Episode 2: Empowered Patient- How I Fought Through a Crazy System & You Can Too
In today's world, it may seem like prescription medicines are the only health solution present to us. But for Haylie Pomroy, you can achieve a healthy body even without having to rely on medications. After having been diagnosed with ITP, an autoimmune disorder that attacks your body's platelets, Haylie went on a journey that led her to be able to bio-hack her body so that she did not even need the drugs. In this episode, she bares it all as she lets us in on her story of rediscovering health, sharing the principles she learned from watching plants, and seeing how her body not only is surviving but also thriving. How could you strengthen your body to weather the storm? What is your path to wellness? How can you free yourself from the weight of physical and emotional burdens? Is it possible to be drug-resistant? Haylie shows you the answers and more as she gives her food philosophies around nutrients to enrich the soil that is our body so we can grow, be healthy, flourish, and have an abundance of energy.
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Empowered Patient- How I Fought Through a Crazy System & You Can Too
Let me tell you a little bit about how I got started in this. I was planning on going to vet school. I have a minor in Biochemistry and I was fascinated by how nutrients and micronutrients were used both in soil and soil sciences, as well as animal feeding and animal husbandry. It was fascinating to me, and then my health took a turn for the worse. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder after hemorrhaging from a tonsillectomy. They weren't sure what was going on. It took a couple of years, lots of Prednisone, some anti-rejection drugs, everything from CellCept to Imuran, 60 milligrams of Prednisone. That was a wild ride before they figured out that I had ITP, which is an autoimmune disorder that attacks your body's platelets. The things that would create clotting factors. It’s pretty important, that’s why I hemorrhaged after what would be a routine surgery.
In that process, one of the things that happened was I had to fight for my own health. I had to figure out how I could get off of the drugs that were wreaking havoc in the body. I'd lost part of the kidney function of my right kidney. I was hospitalized because I was having significant reactions to the drugs that I was on. It wasn't doing a great job in regulating the values in my blood. My labs weren't great even though I was on a ton of medication. All my life, I had what they called systemic eczema. It was like one of those kids that had terrible food allergies. The real thick eyelashes, the allergy shiners, cracked dry lips, the rashes behind the knees and the elbows. It was always difficult as a kid because there were a lot of things I couldn't eat, a lot of things I couldn't consume. Later, in studying the body and the body's mechanisms, how the metabolism works, and how all of the immune system works together, I learned that part of that is what they call Atopic disorder, which was a precursor or a foreshadow to going into full-blown autoimmunity.
I was planning on going to vet school. I had had an alternate position. I was working for a company that had a lot of different natural health therapy integration. It was something on that side that I was maybe flirting with a little bit. I was maybe starting to go, "It's interesting." Being a kid with food allergies, I grew up knowing what millet, quinoa, and kale were because I had to eat clean or I rashed out from head to toe. It wasn't something that I was integrating in my early twenties as a lifestyle. My health took a turn for the worse and I was in crisis. It was at that point that I said, "I've got to do something different. I've got to figure this out.” I've got to be able to biohack my body and see if I can either get these drugs to be wildly effective in my body or figure out how to heal my body so that I didn't even need the drugs.
That sent me on this crazy journey to understand if I could take some of the principles that I was watching plants, crops and herbs grow incredibly at a healthier and better rate because they were infusing the soil with nutrients. If I couldn't infuse the soil in my own body with the right nutrients that could change how maybe I could become drug-resistant. I could become bug resistant. I could become hailstorm resistant. How could I strengthen my own body so that I could weather the storm? That sent me on this journey. It was a journey that I have no intention of getting off of. In this journey, I've had the opportunity to meet amazing and incredible people. People like me that are trying to figure out how can they find their path to wellness? How can they free themselves from feeling like their physical, emotional, and the body that they carry around all day long is one that's thriving and not just surviving?
To fast forward a little bit, I was able to biohack my body. I was able to come off of all of the medications that I had been on. I have beautiful platelets. In that process, I also changed my life's work. I became a nutritionist. I became a natural health practitioner, specializing, incorporating and integrating all kinds of therapies. Probably the one thing that I was the proudest of is I became a diehard advocate for individuals going through health struggles. That's how my clinic began. I didn't continue going to vet school. I am not seeing dogs and cats, horses and pigs, sheep and snakes in my clinical office, although I have many of those as part of my family. In my clinic, I see real people, whether those people are individuals that are top athletes looking to seek incredible performance or individuals like myself who are hoping that there's some way that you can turn your health around.
