from what you’ve been reading about it?

Kaayla: Yes, very much, so. We’ve got around a hundred and fifty research studies at this point. Many done with Arabian researchers. But many of them are very good studies. Not all of them, of course, but we’ve got enough good studies so that the evidence really is coming in. Now, in terms of the people with allergies, what gets very interesting is how the first thing is, if they can actually tolerate the camel’s milk. They’re going to get some real nutrition in their diet because many of these children are the ones who are reacting to everything and their diets become more and more limited. And it’s a nightmare for the parents, they’ve got children who are failing to thrive, but children who are reacting to everything. And even if those children can say, tolerate something like rice milk, there’s really no nutrition in there. It’s a substitute that maybe they don’t react to, but it’s empty calories. And we need something to help those little bodies and brains grow.

Trevor: Yeah, and soy was oftentimes used as an alternative too for people. And I think we’re getting more away from the soy. As you mentioned before, there are some issues around soy, so people are looking for alternatives for nutrients for our little ones.

Kaayla: Absolutely. And camel’s milk is not cheap of course, but when your child can thrive on it where nothing else seemed to work, and even start to heal, just amazing. And many of those allergic children, they’re facing a lot of very difficult skin problems, all the eczema’s. And the older folks, the psoriasis, so things we’re not reacting to, it’s life changing for people who suddenly see their skin clear up, where it was painful, it was ugly, they didn’t wanna go out in public. So many blessings.

Trevor: Yes, and so what else is the research showing? You mentioned to me that you’ve seen some things around auto-immune diseases as well. And some research on that. What have you found on those?

Kaayla: Well, most of the research is on autism, and we have most of the testimonials from the parents of autistic children, who have started to really heal and thrive after taking on camel’s milk. So some of the reasons for it have to do with healing the gut, it always starts with the gut, and camel’s milk including unique immunoglobulins, the secretory, IGA, helping heal the gut. Camel’s milk also [inaudible 00:20:31] containing unique oligosaccharides. Now what we often think of oligosaccharides being, what causes flatulence. Beans, beans the musical fruit. So that’s what we think of, and I could predict people would say, “Well, even if it makes my skin better, I don’t wanna have a lot of gas problems.” But it’s different oligosaccharides, they’re healing oligosaccharides that are very involved in the immune system and the gut. So we know most of our immune system is in the gut, and there you go. Heal the gut, heal the brain, heal the immune system,

Trevor: Interesting. And is the difference because of the diet that camels have? I don’t know much about camels because we don’t have any walking around Utah!

Kaayla: Not too many in New Mexico, but they could thrive in Utah. There are some herds in Colorado. They would thrive in New Mexico. There’s herds in Texas. They actually thrive in many different climates and not just Arabia or Australia, which is where people think of them being. So, their diet would be wild. They are foraging, they’re not fed very much, so it’s mother nature’s diet that those camels are on. And some of the other issues is camel’s milk is naturally the form of A2 protein that people are less likely to react to. Now, some types of cows, like the little Jersey cows, the long-horned cows, some of the Indian cows, are A2 as well. Sheep are A2, goats are A2, reindeer are A2. Bet reindeer milk would be great for our skin and health too.

Trevor: Okay, alright. Reindeer milk, that’s kind of a new one to me, but that’s right around the corner as well.

Kaayla: Well if Santa was drinking the reindeer milk, and less of all those cookies and carbs, Santa would be very, very slim and handsome!

Trevor: Probably so! Okay, so with cow milk, can people find out that they get that particular milk from those particular cows? How do you know? That’s an interesting concept too, that maybe down the line we’re not gonna just have cow’s milk, but from specific types of cows that have healthier milk. I hadn’t even thought about that, but that’s an interesting concept.

Kaayla: Well, you can ask your farmer if they have A2 cows, and more and more of the small farmers are switching their herd over from A1 and perhaps A1 and A2 cows, over into a pure A2 herd. And there’s many reasons that’s beneficial, they can actually make more money that way because they can sell the pure A2 milk for more money.

Trevor: And why exactly is A2 better? Can you explain that a little bit more?

Kaayla: Yeah, it’s an A2 form of protein that is much better tolerated that’s not triggering all sorts of reactions to the casein. So the children with autism and many of the people who are reacting to cow’s milk, it’s often not a lactose or milk sugar issue, it’s a milk protein, a casein issue. So, having the A2 form of casein people are much less likely to start reacting negatively to that.

Trevor: Interesting. Well, these are all really great things to be aware of. And where do people find camel’s milk right now? How do people get it? And you said it is more expensive too.

Kaayla: It’s definitely more expensive, and most people will get it online. And I do recommend Desert Farms. And if you’re really lucky, there may be some camel farmers in your own backyard, or in your neighborhood.

Trevor: That’s great. And what is the general cost? Do you know the cost of camel’s milk?

Kaayla: It’s like eighteen dollars a pint.

Trevor: Oh wow. Yeah.

Kaayla: So it adds up fast. But if it can heal somebody who’s really challenged, it’s a miracle at any price.

Trevor: So this isn’t something that people would be putting on their cereals or in their coffee, but it’s something that they’re actually drinking for nutritional benefit? So it’s a different way of looking at a dairy product?

Kaayla: Yeah, I’ve used it in my coffee. I tend to be a low-carb person, but if I were eating cereal the milk I’d put on it: camel’s milk. And it is delicious. It’s very white, I think people are afraid it’s going to taste camel-y. People think goat milk is too goat-y, they say. So people have been intimidated

Trevor: Right. Yes. This is inspiring me to try it, I haven’t tried it. Like I said, I’ve seen it at conferences, and hear people talking about shifting to doing more camel’s milk, so I’m interested to see more of this come out and try it myself. Well, thanks for sharing that information with us! Kaayla, tell everybody how they can learn more about you, and what you’re up to.

Kaayla: Well, I’m the Naughty Nutritionist, telling the truth that’s too hot to handle. So I take on a lot of controversies because people are overwhelmed with all the information out there, how inconsistent and contradictory it can be, and I have a little fun with it and try to provide good education plus entertainment at the same time. Website is Drkaayladaniel.com.

Trevor: Great. Thank you. And I think it is interesting, when it comes to food there are definitely a lot of different opinions out there. A lot of different … Sometimes it’s just people opinions and it’s not based upon any research. So I appreciate you taking time to look at research, and correlating that with the foods and the information that you’re sharing, rather than just maybe and idea or a philosophy that somebody might have. Looking at science behind it is always a good way to think about our foods and what we choose to eat, and our diets.

Kaayla: Yes, I think the combination of good science plus mother nature’s wisdom. That’s very powerful.

Trevor: Absolutely. Yes, certainly there are certain things that mother nature can help us with for sure. And knowing things that are in their whole form, and that we’re getting back to nature, can’t really go too wrong with that. It’s a great place to start, anyway. Thank you so much again for your interview. I appreciate you coming on.

Kaayla: Thank you!

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Kaayla. We got some tips on maybe some foods to start enjoying to include in your diet, such as bone broth, and maybe even camel’s milk if you’re ready for that. And to learn more about Kaayla, you can go to my website, thespadoctor.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. And while you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community, or you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. And if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your own customized skin report at theskinquiz.com. It’s free, takes just a few minutes, you’ll find out what information your skin is trying to tell you about your health, and what root causes might be holding you back from the skin you want and deserve. So just go to theskinquiz.com and get your own customized skin report. Also, I invite you to join me on social media, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and join the conversation. And I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.

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Glowing Skin and Health with Naomi Whittel

March 8, 2018 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

On today’s podcast, we’re discussing Graceful Aging and Glowing Skin through Autophagy. I know that might sound like a funny word, but it’s one you’re going to want to know about it because of the tremendous impact it can have on your health and your skin.

My guest today is Naomi Whittel. She is CEO of Twinlab Consolidated Holdings and was named the nation’s leading female innovator in the natural products industry by Prevention. Naomi is known as a trailblazer and an advocate of purity and potency in nutritional wellness.

Naomi has traveled around the world and back again and has immersed herself in the world’s healthiest cultures; to touch, to feel, and to learn about the ingredients that keep them healthy with glowing skin. She has looked for ways to combine nature with science. Her breakthroughs led her company, Reserveage Nutrition, to become the fastest growing midsize company in the nutritional supplement industry. Now, leading the charge as the CEO of Twinlab Consolidated Holdings (which acquired Reserveage), Naomi continues to deliver on her promise to help millions thrive with award winning supplements they know will truly help them.

Her story and products have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, PBS, InStyle, The View, Dr. Oz, SHAPE, Good Morning America, Today Show and more. She is a steward of sustainability, a sought-after keynote speaker, and a member of the UN Chamber of Commerce. Naomi lives in Boca Raton, Florida with her husband and their four children.

In this interview, we discuss autophagy, what it is, how it helps, and how to achieve it as well as glowing skin. Naomi is a wealth of information on this topic, so please enjoy this interview…

To learn more about Naomi Whittel, go to her website here.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Trevor: Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to the Spa Dr. podcast. On today’s podcast we’re discussing graceful aging and glowing skin through autophagy. I know that might sound like a funny word, but it’s one you’re going to want to know about because of the tremendous impact it can have on your health and your skin. My guest today is Naomi Whittel. She is CEO of Twinlab Consolidated Holdings and was named the nation’s leading female innovator in the natural products industry by Prevention.

Trevor: Naomi is known as a trailblazer and an advocate of purity and potency in nutritional wellness. Her story and products have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, PBS, InStyle, The View, Dr. Oz, Shape, Good Morning America, and many more. She is a steward of sustainability, a sought-after keynote speaker, and a member of the UN Chamber of Commerce. She lives in Boca Raton, Florida with her husband and four children.

Trevor: In this interview we discuss autophagy. What it is, how it helps, and how to achieve it. Naomi is a wealth of information on this topic, so please enjoy this interview.

Trevor: Naomi, it’s so great to have you on my podcast.

Naomi: Thank you, [Dr. Cate 00:01:23]. I am thrilled to be here.

Trevor: I know you’ve got a really interesting story, so let’s start with your story. What led you onto the journey to doing all the great things that you’re doing?

Naomi: Well it started when I was a little girl and I was born in Switzerland on an organic or biodynamic farm. You know all about the benefits of biodynamics, and despite this incredibly clean, pure, nutrient-dense lifestyle that I was exposed to, I suffered from the autoimmune disorder of eczema, and it manifested as eczema that was so bad it would cover all of my skin and it would bleed and it would pus, and all of the negative effects that it has.

Naomi: And so growing up I would just stay fully covered like this at all times, and I was just looking at a picture of myself when I was about seven years old and I was covered from head to toe and you could just see my hands, and they looked like they were 60 year old’s hands because they were red and they were cracked and there were places where they were bleeding, and so I was very shy and very embarrassed of the way that I looked and when I moved to the US I was about 14 years old and my mother had said to me, “It’s the springtime. You’ve missed out on so many things that you would want to do with your friends. You should go to the pool like they do, because the weather’s getting nicer. You should put on some shorts and a T-shirt. It’s not a big deal. You have a lot of friends. They’re not going to judge you.”

Naomi: And that was the same time of the year that I was getting ready to go to the spring dance, and I had my eyes set on this one particular boy named Clovis Chester Young, and I adored him. I thought he would be my future, and ultimately I listened to my mother and I wore shorts to school one day and a T-shirt, and I think when he got a glimpse of my skin and saw me in that way, it just grossed him out and he didn’t invite me to the school dance and it was that moment in time where I would say that all of my self esteem just fell and I committed at that point to myself, it doesn’t matter what I do. I’m going to get rid of this eczema.

Naomi: But what I didn’t realize at that time also was that this eczema isn’t something I could get rid of. It was deep, deep down at the cellular level, so I could suppress it, which I ultimately did and I went to the pharmacy and I went to a conventional doctor for the very first time, and I started to take different steroids and different products to suppress the eczema, which I did for a little while but you know that doesn’t last. It’s just like a Band-Aid.

Naomi: Ultimately if I fast forward in my own journey, I got to a point where I was working with this amazing Oriental Chinese medicine doctor and he was doing acupuncture and he was looking at how I had blood stagnation and he was working on my gut and on my overall wellbeing and my health and really helping to fight the autoimmune disorder, and with that process the layers of eczema were coming out of my body. So sometimes it would get much worse and other times it would start to thin out, and it was this onion peel essentially, and during that time he also gave me these little Chinese herbs. They’re like little black pellets. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken them.

Naomi: I would use those and over the course of a year and a half, the majority of the eczema, like 90+ percent of it, came out of my body and surfaced out, so it was a great healing experience, and then fast forwarding to when I was getting ready to have a child and I went and visited my doctor. My husband and I met with our doctor, Dr. Ericson, and as an integrative MD he did everything under the sun. So he’s testing my blood, my urine. All the different … My nutritional profiles, everything, to just make sure that I was ready to have a child, and I got a call back from him a couple of weeks later and he said to me, “Naomi, I need you to come into the office. I want to go over your results.”

Naomi: I was a little bit surprised. I thought, “Okay, that sounds fine. Let’s do that.” Just was wondering, and when I got into his office he went through the list of heavy metals that I had in my body, and I was in shock over it and I thought, well how on Earth? I eat clean. I do everything from this health conscious perspective. What’s going on? Why would I have high and toxic levels of heavy metals? And Dr. Ericson said to me, “You have no business getting pregnant right now. You have to detoxify from this poisoning that you’ve had.”

Naomi: And so I was trying to figure out, where did this all come from? And he ultimately traced it way back to those little tiny Chinese herbs, and so this was this next big defining moment in my life where I thought, okay, here I’ve worked with some amazing herbs that have really helped me to heal, but on the other hand by not understanding how they’re processed and where they come from, I’ve been a fool and I’ve hurt my body, and it took me months and months and months, over six months to get through the majority of the toxicity from those heavy metals.

Naomi: So that’s what got me interested in health and wellbeing and nutritional supplements in particular. Then I started to make a commitment to myself that I always needed to know where things come from. It’s great to take vitamin C or it’s great to take ashwagandha or whatever it is that we’re taking, but unless we know where it was grown and how it was processed, we don’t really know what it is that we’re putting into our bodies, and so that’s how I began on the journey of obsessively trying to discover where things come from.

Trevor: Wow, that’s definitely quite a journey. When people share their stories like that, I’m always fascinated to hear the people that take those types of journeys and take it into an opportunity to learn and to educate others, because it turns it into a very empowering experience instead of a scary one. Because we can look at those life learnings and choose to either get upset and angry or shut down, withdraw, or we can take it as an opportunity to do everything we can to find a solution, and then once we find that solution the next step is then to share it with other people or to help other people be able to avoid what we’ve been through, right?

Naomi: That’s exactly right. I completely agree with that, and what I find to be so interesting about this particular journey was it’s very surprising and unusual to get that heavy metal toxicity from something that’s really been healing, but when you study and look at how things are actually processed it makes a lot more sense because there’s so many steps along the way, especially when we live in a society that’s really commercially based. We have to be so much more protective of our own health and our own wellbeing. Like with the incredible skincare that you’ve created, I know that when I use your skincare, and you just told me, and congratulations. You got EW … It’s what? EW-

Trevor: EWG verified, yeah.

Naomi: Verified, and I know how incredibly important that is for our health to have that kind of certification, but so many companies just would never do it because they have ingredients in their products that don’t belong there, but maybe give a more sensory, beneficial experience or they smell really good but they’re so incredibly toxic, so that journey I think is important for every one of us and especially those of us that are sharing those solutions.

Trevor: Absolutely, and you’re definitely not alone in that journey that you went on. I’ve seen it with patients taking certain Chinese herbal formulas. I don’t think they’re all contaminated, but some of them are and then other things like even just greens. People are consuming a lot of greens or they’re doing green powder and they’re thinking they’re doing a great thing, but if they’re loaded with pesticides, or what’s in the soil that they’ve been grown in, and it’s concentrated. When we do a supplement, we’re concentrating all of those possible toxins that can be in the environment, so I’m so glad that you worked hard with your travels and your research and scientists that you brought in to create supplements and products that are clean.

Naomi: That’s the joy of it, and that’s really what I’ve done since day one because when you have the opportunity to work with the top researchers, and the researchers have been maybe focused on an ingredient. For example I was in Calabria, Italy and I was there because there’s this amazing special citrus bergamot fruit that grows there, and there’s only a 20-mile radius that it grows in and the scientists have discovered that this little special fruit is so rich in antioxidants and flavonols that they were going to do a lot of research on it, and they discovered that it helps to raise the HDL cholesterol profiles and lower the LDL, so for people who are on statins, for people who don’t want to do statins or can’t because of the joint pain and so forth that it creates, here’s a natural option that’s been used for thousands of years by the locals and now the research is really supporting it, and so that’s what got me … That kind of journey and learning from different parts of the world is where I focus all of my energy.

Trevor: Absolutely, and then you’ve got a book coming out this week. Very exciting. Whenever anybody writes a book obviously there’s a lot of information that you’ve been wanting to share, so let’s talk about what are some of the big things from the book? What made you decide you had to write a book right now?

Naomi: The book took me three years, and it was seven years of research that went into it. As I was just mentioning, this beautiful citrus bergamot fruit. While I was over in Calabria, Italy, one of the main scientists, Dr. Elizabeth Janda, was drinking this special tea from the citrus fruit. So if you think about Earl Grey tea, Earl Grey tea that has the natural citrus bergamot has some of these benefits, but anyhow she was drinking this tea and I was drinking it with her, and by the end of the day when we left her laboratory, I had had like four cups of it, and so I asked her. I loved it, it was delicious, but I asked her, “Why do you drink so much of this whole citrus bergamot tea?” And she kind of smiled and laughed and said, “Well, because it’s like my anti-aging elixir, and the reason I love it so much is because it activates a process in my body called autophagy.”

Naomi: And I had never heard that word and I was very curious to understand what it was, and once she explained it to me she said, “In Greek, autophagy means self eating.” So “auto” means self, and “-phagy” means to eat. That sounds a little bit crude but ultimately what she was talking about was the self eating is what goes on at the cellular level. We have a mechanism inside of all of our bodies. We all have it and it slows down with age and it slows down from the accelerated agers that are in our environment, but if we can help to activate it it actually eats away the debris and the junk and the accumulation of all the toxins that build up and slow down our cells, so in return once we are able to clean it up, almost like a little Pac-Man or a Roomba inside of the cell, once you can do that then your cell is able to behave as though it were younger and it ultimately is like a younger cell.

Naomi: I got fascinated by this word and fascinated that the citrus bergamot tea could help to activate it in my body, so I came back home and I searched all over the globe for the top researchers that would help with really understanding how to get this working in our body through exercise, through diet, through nutrition. Simple home remedies and so forth, and that began my journey three years ago and now I have this book that’s about to launch tomorrow. Glow15.