I have a lot of food philosophies around using those nutrients to enrich the soil that's your body so that you can weather the storm, but you can also grow, be healthy, and flourish so that you can have this abundance of energy. I always look at it as a bounty to give back. It's cool that we're coming right into this show. I've got a guest here that is a client that I said, “If you’ve got questions for me outside of the office, I want you to come on in and make sure that you ask it with all these people here that maybe are struggling with the same thing because that's what I found.” I found that I wasn't the only person out there that had their body completely trashed by the only thing that I thought was the option for me which was a ton of medication.
I didn't understand that I had the ability to heal my body. I have some clients that our goal is always to go as natural as possible, as helpful as possible. Sometimes I have clients that have to be on a medication. It's a lifesaving medication. How can we keep that body healthy through that process? How can we put power on the plate? How can we also create these crazy, amazing protocols for progress so that you're not being seen by a doctor or a practitioner, but you are the captain of your team and you're creating this health and wellness journey?
We're going to do a couple of fun things. I want to talk a lot about what happens in my clinic because I'm your nutritionist now. I've also had 25-plus years now of clinical experience working with some of the top doctors in the world, and some of the top practitioners in the world. If you have questions, we're going to have an opportunity in the second half of this show. Maybe you have already checked me out, it's HayliePomroy.com. On the website, you can get free newsletters. I've got incredible recipes. There is a whole educational section. We teach webcasts. It's all about educating yourself, being in awe of your body, and finding out how you can have the health that you deserve, should have and can have. I believe in you and I know you can do it. If I can, you can. When you have questions, you can always go to our Facebook page. We have a private Facebook page too where it's a little more discreet.
Some of our questions are candid. In the clinic, I always say that the chair that my clients sit-in is the chair that at that moment in that given time, the whole world revolves around them, around finding solutions, moments around maybe being cathartic, moments where we maybe celebrate some successes together, but about getting the help that you need. I get asked a lot what's unique about what happens in the practice, and what's unique about my books. First and foremost, I believe that anything is possible. As long as we're still breathing, our bodies have an amazing and incredible ability to regenerate, heal, pick life and vitality over degeneration. Regeneration is possible. The other thing is if I don't know the answers, I love the journey. We go into these great, amazing journeys with clients where it's all about figuring out what's going on, why, how, and what resources we can get.
I want to talk about creating a health wish list. It's important. When I was in that crazy insane space, I had a doctor asked me, “Why are you hell-bent on getting off of these drugs?” I said, “It's not about getting off of the drugs. I take them ten times every day if they made me feel good. I feel awful. I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I have a rash. I'm losing my kidney function.” I remember having eighteen bruises on my right leg because of ITP. You have a tendency to bruise easily. My gums bled, my hair was falling out. I said, “It's not that I'm hell-bent on getting off of these meds. I am hell-bent on feeling amazing and nobody's going to stop me.”
When my clients come through the door and I want you to start thinking about this, what is your health wish list? I want you to dream big. Don't take anything off the table. Do you want to run faster, jump higher, sleep deeper and love deeper? Do you want to know how to make something super easy in your kitchen? Whatever your health wish list is, it’s what we're going to talk about. I'm going to encourage you to stake your claim. Let me know what is it that you want for your health? The other thing is no matter who you see as a practitioner whether it's a nutritionist, a dietician, an internal medicine doctor, the top neurologist in the world, you want to walk in and walk out.
You want to walk in with a desire for a protocol for progress and walk out the door with that. When I was going through that and the doctors were asking me, “We're going to taper you down on Prednisone. We're going to burst you up again. We're going to layer you with CellCept because you're not tolerating Imuran.” The list was so large and I would say, “What is it going to take for me to get off of those?” I'll never forget when I was 21 years old and he said, “You're never getting off of these. We've got to figure out how long you can tolerate them, and hope that there's a new drug that comes along in time for when you stop tolerating them.”
I said, “That's insane and that's crazy. I'm going to ask you again.” This is the question that I always tell my clients to ask when they go in, “What is it going to take for me not to be considered diabetic again? What is it going to take for me to be able to lose weight, to be able to burn fat for fuel, to be able to take food and turn it into energy? What is it going to take? How are we going to measure the progress?” It's not if it's going to happen. It’s that it’s going to happen and what it’s going to take to make it happen.
The other thing is as you're enjoying this, as you're participating with us on HayliePomroy.com, as you're in our Facebook group, know that it's all okay if and only if it promotes real change. Whatever your health philosophy, whether you believe in Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese medicine, Daoism, five elements, internal medicine, pharmaceutical, the more the better, the many the merry, whatever it is that you believe in philosophically, I'm going to always ask you one thing. Is it promoting real change that's going to make your health wish list a checklist?
I want you to be bold and stake your claim. I have a client here that's got some things that he's going to ask us about and we're excited about that. Our whole world is about bringing together real people. That means people that travel, struggle, have victories, and have stressors. Real people that incorporate real food or whole products to evoke real change. Make sure if you have questions, I want to know what's on your health wish list and let's talk about some ideas for a protocol for progress for you. I'm going to give you some ideas that you can start today and not tomorrow. They are not theory. If you've read all my books, they are not fluffy. They are science-based. They are not about some theory that someone thinks that could possibly happen. I am results-oriented. We're going to make sure that we have tips for things that you can do today whether they are ways to thin it in a minute. We have a whole series on that. We have a Dear Dr. Sanders Letter, how to prepare for your next office visit. We have some great articles on labs, how to look at that and what does that mean in your body. We have some of the most helpful and delicious recipes in the world on our site.
We're going to take a couple of questions here and don't forget to go to HayliePomroy.com. Type in maybe chicken or beef, and look at all the incredible recipes. Don't forget desserts and pleasure in my philosophy can be the reason why you lose weight. Put power on your plate. Before I take my first question, I want to leave you with this. If you're considering doing a diet, I want you to ask yourself, what does that mean? For me, it means did I eat today? Did I eat today to evoke real change to make your health wish list a health checklist? I have been talking and I've had one of my clients, Steve, here. Steve, thank you for coming in.
It's great to be here.
He's been listening to me talk about the power that you can put on your plate and that anything is possible. Steve, do you have any questions for me?
I do, Haylie. When I come and see you, you are full of energy all the time. In my line of work, I travel incessantly and I'm constantly adjusting the time changes and late-night business dinners. How do you do it? How do you keep the energy that you have?
I have a ton of blog posts about travel on HayliePomroy.com. There are two things that I always do. I always eat within 30 minutes of waking. No matter where I'm at, I go to that time zone and I eat within 30 minutes of waking. Like you, I take my cleanse shake with me all the time. Whether I bring packets of oatmeal. I'll use an immune boost or echinacea tea as the liquid to make my oatmeal. I bring raw nuts and seeds. No matter what, I eat within 30 minutes of waking. If I got into something bad, I have clients that maybe have a food hangover, alcohol hangover, ham hangover, whatever happened the night before is gone when you wake up in the morning and you start eating within 30 minutes of waking.
The other one and it sounds basic is I hydrate. It is easy to get dehydrated when you travel. Remember that dilution is the solution to pollution. What I mean by that is if you can wash away or continue to keep yourself hydrated, your body is going to release a lot of what you're exposed to when you travel. I always make sure that I have food available to me the second I get home. Whether it's something that I've pre-packaged myself. I've made the chili. I've made the Warrior soup. I use one of the services to have groceries delivered to make sure that they get there. I order it right when I get to the airport so that I have fresh food because one of the things happens is you're exhausted. You get off the plane, maybe you're delayed. Maybe you haven't had enough food. You have your crash stashes things like the bars, the shake, the jerky. When you walk in that door, maybe there are some fresh berries.
When you travel, you're hydrated and you've kept your blood sugar stabilized because you've had your breakfast within 30 minutes of waking, I'm sitting here looking at you going, “Are you doing all these things?” If your adrenals are a little bit stressed, fruit can help calm the adrenals and get you settled back into the home. When I walk in the door, I try to have mangoes, berries, if I have frozen black cherries or things that are going to say, “You're back home.” Time travel or traveling on a plane, especially, there are stressors that we're not even aware of like radiation exposure and all these studies and things like that. I don't know that our bodies are meant to be going 500 and 800 miles per hour. When you get home, you've got to nestle back into “home” or maybe the hotel. I'm looking at you and I'm wondering if you're doing many of those things, but if you want to know how I have the energy that I have. I always eat within 30 minutes of waking. I bring a crash stash. I stay hydrated and I come home to a bounty full of fruit.