Trevor: Oh, that’s so fantastic. It’s great that you learned a little bit and then wanted to expand upon that, and you’ve created a whole program around it. The name of the book is Glow15. It’s 15, right? 15 days. So, why 15 days?

Naomi: That was the biggest surprise around the book. When I did the program I loved the results I got. I had more energy. I could deal with way more stress. I had just sold my company about six months before and I had then taken a job as the CEO of the parent company and I was traveling all over and I had all of these different things going on and I was doing the program and I had more energy. I felt more vital. I dropped a couple of pounds that were toxic weight that was sort of holding me back, and I got so excited by that that I decided to have all my friends and family do it, which they did, but then where I went is I went from there to actually a university, Jacksonville University, and I told them I wanted to do a clinical study, and so we put together an eight-week clinical study for women and the women were everything from mothers to administrators to doctors to CEOs to the deans of the college.

Naomi: Everybody came together and 15 days into the study when the women were being studied on how their autophagy was being activated, I got a call from the lead researcher and she said, “Naomi, each and every woman has achieved benefits in 15 days, from dropping weight to improving the depth and the length of their wrinkles, to sleeping better, to having more energy, to reducing the body fat, to improving their cholesterol profiles.” I mean the list was enormous. And so Glow15 is a lifestyle, but we got results in 15 days and that’s why it got that name.

Trevor: Oh, okay. Got it. Alright. And so what are some of the top foods that help with this?

Naomi: Some of the top foods, well there are so many which is really exciting, but some of the top foods are avocado helps with it. Salmon helps with it. There are sphingolipids. There are all different sorts of polyphenols, so a lot of the dark berries and red wine and chocolate both activate autophagy. So the dark chocolate, the dark, rich red wine. So it’s a lot of foods that you would never imagine. There are 140 different foods that we recommend, and what I would say around food is it’s as important to think about when you eat as what you eat, so it’s not a program that tells you to deprive yourself of any sort of foods. You can have your carbohydrates, but instead of having carbohydrates in the morning where they’re going to spike your insulin and imbalance your blood sugar levels and create so much free radical stress on your body, instead you can have them later at night. So fat first and carbs last is a big part of the program.

Trevor: Very interesting. And so when you talk about fat first, those are things like the avocado and salmon that you mentioned.

Naomi: Yes, or you could talk about macadamia nuts. Also we have another principle which is around … We call it IF and PC, so intermittent fasting and protein cycling. This is not a ketogenic diet, but what it is is it embraces the importance of good, satiating fats, and so we have these amazing delicious avocado glow recipes, and then we also have these little egg recipes which every other day you’re going to have them with not the egg white but the egg yolk, so getting the good fats from the egg yolk and a lot of different foods.

Trevor: Interesting, and then with the carbohydrates, which type of carbohydrates are your favorite ones?

Naomi: Certainly the complex carbs, the whole food carbs that have higher levels of fiber in them and it could be anything from a sweet potato as a carbohydrate. You’re really looking for the ones that have the highest level of fiber, so any of the vegetables that are fibrous vegetables I think are very important too.

Trevor: Okay, so you’re not talking so much about grains as more vegetable carbohydrates. Because a lot of hear carbohydrates they think grains. They think bread, pasta.

Naomi: Yeah, and that depends on the individual. For me, I don’t like to have any of the wheats. Obviously I don’t want gluten in my personal body, but that’s just me. That’s because of my autoimmune disorder that I have, but I do like to have a lot of the fibrous vegetables as a carbohydrate.

Trevor: Let’s go back to talking about eczema, because I think that’s an important one. I know you mentioned that as part of your journey and I don’t know if you knew this but I struggled with eczema when I was a kid too, and that was actually what set me on the path to becoming a naturopathic physician because of learning about a different approach and not suppressing the eczema. That was making it worse with all the adverse reactions to medications. But instead looking for the underlying causes and supporting the body. So when it comes to eczema I imagine it’s still a tendency for your body to have that, so what part of this plan, what do you think helps the most in keeping that at bay?

Naomi: That’s such a great question. I’m so glad you asked it, because while I created Glow15 over the past several years, many of the principles in it I was using really to help reduce the inflammation in my body, but what I didn’t realize is I was activating the autophagy inside my cells, so like with eczema so much of the time our cells get very stagnant with the buildup of the toxins. We’re not able to eliminate the toxins as effectively as other people so therefore we need the activation of autophagy ourselves probably more than we even realize, so the things that I was doing and that I continue to do as part of the program is fasting.

Naomi: This intermittent fasting. I’ve been fasting for the past 25 years and I’ve used it as a key tool to help reduce the inflammation, and now I know it’s a key tool to activate my autophagy. A lot of women think, “Oh, I can’t fast. It’s going to affect my hormones, or I might not be able to do it.” I find that men do a lot more fasting than women and for me it’s such a powerful tool. It really creates this cellular brilliance, this beauty brilliance that we all have inside of ourselves. So in the program I recommend not eating for 16 hours. It’s a very simple intermittent fast and you do it every other day, so you’ll do it let’s say three days out of the week.

Naomi: And so for someone who’s interested in fasting, the steps that I would take to get there is first and foremost I would reduce and try to eliminate sugar out of someone’s diet. That’s the first step, and once you’ve got control of the sugar then you can start to eat more of the good and healthy fats, and then once your body is adapted to eating more good fat, not eating for 16 hours is something that you don’t even notice because you’re satiated and you’re running on a much stronger fuel and that’s fat instead of sugar, so I use that all the time as a tool.

Trevor: Great, and I imagine this diet is very anti-inflammatory too. Immune balancing, so all of the different root causes that trigger eczema are addressed in this, so that’s great.

Naomi: Yeah. The other thing that I would say that I think is very important for eczema is the polyphenols. I discovered that there are a number of what I call powerphenols, so they’re more than just the polyphenol. A polyphenol can be found in dark chocolate, can be found in the red wine, green tea, in the citrus bergamot. These are all polyphenols, and they all have antioxidant and protective benefits to the damage that we can incur through free radicals, but the reason I call them powerphenols is because they also, those four, so green tea or EGCG that’s found in green tea, resveratrol that’s found in red wine. You find it as I mentioned in the citrus bergamots and you can find it in a lot of citrus fruit but especially the citrus bergamot where you find it in like an Earl Grey tea, and these nutrients activate specifically autophagy as well. So I like to use powerphenols on a daily basis in my food and supplementation.

Trevor: Fantastic. I think those are all great things. It’s interesting when you’re talking about bergamot, I have it in my skincare line so in addition to internal it’s also great externally.

Naomi: It is so great externally. If you think about all of the most amazing perfumes in the world, they all use citrus bergamot as the base. While I was in Calabria, Italy actually and I was there working with the manufacturers, there was a group of like Chanel … All the top perfume houses were there because that’s the only place where they get their “elixir of the gods” I call it.

Trevor: Yeah. It smells amazing, so I’ll have to start doing it internally as well because I haven’t been doing that. Great. What are some of the other things that people can do? Exercise, sleep. Any other things that you want to recommend along with the diet?

Naomi: Yes, I’d love to. With exercise it’s very easy. The two forms of exercise that activate autophagy the best are interval training, so it could be where you’re walking faster for a minute and then slowing down, so interval in whatever way you want to do that and that can be at a gym, that can be at Orangetheory. It doesn’t matter but just interval training, and the time is what matters is you do it for 30 minutes. The big thing that we discovered is less is actually more with exercise and activating autophagy, so in the program it’s every other day, and then the other type of exercise is resistance training, and again that can be like this morning I was doing yoga on the beach. That’s resistance training. I’m using my own body weight to resist and those are great ways. You can use something that you have in the house. For people who like to go to the gym, which is not me, you can go to the gym and do the resistance training but those are the two forms, and 30 minutes activates tons of autophagy every other day.

Naomi: The other thing I would say around the exercise is it’s really interesting because we know that stress is bad for us, and that’s like the chronic stress that could be even low grade that we’re under, but acute stress loves autophagy and autophagy loves acute stress, so these kind of exercises are providing your body with the good stress or the acute stress, so that’s something that I want everyone to keep in mind.

Trevor: It’s really interesting this idea of acute stress, because our bodies do a great job with acute stress. It’s the chronic stress that gets people in trouble, and so there’s a lot of talk about stress management and I see some people sometimes get frustrated and say, “Well we’re all stressed out. Stress is part of life.” But the issue is the chronic level. Letting it continue to burden our bodies, or to find one thing like exercise and then overdo it, and then it stresses out your body.

Naomi: Right. I love that point that you made. You’re so right, and I think for somebody like you, you’re really living it. You can see the vibrance that comes through your skin and the wellbeing that you exude, and I’m sure you must think about chronic versus acute stress and how you manage that, right?

Trevor: Absolutely, and it’s a huge part of that and it’s easy to get stressed all the time, but we have to take care of ourselves. Especially when we’re taking care of other people. You’re a mom too. You have four kids, right, and I have three, so we’ve got the kids. You’ve got your clients and a lot of people that you’re … So there have to be ways to manage that, right?

Naomi: I love it. No, I totally agree, and just even understanding there’s a difference between … That good stress is actually really beneficial to helping us eat away the fine lines and wrinkles and break down the toxic fat, all through this process along with understanding okay, I’ve had this ongoing stress and I’ve got to move past it.

Trevor: Yep, absolutely. So what are some of the ways that … Do you talk about stress management in your book?

Naomi: Yeah, I definitely do … I definitely do a bit. I’m sorry.

Trevor: That’s okay. No, I was reading through your book. I got started on it but I haven’t finished it. I’m real excited. Your team sent me a copy of it so I’m excited to finish it but I haven’t gotten to any of the stress management stuff. I was wondering if you have tips in there.

Naomi: I do but it’s interesting because when I did the clinical study at Jacksonville University, at the end of it we sat down and we did a postmortem. Like, “What did you guys love? Here are the results. What worked better than you thought? What wasn’t as good as you thought? How do we improve this? Because this is going to go out to millions of other women and I want there to be the easiest and fastest and most effective results from it.”

Naomi: And so the majority of the women said, “We were hoping to get more out of the sleep program,” and I couldn’t figure out why what we were doing wasn’t quite working and so I went to Michael Breus, America’s sleep doctor and said, “Michael, help me.” What he did is he helped me to understand that … We put a quiz in the book which I hope you do, and the quiz basically looks at what type of sleeper you are. We have different words and we use this technique that he built for us so that we could understand what our own circadian rhythm was, and then once you get your circadian rhythm into the right flow, then you’re able to activate autophagy and we activate the most of our autophagy at night while we’re sleeping, so what I discovered was that every single cell in our entire body has a little clock inside of it and that clock can either be working or not, and we talk about stress being chronic or acute.

Naomi: When you’re dealing with chronic stress, and it may be that you’re working late hours or that you’re traveling a lot and you’re dealing with jet lag, your body gets out of rhythm and when it’s out of rhythm it’s in a place of chronic stress. Even if you’re deprived of one hour of sleep that’s affecting your entire health, your metabolism, everything. And so knowing what type of sleeper you are and how much sleep you really need puts all of that into balance and then lets your body naturally work with its own rhythms, with its own autophagy rhythms, and so I think that process of learning about circadian rhythm, doing the quiz.

Naomi: I learned that I’m better off if I sleep for 7.5 hours than if I sleep for 8 hours. That’s better for my body because I’ve had five sleep cycles, and I’m very excited about everyone that reads it or looks up circadian rhythm. Autophagy won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2016 and circadian rhythm won it in 2017, so these are the big topics for improving our health and wellbeing.

Trevor: Yeah, absolutely, and I’ve had Dr. Michael Breus on the podcast so yes, we’re familiar with him. He’s fantastic. I’m glad that you were able to fit in some of his information in your book. Well Naomi, it’s been fantastic interviewing you today. Tell everybody where they can find your book.

Naomi: Well Dr. Trevor, thank you so much. You can find my book at Amazon or you can find my book at Barnes & Noble. You can go to Glow15.com and it’s found there, so it’ll be found all over the place.

Trevor: Okay, well good luck with your book and I hope everybody will go out and get a copy or get a Kindle version or something so that they can check it out.

Naomi: Thank you so much.

Trevor: Thank you for being on my podcast. Thanks for your information today.

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Naomi Whittel and learned about autophagy and what it can do for your health and your skin. To learn more about Naomi you can go to my website, TheSpaDr.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview and you’ll find all the information and links there, including the link to get her book. You’ll also find the transcription of the podcast there as well, so you can check that out. And while you’re on the website I invite you to join the Spa Dr. community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows, and if you haven’t done so already I highly recommend you get your customized skin report at TheSkinQuiz.com. It’s free. It takes just a few moments. You can get great information about what your skin is trying to tell you about your health and what you can do about it. Just go to TheSkinQuiz.com. Also I invite you to join me on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, and join the conversation. And I’ll see you next time on the Spa Dr. Podcast.

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Your Child’s Health with Ryan and Teddy Sternagel

February 21, 2018 by Dr. Trevor Cates 2 Comments

My guests on today’s episode of The Spa Dr. Podcast are Ryan and Teddy Sternagel who started My Kid Cures Cancer one year after their son Ryder was diagnosed in 2014 with stage four neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer of the nervous system. They’re here to talk about how to become the CEO of your child’s health.

Wanting to do everything they could for their son, Ryan and Teddy dove deep into integrative research and as a result, today Ryder is a happy, healthy little boy. Early on in the journey, however, it had become apparent that practically no information of this kind existed written in a way that parents could understand if and how it would apply to their children. After consulting with doctors and health experts all over the world, and a whole lot of trial and error, My Kid Cures Cancer was born to make finding this information accessible to other parents that need it.

In today’s interview, Ryan and Teddy tell their story with their son Ryan’s journey. And, they share tips on how the rest of us can create a healthier home for our families to thrive. Learn how to take control of your child’s health today.

So please enjoy this interview…

To learn more about Teddy and Ryan, go to MyKidCuresCancer.com

There you can grab your Healthy Home Checklist.

Through its videos, podcast and in depth articles, My Kid Cures Cancer provides parents with information both on integrative approaches to cancer treatment for those that need it and how to make sure cancer never afflicts their family in the first place for everyone else.

Search “My Kid Cures Cancer” to follow their podcast or YouTube channel.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Trevor: Hi there, I’m Dr Trevor Cates, welcome to the Spa Dr. Podcast. Today’s podcast is about how to be the C.E.O. of your child’s health. My guests are Ryan and Teddy Sternagel who started My kid Cures Cancer one year after their son Ryder was diagnosed in 2014, was stage four neuroblastoma, that’s a childhood cancer of the nervous system. Wanting to do everything they could for their son, Ryan and Teddy dove deep into integrative research and as a result today Ryder is a happy healthy little boy.

After consulting with doctors and health experts all over the world and a lot of trial and error, My Kid Cures Cancer was born to make finding this information assessable to other parents that need it. In today’s interview, Ryan and Teddy share their story with Ryan’s journey and they share tips on how the rest of us can create a healthier home for our families to thrive. So please enjoy this interview.

Ryan and Teddy it’s great to have you on my podcast.

Ryan and Teddy: Hey Trevor, good to be here. Great to be here, thank you.

Trevor: And I know you guys live right down the street so we really should be doing this in person but we’re so used to doing things a certain way that we have to do it this way, right?

Ryan and Teddy: I was just telling Teddy we still got to stop by Ryder and have one of those snack bars you posted. He’s been craving it.

Trevor: Right, Thalia’s bar. You definitely need to have some of us those. Yeah, absolutely. You guys are in Park City, it’s so great to have you as neighbors. Why don’t you guys just start off by telling what your story about, what got you into doing what you’re doing now. What your big goal and missions are.

Ryan and Teddy: I guess it’s been three and a half years but it all started with the worst news that any parent could ever receive, well at least, right up there with the worst news. Our son Ryder who is now four and a half was diagnosed with stage four cancer. It came as a complete shock to us because we were just, we were pretty health conscious and really did our best to live an organic healthy lifestyle and just trying to do everything right, whatever that means. But to us we felt like we were doing everything right and we always joked that our kid looks so healthy and so it really was just such shocking news for us.

When Ryder was about one, that’s when we found out when I was nursing him and I felt a lump sticking out of his back. It wasn’t big enough to really set off any alarm bells right at that very moment but going through the weekend just realizing that there was a lump where there shouldn’t have been just made us both super uncomfortable and we got into the doctor right away, his pediatrician who also happened to be a naturopath, which went along with everything that we believed in and still do to this day and I believe that’s why Ryder has done so well so I do stand by that. Nobody thought that it was anything of concern. I really had to push to get a second opinion and to get a referral to at least an orthopedic because I didn’t know where to even go for a lump staking out of your baby’s back.

So we finally got that right for all to the main children’s hospital where we were living at the time and they told us to go home and wait and see take.

They had to take an x-ray and …

And blood work. Blood work came back fine and the x-ray showed that he was constipated which was also kind of a red flag looking back on it because he was very regular up until that last few weeks or so.

And then he just pretty much just stopped going all together. And so all of those things compounded for us with the fact that he also wasn’t crawling and everybody says your child develops at his own pace but the fact that he wasn’t crawling, having a hard time sitting up, the constipation out of nowhere and this lump that nobody could explain.

And he fell off the growth chart.

And he completely fell off the growth chart.

Kind of stopped growing at like six months.

Right. He had started around the 90th percentile and dropped all the way down to I believe he was in the 25th the time that he was actually formally diagnosed and I was told it was because I was breastfeeding him, which now I look back and I’m like that’s crazy. And I have a second child now and she was breastfed and she stayed on the growth chart. Basically all of those things just lead Ryan and I to just not take the whole wait and see approach. Just we could not live with that and I had been Googling like a maniac looking for just reasons why there would be a lump sticking out of Ryder’s back and I kept coming back to neuroblastoma which is a really rare form of childhood cancer. All of the things matched up with that.

So when I took that back to the orthopedic doctor they thought I was just one of those overly paranoid first time moms and even said neuroblastoma is so rare, if he had it like his stomach would be sticking out more and all of these different things but we’ll do an ultrasound for your own peace of mind. It was that ultrasound that said that there were some large masses that resembled neuroblastoma that led to an M.R.I. And the M.R.I. is where we just got slammed with really just it was so shocking because it wasn’t just, I mean just neuroblastoma, it was the fact that the little lump that I had felt had actually spread to the four quadrants of his stomach. It was stage four, it had metastasized to his hip bones. We were almost starting to believe that it was nothing and then bam. That was really hard and of course once he was diagnosed and they wanted to get us in right away to start chemotherapy and that’s where Ryan and I put on the brakes and knew that we had to be doing other things to support him.

Yeah. It was a very large tumor, larger than his kidneys. His primary tumor was larger than his kidneys, it was inside of his spine, like inside of and growing out of his spine. Then there was a couple secondary tumors and like she said, they had all metastasized into the bone. It was tough, it was really tough news and that’s obviously not what you want to hear. I don’t know, kind of like through our transition into living a healthy life and just all the stuff we talk about, we had seen a bunch of holistic cancer documentaries if you want to call it that. We’d seen some stuff on the Gerson therapy which is a pretty well known alternative holistic cancer. The Brezinski documentary, that sort of thing. We knew we wanted to be putting all available methods to use and not just necessarily relying on conventional treatment.

It became clear to us, when you get really into, really into alternative stuff then a lot of people say just go 1005 and a lot of people do go 100%, adults that is. Children you don’t really have that choice. That was made pretty clear to us but what we did know is that we were going to do everything we could.

I mean we really started from day one doing all of these like holistic protocols that we’ve been researching and we just kept like through call it divine intervention being led to the right people that were helping us and we got connected to an amazing naturopathic oncologist who really guided us in the beginning. And ultimately with Ryder fast forwarding we were able to stop halfway through the conventional protocol. So instead of going through eight rounds of chemotherapy …

Would have been at least eight rounds.

At least eight rounds, we stopped after four rounds. It wasn’t easy because like Ryan said it is hard with kids and today’s medical system but it’s what we were able to do and as you know we did move states and that’s why we’re here and neighbors with you and we found a great team to work with and they took away and see approach. So stopping chemotherapy still meant Ryder was getting scanned with M.R.I.’s every three months and then that was pushed up to six months and at our last M.R.I. our oncologist made the decision to wait an entire year because at this point it looks like what’s left is just scar tissue and his remaining tumor that was in is spinal cord.

So needless to say, Ryder is doing amazing. He’s running, he’s jumping. We weren’t sure if he would ever be able to walk and …

A lot of people were telling us he probably, even if he lived wouldn’t be able to walk.

Right, and our team here when they saw the scans, I mean didn’t know how he would ever walk. The tumor was so large in his spinal cord. It’s a miracle and I think it’s really a testament to everything that we did to support his body through this and that’s really where My Kid Cures Cancer was born. We originally just had a fundraising Facebook page that we used but we still like to post updates and share the things that we were doing for Ryder and why we needed fundraising and of course all these holistic approach protocols aren’t covered by insurance so that was really our big goal and raising money so that we could afford to do all of the things that we did. Like we bought an infrared sauna right away. We bought a rife machine, a nice juicer and of course all the produce that goes into it.

Like in the hospital we literally, we had a whole juicing set up in the hospital and that blew the nurses. Oh, you’re making his own feeds and yeah, okay.

Yeah, we never used their feeding formulas, we always made our own and Ryder did so great and so I really believe that everything that we did to support his body really helped him not only thrive through treatment but it helped us to cut that treatment in half.

Trevor: Wow. What an an amazing journey. And so, how long ago was that last M.R.I.?

Ryan and Teddy: So that was back just right before his birthday, his fourth birthday back in May.

Trevor: Okay, all right. And you say he’s doing great now?

Ryan and Teddy: Yeah, he’s still doing great.

Yeah, running around. It’s funny, he’s four and I guess more of a typical toddler. He can be a punk about things at times and that sort of thing but it’s like those are normal parent problems to deal with.

It’s funny we were joking, he is a little punk about certain things but when it comes down to his protocol he knows and it’s all business. Like he willfully sits in the sauna five or six days a week with Ryan for 45 minutes at a time getting it as hot as it goes and [winter in 00:11:57] our basement which is typically around 140. He takes all of his supplements, his capsules. He drinks his juices.

Knows all of his supplements.

He knows them all. Like you pull the bottle out, oh, that’s propolis. That’s his job and so when he’s being a typical four year old it’s funny he just, he knows the difference. He knows what he needs to do versus what he can kind of get away with.

Trevor: That’s great and that’s because he’s got amazing parents that have helped guide him along the way so you guy have done an amazing job. And also the health team that you’ve developed, that sounds like they’ve been a lot of help to you. It’s interesting as we’re talking about this, you guys do have a pretty unique situation, like you said that type of cancer is very rare. I think as parents it is an interesting balance of trying to figure out how do you be good parents and aware without being paranoid, right? So what have you guys found with that? There’s so much we could talk about raising kids and their health and I have three kids and we definitely have had our struggles over the years, know getting sick or traumas or various things that we’ve gone and it is this balance, especially when they’re little, they are completely dependent upon you. And so you’ve got to make those choices but at the same time you don’t want to be the paranoid parent.

Ryan and Teddy: Yeah, exactly. I think there absolutely is a fine line but at same time a huge part of our following are parents that their children don’t have cancer and they’re just following to learn about how to lead a more healthy anti-cancer lifestyle. I think at the end of the day we make so many exceptions to our health when we go out, if you’re going to a friend’s house, out to dinner that I think when we’re at home we just really need to be on top of our game and just set our kids up for the healthiest life.

Yeah, and I think the other thing is you don’t need to be paranoid but you want answers. [inaudible 00:14:21] low chance that if something’s going wrong with your kid that means they have cancer but maybe it means that they had some antibiotics or they ate too much not organic food and then that glyphosate got in there and messed up their gut. Maybe they’ve got some gut problems that need to be addressed. Does that mean that it has to be some like paranoid end of the world type thing? No. It’s your job as a parent to figure out what’s going on with the health of your kid and address whatever that might be. If it’s a gut thing then there’s a whole lot of information these days on the Internet about how to fix a leaky gut or dysbiosis that sort of thing. It’s just figuring out what needs to be done and doing. It doesn’t need to be a paranoid thing, yeah.

Trevor: Right. It’s more about being aware than paranoid. And then you guys talk about being the C.E.O. of your kids’ health, I like the way you put that. Explain that a little bit for people.

Ryan and Teddy: I guess like day one when I’m trying to research, dig through all these studies and Pub Med and come up with all these protocols and everything and I’m bringing in, consulting different naturopathic oncologists and cancer coaches and we’re both just on the phone all the time or on the internet all the time. Right away there was this like almost expectation that I needed to be the, like I put that expectation on myself and then also trying to justify all the stuff we’re doing to other people, now I have to be the expert and be able to explain all of it to our parents or to our friends or to whoever is asking.

But it’s not really the kids. You don’t need to be the expert per se but, you know, a C.E.O. isn’t necessarily, like he’s not a financial guru but he knows enough about finance to like evaluate his C.F.O. and get him in there to mess with all the finer points and same thing with the C.O.O. for operations and C.T.O. for technology. You get the analogy. You don’t need to be the expert but you need to be the guy running the ship bringing in all available resources that it’s going to take to do the job sort of thing. So that’s why within a week we had a naturopathic oncologist who turned out to be like the premier naturopathic in the country. Now I’m going to like the cancer conferences and stuff and he’s the one giving the keynotes on all those types of conferences so that’s pretty cool.

We got a nutritionist, we were consulting with all sorts of various cancer coaches. If you watch The Truth About Cancer documentary series, the first one, the first version of that series came out like I think a couple weeks after diagnosis. So we were sitting there with like pens and paper and just writing down every one featured on that series that really resonated with us and I was on the phone with them getting advice and getting pointed at different directions just right away. You’re in charge pretty much. You don’t have to be the expert, making the final calls and bringing in the people that need to brought in sort of thing.

Trevor: Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure there’s a certain amount or I’m guessing there’s a certain amount of fear, some things that are scary about all of that. Anything you want to share about that?

Ryan and Teddy: What we have found is it is scary and there have been parts of this last three and a half years that have been terrifying, especially at the very beginning. What we have found is that the busier that we have been and the more on top of Ryder’s protocol we’ve been, the better we sleep at night and sometimes we’re only sleeping a few hours by choice because of everything but the better we feel about it. So really doing all of this is our way of knowing that we’re doing everything as Ryder’s parents that we can be doing. And now for our daughter too because we don’t want her to ever have to deal with this.

Lately we’ve been working with other parents of children going through cancer and trying to do everything they can and that’s a comment we’ll get quite often is this is really scary, what do we do. The first thing I try to tell them is you don’t have time to be scared. There’s just too much to figure out. There’s studies to read, there’s people to consult, there’s just fund raising to do. All that stuff and I think every once in a while it would all catch up to me or us and we’d have our little breakdowns or whatever then you brush yourself off and you get back to work. It was always very empowering knowing that there’s a lot you can be doing. You don’t have to just sit back and feel like a victim. You can take charge of the situation whatever that situation might be and do what you have to do.

Most people, I mean, many people go through conventional treatment 100% conventionally and listen to the, I can’t even call it wisdom but we were told don’t eat fruits and vegetables. Just like crazy things that looking back which is common sense you’re like why. We were empowered to do these things for Ryder and another part of his story which I think is a really big part is we asked for a feeding tube before he even started chemotherapy. It was a battle to get it because it was just not heard of. Why would you want a feeding tube, he hasn’t even had chemotherapy and he’s not losing weight, but we knew that that was our insurance to make sure that he would be getting the right nutrition and he was one. I mean, that’s still like an infant, barely a toddler and at that point he couldn’t take in anything at a therapeutic level that would actually help him without that feeding tube.

So we kept it for over a year and I attribute it like hugely to what we were able to put into him and now that he’s four he’s able to do the same things he was able to do then but he’s able to do everything orally.

Trevor: Did you find out anything about why this happened, like why he developed this type of cancer? Did you have any insight on that, any answers?

Ryan and Teddy: I think it’s something that we visit frequently sometimes and we both have our own theories. As a type of cancer for him it developed while I was pregnant while he was in the womb. I think for me if I could go back and do it over again I would eliminate all of the EMF’s around me and I would learn, I would have taken my stress and just managed it better because it’s like I was working full time and I was just allowing the stress and the cortisol I think to go to Ryder. I’m not saying that’s what did it but if I could go back and repeat it now I know like what real stress is like but I think I can manage it better and so it’s just funny because it’s just the work stress, it doesn’t matter like in the long run but I wish that I didn’t put that into Ryder. And who knows because it’s all just theory, like we never really know why or how something goes wrong. That would be what I would do.

Yeah, yeah. In general, when you hear about the reasons adults got cancer it’s never just one particular thing. That’s the reason that more and more adults are getting cancer is the same reason the more and more kids are getting. Really it’s just there’s, everywhere you look there’s more chemicals in the environment, the electromagnetic fields are getting stronger, people’s lifestyles are more stressful. Just the world is more stressful place.

Yeah, and all the toxins too. Like I was saying earlier, we thought that we were living like this healthy lifestyle. When Ryder was diagnosed, we went through our entire house and literally filled up two big black garbage bags full of chemicals that were still in our home that we were still using even though we were like health minded. So now I realize that’s like okay, there are still a lot of toxins that like we don’t even think twice about. Like bleach or toilet cleaners, hair sprays, certain deodorants. There’s still.

I think processed food and like hydrogenated fats are a really big deal, I think especially for childhood cancer, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Those are literally, that’s what your cells get made up of is fats. If you’re putting these unrecognizable fats into your body, for an adult that’s just going to gunk things up over time and not allow oxygen into the cell and that’s kind of one of the prime causes of cancer is, one of the root mechanisms of cancer I should say is oxygen deprivation to the cells. If that’s still in your diet, and we were still going out to eat.

Pretty frequently.

Yeah. We were eating organic at home but then you go out to eat and it’s kind of like magic.

Whatever you want.

Whatever. If your kid in the womb is literally being developed with these unrecognizable fats for cells, it’s not surprising something would go wrong on top of all the other stuff, yeah.

Trevor: We are seeing rise in childhood cancer rates, right?

Ryan and Teddy: Yeah, and we’re told it’s just bad luck. We’ve done enough research to know that it’s more than just bad luck.

Trevor: It definitely seems like there’s a correlation with the rise in the number of chemicals in our environment with those rates and cancer arising. I talk about this quite often about how we’re exposed to more toxins now than we ever have been because the chemicals, the toxic chemicals that have made in the past that have been linked to cancer are still lingering in our environment even if they’ve been banned they still exist in the soil and our water and they travel over from other countries where they’re not banned. And then harmful chemicals, carcinogenic chemicals are continuing to be made in our environment and then we find out about them after some time passes. And then maybe they’re banned. We’re getting more of these in our air, water, food and personal care products than ever.

So whatever we can do to reduce this I think is important. I do encourage people to get trash bags like you guys did and go through your house and find all those things. I talk a lot about this in my book and where to find these and how to read labels and how to just throw things away and get a fresh start, you don’t need those things. We have so many options now for natural products, organic food and a cleaner way of living, cleaning products, all these things, we have much better, we have so many options, we don’t need all these other things.

Ryan and Teddy: And some of these options work so much better because now we have eliminated all of the chemicals and I could never go back. When I smell certain detergents that are made of chemicals and I can smell people from like 10 feet away and it doesn’t smell good to me I’m just like wow, if I can smell that from here what is that doing you know to just your body.

It’s just kind of a mental leap that I guess you have to take but I don’t even think like, oh, I wish I could use that chemical product anymore. I wish I could still use anything. There’s a natural God given alternative for whatever it is, be it a cleaning product or personal care product … I just got like a cotton/hemp/wax based food wrap to replace plastic wrap for your leftovers and stuff. There’s nothing that you really have to rely on for chemicals but it’s just, yeah, I guess it’s just getting past that, what we’ve all been taught is these are the things you use but it’s just, yeah, it’s just not the case, doesn’t need to be anyway.

Trevor: Yeah. We certainly get set in our patterns and the things that we use and all of that. Sometimes it takes an interview like this for people to, wait, why am I using plastic on everything and everything and why am I using these toxic skin care or cleaning products. You also talk about creating a culture of health in your family. How do you cultivate that with your family?

Ryan and Teddy: I think this notion of your kids only know the reality that you present to them is pretty big. I was interviewing Dr Darrell Wolf on my podcast a while back. We have a show just interviewing people about holistic cancer approaches and sort of thing. He made the joke, he’s like, when’s the last time your 11 year old said, all right mom, I’m going to go grab the visa and take the car down to the store and pick up some food. It just doesn’t happen. What you bring into the house is basically the options your kids have. If those options are all healthy options then those are the options they know, you know what I mean.

Living example. There are just living that example for them. They watch you, and we started believing with Ryder because we were told so many times that Ryder was just so special and so unique that he would take all of these things for us that the typical four year old wouldn’t. While I get that he was like completely indoctrinated and he didn’t have a choice, it’s really interesting to see his 20 month old sister completely mimic everything that he does and by golly whatever Ryder gets she wants it too and so we have to make her own little green drink.

Fighting for the green powder.

It’s hilarious because she wants it. I don’t even have to like barter with her or anything. And sometimes I find myself bartering with Ryder, like hey, if you want to go play then you need to do this first.

It also has to be like a whole family thing too. You can’t be just eating crap and then expecting, even if they don’t see you, I don’t know, kids are pretty energetically sensitive. I think their B.S. meter is pretty high. And so if you’re not practicing what you preach and you’re not actually doing the things that you’re telling them to do, they’re going to get it it’s going to come through. Pretty much everything that Ryder does we do. We do like the hot-cold thing for metabolic function and immunity and all that stuff. I take a cold shower every morning or like a contrast hot-cold shower. Ryder, he gets his hot-cold shower right after the sauna. Park City, winter cold water that’s pretty cold.

You know.

I think he got up to counting to 40 in that cold water the other day. I don’t know and it’s fun like getting the whole family involved in all this stuff. We got little exercises we do pretty much every day and …

That’s a good point. I mean we do make it fun. Like our house is not like this strict house that you wouldn’t want to come over to. Everything that we do we do try to make it just normal and fun for the kids. It’s not something that they feel like they’re being punished over, it’s how they live and I think that they’re both pretty happy kids.

Very happy kids.

Trevor: I think that’s a really great point that it’s not a sacrifice, it’s not giving things up, it’s not oh, we’re going to change things and life’s going to be miserable. It’s actually a lot of fun. My daughter [Thalia 00:32:27], my two older ones they’re teenagers so they aren’t as involved in making meals and stuff with me anymore but my 11 year old, she loves it, she loves getting things like the zucchini and squash on the spiralizer and it’s just so much fun. Juicing and making and making smoothies and figuring out healthy ways to make dessert, coconut whipped cream, she loves that. But we make it fun, it’s not that we’re like oh God, we’ve got to do this.

I think you guys are, you’ve been doing it a while but for people that are watching or listening sometimes it’s a daunting thing to start off and you’ve got, maybe it’s for people who have a big family and they haven’t been doing any of this. Do you have any thoughts on how to get started. What’s the first thing that people can do?

Ryan and Teddy: Maybe you have like a practical first thing or something babe but I think like back to the mindset of it, if you can get past like thinking that you’re depriving your child, you’re taking something away from them, you know what I mean, and instead you’re providing for them. You’re providing them a healthy life because maybe they don’t have any health problems now that you’re aware of but I mean just with all the rates of everything we see today just pretty much one in two you are going to get cancer at some point in their life, heart disease. You’re either setting them up providing them with the tools for a long healthy life or they’re going to go down the standard American route and you’re really rolling the dice there. So yeah, that was more of a philosophical mindset thing. Do you have any, what’s the first.

I completely agree with Ryan. I think mindset is huge for us. We really felt like we didn’t have a choice. It was almost like cold turkey. We went like 1000% with everything because we were fighting for our child’s life and we’ve kept that mentality because we just don’t want anything like that to ever hurt our family again. I hear people saying, well, how do you afford it all, it’s so expensive and it’s like the truth is it’s really not and I find when I go to the grocery store and I compare prices of buying a ton of produce versus buying like meats and processed foods, that’s actually quite a bit more expensive and it’s not nourishing, it’s not filling so I would say just not letting money be your guide because I do find a lot of people just think that this organic way of life just cost too much and isn’t an option.

I feel that nothing could be further from the truth and just making that a part of your lifestyle, you can grow your own food and there really is like a healthy alternative to everything like you are saying with the make up and our beauty products.

Even if you are standing there comparing an organic apple to a non organic apple and it is more expensive. Well it’s like so what. When you start digging into glyphosate particularly, but just all the different pesticides and herbicides and all that what they do to your gut and then what that means when you have gut damage and then back to that [inaudible 00:36:12] it’s like if you can afford a T.V. plan, a Netflix or a new car or whatever for a couple extra bucks a month on your grocery bill is just-

I think just prioritizing. Our culture I think I see it coming around like more people are getting more into like this healthy mindset and I think just like if everybody just collectively puts that priority on health then I just, we’re going to get healthier.