That’s simple. I have no excuses if I can't do that. I'm happy to report that I had my annual physical and my labs are better than ever. Thank you. I've been seeing you for the last few months and it's awesome. There was one thing however. The LDL or bad cholesterol was threatening the danger zone. I wasn't quite there. He said, “You might think about going on statins.” I'm not excited about that. I don't want to take any undue risks, but is there a way I can alter my diet to mitigate that?
There are also a couple of things to think about. Everybody's talking about cholesterol medications, statins specifically, whether it's Lipitor or a multifaceted one like Crestor, the old one like Gemfibrozil. They're talking a lot about, “Maybe we're overprescribing those. Maybe they don't have the cardiovascular benefit that everybody was hoping that they were this miracle drug that would prevent plaque and blockage in the arteries.” The research is leaning a lot more towards inflammation. Everybody reading out there might not know, but you and I worked a lot on inflammation and inflammation pathways. Our body takes the cholesterol molecule and it metabolizes that through a pathway, a group of enzymes called Cytochrome P450. It takes that cholesterol molecule and it manufactures all of your anti-inflammatory and pro-inflammatory hormones out of it.
If you're researching or listening to any of the news and media about statin drugs, everybody is talking about inflammation and inflammation pathways. You know that we want to look at different things. When we look at the LDL starting to creep up, we want to look at a couple of things. One, we want to look at how are we processing things through that metabolic pathway of those enzymes? How are you breaking down the cholesterol molecule? There are people that eat eggs and shrimp every day that doesn't have elevated LDL. There are people that eat these crazy, terrible low-fat diets that have elevated LDL. You can consume cholesterol, but your body manufactures it too because it's the precursor for all those hormones.
Steve, why is your body manufacturing a little bit of extra LDL? How can we get your body to take that goldmine of LDL and manufacture it into all of the heart-healthy hormones? From a preventative perspective, you and I, we’re going to be looking at another lab called a CRP or Cardiovascular-specific Reactive Protein. That's going to let us see if you're creating the enzyme that is inflammatory that creates plaque. You can have tons of cholesterol circulating in the blood and not create any plaque. You can also have low cholesterol. We've seen individuals as low as 145. They want to keep you under 200, but under 172, 170 you start to have memory and cognition issues. We've seen people as low as 145 have blocked arteries. It's not that you're circulating cholesterol. It's are you creating the inflammatory enzymes that create the cholesterol to stick to the walls? We’re going to look at that, but from a food perspective, we're going to be focusing on activating those enzymes so we can take the cholesterol and turn it into these amazing feel-good hormones. How are we going to do that? I'm always saying that vegetables are unlimited. This time we're going to say, “Double the dose of vegetables are mandatory.”
How about the red wine?
If you're going to add a layer of that in, vegetables are going to be quadrupled. What I want you to do is I want you to oscillate between raw and cooked vegetables. Some people do a meatless Monday. I want you to do a raw veggie Saturday or Sunday. Pick one day a week where you're doing raw vegetables five times a day, then I want you to pick one day a week where you do absolutely no raw food and only cooked vegetables. One of the things that happen when you do raw vegetables is they're difficult to break down. They're hard for the body. The moment you start chewing to when they hit the stomach, to when the body starts to absorb those micronutrients, you're absorbing a lot of phytonutrients that are in the raw vegetables that go away when they're cooked, but that is created. We're going to call it positive peer pressure or positive stress response in the body that your body has to create a unique grouping of enzymes in order to deal with that many raw vegetables in one sitting.
We're going to stimulate this, then we're going to do the cooked vegetables. We do veggie soup when you're sick. When you have a fever, you do a chicken soup. We're going to do a whole day with cooked vegetables because they deliver micronutrients easily to the body. We're going to use these pumping mechanisms to stimulate that Cytochrome P450, metabolic pathway so that you can take your cholesterol. LDL is low down dirty lipoprotein because it has a low density. When it has a low density, think about the blood flushing through the veins. If it's a low density, it bobs around and can bind to the artery walls easier. If it's a high density, it pushes through with the flow of the blood. We want those low-density lipoproteins to be broken down into the healthy hormones. I want you to cycle. I want to check your CRP. We want to make sure that you're not in a pro-inflammatory state. That's much more important to me than an elevated or mildly elevated total cholesterol.