Trevor: You might be spending a little bit now but saving money down the road.

Ryan and Teddy: Exactly.

Trevor: I’m glad you brought up the money thing because I do think that for a lot of people what we just can’t afford to eat like that or we can’t afford to shop at a health food store. But you don’t actually have to. I’m finding more and more regular grocery stores carrying organic produce and you can order some things online and save money. So there are definitely options.

Ryan and Teddy: Absolutely.

Trevor: Great. Well, thanks you two for coming on and sharing your story, your journey and information. Tell everybody about your podcast and how they can find out about your podcast or your YouTube channel.

Ryan and Teddy: The podcast, everything we do is just My Kid Cures Cancer. So whether it’s podcast, YouTube channel, Instagram, Facebook, My Kid Cures Cancer. Mykidcurescancer.com is the website where we kind of post all the stuff we do. The podcast in particular, if anyone’s watching this that is either going through cancer themselves or a loved one going through cancer …

Or wants to prevent cancer.

Or wants to prevent cancer, yeah, that’s pretty much all we talk about is approaches to cancer. Integrative/holistic approaches to cancer. If you do start digging into that world there’s certainly different opinions and views on what’s the right way to do it and all that. I like to say we bring all sides to the table on the podcasts. A lot of the folks on the truth about cancer series and just different naturopathic oncologist and functional medicine guys and all sorts of people. So yeah, it’s pretty neat. And then YouTube, I think what we’ve talked about your day gives you a bit of indication of like, we try to make fun, healthy videos showing how we implement all of this stuff with our kids and make it fun for the family I think.

Yeah, exactly. We’re also building a healthy home right now too so we are trying to incorporate that just into our social media and our YouTube just too like we were talking about earlier the healthy alternative to everything. It’s no different with building a house too because pretty much everything in a traditional home is very toxic and obviously we’re going to be taking and are already taking a very different route. So are going to be sharing that as well.

Indeed.

Trevor: Excellent, great. And I’ve been on your podcast, love it, we had fun.

Ryan and Teddy: Yeah, that was great.

Trevor: Well, thanks again for joining us today and sharing your information and we’ll have the links up for your website and your podcast below your interview. So thanks again.

Ryan and Teddy: Thank you, Trevor.

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Teddy and Ryan to learn more about them, My Kid Cures Cancer, their YouTube channel, their podcast, all of that information, just go to thespadr.com. Go to the podcast page with their interview and you’ll find all the information and links there and also they offered a healthy home checklist. So I’ll give you the link to that as well. This health home checklist is a downloadable P.D.F. checklist to help you remove toxins and supercharge your environment and your home for your family so it’s a place of healing.

So again, you can get all of that at thespadr.com. Go to the podcast page with their interview. You’ll find all the information and links there. And while you’re there on the website, I invite you to join The Spa Dr community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you can get the audio and video versions there as well. If you haven’t done so already I highly recommend you get your customized skin profile by going to theskinquiz.com. It’s free, takes just a few moments. You can answer a few questions and you’ll get your own customized skin information at the skinquiz.com. I’ll give you information about what your skin is trying to tell you about your health.

Also I invite you to join me on social media, on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube and join the conversation. And I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr Podcast.

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How to Drop Belly Fat with Kellyann Petrucci

February 15, 2018 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

On today’s episode of The Spa Dr. Podcast, we’re discussing how to drop belly fat from your body. And, here’s a bonus… the solution is also great for your skin.

My guest is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci who is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Dr. Kellyann’s Bone Broth Diet and Dr. Kellyann’s Bone Broth Cookbook. She also is the host of the highly successful PBS special, 21 Days to a Slimmer, Younger You .

Dr. Petrucci is a concierge doctor for celebrities in New York City and Los Angeles. Dr. Petrucci did postgraduate work in Europe, studying naturopathic medicine in England and Switzerland. She is one of the few practitioners in the United States certified in biological medicine by the esteemed Dr. Thomas Rau of the Paracelsus Klinik Lustmuhle in Switzerland.

Dr. Petrucci is also weekly contributor on Dr. Oz and appears regularly on Good Morning America and other national news programs.

In today’s interview, we discuss why belly fat is dangerous for your health and what you can do to finally get rid of it.

So please enjoy…

For another great discussion check out my previous podcast episode with Dr. Petrucci here

And to learn more about her go to her website here.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

Trevor: Hi there. Dr. Trevor Cates here. Welcome to the Spa Doctor podcast.

Today we’re talking about how to drop belly fat, that dreaded belly fat, and with the side benefit of what we discuss today, it’s actually good for your skin. So it helps to have glowing, naturally youthful skin from the inside out. My guest is Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. She’s been on the podcast before. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Dr. Kellyann’s Bone Broth Diet, and Dr. Kellyann’s Bone Broth Cookbook, and she has a new book coming out that she’s going to mention. She, also, is the host of the highly successful PBS special, 21 Days to a Slimmer, Younger You.

She is a concierge doctor for celebrities in New York City and Los Angeles, and she did post-graduate work in Europe studying naturopathic medicine in England and Switzerland. She is, also, a contributor on Dr. Oz and appears regularly on Good Morning America and other national news programs.

She’s really busy, so I’m excited that she was able to squeeze in some time to talk with us today, and in today’s interview we discuss why belly fat is actually dangerous for your health, and what you can do to finally get rid of it. So please enjoy this interview with Dr. Kellyann Petrucci.

Kellyann, it’s so great to have you back on my podcast.

Dr. Kellyann: Hi. I love being here. It’s great to be here.

Trevor: So today we’re talking about belly fat, how to drop the belly fat, and it’s something that people talk about a lot. It’s that dreaded belly fat. So let’s talk about, first of all, it’s not just unattractive. It’s unhealthy, right?

Dr. Kellyann: Right.

Trevor: There’s a reason why we want to get rid of it, besides just fitting better into our clothes or the obvious cosmetic reasons.

Dr. Kellyann: Yeah. That’s why people usually target belly fat, because they hate having that belly hang right over those pants. Nobody likes that. We call it BOB, belly over belt. Nobody likes that. But there’s actually a clinical reason. So if you pinch your belly fat, if you pinch that inch, that’s your subcutaneous fat. Nobody likes it. But here’s what’s going on inside. It’s like a cauldron brewing of toxins, and hormones, and things that don’t serve us in any way.

But here’s what’s even worse. Belly fat actually wraps around your visceral or your organs, and so this is really dangerous for people, and this is the precursor to so many of the modern day diseases that we see today, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, all of it. It has so much to do with that, and you can really, as you know as a doctor, can really zero in on someone’s health by their belly fat. We see this all the time, that people that, “Hey, I have tried to lose weight, but I can’t seem to get rid of the belly,” and studies are showing us that even if you’re thin everywhere else, when you have that belly fat, you’ve got higher risks of all of those diseases that I just talked about. So it’s not only unattractive. It’s really important to cleave that stuff off.

Trevor: Yeah. It’s so true, and I know that I used to do a lot of body composition tests when I would do weight lose programs in the spas, and that was one thing that we noticed. Not the pinch test, but the other types of body fat analysis tests. People were sometimes really surprised at how high their fat percentage was in their body, and a lot of that was because it’s hidden in that area. You may not see it in the arms and the legs. If you look at someone, they may hide it really well, but around that area right there, you can hide a lot of fat in that area.

Dr. Kellyann: You can, and it’s just like with eating, we call it portion distortion when people aren’t realizing that they’re getting piles and piles more food than their body actually needs. Well, the same holds true, exactly what you said with belly fat, and because we’re in a day and age where you can throw on a pair of yoga pants. You can totally rock yoga pants and look great. It’s when you go to put your jeans back on and you realize, “Oh, my gosh, there’s a whole new really happening here. I’m really getting thicker around the waist,” and so it can be easily hidden, but it’s something that we have to pay attention to. You have to think of it as a barometer to your health. It’s really important.

Trevor: Yeah. I’m so glad we’re talking about this, because, again, it’s not just about the way it looks, but the fact that it is the most dangerous type of fat. When you collect it in that area, it does predispose to these diseases.

Okay. So let’s talk about how to get rid of belly fat.

Dr. Kellyann: So there’s a couple of ways. Yeah. There’s a couple of things that you can do for belly fat. But here’s what I find to be the most important, because there’s three things that have to happen, and I talk about this often. In order for any program to ever work, and we know from being in clinic and actually seeing patients what works and what doesn’t, and if you were to take all my patients and put them in a football field and say from all these patients, what actually worked, what actually turned their health around, it was when they were able to reduce inflammation they were able to become a natural fat burner, and that really means getting your sugar in balance, and they were able to heal their gut.

These three things are really prime. They’re the most important thing that you can do for your health, and so what I’ve done is develop a plan to actually conquer these three things, and the best way, and all the research, Dr. Cates, is showing us, all the research, that when you put mini fasting in place, that’s what I like to call it, mini fasting in place, this is not only good for longevity, it’s not only good for your metabolism and all these things that we used to think it was dangerous for. Gosh, what does it do to my metabolism, all these things. It actually helps all of these things. So when you do what I call smart fasting or mini fasting, you will achieve results with burning fat like you can’t believe.

So let me take a moment to explain the difference between regular fasting and mini fasting, and mini fasting is what we do. It’s when we have bone broth or some kind of liquids that are involved that keep you from going crazy, because this comfortable fasting. A lot of people, they get afraid even when they hear the word. When they hear the word fasting, they’re thinking, “This is going to be a white knuckle situation, and I don’t want to walk into this situation. It’s not going to be comfortable. I can’t do it. I won’t enjoy this,” but we use bone broth as a part of the fasting plan, and it really works beautifully, because you’re able to enjoy bone broth, never get hungry, never feel that crazy feeling, and the wonderful thing is the results are still the same. You get the same results, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a really beautiful thing.

So we do that, and the second fold of all of this is we do something called your slim window. The biggest research out there right now is showing us that when you actually condense the time that you eat, it makes a big difference in burning fat, and here’s what’s great. It burns stored fat, and that’s what we want. That fat under the chin, behind the arms, and your belly, it burns that first. It burns belly fat first when you do this.

So that’s really a big motivation and why the program is so successful.

Trevor: Okay. Great. And then the timing on these, when you talk about a mini fast, how long are we talking?

Dr. Kellyann: So here is a typical program. Here’s what works really well for people. If during the day, up until about noon, and, again, this can be shifted depending on your schedule and your lifestyle, but about till noon, if you have broth, if you drink broth, lemon water, and we give you a number of things that you have choices to drink. You do that until noon, and then about 12 to six or seven … 12 to seven is when I typically eat. That’s your go time. That’s what we call your slim window, and that’s when you eat these foods and add the collagen that we’ll talk about, and you add the broth in there, and it really is a burning powerful time to condense your food, and you’re not going to believe the results.

They just did a big study, and they showed that they gave mice, they did animal studies, and they showed that mice that they let them eat whatever they wanted for this short period of time, they could not believe how they actually were able to burn fat, as opposed to when they had the same type of food available to them all day. It was a big difference.

So it’s really something for us to pay attention to, because it makes all of this so much easier. It really does. And you get into the swing, and you get used to it, and you energize a lot, and the longevity studies on this type of fasting is really telling, and it’s really showing us a lot. It’s really directing us to where the future of food really is. It’s not only what you eat, but it’s when you eat. That’s the big piece here.

Trevor: Interesting, because we oftentimes talk about what to eat and what not to eat, but we don’t necessarily talk very much about the timing and the importance of fasting, and so you’re not talking about fasting the entire day. It’s just part of the day, right? Yeah.

Dr. Kellyann: Yeah. That’s the difference. You fast part of the day, and during the rest of the time, your body turns into this fat burning, metabolism revving machine, and that’s what we want, because when I talk about those three things, becoming a natural fat burner, I talked about really making sure you heal your gut, all of these things. That all happens in that time frame. Well, when you give your body that kind of rest, your body goes through a system of cleansing, and it goes through a system of cleaning up the debris and really revving the system up in a way that we really have not done as a culture, and we really should be doing as a culture this constant cleansing.

Just like you have your system for cleansing the skin, like nobody’s business, well, guess what? That’s got to go on with food, too. We have to figure out ways in which we give our body, which we give our viscera, which we give all of our whole system ways to break and rev up.

Just like resetting, just like anything else, when you relax, or you meditate, or you do all of these things that we’re finding that really make a big difference, you do that with your body with food, but you do it in a way that’s comfortable.

And here’s the thing. When you really get into this pattern of doing this, you don’t feel like you’re suffering at all. You just don’t feel like you’re suffering. I mean it’s a way of going into mild autophagy. So autophagy meaning really going through and getting the old cells out. We want to make sure that our cells … Everyone has these dormant, so to speak, even like cancer cells, and your immune system acts like a BB gun shooting these things and really getting your body revved up and healthy.

So really everything rises and falls on our immune system. Longevity and all of these things we talk about, about being more beautiful and about being more healthy, so much of it relies on that, and having this eating window in place not only accomplishes all that, but, again, it’s the first place that you start to lose weight, is in your belly, and because we know belly fat, again is dangerous, we need to really focus on that and get those inches off.

Trevor: Yeah. Absolutely. And if you think about it, if we look back at our ancestors, at the progression of modern living, and how now we have all this food, we have everything available at our fingertips, so we can eat all day long all the time, and we can get anything. We can drive, get to go through the drive through. We can stop at the store. It’s ridiculous. I think it’s so great, this idea. This is not how we were naturally made to work. We’re not supposed to have food at our fingertips. We’re supposed to go and work for it.

Dr. Kellyann: I love that you said it. I love that you said that.

Trevor: We have these times where we don’t have food.

Dr. Kellyann: I love that you said that. It’s so true. So for those of you that don’t know anything about my background, I started out very much in the paleo world and studying paleolithic science, paleolithic nutrition. I’ve written five paleo based books before I started the iteration with the bone broth and so forth, and I am telling you, I truly understand our genetic wiring. I really do, that lineage wise, and the thing that’s crazy is that there are foods that we are actually designed to eat. There are foods that we actually can digest better and metabolize better, and when you put them into a right system, a system in which your body really evolved and really is working at its best self, the things that can happen, as you know, because you and I have broke bread together many, many times, and we both know, we both know, we both come from really I would say the same paradigm, that we get how food really can make such a difference.

And so part of the program, this 10 day belly slim down program, part of this program has something called SLIM-gestion foods, and this is an important part of the program. So if we walk through the program, if everybody wants to get a little bit of a mind’s eye, one of the components of the program is what we just talked about. It’s this slim window, or this eating window, when you should eat, this autophagy, so to speak, of cleansing of the body.

The other components of this is SLIM-gestion foods, meaning that your digestion actually has a whole lot to do with how thin or how heavy you are. Bottom line, it does, and so another thing that was really compelling to me, this is actually backed by research as well. There is research that actually shows us this beyond a reasonable doubt. So we really have to take care of gut health. So all the foods in my programs and in my protocols, they actually stand by that. They are always going to be foods that are gut healing, and it becomes so easy to think about how you really build a plate, and understanding that once I know how to build a plate, it becomes really powerful. I can do it anytime, anywhere.

I know that I look at a plate, and I know that I need protein. I know I don’t need a whole lot of protein, but I do need protein, and then I have to think about how I get my fuel. Well then, that’s carbohydrates. How do I get those? Well, there’s two lanes. One is the green fibrous vegetables that we want to get, and the second is energy vegetables. We talk about sweet potatoes, and squash, and even things like jicama. If you don’t about jicama, it’s a great root vegetable. It’s crunchy. It’s sweet. It’s delicious. I hope everyone can try that. Dip that in some guacamole. It’s great. Even carrots are considered an energy vegetable, onions, these type of things.

So you have your fibrous vegetables. You have your energy vegetables, and this is all depending on what you need, what fuel you need. This is where personal play comes in, and then, of course, healthy fats. Very important, imperative. You and I talk about this all the time, and we know that our cells, they need to bounce. Our cells have to be fluid. They can’t be like a swamp. They have to be like a river, flowing, and these cell membranes are so important, and these healthy fats will do that for us. So, again, this is imperative.

So thinking about all this when you’re building plate, and then to top it off, I love berries. A serving size is about a handful, a handful of berries. Beautiful way to add some sweetness to your diet. But that’s the perfect plate, and when you start building this plate, it really becomes second nature, and this is good for your digestion. Therefore, it’s good for your weight. Therefore, it’s good to heal the gut, and there you go. This is all good belly blasting foods.

So you’ve got your mini fasting. You’ve got your timed eating. So say I’m going to eat 12 to seven. I’m going to sip on broth. I’m going to sip on tea. I’m going to have some coffee. I’m going to have that until noon. About noon, okay, this is my go time. This is my slim window. From about 12 to seven, I’m going to incorporate some of these SLIM-gestion foods.

Then what we do is our third tier of this, is I love collagen, as you know. Love collagen. I love collagen shakes. How about making a collagen shake, which most people … I have not tested anyone on collagen, that has been a protein that they’ve been adverse to. The reason why I love collagen so much is because when you’re in practice so long, and you see different kinds of proteins come and go, you know so many people, “Well, this makes me break out. Well, this gives me digestive problems,” and the list goes on and on. But the beautiful thing about collagen and collagen protein, it seems to agree with everyone. So how about a collagen shake, and all of those things we talked about. So put some leafy greens in there. Put a little bit of berries in there. Put some healthy fat in there. Bam, you are ready to go. Your mind and your body is in sync. You’re ready to fly.

And a little trick. You can take vegetables, vegetables you like, say kale, or spinach, or whatever it is. Put them in the freezer. They’re frozen. They’re there all the time. It makes it so easy. Take some berries. Throw them in a bag. Throw them in the freezer. You just throw those suckers in whatever you’re using, your Bullet, or whatever you’re mixing your shake with. Bam, blend that up, and that is a great meal, and I love to add those in, because it makes a big difference in burning fat.

And, again, when we’re talking about burning fat, we have to talk about stored fat, because that’s belly fat.

Trevor: Yeah. Absolutely. And everything that you just described, all the foods that you mentioned, are, also, great foods for the skin. So, here you are, you can drop the belly fat, and then, also … And you know this. It’s just I have to bring it up.

Dr. Kellyann: Of course.

Trevor: [crosstalk 00:18:21] those skin loving foods.

Dr. Kellyann: Well, that’s what I am saying. So for those of you that don’t know, that we pal around all the time. We pal around, and we get along so well, because it would be you and I looking around for, “Is this organic? Is this not organic? Oh, do they have the kind of food we like.” Even if we decide that we’re going to drink, “Do they have the kind of alcohol that we like,” because we are all about gut health, because you cannot have beautiful skin, and you cannot have a belly that does not have belly fat unless you just employ these couple of simple ways of life. The thing is, for people who feel like, “Oh, my gosh, I have a piano on my back. This is really daunting to me,” and it really isn’t.