We want to make sure that we've got low inflammation in the body and then we're going to do that osculation between a day a week of cooked vegetables, and a day a week of raw vegetables. Make sure on the website, you look at the Warrior soup or The-Burn soup. Go in and punch in on HayliePomroy.com soups, you’ll see we have many incredible recipes. When you make them, make them double batched, triple batched. That way you can freeze them. When you're traveling and you come home, that can be your cooked soup day or your cooked veggie day, and we can play with that. Does that sound like some practical things?
Thank you, Haylie.
Thanks, Steve. We are having way too much fun over here. We have Dana from Orange County, California.
Haylie, I'm excited I got through.
I'm excited to talk to you. How can we help you?
I have a family history of thyroid all the way back to my mother's side. She had radioactive iodine when she was younger before she had kids. All three of the sisters all have thyroid issues. I had a thyroid nodule that they had biopsied. Everything was fine with that. I also had Hashimoto's but the doctor says, “You're fine. You don't need to do anything. See you in a year.”
To get everybody up to speed, Hashimoto's Thyroiditis is what it's called and we do see it a lot. It is considered an autoimmune disorder. Usually, there are two variations on the theme. It's not necessarily an issue that the thyroid doesn't produce what we normally hear as hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism. Hyper, the thyroid produces too much or hypo, the thyroid doesn't produce enough. If the doctor diagnoses with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, what we're seeing usually is either an antibody or peroxidase. There are two labs minimally that we typically have our clients run with this. The Anti-Thyroid Antibody or ATA and anti-thyroid peroxidase. Sometimes we see people with one or both positive and are diagnosed with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. The other thing that we want to look at is all of the other autoimmune markers.
In the Fast Metabolism Food Rx book, there's a whole section on autoimmunity. You can also go to the website and I've got a list of additional labs to run like sedimentation rates, ANA titers, eosinophils. They typically can also be an allergy piece, but it's unfortunate because oftentimes a lot of physicians feel like Hashimoto's is a disorder of the thyroid. They say, “Maybe your TSH levels, your thyroid-stimulating hormone is normal.” It is not even a thyroid hormone, it’s the pituitary hormone. Maybe your T4, which is the hormone that the thyroid produces through the liver pathways and converts it into T3, which is the bioactive hormone. Maybe those are normal with individuals that have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. A lot of doctors aren't sure what to do with the autoimmune disorder that it is.
There are some amazing and great things that you can do. In the Food Rx, there are specific foods that are good to put power on your plate from an autoimmune perspective. Individuals with autoimmunity have a sensitivity to the top allergens. We normally see individuals have some sensitivity to wheat and gluten. It's not because that's trendy. It's because it's a glycoprotein, which mimics the carriers in our own blood with our own DNA. If you're having an autoimmune response, your own immune system is reacting negatively to your own cell. Having that similarity in the food source, we see that people are sensitive to that. Most of the common allergens are dairy, corn, and wheat. Those are all things that we have found that if you can eliminate that can be helpful.
On the website, we have a Dear Dr. Sanders Letter. You might want to print that out. It's also in the Food RX book, but it helps you prepare for your next doctor's visit which is, “I have this issue, I'd like these labs run.” We take you through that process, but also what are they creating for your protocol for progress. You need to chart this yourself. Make a spreadsheet, write it down, go in every visit because they see tons and tons of clients. I always say, “Tell them something meaningful about yourself either a funny joke or something that's going to make them maybe snap out of the monotony of their day and know that you're this special patient. If you've had a history of cold nodules, it's important that we know what's normal in your chemistry and what's off in your chemistry.
Get that list of labs to have run sedimentation rates, ANA titers, T4, T3, reverse T3, TSH, sex hormone-binding globulin is important with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, then all of the sex hormones, estrogens, fractionated, progesterone, testosterone free and total as well as vitamin-D levels. Those are all important to check. You can say, “I'm going to go back.” Ask the doctor to run all these, but then what do I do? What we want to do is I always look at things as a scientist. What is normal first so we can take those off the table. Normal in labs doesn't mean health. It means that the body can be in a state of dysfunction to create normalcy in that chemistry. What are those values? Which ones are the red flags are being flagged? It’s looking at what we can do to balance and stabilize those.
We use a natural bioflavonoid. We have a product called metabolism energy. It has a lot of quercetin in it. We also have a natural product in metabolism histamine which has a lot of not only bioflavonoids, but helps your body create its own histamine blockers, balanced eosinophils. I want you to go onto the website, look at what are the ingredients that are in it, google those ingredients and look at what mechanisms that they help the body, and see if you're having any symptoms associated with that. Are you having cracked heels, thinning in the eyebrows especially out towards the corner of the eye? Do your hair start to break off either in the crown or around the sides of the face?
I have all those.
When you have a physician that doesn’t make you feel that he is taking and pulling you over the hurdle that you're having. Maybe he's even an adequate partner, but he's not going to drag you over the threshold or cross the chasm. Go in with some good research, NIH, CDC research, any Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Harvard. There are good articles on Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. We have some amazing blog posts on articles that I've written that can help if you bring in and do research sometimes for the physician. You have to remember that your health has to be most important to you and if you need to bring everybody along, I'm sorry that that's the case but that's sometimes the way it is. With Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, it's not something to be poo-pooed. It's something that you want to make sure that you are creating a standard of what your body is saying from a chemistry perspective, that you're checking that in the beginning.
Typically, with my clients, we do every 8 to 12 weeks. As I've always told you, I'm results-oriented. We're evoking a change in the body's chemistry. Go to our website HayliePomroy.com and there's a health wish list. On the health wish list, there's a questionnaire that lists all of your symptoms. There are traditional symptoms with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, but there might be some things that you're not thinking of. For example, waking not feeling rested, not being able to obtain quick and deep sleep. Any areas of inflammation whether it's in the hands, feet or elbows can correlate with that autoimmune aspect of it.
Let's get good labs run. Let's make a clear list of our symptoms and then let's look at the foods in the Food RX. I want you to think about modifying for autoimmune issues, not modifying for thyroid issues with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. Many people think that it's a disorder of the thyroid, but it's related to how your body's immune system is responding to you. We want it to be in love with you, not in combat with you. Thanks, Dana.
Thank you.
It has been awesome sitting here talking with you, Steve and Dana. That was amazing. I want to make sure that you guys have all the access to the things that I've recommended to both Steve and Dana. They're all available on my website at HayliePomroy.com. They are in the membership section though. You can still get incredible great recipes and free newsletters, but for those health wish list, the charts, the Dear Dr. Sanders Letters, those are all in the membership section of our website. You can use the code, JOINMEFREE, and you can have 30 days of our membership for free. Make sure that you are filling out all those questionnaires for yourself. You're taking in those requests to your doctors. You're creating protocols for progress and let's keep this science geek going. We have another Haylie from Los Angeles. How can I help you?
Haylie, thank you. I have a question about some of these current diets that a lot of people are talking about like keto or eating paleo. Are there any of them that you highly recommend or one that you recommend more than the other? I want to know what you think about some of these trendy diets that a lot of people are talking about and that a lot of health foods seem to be targeting.
The diet industry is a big business. I've been in clinical practice for many years. I've seen every diet fad come and go and be recirculated. I've had about every book across my desk from to your point keto or the DASH diet or five of these and don’t eat that. I have written myself five nutrition books with the concept of diet being, “Did I eat today?” To achieve whatever it is, particularly in your health. The thing that I always say is first define what it is that you're wanting from a food protocol. Secondly, if it's not something that you would do to your dog or your cat or someone that you love, don't do it to yourself nutritionally. What I mean by that is if you get up in the morning and you walk out the door and you have a beloved pet and you don't feed them for hours and hours, that would be deemed as cruel. It would also be bad for the dog’s psyche, for their digestion, and for their coat. It's bad for the human population in my opinion.
I'm not a big believer in fasting unless it's for medical, spiritual or religious reasons. When you incorporate that intention behind those, the body knows that it's not a stressful famine experience. Being in the agriculture and the animal science industry, we used the production of ketones in the dairy industry to hyper produce milk production. There are many organizations that have come out strongly against that being cruelty to the animal issue. When keto got popular, I was super frustrated that I was seeing that the diet industry was taking advantage of people struggling with their health.
When you do something to alter the metabolic pathways like in keto diet, you can lose weight. The issue is that it doesn't heal the metabolism. It doesn't even begin to address why it's become difficult to lose weight, why the body doesn't have energy, and why the body doesn't burn fat for fuel. That breaks my heart. With the popularity of CrossFit, it was an interesting marriage that we saw with this particular type of exercise and incorporating a particular type of food style and the concept of going back to paleolithic times or cavemen eating. There's been a lot of different verbiage around it. My trepidation about that is making sure that we don't alleviate any particular foods in our diet that are considered whole foods, that we look to see if you're getting and achieving what you want from it.