And the thing about when you start really getting the inflammation down, you start healing the gut, and you become this natural fat burner, and you can start to naturally control these hormones and these things like leptin, your hunger trigger. When you naturally start to control these things, you have something in life which I call time reallocation. All of a sudden, that you’re finding that you have more time for things. You really do. You have more time, and you have more passion about your food.

I’ve had patients who have come in, and there’s no way they were ever going to get in the kitchen. They couldn’t care less. They didn’t want anything to do with it, until they started becoming passionate about what was happening to them. Passionate about all the changes that they’re seeing, better sex life, more energy, and all these things that people dream of that really can happen.

We’re seeing it over and over again, right? We see it so many times, and for us, it’s typical, because, again, let’s talk about this again. Hunter gatherer times, we’re talking we are primal beings. We are, and we are by genetic design. We have a DNA that runs through us, and it’s a blueprint. Make no mistake about it. Therefore, it makes no sense … There’s certain animals in the zoo, or certain species, that eat the same foods. Why? It works best for them. And I know that everybody has different backgrounds, everybody has different situations and all of that, and you have to do personal play, and you have to tweak some things, and I understand that.

But we have to remember that there are foods that undoubtedly reduce inflammation, heal the gut, and help us become a natural fat burner, and as you say, they make your skin better, and they get rid of belly fat and all these great things, and so people need to learn about them and they need to implement them.

Trevor: Yeah. Absolutely. Just for clarification, you’re talking about the foods on the plate, and you mentioned protein. What types of protein do you recommend to people?

Dr. Kellyann: So I know that there’s people that may be listening that have a more vegetarian based diet, and for me, what I have found in looking at empirical data and looking at tests of so many people over the years, animal fats seem to work really well with people, animal fats and fish. Here’s where the discrepancy comes in. When people think of a more paleolithic lifestyle, or they think about getting protein, they think about the big hunk of protein, and that’s not actually true. Actually you need very little protein. But you do need protein with your meals.

So here’s what I say. We’re all trying to figure out where do we spend our money? What is the best place to spend our money? So if you are going to look at your food situation, say I’m going in the grocery store. Where can I cleave off some of the expenses, and where do I actually need to spend, and I always advocate by getting a high quality protein source is a really smart way to spend your money. It’s just a really smart way to spend your money, because then you’ve got those healthy fats in there. You’ve got CLA, conjugated linoleic acid. All of these are very protective, and, again, since we’re cellular beings and things really do come down to the deepest level, which is your cells, all of these things are really good for really enhancing your cellular matrix.

That’s where all of this becomes important. So what I say is where do you spend your money? I would say spend it on getting those healthy proteins in there. So I love fish, healthy fish, healthfully raised fish and healthfully raised animal proteins, healthfully raised animal proteins and eggs, and I know that’s one of the red flags for people with some intolerances, but I find that most people typically do really well on eggs, and it’s got the biotin in there and all of these really good things for our skin, our hair, our nails, and to cleave off belly fat, because choline, which is, also, in eggs, transports fat. So all of these things are important, so just make sure that you do have some good source of protein, and it doesn’t have to be a lot.

I actually agree, really, we need to focus more on … Because this is where people are lacking, how do we get those vegetables, and it should always be a trigger in your mind, how do I get more vegetables? How do I get more vegetables, because there’s no surprise that it’s going thwart a lot of diseases that we see.

Trevor: Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks for clarifying that, and then for people who are intolerant to eggs, which I do find with a lot of skin issues, once you get your skin issues under control, sometimes people can go back to eating eggs. It can be one of those big trigger foods initially, and you can always modify and find other forms of protein if eggs don’t work for you. But, yeah, for some people they’re great.

Great. And then I just want to bring up fasting. Go back to fasting for a minute, because I know that it’s one of those words that, for some people, it’s really a tough thing for them to hear about, “Oh, you’re going to expect me to starve myself.” But I love that you’re using bone broth, because we’re talking about something that’s still going to nourish the body, and let’s compare that to a water fast. So I know that water fast, sometimes people are talking about that. How do you compare like a water fast to something like what you’re doing?

Dr. Kellyann: So I’m all for a water fast, because there is research that is showing there are benefits, and there’s even crazy research and studies out there that are showing that for people with cancer, it’s a really good way to jump start and really … Because, again, you go into that autophagy, and that’s such an important word. We’re going into autophagy, which means you’re really cleaning out systems that need a break, and cells start to slow down instead of speed up. So that’s a really important concept.

However, in order for me to tell you that you can go on a water fast, I have to see you. I have to know you. I have to know your history. I have to know the beats of your life. I have to know more about you. Maybe it’s good for one day for one person. Maybe it’s three days for another. Maybe a five day water fast would be advantageous for some. But I have to know a lot about you.

This is a system of fasting that you’re going to get really similar results, really similar results, and you get to be comfortable, and I can safely recommend this to you, because here’s what I know. You’re still getting all of the nutrients that your body needs, and we know that so many of us are so nutrient deficient. So what I try to do is pull people towards sufficiency.

It’s super important that you do two things, and so people ask me all the time, “Give me the lowdown. How do you really get healthy? How do things really work,” and you can simplify everything that I do in a nutshell by saying that my philosophy and my paradigm is that we do everything to push nutrients into the cells and push toxins out. That’s the game. That’s how you get healthy. That’s how you get well. That’s how you burn belly fat and body fat, and get beautiful skin, and all of these things, which is why your skin care products are pristine and have nothing in them but healthy ingredients, because I’m sure you feel the same.

So this is a really important core philosophy that makes a big difference, and why fasting really works with bone broth. Think about bone broth. It’s one of the healthiest things you can put in your body. You’ve got that really healthy protein. You’ve got minerals. You’ve got amino acids, things like glycine, which actually help people sleep. One of the things I hear the most is, “Oh, my gosh, I’m actually sleeping now,” which is something that people are so lacking in. It helps calm your nerves, all of these wonderful things, and then, of course, there’s gelatin, and if you think about gelatin, gelatin is what gives us those really strong matrix in your gut. We talk about healing your gut. So if you get a sunburn and it’s bothersome, you put a little aloe on there, right? That’s the first thing that we do when we have a sunburn. Oh, I’ve got to grab some aloe. Well, you can think about gelatin like this to your gut. It soothes. It heals. It nourishes, and it gets it back on track.

You know how I feel. I’ve got a real bone broth love. I mean I could talk about it for days. But that’s why I love it, because it offers so much nutrition with very little calories. I mean who could ask for more? I am offering something that has so much nutrition and hardly any calories. It’s a win-win.

Trevor: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. And if you all want to know more about bone broth, you can watch Kellyann’s interview from when she was on that podcast before, because we talked all about bone broth.

Kellyann, thank you so much for coming on. I know you’re so busy right now. So tell everybody where they can find you.

Dr. Kellyann: Sure. It’s DrKellyann.com, D-R-K-E-L-L-Y-A-N-N, DrKellyann.com, and I sure hope everyone picks up a copy of the 10 Day Belly Slim Down. Can I show it to everyone?

Trevor: Yeah. Let’s see it, and we’ll have a link for everybody to get the book and all the great stuff you’re offering. Bring it back a little bit so we can see it.

Dr. Kellyann: Can you see it now?

Trevor: Yes. It looks very great.

Dr. Kellyann: Hot off the press. I just received it yesterday. So hot off the press.

Trevor: Excellent. Very exciting. Kellyann, it’s always so great to see you. Thank you so much.

Dr. Kellyann: You, too. Thank you.

Trevor: Okay. Bye bye.

Dr. Kellyann: Bye.

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Kellyann Petrucci. To find out more about Dr. Kellyann and her upcoming book, her new book, just go to TheSpaDoctor.com. Go to the podcast page with our 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. You can, also, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, so you don’t miss our upcoming shows. And if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your customized skin report at TheSkinQuiz.com. It is a free online quiz, and we’ll give you information about what your skin is trying to tell you about your health, what is your skin type, and it’s going to give you some tips on what to do to address the root causes. Just go to TheSkinQuiz.com.

Also, I invite you to join me on social media, on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and join the conversation. And I’ll see you next time on the Spa Doctor podcast.

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Keys for a Passionate Relationship with Susan Bratton

January 18, 2018 by Dr. Trevor Cates Leave a Comment

On Today’s podcast we’re talking about keys for a deeply passionate relationship. Passionate loving relationships are part of a healthy life and help us have a healthy glow. And this is in part fueled in the bedroom, so I wanted to invite the perfect guest to talk about this intimate topic.

My guest today is Susan Bratton. She is considered the “Dear Abby of Hot Sex” to fans around the world, and her fresh approach to bedroom communication skills help millions of people—of all ages and across the gender spectrum—transform sex into passion.

Susan’s straight-forward lovemaking advice is rooted in her personal experience of watching her marital intimacy wither as she and her husband pursued dynamic careers. When her relationship hit a crisis point, Susan made a fierce commitment to do whatever it took to hold her family together and revive the passion in her marriage. Today, she and her husband have the kind of dream relationship most people stopped believing was even possible— until they discover her practical tips.

After 15 years and over 30,000 hours of research, practice, teaching, and testing, Susan distilled the six simple essentials that ignite passionate lovemaking into her latest #1 international best-selling book, Sexual Soulmates. Beloved for speaking from the heart and shooting from the hip… she’s written over 20 books and programs including, Sexual Soulmates, Relationship Magic, The Passion Patch, 30 Romance Tricks That Work Like Magic and Revive Her Drive. She has thousands of fans who devour her Better Lover YouTube videos.

A serial entrepreneur who was named a Silicon Valley “Woman of Influence,” and AdAge “Top 10 Internet Pioneer,” Susan and her company, Personal Life Media, Inc. been featured in The New York Times and appeared on the TODAY Show, ABC, CBS, CNBC, CW, Fox, and NBC.

In today’s interview we talk about the different types of female orgasm and how to improve your intimacy and passion with your partner.

* This interview is intended for adult viewers and listeners only. We do discuss human anatomy and sexual function. My intention is to open the dialogue up so that passion is not a secret.

So please enjoy this interview…

https://youtu.be/RueLvvyYXDo

To learn more about Susan Bratton, go to https://personallifemedia.com

TRANSCRIPTION:

Trevor: Hi, there. Welcome to the Spa Doctor podcast. On today’s show, we’re talking about keys for a passionate relationship and the female orgasm. Passionate, loving relationships are a part of a healthy life, and help us have that healthy glow, and this is in part fueled in the bedroom. So I wanted to invite the perfect guest to talk about this intimate topic. My guest today is Susan Bratton. She is considered the Dear Abby of hot sex to fans around the world, and her fresh approach to bedroom communication skills helps millions of people of all ages across the gender spectrum transform sex into passion.

Susan’s straightforward advice is rooted in her personal experience of watching her marital intimacy wither as she and her husband pursued these dynamic careers. When the relationship hit a crisis point, Susan made a big commitment to do whatever it took to hold her family together and revive the passion in her marriage.

Today, she and her husband have the kind of dream relationship most people stop believing was even possible, until, of course, they discover her practical tips. After 15 years and over 30,000 hours of research, practice, teaching and testing, Susan distilled the six simple, essentials that ignite passionate lovemaking into her number one international bestselling book, Sexual Soulmates. A serial entrepreneur, who has been named a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence, an ad age top 10 internet pioneer, Susan and her company, Personalized Media, have been featured in the New York Times and appeared on the Today Show, ABC, CBS, CNBC, CW, Fox, and NBC.

In today’s interview, we talk about the different types of female organism, and how to improve your intimacy and passion with your partner. This interview is intended for adult viewers and listeners only. We do discuss human anatomy and sexual function. My intention is to open up the dialogue so that passion is not a secret. This is something to embrace for better health and relationships, so please enjoy this interview.

Susan, it’s so great to have you on my podcast today.

Susan: Well, you’re a bit of a brave soul, Trevor, inviting me to talk about female orgasm, so thank you so much for doing that, because it really is a service to women to be in conversation about our orgasmic potential.

Trevor: I so agree with that. I know it is interesting that a lot of people shy away from this topic. They don’t want to talk. But having a healthy sex life is so important to our health. It helps us with our glowing skin, too, but the satisfaction we have in life, the hormones that are released during orgasm, all these things really contribute to health, and for people who are missing out on this or could do even more to improve it, I think it’s a disservice for me not to be talking about this, and you’re the perfect person to talk about this, because you certainly do a lot of talk about this.

Susan: Yes. I do. Well, when I was moving toward being in service to people around their sexuality, I could have gone in many directions. There are many marriage and family therapists and sexual therapists, and they help people with problems, and what I wanted to do was be on the other side of that spectrum of sexuality. I wanted to be in the opportunity side. I wanted to be the person that spent a lot of time doing what I call closing, bridging the orgasm gap, helping men and women achieve more pleasure and connection by understanding bedroom communication skills, and I’ve got some to share, as well as orgasm techniques, and conscious heart connected lovemaking techniques.

So I’m kind of a techniques guru. I collect lots of things that help people have more pleasure and connection, and on this conversation that we have today, I’m going to just give as many ideas as I can, and as you’re watching us, don’t feel like you have to do them all, but know that in your heart, there will be something that calls to you, that says, “Oh, that’s something I’d like to try,” or, “Oh, I never thought about it that way.” A reframe, even a simple reframe of a mindset can open you to more pleasure and connection.

So I just wanted to start with a few things like that, and I also wanted to start out with the masculine versus feminine conversation, and just say I always like to start my conversations about sexuality with the discussion that I’m in support of everybody, no matter whether they’re sexual, nonsexual, asexual, where they are on the gender spectrum, what their gender fluidity is. I really embrace all people in my conversations. So if I say him, her, things like that, just know that those are more like suggested polarities than absolutes.

Trevor: That’s perfect. Thank you for clarifying that. Yes. It’s very great clarification. I think it’s great that we’re talking about the female orgasm. That’s mostly what we’re focusing on today, but this is great for men to listen and watch, too, because, hey, it’s all part of the experience, right?

So let’s start with the physical structure, physiology. Let’s talk about the clitoral structure.

Susan: Okay. Most women think about their clitoris, which is typically the most sensitive sexual area on any person. It’s the go to place for the easiest pleasure.

Most people think about their clitoris as that little nub of an eraser in their vulva, and if you go online now and you type in 3D clitoral structure or 3D clitoris, you’ll actually see videos of what the whole clitoris looks like spinning in video. The clitoris, your clitoris is an amazing thing. That little tip is just the tip of the iceberg. It actually is the head or the glans, and it actually splits into two little legs. Those are called the crura, and it has these little punching bags that hang down. Those are called the vestibular bulbs, and all of that whole thing is erectile tissue. You, also, have a urethral sponge and a perineal sponge that bracket your vaginal canal, and those are erectile tissue.

What’s so great is, that if you think about a man, he’s not going to have very good sex if he doesn’t have an erection. When his penis is flacid, it feels good to touch, but it feels way more pleasurable for him when it’s erect.

So women, I think, because we’re not aware that we have all this buried erectile tissue that loves to be engorged, or filled with blood, or [tumessed 00:07:27]. These are all words for it. If you know that you’ve got all that stuff and you can start working on touching it and stimulating it by going up inside the vagina, as well as around the clitoris, the clitoral hood. The spots down the side of your vulva, which are where your pubic hair is. Your mons is at the top, and then there’s your vulva. That’s where the bulbs are, underneath there. Those are the little punching bags that love to get puffed up.

Trying to have sex without your clitoral and erectile tissue engorged, means you’re leaving a lot of pleasure on the table. You’re leaving a lot of orgasmic potential on the table, and so I think just understanding that you’ve got all that in there is a very important point.

Trevor: Yeah. That’s great. I mean I think that it’s so true. We just think that it’s this one little part that sticks out, and there is so much more to it, and understanding … As a physician, I really love to study anatomy and physiology, and I’m really fascinated by this, and I’m not sure if everybody feels the same way I do. But I think in order to really understand how it all works, it’s good to know what the structure is, so that’s great.

So the benefits of engorgement are going to help with pleasure and increasing your ability to orgasm, correct?

Susan: Yes. So if you think about, okay, if I’m going to have sex, if I want to achieve an orgasm or multiple orgasms from clitoral stimulation, which is just one way you can, then the best thing to do is do a lot of sensual massage. Enroll your partner or massage yourself, so that you’re massaging the whole clitoral area. Now especially your clitoris itself, the little tip of it. Homologous to the penis, that’s the tip of the penis as well. We start out the same person, and then we get bathed in hormones that turn us into a boy or a girl in gestation, and so we all start out with the same equipment, and it morphs based on the hormonal bath that we get.

Your clitoris will actually get an erection. Don’t even worry for now about all the tissue buried inside. Even if you just think about engorging the clitoral tip, and there’s a shaft. It’s on a little stalk, and you can actually, with nice organic avocado oil, organic coconut oil, things you’d literally put in a salad and eat, that’s about all I’d recommend for your genitals, because you don’t want to put any lubes that have chemicals in them. Who am I talking to, Trevor? I mean you’re all about natural ingredients, right? And nothing that you wouldn’t put on your face, you shouldn’t put on your vulva.

Getting your clit to actually get an erection … Your clitoris will actually pop out with an erection, and that stalk is like a little mini hard on, and that is a really great thing to start with, and then massaging your vestibular bulbs, and feeling up inside your vaginal canal, the roof, the base. Doing the whole clock, rock around the clock, three, six, nine and 12. All of those things expand that tissue and help you achieve orgasms and multiple orgasms.

Trevor: Okay, great. Now you were talking about using fingers. There are lots of toys out there. How do you feel about devices, and toys, and gadgets, and gizmos?

Susan: I think everything is excellent and has its place, and different women respond to different kinds of things. What I would say is that generally if the only way that you can achieve orgasm is through a vibrator, you’re going to over stimulate your clitoris, and then it’s going to require a lot of intensity of vibe to get you to have an orgasm.

I’d recommend that you start at the opposite end of the spectrum. You can actually have an orgasm from the very lightest of touch. Because I publish programs that teach orgasm skills, online programs, audios, videos, eBooks, one of the programs we have is a program called Expand Her Orgasm Tonight, and that teaches a clitoral stroking technique that is so delicate.

You know how when you get an eyelash on your eye, and you use that little soft pad of your finger to get it out of your eyeballs? Do you know that level of touch that I’m talking about? It’s very light.

That’s the touch that this technique uses, and if you stroke up slightly under the hood of your clitoris, most women like just off the left side. Some women like just off the right side of the clitoral hood. If that was 12 o’clock, maybe at 10 or two, you’d find a little spot underneath there, right on the glans that likes a very, very light consistent stroke.

When you’re able, as a woman … If you have a partner, it’s really great, because you can completely surrender to the stroke, and relax into the stroke, and then what that allows you to do is just receive and really be with the sensation that’s getting delivered. You can do it to yourself, but it’s never as good. It’s kind of like scratching your own back. It’s just not as good as when somebody’s scratches your back for you, or tickles your arm for you, right? It’s just good to get it done to you.

So if you have the ability and have a partner who can stroke like that, stroking that lightly actually allows you to circumvent clitoral fatigue. Vibrators often give you clitoral fatigue. You’re one and done. You might have one fast, big orgasm, but it’s not what your body is capable of having. It’s not the level of pleasure that is available to you, and instead of trying to make the orgasm happen, if you allow the orgasm to happen through this very light and consistent stroke, you can actually go into an expanded orgasm state, and then stay in that state. An expanded orgasm is … I’ve got some slides for you. I wish I had brought them. I can post them. I can give you a link to post with the video, if that’s possible.

Essentially there is the orgasm. You go up, and then you have a climax, and then you’re done. That’s one way you can orgasm. But that’s kind of like leaving a lot of fun on the table. Then there’s the multiple orgasms. I had one. I had another one. I had another one. They might be bigger, and then you’re done. So they go whoop, whoop, whoop, like that. That’s multiple orgasms. That’s how we think about things.

I think we’re caught in the paradigm of the masculine orgasm, because men think about their orgasm as they climax, they ejaculate, and they’re complete. But women, although we do ejaculate and every woman can ejaculate, we can just keep staying in orgasm. We can be in an orgasmic wave that just keeps getting better and better, and an expanded orgasm is one where you actually learn how to open and relax, take a very slow, easy, light stroke that expands the energy throughout your whole body, and instead of having a climax where you’re done, you’re actually staying in that climax, and it’s growing, and it’s expanding in dimension for you. That’s the kind of orgasm that often people associate with tantric lovemaking, or spiritual sex, or sacred sex, because it’s an almost meditative quality of pleasure.

Trevor: Interesting. There are all these different types of orgasms, and most people, the majority of people just think about the one, like you’re saying, because it’s so obvious for a man to orgasm, and so then people just assume that the female orgasm is going to be the same. But it sounds like it’s really different.

Susan: There are so many kinds of orgasms. You can have clitoral orgasms. You can have orgasms from penetration, so penis in vagina. They call it PIV sex these days. Intercourse is what we called it in the old times. You can have orgasms through anal sex, because you’ve got a perineal sponge, and there’s a lot of rich and enervated tissue in the anus, and for some women, that’s their best orgasm. For other women, their best orgasm is vaginal. For other women, their orgasm is clitoral. There’s breast-gasms from the erectile tissue in your nipples and breasts. There are oral orgasms. So Deep Throat was actually true. You can have orgasms from going down on a man. You can have orgasms from kissing. You can have orgasms from getting a foot rub. You can have orgasms from a sensual massage. You can have female ejaculatory orgasms, which sometimes are called squirting orgasms, because liquid, fluid comes out, which is a prostatic fluid that all women have and all women are capable of having these ejaculatory orgasms, and it’s not pee. A lot of women think, “Oh, gosh, it’s pee. I’m peeing,” and you’re not.

So those are just some of the kinds of orgasms. There are people who are polymorphously sensual. They can have orgasms from many different kinds of sensation. So there’s a big smorgasbord, a smorgasmbord board available to everyone.

Trevor: Wow. That makes me wonder what is the definition of an orgasm?

Susan: Yeah. Well, I’m sure there are the Masters and Johnson version. There’s the plateau, and the climax, and the peak. But, again, I look at that, and I think that’s an old 50s style masculine ejaculatory orgasm, so I don’t even think that.

So I think the orgasm is an intense amount of pleasure in a compact amount of time that can be stretched and expanded, and can be generated through many types of sensation. There are, also, mental orgasms. There are think offs and things like that. You can be hypnotized to have orgasms. You can be talked verbally through orgasms.

The one thing that you know about people is that although we’re all human beings and we’re all the same animal, we’re all the same species on this planet, we have a wide variety of things that turn us on, and so what your orgasm is like and how you have it is wildly different than everyone else in the room, but equally as valuable, and important, and matters.

Trevor: Yes. Okay. Thank you for clarifying that, and I was kind of curious of what your definition was of orgasm. Yeah. I’m sure it’s different than the typical maybe medical …

Susan: Because there are so many kinds of orgasms. What’s an orgasm? Which kind? Which one?

Trevor: Okay. So you talk about your sensation map and how to expand that. What is that?

Susan: Right now, it is likely that you have a certain go to kind of orgasm, if you orgasm, and I do want to get into, and we are going to get into more I know about bridging the orgasm gap. The orgasm gap is the fact that 90% or more of, and I’m not even being generous, men can have an orgasm from intercourse, where maybe part of the time, half the women can have an orgasm from intercourse. So women are at a huge deficit in their ability to orgasm from intercourse. Yet what men want most, our partners want most is frequency of intercourse. That’s what the testosterone driven male wants. He wants to be inside us a lot. What we want as women is satisfying sex. We want satisfaction. We want orgasmic pleasure and emotional connection, and so that’s because we’re estrogen dominant.

There are tricks, let’s just call them tricks to bridge that gap, to close that gap so that you’re both being satisfied through penetration equally, and you both look forward to it, so that over time, you’re not less likely to want to be with your partner. You’re more likely to want to be with your partner. You’re on what I call the upward pleasure spiral. Sex keeps getting better for you, instead of worse for you. Those are the techniques that I love, those tricks that make sex better, and better and better, instead of worse, and worse, and worse.

So the sensation map, expanding your sensation map basically means that if you’re lucky enough to be one of those women who has an orgasm or is even multi-orgasmic, you probably get there through one path, and there’s some people who have lots of ways to have orgasm, and that’s what I’m really talking about is expanding your ability. It’s like cross training at the gym. Sometimes you do squats. Sometimes you do lunges. Sometimes you do pushups. Sometimes you do planks. They all get you in shape.

That’s the same thing for your own physiology. You actually can grow your neural networks to feel more pleasure from a wider variety and kind of sensation that gives you different orgasms. So orgasms are a learned skill. You can learn how to have clitoral orgasms. You can learn how to have female ejaculatory orgasms, and breast-gasms, and oral-gasms. You can have any kind of orgasms that you’d like to have. It’s just a matter of practicing, putting your attention on feeling the pleasure, having the communication skills to adjust the delivery of the pleasure with your partner, and practice makes perfect.

I’d like to talk about … I have a free gift for you, and I’d like to give it to you right now, because it really goes with what I just said about expanding your pleasure map. You can expand your own pleasure map as a woman with your solo sex practice, and that is awesome, and it keeps you in good health, and it keeps your genitals engorged, which prevents atrophy. You don’t want your genitals to atrophy. You don’t want the skin to become flacid. You want to keep it rich and full of blood, and turgid, so that it’s energized and has vitality. So solo practice is fantastic.

You can do it with a partner, and when you’re with a partner, one of the things that holds women back from their own pleasure is not that they don’t know what … That they’re afraid to ask for it. Women are often okay asking for what they want. They just don’t know what they want.

That’s where some of the difficulty comes in. It’s kind of like art. I don’t know what I like, but I know it when I see it, and the thing about women is we’re different every day, because we are hormonal animals. We ebb and we flow. Where men, they’re more steady state. So they need to know what we need today, because it was different than yesterday.

I think it’s my top selling book at this point, is Sexual Soulmates, The Six Essentials for Connected Sex, and in it is a technique called the sexual soulmate pact, because I believe that sexual soulmates are created. They’re co-created. There might be some nice chemistry in the beginning, but that doesn’t last. You got to create your soulmatery together, and when you use the sexual soulmate pact, it’s a verbal communication agreement for the bedroom that allows him not to have his ego hurt, and you to be able to say what you need, and for him to just say, “Thank you,” after you’ve given him some feedback, so that you get acknowledged and reassured that your feedback is appreciated, so that he understands that the more feedback you give him, the better lover he is, because he is wired to want to give you incredible pleasure.

So you are doing him a favor by creating this pact, where you’re going to tell him, “I don’t like that. It hurts too much. That’s kind of scratchy. Move up. It doesn’t feel good at all. Let’s stop and do something else,” or, “I want it harder. I want it softer. I want it faster,” whatever it is, you’ll know at least if something’s not right. You’ll know if there’s a little something more you want, and if you can tell your partner without any like, “I know. I know what I’m doing,” it gets rid of all that, and he gets hungry for the feedback. He gets a taste of feedback and the power of it in a really kind agreement way, and, all of a sudden, he just becomes such a better lover, because he’s finally getting the data that he needs to do the job that he’s put on this earth to do, which is to pleasure the goddess.

The sexual soulmate pact is my gift. It’s an excerpt from my book. It’s one of the chapters. Should I give the URL right now? It’s at PersonalLifeMedia.com, that’s my website, and I’ve got tons of stuff on there, like thousands of articles on everything I’ve talked about and more. So it’s at PersonalLifeMedia.com/sexual-soulmate-pact, P-A-C-T. It is your pleasure pact.

Go ahead and grab that with my compliments and try that out. Try that soulmate pact agreement out. I think it will take your ability to expand your pleasure map to a whole new level, because you’ll have an agreement with your partner that it’s safe to push the edges and explore, and open up those new neural networks to pleasure.

Trevor: I love that. Thank you, and we’ll have that link up on the website, too, on my website under your podcast interview. But I think that’s really an important point, because it can be somewhat tough to talk about this, and creating that safe place for it and opening up that dialogue, I think that’s a great thing, because you don’t want him to feel threatened or like he’s done something wrong, but, at the same time, you want each other. This is a relationship. This is part of a relationship, right, is the communication with each other, and it should be a safe place to explore and have fun.

Susan: And if you don’t have the words for what you want, this is a way that you can begin to at least have some communication instead of silence.

The reason that couples end up in the therapist’s office is that they either fight, which is the minority. The majority is that they’ve cheated, one or two of the partners have had infidelity, and they’ve gone elsewhere to get the satisfaction that they crave, because they haven’t been able to have communication skills for the bedroom. This sexual soulmate pact is literally the antidote for infidelity for the large majority of couples. So it’s a very important skill to learn, and it’s learnable.

Trevor: I think that’s such a great point. I know you socially. I’ve seen you and your husband, Tim, and you guys are so cute together, so sweet together, and it’s obvious how much you love each other, and I’ve looked to other people, looked for those relationships that have that really cool connection, and my parents kind of have that, too. It’s funny, because I’ve asked both of you I think what are the big keys, and sex is a big part of that, and having great sex, having good communication, those are really keys to keeping a relationship going, right?

Susan: Yes.

Trevor: So anything that we can do to help improve that I’m a big fan for. So let’s talk about setting up the lover space.

Susan: Yeah. So one of the things when you’re trying to bridge the orgasm gap, when you’re trying to get the pleasure you deserve as a human being on this planet in this lifetime, the pleasure that is your God given gift as a woman. There are three big things for women that are the most important, according to experts and research. A lot of what I’ve learned I’ve learned from a wonderful book. I’m just going to look on my shelf right now to remind myself of it, Come As You Are, by Emily Nagosky. She really studied a lot of research on sexuality, on women’s sexuality, and it helped me piece together a lot of things that I had noticed over the last more than a decade that I’ve been helping people have hot sex.

I always knew about engorgement, but there was something that she really put into place for me that drove things home. We talked about engorgement as being one of the biggest factors to having more sexual pleasure and orgasm. The second is the idea of context, how important it is that we feel emotionally connected, that we feel safe, that we’re not worried about unwanted pregnancy, that we’re not worried about STIs, that we’re worried that we’re with a good partner who is going to take care of us, not hurt us. All of those kinds of emotional or mental context pieces need to be in place, or you will not have an orgasm.

I was talking to a woman last night at a party and she said, “I really, really love this guy. He could be the one, but I don’t know what it is. I just haven’t been able to have an orgasm with him, and I’m worried about it,” and I said, “I would worry, because he needs to feel like he can give you that orgasm, or he’s not going to want to stay with you.” I’ve literally been kicked out of bed by a guy when I was in my twenties. I was naked. I just had sex with him, and he said, “Get your clothes and get out of here. I’m not going to see you again. You’re no good in bed.”

I realized that there were a lot of people who break up with people because they don’t feel that chemistry, and what’s really going on for women is the context isn’t right. There’s something wrong. We don’t feel safe. We can’t surrender. We can’t let go. Or our guy doesn’t know how to stimulate us well, which part of that is the soulmate pact, sexual soulmate pact is teaching him what you need, because we are all wildly different. Some women really hard. Some people like it super light, and women, we go back and forth.

So the lovers space is part of this concept of context, and it’s really setting up an environment for lovemaking that makes you feel very comfortable. For example, I’ll give you some specifics. An orange light bulb in your bedroom or candlelight make you look very pretty. They literally camouflage cellulite. I don’t know what it is. It’s frigging magic, but orange light. Just take the bulb out of your bedroom light. Screw in an orange 15 watt CFL party light from Amazon.com for $7, and instantly you look like a goddess. So that’s lighting.

What’s the temperature? Are you too hot? Are you too cold? Do you need a blanket? Guys get hotter than you do. How do you keep yourself warm while you’re making love?

Another one is music. Is the music nice? Do you have enough water? Is your lube a quality lube? Is the bed protected? You’re not going to get anything on it? You don’t want to have to hold back from allowing yourself the pleasure of letting ago. So do you have on lingerie that makes you feel beautiful, if that’s what you want? Is he scratchy? Send him back and have him shave that little thing that’s getting itchy. Is there a springy thing poking out in his pubic hair? Does he need to wax that stuff? Are their fingernails dirty? Send him back three times and train him to clean himself up, because women say the number one thing that they require for men is cleanliness for sex. Number two is emotional connection or presence, that’s presence in the moment. Not trying to do me, but actually being with me.

So your lover space, take a minute to figure out how to set the space so that it’s conducive to you surrendering to your pleasure, and that’s a really good way to bridge that gap. You might never have been aware that things just aren’t good enough for you, so you can’t let go. You deserve to have the best pleasure possible in the best situation that supports your pleasure.

Trevor: Yeah. That’s great. Okay. Perfect. You were telling me about using fantasy to fuel your pleasure. This is a big thing for people, right? What do you think … Because actually I feel like sometimes it’s a bit much. There was all of the porn, and all the different things out there. It can be a bit much. So how do you use fantasy without going overboard, but just the right amount?

Susan: Yes. So some people are more visual. Some people are more auditory, and some people are more kinesthetic. There are certain point for whom, and you might not be one of them, they love to hear sexy talk while they’re making love. It turns them on more, and literally afterward, they can’t even remember what you said. They just know it was incredibly exciting.

So people who are auditory in their theta state … Your theta state is your brainwave state of lovemaking, meditation, deep relaxation. That’s why it’s very important to be relaxed before you try to be aroused. If you try to get aroused when you’re stressed, it’s really hard. But being relaxed allows you to get aroused.

So fantasy is not right for some people, but it’s great for others. Fantasy can be great when you’re masturbating. Fantasy can be great when you’re having … If you’ve been with a partner for a long time, you can share stories. Oh, right now we are in a French chateau, and we’re in a big four poster bed, and it’s 1774, you know, whatever. You can co-create stories with your partner that turn you on more. It’s just a really good way to bring play in, as well as … I don’t like the word dirty talk, but I do like the idea of sexy talk, and by sexy talk, what I really mean is verbal appreciation during lovemaking.

So because men are typically more visual, they’d like to see you naked. You’d like to hear them tell you how sexy you are, and so letting a guy know that what you want is a lot of verbal appreciation, “Your body looks so beautiful. I see your vulva. It looks so pretty. I love the way you’ve trimmed your pubic hair. Oh, I see your clitoris. It’s just starting to peek out. Your lady is getting like rosy lipped and getting a little bit darker. I can see the engorgement happening. Oh, look, your little clit just popped out.” For some women, that could be the sexy talk they need, because it’s the proof of their arousal given to them verbally.

So because everyone is so different, I don’t know what’s right for you, but I do know that something is, and it’s yours to discover how you can use fantasy or sexy talk to talk things further in the bedroom for yourself and expand your pleasure map, because all of this is just opening you to more pleasure.

Trevor: Yeah, absolutely. I mean certainly people … It seems to be a very individual thing of what people like, but I love that. Are you auditory? Are you visual? Are you kinesthetic? Those kind of things certainly apply in the bedroom.

Susan: They do.

Trevor: But, like I said, I feel like sometimes the whole porn thing is getting to be a bit much with all the online porn. Any thoughts or comments on that?

Susan: Yes. Porn is I don’t know how big a business, like eight hundred million. It’s giant, and I’ve heard that up to 25% of viewers now are women, and it breaks my heart, because Time Magazine within the last year quoted a piece of research that said that they did a random sample of pornography, and 96% of it was degrading to women.

Porn is primarily there because men have a need for frequent ejaculation. They can’t have as much intercourse as is required for them to move their semen through and keep it topped off. They’re biologically programmed to need to ejaculate, so that they’re ready when a woman is ready and fertile, and so they need to keep that moving, and they use pornography to masturbate to have ejaculatory orgasms.

We look at that and we’re all like, “That’s so disgusting,” and for us, it is, because we’re women, and we don’t really need to do that. Now, there are women who are very sexual, and they need a lot of orgasms and a lot of sex all the time. There are lots of women like that. There are women on the other end of the spectrum who never want sex. There’s about 3% of the population that’s just completely asexual. So, again, it’s a range.

But here’s the thing. The thing that’s I think the worst about it is that it’s not going to go away. It’s only going to get bigger and worse, more, and young kids are watching it, and they think that’s what sex is, and we have a whole culture of young men, who through all of the toxic food they eat, and our food supply, and all the toxins and chemicals, and all the masturbating to porn, they literally can’t even get an erection around a woman, and the only thing they know how to do is the stuff they saw on pornography, and so it’s depressing.

The only antidote to it is for you to know that everything that you need to have a fulfilling sex life is inside you. You don’t need to watch porn to get ideas. You can just say what turns you on, and what turns you on today may not be what turns you on next week or the week after. This is where fantasy comes into play. What’s turning me on right now? What’s getting me excited? What do I kind of get juiced up about right now?

Because we’re always maturing throughout our lives, our sexuality is always maturing and our sexual tastes and desires are maturing and changing, and so if you just listen to your heart, listen to your vulva, she knows, she knows what you want. The more you can tap into her and just let her tell you what turns you on, and the more you can share with your partner what those things are that you’d like.

A perfect example of the number one thing women ask me is how do I get my man to take control in the bedroom? They don’t feel like if they leave it up to him, he’s going to be able to ravish her, and turn her on, and give her orgasms, that he doesn’t have enough skill. So I am a big believer in learning about sex techniques, because that’s what I’ve devoted my business and my life to, is teaching people sex techniques. For example, I have a video collection called the Steamy Sex Ed Video Collection that shows over 200 heart connected, conscious lovemaking techniques. It’s for couples to watch together. It’s for singles to watch, so they can be prepared when they find the one and they want to have that incredibly romantic,, emotionally connected, slow, sensual, sacred, erotic kind of lovemaking.

You have to say if someone’s doing something that feels porny to you, to say, “It doesn’t feel authentic to me. It feels like you’re doing rather than being. Let’s go back to just being. Let’s look in each other’s eyes again and just connect about why we’re here together.” A part of us as women have to say, “No. That’s not what I want,” and maybe you don’t know what you want, but you can vaguely define it.

The only solution there is, is to educate yourself, learn techniques yourself, be open to trying new things, consider that your sexuality is a practice, and that you’re always getting better at it, and doing these kinds of things we’ve been talking about, engorgement, vulva massage, setting the lover space, using fantasy. These are all kinds of things that you can now that you know them bring into play to kind of move away from that canned porn negative stuff that’s a turnoff. Hey, but sometimes there are things you want to do, like naughty things. You want to get dressed up like a dominatrix, and spank your boyfriend, or whatever. There’s nothing wrong with playing and having fun, too. So I don’t want to dissuade you from that, because just make stuff up and do it and try it out.

There is no failure. There’s only the feedback that that worked or didn’t work, or I like this part of it. I didn’t like this. Next time, let’s do this. I like that one thing, and come up with ideas.

Trevor: Okay. That’s great. I so love it. Susan, this has been so much fun. Tell everybody your website, how they can find you, and is there any last parting words that you want to share?

Susan: Okay. You can go to PersonalLifeMedia.com/sexual-soulmate-pact, P-A-C-T, pact, and you can get that free eBook. My website is PersonalLifeMedia.com, and if you ever have any questions, feel free … I mean my tag line is trusted hot sex adviser to millions, and that’s because I’ve spent over a decade answering people’s questions by email, doing videos, doing everything. I’ve got a YouTube channel. It’s Better Lover, and really it’s just about sex advice and great ideas, and if you like the kinds of things that I’ve told you today, I’ve got more. I’m here for you. There’s no question too dumb, and I’m always happy to answer more, or point you to an article, or what have you.

So feel free to reach out to me. It is my pleasure to support you and your pleasure.

Trevor: Thank you, Susan. Thanks so much for your information. What better person? You’re just so open and friendly. It’s a tough conversation for a lot of people, so it’s nice that you can be so open, and relaxed, and friendly about it. I appreciate your information today. Thank you.

Susan: Thank you so much.

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Susan. To learn more about Susan, get the free gift that she mentioned and get the link to her website. Just go to the SpaDr.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there.

While you’re there, I invite you to joint the Spa Doctor community, and you could, also, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss any upcoming shows, and if you haven’t done so already, you can get a free skin assessment by going to TheSkinQuiz.com. It’s a free online quiz I put together to help you figure out what messages your skin is trying to tell you about your health, what your skin type is, what your root causes are, so you can finally address these underlying causes. You just go to TheSkinQuiz.com. I, also, invite you to join me on social media, on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and join the conversation, and I’ll see you next time on the Spa Doctor podcast.

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Busting Skin Care Myths with Rachael Pontillo

January 4, 2018 by Dr. Trevor Cates 1 Comment

My guest today is Rachael Pontillo. She is the bestselling author of the book Love Your Skin, Love Yourself . She’s a Board Certified International Health Coach, licensed aesthetician; and natural skincare formulator and educator. She’s the president and co-founder of the Nutritional Aesthetics™ Alliance, the creator of the popular skincare and healthy lifestyle blog, Holistically Haute™, and creator of the online course, Create Your Skincare. She’s an avid herbalist, self-professed skincare ingredient junkie, and lifelong learner.

On today’s podcast, we’re breaking down facts from skin care myths around skin care DIY as well as other popular skin care products and practices.

So please enjoy this interview…

Find out more about Rachael’s online Herbal Skincare Summit

To find out more about Rachael, go to: www.rachaelpontillo.com and www.createyourskincare.com

Here’s a link to her free skincare class: www.createyourskincare.com/free-class

TRANSCRIPTION:

Trevor: Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. Today we’re busting skincare myths. My guest is Rachael Pontillo. She’s the best selling author of the book, Love Your Skin, Love Yourself. She’s a board certified, international health coach, licensed esthetician, and natural skincare formulator and educator. She’s the President and Co-founder of the Nutritional Aesthetics Alliance, and creator of the online course, Create Your Skincare.

On today’s podcast, we’re breaking down facts from myths around skincare, do it yourself DIY, as well as other popular skincare products and practices. You may recognize Rachael because she’s been on my podcast before. I’m excited to have her back on to share additional information with you. So, please enjoy this interview with Rachael Pontillo.

Rachael, it’s so great to have you on the podcast.

Rachael: It’s such a pleasure to be back. Thank you so much.

Trevor: Yeah. I know you’ve been on before, but I wanted to have you back, because it’s been awhile, and we’ve got some updates and exciting things going on. Just as a reminder for everybody, because you have been on before, but we talked about this a bit before, but you’re a holistic esthetician. You have more of a holistic mindset, which is not the typical thing. So, explain to everybody how you’re different than maybe a traditional esthetician.

Rachael: It’s interesting because the world of holistic aesthetics, just like the world of holistic health, or holistic medicine, it has a lot of different definitions, and when we’re thinking about green beauty or holistic, there’s obviously different shades of green. The way I personally define holistic aesthetics and holistic skincare is really working on the skin from the inside out, with positive diet and lifestyle and mindset changes. And from the outside in, with noninvasive and all natural skincare products and treatments, and home care regimes.

What I have found in the earlier days in my practice when I was just thinking about holistic aesthetics more as just the natural products and the treatments that are not zapping and poking people, you’re still working on the skin kind of from an allopathic … Which is symptom related. You see something and you do what you can to fix it. But, that’s not doing anything really to address the cause, unless it’s something where the cause itself is actually topical. Which with skin, you know that, that’s rarely the case. It’s almost always something internal.

It wasn’t until I went to the Holistic Nutrition School and got my health coach certification and started doing more with coaching and learning more about diet and nutrition, and different causes of skin issues … I know that’s your expertise. It wasn’t until I started learning about that, that I realized, oh my goodness. We really have to approach the skin with this really broad perspective. It’s so different for each person. It doesn’t matter whether you appear to have the same symptoms, or even if you’re related, lifestyle changes, and diet, and stress, and emotional things can completely change how a regimen is going to react from one person to the next. It’s not only just holistic in terms of the diet, lifestyle, mindset, and topical stuff. It’s also got that bio individual factor in there, looking at, okay, what is this person’s skin behaving like on a day to day basis? How does it react to certain things?

I have a very personalized approach in my practice where I actually custom formulate for people. I design treatments for people, and that all gets adjusted. It gets adjusted every time I have a consultation with someone, or I see someone and something changes. We adjust everything. It’s not just, here’s the protocol for this person with this skin condition, because that doesn’t help if the cause of that skin condition is different, or if that person … Something in that person’s lifestyle is interfering with that protocol’s ability to be success for them. Holistic really means looking at the whole person, and kind of matching them up.

Trevor: Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Now, we have a very similar approach to skin and the holistic mindset of that, so that’s great. Thank you for clarifying that. Definitely not always the approach you’re going to get from an esthetician, but you have a lot more training than just esthetician training. You have the health coach aspect, that training as well. That’s great.

One of the things I want to dig in today is some of the beauty myths out there, and skincare myths, so we can bust through these, because there’s so much marketing hype, and money spent on products and procedures. It can get really expensive. I want us to talk through some of these myths together. One of them has to do with oils and the skin. Let’s talk about that. I think you know my take on oils to the skin, but what do you feel about oils and skincare?

Rachael: It’s a big topic. Oils themselves, there’s kind of a misconception of what they are, because I think that the commercial skincare industry has kind of given them a bad name, over the years. Because the oils that have been used in my own products that are synthetically based, have been typically petrochemicals like mineral oil, or white petrolatum, or other industrial grade lubricants, really. They’re not anything that brings nutrients into the skin. There is a lot of concern that applying oil to the skin is going to suffocate the skin, or create an occlusive barrier that is going to not allow for any ingredient penetration, or respiration, or even detoxification. It’s just creates this barrier, which sometimes you want a barrier. If you’re healing from something or if you’re trying to keep moisture in the skin. But, if it’s not also delivering nutrients, and it’s potentially leaving trapped stuff that should be coming out, in, it’s really not going to be any benefit to the skin.

There’s this idea that oils clog the pores. That if you have oily skin, you should not be using oil on your face. That’s something that I subscribed to for a longtime. Even in my aesthetics training, I really didn’t learn about oils until a little bit later in my training when I started working with an Ayurvedic line and studying under an Ayurvedic doctor. And, they’re very big into oils in Ayurveda, all over the body, which is fabulous. I always acne and oily skin, so I was always like, oh, no, no, no. Oil equals grease, or dirt, and that’s just not the case.

There are so many incredibly nourishing oils that we use for the skin that are plant-based, such as jojoba oil, even some forms of coconut oil, rose hip seed oil is one of my favorite. I know that argon oil is really trendy these days still, hemp seed oil. I mean there’s hundreds and hundreds. Each of them is pressed, or expressed, or expelled from a seed, or a nut, or pit of a plant. Sometimes the flesh, sometimes the entire seed pods, but really most seed oils, most plant oils are from the reproductive part of the plant. They’re pressed, usually cold pressed. What that does is, just like when you’re eating sprouted vegetables, it has all of that new life energy, that creation energy, that generating energy about it. That goes into the oils, energetically. These are composed of essential fatty acids. They all have a different essential fatty acid profile. Different levels of saturation, meaning [inaudible 00:08:31] That’s kind of the layman’s term. How thick or thin, or how heavy or dry and oil is. I’m sure you’ve heard of the term, dry oils, where you put it on and it seems to evaporate right away, or absorb right away.

Then we have oils that are much heavier and more solid, like a shea butter, or a coconut oil that will be solid to a certain smoke point, and then it might liquefy, and some of them don’t. Some of them don’t at all. They stay solid all of the time, unless they’re heated to very high temperatures. That has to do with the level of saturation, meaning from a chemical standpoint, all of these carbon chains that make up these essential fatty acids, how much oxygen is attaching to the breaks in those carbon bonds. How many breaks are there, which are opportunity for oxygen to come in, which would then cause that oil to be less saturated, meaning it will dry faster.

So, for people who have a lot of oil naturally in their skin, there are definitely oils that can be really beneficial to them because they are less saturated. They’re going to absorb faster. They have a great bioavailability about them, because the skin is made up of this lipid matrix on the outside. It is designed to work with oils and actually repel water. Like attracts like. When it sees an oil that it recognizes, it sees this similar essential fatty acid composition, it reaches out to almost shake hands. Like, hey, I know you. Come on in.

It’s such a powerful way to deliver nutrients into the skin. We often see water-based products that have these active ingredients that have to be packaged into what’s called a delivery system. Usually in some for of a lypozome which is an oil soluble kind of egg that is intended to be easier penetrating, because it’s protecting that water soluble micronutrient with this oil soluble coating that helps it get into that lipid matrix. But, if we’re using oils that already have these essential fatty acids, and also have antioxidants, vitamins, and other nutrients that the skin needs in a whole plant form, it’s going to absorb that much more easily. If you’re someone with oilier skin, you can use a less saturated oil, and it’s not going to sit on the surface. It’s going to absorb, and what is not absorbed will just evaporate, which is fantastic.

If you are someone who has dryer skin where you actually do need a little more protection, you need maybe that emollient barrier, or it’s maybe this time of year, and the indoor air is very dry, because now maybe you’ve got a forced air heating system, or you’re running your fireplace. It’s just sucking the water out of your skin, which happens. That’s called transepidermal water loss, where water actually evaporates from your skin. Thicker lipids such as a coconut oil, or a shea butter, something more saturated, with less oxygen in it, is going to stay on the surface a bit longer and keep moisture in.

Oils are really important to help keep moisture in, keep water in. If you just apply a lotion or a water based product, and there’s not enough lipid inside that product, or you’re not applying a lipid afterwards, it’s going to evaporate. Oils are so important to help keep the skin nourished, protected. Even though oils themselves don’t hydrate … And that’s another myth, that oils hydrate. It’s like a big pet peeve of mine. They don’t hydrate because they don’t have any water. They’re not bringing water into the skin, but they are helping to keep water in the skin, which does then help keep the skin hydrated.

In terms of clogging, there are definitely some oils that are more prone to clog skin for some people that others. But, it really depends on each individual person’s biochemistry, the lipid structure in their skin itself. Also, what fats they’re taking in internally in their diet. That can absolutely affect how the oils on the surface of the skin behave and react with other ones. It’s kind of a little bit of trial and error necessary, but there are some oils that are known to be a bit more risky for some people with acne prone skin, or oily skin. Something like a hemp seed oil is known to be a lighter oil that is going to penetrate faster and evaporate what’s not there, and less likely to clog. Whereas certain forms of coconut oil, and certain forms of like a cocoa butter might be too heavy for that type of skin. The molecular structure might be too big. It’s not going to penetrate. It’s going to sit there and that could cause clogging to happen.

Trevor: Right. Wow. Okay. Well, that’s great. It gives us a lot of information about oils for the skin. I think it’s really interesting to point out, as you said earlier, that when we’re looking at traditional skincare products that have been used traditionally, up until more recently, it’s been a lot of these synthetic oils, or the ones that are not coming from plants. They have a very different effect the skin, and comparing the two on the effect it has on the skin is totally different.

It’s nice to see more of these plant oils being used. I’d see it quite often. Because, you know we have oils on our skin, and my skincare line, The Spa Doctor Line. We often hear from people with acne prone skin, oily skin, that that same kind of reservation in the beginning, of oh, I don’t want to put oil on my oily skin. But then once they start using the products, they realize not only does their skin not breakout, but their quality of their skin is improving. They’re generally breaking out less. It’s so great to see that switch. It’s almost as if, I think about when we went from our low fat diet phase in the eighties, to now we’ve kind of swung in the opposite direction. Sometimes people are going too far in the other direction with fats in diet. It’s great to see that it has to do with the quality of the ingredient, and where it’s coming from.

I love what you talked about with the seeds of that. The oils coming from the seed, and it’s the beginning of the growth of a plant and energetically what that means. That was an interesting little take on that as well. So, thank you for all of that. And then also talking about the different types of oils, even plant based oils. How some can clog pores more than others. I liked how you point out that coconut oil, that some types will clog the pores, but not all. I know that we use a little bit of coconut oil in our cleanser, but it is the type that is not going to clog pores. We definitely see that with coconut oil, as well, so thanks for pointing that out.

Rachael: Yeah. Coconut oil is actually a really interesting one, because there are some many different ways to source it, and to express it. Whether it’s going to be clogging, or whether it’s going to be drying, or irritant … I was actually just discussing this with one of my students who also is creating a coconut based line. She does a ton of research on it. She was saying how some of these product lines claim that a coconut oil might be more alkaline rather than acidic. For topical skincare we actually do want products to be a little bit more on the acidic side, not the alkaline side, because the skin itself is more acidic. But the varying levels of heat used to press out the coconut oil are what kind of determine the pH of the coconut oil, which can absolutely be a factor in how that reacts on someone’s skin. It also obviously depends on what other ingredients are in that formulation.

Even though coconut oil is a fairly saturated oil, it’s fairly saturated and stable, it melts at 76 degrees. But, that’s a physical change. It’s not a chemical change. It goes back and forth between solid and liquid, but it chemically does not change. The function itself does not change. It’s stable in that way, it’s just not stable in the fact that, if you’re using virgin coconut oil, and you want it to be an oil serum, but you’re shipping it to somebody and it’s cold out, that’s going to separate, most likely, or it’s going to solidify and that’s kind of a production issue that you have to deal with. Certain forms are a little bit more stable in the liquid form. And then molecularly, some of the essential fatty acids in coconut oil are a larger molecule. However, it also has a lot of medium chain triglycerides, which are a smaller molecule, and that actually does penetrate better. It really depends on the person. It depends on the overall formulation and absolutely, the quality of the coconut oil, and the sourcing.

Trevor: Right. And it was interesting, you were taking about pH, and I typically think of pH as not something you can test for in oils, because … Yeah. So how does-

Rachael: That’s hard.

Trevor: So, how do you look at the pH of certain coconut oil?

Rachael: It’s really hard to actually measure it. There’s laboratory equipment that does it. It’s not something that’s easily doable at home with strips, unless you’re making an emulsion. But, fixed oils, carrier oils, they are fatty acids. They are fatty acid chains. So, when there’s acid, there’s pH. Potential hydrogens determines acid versus alkaline. It’s something that does have to be tested on a larger scale than what we would see in a DIY product, or even a small batch artisan brand.

Trevor: Okay, okay. Cool. All right. I think we covered oils.

Rachael: We did.

Trevor: Let’s move on to a different one. Another thing people ask a lot about is, skin brushes and cleansing of the skin using different facial sponges and brushes, and the electronic brushes to try and cleanse the skin, clear out the pores, get off the dry skin. What do you think about all these gadgets and gizmos with skincare?

Rachael: It’s a tricky one, because I think that in general, in Western society, we overdo it. We have this relationship with our skin that is not actually the healthiest one. We kind of take everything out on our skin. If the skin is showing us something that we don’t like, instead of stopping to pause and think, oh well, why is this happening? What is the skin showing me? How you kind of refer to the skin as the magic mirror. Like, what can we see from what the skin is showing us? Instead of taking that pause to kind of thank our skin. Hey, thanks messenger. You’re telling me that somethings wrong here, that I haven’t already paid attention to, that my body’s been trying to tell me.

As a society we’ve come to accept so many chronic pain issues, and fatigue and all these things that are just stress related, but because we’re so used to them, even though the body might be trying to tell us something, we’re not always paying attention to it. Then the skin has to be like, hello. You can’t ignore me now, because I’m just going to show you that there’s something wrong. Instead of just pausing to try to then figure out what the issue is, so many people want to pop, or scrub, or zap. I really want people to kind of reassess that. Revisit that notion.

When we are doing some kind of skincare treatment, whether it’s cleansing, or exfoliation, we really want to be gentle. The skin is not tile and grout. We don’t need to be scrubbing at it incessantly. What’s in our pores, whether it’s blackheads, or whiteheads, or even just oil itself, none of it’s necessarily bad. It’s there for a reason. There are things that we can do to change what’s in our skin. If we have a lot of blackheads, that is a sure sign that maybe there’s something going on inside with the fats that we’re taking in, because skin cells are formed inside. They’re not formed outside. But, it is also possible that we are coming into contact with too much pollution that we’re not protecting our skin from. Or, maybe we’re using the wrong kinds of ingredients that are not actually being absorbed, so they’re kind of oxidizing and forming this debris on the surface.

I don’t have a problem with some of the more gentler, manual kind of mechanical cleansing things. I don’t personally use them at all. I’m very, very gentle. My skin is really sensitive from years of over scrubbing and years of picking and popping, and doing all the stuff I used to do to my skin before I changed my relationship with my skin. Some of the spinning brushes, if they’re super gentle, meant for sensitive skin, I don’t mind that, but I still don’t even recommend it every day. I have a really conservative approach to exfoliation in general. I believe kind of in the cornia therapy line of thought, which means that we really want to protect the epidermis. It’s there to protect us. If we are forcibly removing those cells before they’re naturally ready to come off, meaning the cells underneath are not mature enough to the point where they’re actually strong enough and healthy enough to protect us, that is going to lead to more inflammation, which can actually speedup the aging process instead of slow it down, which is what we’re trying to accomplish. Nobody wants to speed up the aging process of the skin.

I recommend to people that if you feel that you want to do something like that, use a gadget, or a brush … a lot of esthetician are using ultrasonic cleaning devices. There’s these little scrapers that are like the ion scraper things that even some of the more holistic esthetician are okay with using, that’s okay. But, I would invite you kind of from a mindset perspective, to ask yourself why you feel that’s necessary. What about your skin is so dirty that you need that? What about your skin is making you want to scrub? If you have open lesions on your skin, that’s not something you want to scrub at, because that friction is going to cause more inflammation. That’s something that needs more love and more gentleness in the approach. It’s not something that needs to be zapped and scrubbed, and even like a harsh towel, you don’t want to be rubbing really hard with it.

For me personally, I don’t use them. I don’t recommend them to my clients. If you are someone who likes to have an exfoliation treatment every now and then, I think that’s a great opportunity to treat yourself to a spa treatment and have a nice enzyme facial. Maybe if you want to use that little ultrasonic thing to kind of give the pores a good old clean out, that’s okay. I’m just not a fan of forced exfoliation on a regular basis. I really want people to be gentle and loving to their skin.

Trevor: Right. Yeah. I’m along the same philosophy as you. I believe that if you’re going to do exfoliation, which I think we do need periodically to help the skin cells turnover and to be able to actually let the products that we’re using absorb better into the skin, for it to be very gentle and using gentle facial sponges. I just picked up recently a little bamboo brush that’s really, really soft, and so I’m interested to try that out, too. I’m mean, looking for things that are soft, that are not going to be super abrasive. Like the exfoliant that we make is very, very finely ground up pearl, and so it’s like very fine sand. It’s not rough and abrasive on the skin. So yeah, I’m glad we’re on the same page as that.

Rachael: Totally.

Trevor: I try to get people away from those. All the harsh brushing and all the-

Rachael: Yeah. I just see people doing that and their skin already looks so sensitive. I’m like, oh. I just kind of want to give them a hug. Like, you don’t need to do all that. Just love up on your skin a little. If you want to do more for your skin, you can do things like cooling herbal compresses. You can do a honey mask that is one of the most gentlest forms of exfoliation you can do, and it’s also extremely hydrating and nourishing. There are so many loving things that you can do for your skin if you want to feel like you’re taking action, and you’re doing something in between facials, and in addition to your regular skincare regimen. But, I really encourage all of that to be gentle and kind towards the skin.

Regarding exfoliation, just quickly, hydration is so important because water is a catalyst for exfoliation to happen on its own. So, if you find that your skin is looking lackluster, or uneven, or you’re getting dry patches, dehydration very well could be the cause of that. I would say, look at your water intake and see if that’s something that maybe need adjusting.

Trevor: Yeah. Okay. Wow, that’s a good point. Yeah. Now, we’re talking about the face, what about the body when it comes to those kinds of exfoliation? What do you feel about the rest of the body?

Rachael: Yeah. So, excellent question, because it’s a little bit different. The skin on the rest of the body is a bit thicker than the skin on the face. It’s also covered most of the time, unless you live in a super warm climate. But, even if you live in a super warm climate, chances are you’re in air conditioning, so you’re going to be covered anyway. The skin on the body is not subjected to as much environmental contact as the skin on the face, or even the hands. The skin on the face and the hands, age much faster than the skin on the rest of the body, simply because of the fact that it is more protected.

It’s very important to stimulate the skin on the rest of the body. That can actually handle more exfoliation. I love a good sugar or salt scrub in the shower, that’s made with some of the oils that we talked about before, coconut oil, or olive oil. You just kind of scrub at it with the sugar or salt until it dissolves. Then you know you’re done, and you’re left with this smooth and gorgeous and hydrated, and moisturized skin.

But, dry brushing is also excellent to do for the body. I like a natural bristle brush, like a sisal. I recommend doing it a couple times a week. If you’re feeling under the weather, it’s nice to do it in combination with like a salt bath, so you’re kind of helping your skin with detox, and it’ll help you kind of feel better, faster. I recommend doing it gently, as well. Again, we’re not scrubbing. We’re not cleaning the tile. Upward, long, gentle but firm strokes from the extremities in towards the heart. That will stimulate the lymphatic system. You’re not doing it to scrub. You’re actually doing it to manually stimulate that lymphatic system, and also help the body release toxins that it’s storing in the fat cells. And just improve that blood and lymphatic circulation.

Other types of manual stimulation like a lymphatic drainage massage, or even other types of massage on the face and the body can give you a similar benefit if you’re worried about sensitivity with dry brushing, or scrubbing. It’s really up to you, what you’re comfortable with, but definitely, the skin on the body can handle more manual and mechanical stimulation than the skin on the face.

Trevor: Perfect. Okay. With you on that one. Okay, great. And, I love the dry skin brushing. I talk about it in my book.

Rachael: Yeah, it’s good.

Trevor: If you want more recommendations on that, you can find that in my book, under the clean body section. Lets more, shift into talking about some DIY stuff. There’s so many myths out there on DIY. A lot of celebrities will come out and say, oh, this is the new best thing. This is what I’m doing, and it causes me to look this beautiful. Right? What would you say are some of the DIY things out there that actually might be doing more harm than good?

Rachael: Yeah. So, DIY, I’m a big fan of it obviously. I make my own products. I make my clients products. I recommend that people make their own products when they can, as well. There’s kitchen DIY, and there’s kind of professional DIY. Now, kitchen DIY is when you’re using ingredients that you can find in your home to make products. There’s nothing wrong with that, if you’re using things that are not too acidic, or too alkaline.

This is where we run into issues. I’m sure your audience has seen Pinterest posts and wellness blog posts about using lemon juice for acne, or lemon juice for dark spots, baking soda as an exfoliation, or for acne. These are two of the biggest ones I see. The problem with that is that, the lemon is acidic. Now, when you ingest it, it produces an alkaline ash, but that does not happen on the surface of the skin. It might definitely cause a temporary brightening effect, but it is an alpha hydroxy acid. It can produce too much exfoliation, too quickly as we talked about before, where we kind of want to avoid that. It might temporarily bleach a dark spot that you might see, but that’s only on the outermost layers. Those dark pigment areas actually start much deeper than that. So, they’ll come to the surface if those cells are still damaged.

I find that overdoing remedies like lemon juice, actually can produce more hyperpigmentation in the long run. And it also can cause photosensitivity, or photo toxicity if someone puts that on, and then goes into the sun, or lives in an area where they’re outside a lot, or they’re exposed to UV radiation a lot. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem, because that can actually cause chemical burns, and permanent damage.

Now, baking soda is on the other side of the spectrum. It’s alkaline. It’s used frequently in DIY deodorants, because of its deodorizing effects. It’s used often times with the no pooh method for washing your hair. But even so, it’s got to be diluted, a lot if you’re going to use it topically. When I see things like, oh, make a paste. No, please don’t, because if you make a paste and you put it on, an alkaline substance is going to burn the skin and cause as much irritation as something acidic. And because the skin already skews on the acidic side, it actually can be more damaging to use something alkaline, than something acidic. So those, backing soda and lemon kind of paste things, I don’t recommend those at all.

I recommend using things like the recipes in your book. The DIY recipes in your book are all very safe, and they’re all things that are found in the house, in the health food store. Stuff like that is fine. It’s gentle. You do have to make it frequently and keep it in the frig if you’re not using it right away. But, if you’re doing that, I recommend people do it kind of like when you’re making your meal planning. Or doing your meal planning, or cooking your meals. It’s essentially cooking. You’re feeding your skin from the outside, instead of your body from the inside. It’s all the same thing. If people are like, oh, I don’t have time to do that. Sure you do. Just do it all at the same time, while you’re doing your other cooking for the week, and it’s fine.

But if you do want something that is more shelf-stable, then it gets a little bit more complicated. That’s because if you’re using something that contains water, like an herbal tea, like a juice, like a hydrosol, anything that contains water or plant matter, it’s going to have to have a preservative if you’re not keeping it in the refrigerator and using it within a few days. Natural preservation, that’s a massive topic. It is possible. It’s not a perfect thing right now. Green chemistry is advancing rapidly because demand for all natural and very mildly preserved products has increased so much. I know you found a great preservation system for your product line, which is hard to do. It requires so much testing both with the formulation itself, and then in terms of stability for shelf life.

Anytime you do have something that you make, and it has water in it, whether it is something that you want to just put in a bottle and use yourself, like a toner. I have so many people who are like, oh, I just want to use rosewater and witch hazel as a toner. Well, guess what? That can go bad if you don’t refrigerate it, or put a preservative in it. There are so many different things you can do. You can add a certain percentage of alcohol. You can get broad spectrum preservatives from online suppliers if you know how to use them. And, I recommend you know how to use them. Don’t just buy them and stick them … That’s dangerous. But also, if you’re making a cream or a lotion.

I unfortunately have seen even some herbal books that recommend mixing hydrosols with some of the oils we talked about before. And then, using essential oils to preserve, or using vitamin E, or using rosemary. It’s not adequate. It’s not adequate because you really need what’s known as a broad spectrum preservative, which protects against gram positive, gram negative bacteria, as well as mold and yeast. That’s not something that essential oils can do. Essential oils themselves are extremely powerful. They absolutely do have antimicrobial properties. However, the concentration that would be required for that action to be effective in that type of product would be too high to be able to be safely applied to the skin. I would not consider that a viable, natural preservation method on its own.

There are certainly natural ingredients that do have some naturally occurring antimicrobial properties, but you still need to add a preservative. You still need to test. I typically formulate, like for a three to six month shelf life, because quite frankly, I think we should be using products that are as fresh as possible. Just like with food, we don’t want to eat food that’s been sitting around on a shelf for months and months and months, and months. It’s going to be most beneficial to be freshest.

I think if you’re going to do a DIY, and you want to use kitchen DIY, like what you write about in your book, by all means do it. Go for it. You can absolutely have incredible skin using remedies like that, on a regular basis. I would so much rather people do that, then go to the drugstore, any day. But if you are someone who doesn’t want to make products every day, or you want to use herbs, and you want to use oils, and you want to make creams and lotions, then I recommend that you learn how to do it properly. I teach a course on that. But it’s not rocket science, because people have been doing it for thousands of years, really. But to do it safely, is so important now. It doesn’t even matter if you’re making them for yourself, or for someone else, because … I have so many people who are like, oh, I’m just making this for myself. I don’t have to add a preservative. It’s like, okay. So, you want an eye infection? You want a rash?

Trevor: That’s a good point. So what happens if people’s skin … If their skincare products start to grow mold, and sometimes you can see these things, like the mold growing on it. But, most of the time you can’t see it. It’s just natural. There’s bacteria all around us, and that’s actually not a bad thing, but when it gets in your products and it starts to overgrow, what are the kinds of things that can happen?

Rachael: Like what you just said. Sometimes you can see if contamination has occurred. Sometimes you can’t. Most of the times you can’t. It would be great if the product just went moldy, and you’re like, oh, okay. It’s done now. The skin itself does have a microbiome that’s suppose to keep out pathogens, but we can’t predict what is going to grow in that container, and how your skin is going to react to it.

The most common things that can happen when people use contaminated products is rashes, contact dermatitis, eye infections are extremely common. This is one of the reasons why with eye products, eye creams, eye makeup, you want to absolutely make sure that you are replacing those very often, and not contaminating them, because the eyes are just so susceptible. That is your vision. You don’t want to mess with your vision. It’s just not worth it. I’ve even heard some stories of blindness coming from exposure to pathogens. We’re not here to fear monger. That’s not what its about. If you don’t want to learn how to do this yourself, then there are beautiful lines, like yours, that people can trust that testing has already been accounted for.

But, a lot of people these days really do want to take all aspects of their health into their own hands. I encourage that as well, just learn how to do it right. Learn what you’re doing. Don’t put your health at risk. It’s just not worth it. I’m always happy to talk this like til the sun don’t shine. It’s my passion. But, I really feel strongly that people should know what they’re doing.

Trevor: That’s great. You mentioned, when you were talking about DIY, it needs to have a natural preservative or be kept in the refrigerator. But I wanted to … I’m sure you would have added on to this that it doesn’t stay good in the refrigerator forever. Even if you put things in the refrigerator, they’ll still go off. So, there’s a time limit on that.

Rachael: Absolutely.

Trevor: They’ll just kind of lengthen the amount of time that it-

Rachael: Well, yeah. Your refrigerator itself can be contaminated. I mean, yeah. You just gotta be careful. So if you’re only relying on refrigeration, use that within three days, and that’s it. Just make yourself a little bit at a time. Use if for a few days, and then make it again. Some people love making products every few days, because it’s fun. You can experiment. You can use different ingredients, different herbal tea mixes, or hydrosols. They smell amazing. They feel amazing. Some people just really love doing that. People who love to cook, typically also love to make skincare. There’s a lot of similarities with the techniques. So yeah, absolutely, you do not want to be relying on the refrigerator for months and months and months and months on end, because that’s going to work.

Trevor: Okay, great. So Rachael, you’ve given us so much information here. I know we could keep talking, going on and on and on, but I know you have a course on DIY skincare. You’ve also got a summit going on. I want you to tell everybody about that.

Rachael: I have the Herbal Skincare Summit, which starts on January 8th, and runs through January 12th. We have 15 plus herbalists, holistic health experts, and skincare experts who are all coming together to teach about various ways herbs can help you have the skin of your dreams, really. We talk about how to use herbs internally. You’re a guest on my summit, and we talked a lot about using specific herbs in your diet, as well as topically, and also foods. When we’re talking about herbs, we’re really talking about plants. So many foods themselves would be considered herbs. We have to talk about the inside, and the outside, just like we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, that really is what the holistic approach is.

Herbalism does not work allopathically. It works on the whole person. It works to support the body, to help itself. It doesn’t work like, oh, see that spot? Let’s put some herbs on it. There are certainly some herbal preparations that can be used for little acute things, but that’s not really how it’s meant. It is a whole body healing system for the entire person, not just for the skin.

We have experts who are talking about oils, like we talked about today. We have essential oils, different ways to create different herbal formulations, considerations on how you want to choose your ingredients. We talk from traditional Chinese medicine perspective, as well as from an Adervedic’s perspective. We even have a couple of speakers who are in there to talk about herbal business and herbal skincare business for those who are interested in taking this to the next level, and offering it in their communities, or online. There’s just a lot of resources.

I really wanted to do this because I have always been passionate about skincare because it affected my life in such a profound way. I had such struggles with acne for so long. When I finally found what worked, it was like I could live. It really was. I found that peace and that relief through the plants. The more I work with plants, the more I formulate, the more herbal conferences I attend, and the more plant people I spend time with, the stronger it is, that the plants are just calling to us, and just collectively. For some people, herbalism is still kind of a new thing, or they don’t understand really how it works. For new things, I really feel strongly that we should be introducing them to people in a way that they can easily integrate it into their regular life.

We all wash our faces, right? We wash our face. We shower, I hope. We wash ourselves. We moisturize. We do this on a regular basis. It’s so much more logical for me to teach you how to add this to something you’re already doing, then say hey, go drink six cups of this herbal tea that tastes terrible, every single day. It’s a matter of compliance really. If you are trying to help someone feel better, and look better, they have to actually want to do what you’re telling them to do. Skincare for so many people is so much more fun than medicine, or tinctures or teas. It’s less work. It’s more fun. Let’s bring it in. Let’s bring it into something people enjoy and let the plants introduce themselves that way, and see what other amazing things happen.

I’m honored that you’re a guest. We have an incredible lineup of very knowledgeable speakers. So yeah, January 8th through 12th is the Herbal Skincare Summit.

Trevor: Okay, great. We’ll have a linkup under your interview, on my website, on the podcast page. And I’ll also include a link to your website, so people can learn more about your courses, and other things you’re up to. I do often times send people, because sometimes people say to me, I just want to make my own moisturizers. Moisturizers are not an easy thing to make, so I send people to you and say, go check out Rachael’s course. She’s going to teach you how to make your own products, and do it safely. If that’s something you’re interested in, definitely checkout Rachael’s stuff.

Rachael, you’re awesome. I want to thank you for being such a great resource for my book. When I was writing it, I would call you up. I would email you, say okay, so I need some help on this DIY thing. So you were very helpful, so I very much appreciate your feedback on those things.

Rachael: Oh, it was an honor that you asked me. It was really a pleasure to work on that with you. As I’ve said before, I love how your book came out. You did a fantastic job.

Trevor: Thank you. Thank you so much. And Rachael, thanks for coming on today. It was great to see you, and good luck with the summit.

Rachael: Thank you so much.

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Rachael Pontillo. Got some great tips on how to improve the quality of your skin, instead of doing practices that might be actually harming your skin, to do things instead that really nourish your skin. You can find out more about Rachael. All you have to do is go to thespadr.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview, and you’ll find all the information about her, the links, and information about the upcoming summit.

While you’re there, on the website, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you go to theskinquiz.com. Get your own customized skin report. It’s free. It only takes a few minutes. You can get information about what your skin is trying to tell you about your health, and what you can do about it. Just go to theskinquiz.com. Also, I invite you to join me on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and join the conversation. I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.

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