I've had individuals that have had some negative response from it and individuals that seem to love and flourish on it. For me, I always say that it's important to define what it is that you want out of any food program, and then make sure that you're getting that. Above weight loss, we have to have health gain. That’s critical in any of those. Every fad diets probably come across my desk and some of them are heartbreaking. Fasting and keto for me as a practitioner dealing with individuals that have significant health issues that have slow metabolisms, that have caused metabolic dysfunction in their body. To me it's abusive and it's preying on individuals that are desperate for a change in their lives.
There are all kinds of ways that you can play with food and put power on your plate. The biggest thing is to turn towards food to get the health that you desire. When it's classified as a fad diet, it's usually because it will come and it will go and then if you wait a couple more years, it will cycle back in. You want to make sure that you're looking at your metabolism. You want to make sure that you're using real food to evoke real change because after all, we're all real people in human beings that deserve like our beloved pets and animals to have food, nourishment, and enjoyment when we put power on our plate. Haylie, thank you. That's a great question.
Thank you.
Nothing is off the table. We can talk about anything as it pertains to you and your health. I want you to know that there are all kinds of ways that you can engage with myself and my team at HayliePomroy.com. We have our membership. Don't forget the JOINMEFREE code will get you 30 days of free membership. We have a free newsletter. You want to make sure that you get that because I send delicious and incredible recipes. I’m always science geeking out on those. Wherever you're at, however you feel that you're ready for the support, we have that for you. Make sure you check out the website at HayliePomroy.com. It looks like we have Sarah from New York. Sarah, are you there?
I'm here. Thank you, Haylie. It's an honor to speak with you.
Thank you, Sarah. How can I help you? How can we get power on that plate? What can I do to see if we can kick around some great ideas for your health together?
I suffer from the afternoon exhaustion like 2:00, 3:00. I have no more energy. I'd love some suggestions. I drink a ton of water. I need a little guidance in that area.
There are a couple of things that I look at when a person tells me that they're fatigued in the afternoon. It can depend a little bit if it's around food or without food. There are three things that we look at. One, we look at dysglycemia or making sure that the blood sugar levels stay stable throughout the day. In an individual that is not doing a particular nutrition plan like the Fast Metabolism Diet, or The Burn or something like that, but in general eating good health. Sometimes we need to make sure that we get fruit with your meals so that it can help keep your blood sugar stable post consuming your lunch.
If you're a person that gets tired after you eat. If you're telling me, “Haylie, I have lunch and about 1.5 hours, I need to take a nap,” we need to look at digestive enzymes. We have this test. It's like a home diagnostic test that you can do. It's called the digestive reserve test or the lemon challenge test. You can go to the website. It's easy to do. You need pH strips and a lemon. Try the lemon and test your pH of the saliva and see how long it takes you to stabilize. If it takes a long time, the body doesn't have a good digestive reserve and I've got a list of great foods that would support that. That's a great way for us to know if it's digestive-based. After lunch specifically, the body has a tendency to have a little bit of a harder time digesting.
If it's not food-based and it's not blood sugar-based, then we want to look at adrenal reserves or what we call adaptogenic hormones. In the afternoon, what happens is the body has these two parts of the nervous system. One is called parasympathetic tones and one is called sympathetic tones. The best way that I remember or can keep these straight is sympathetic tones are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, while the parasympathetic tones are deep restorative sleep. I can write 40 volumes of book on what the nervous system does, but this is a way that I isolate that out.
In different aspects of medicine like in Chinese medicine, they call the afternoon, 3:00, 4:00, the point of reflection. When you're doing workshops on how to get work done in a day, they'll talk about that point in the day where you say, “What did I get done now? How much time do I have left at work? What can I get done before the end of the day?” Part of that is a natural process in the nervous system where the body starts to come into more of the rest and restoration hormones naturally. When it's overwhelming and it doesn't feel like in balance, you're not able to sustain energy through that transition, it means that we need to nurture the adaptogenic or adrenal hormones more effectively.
We have a specific program for adrenal and stress. I don't want to say stress reduction because unfortunately, I don't have a magic wand that can change the particular environment that maybe is creating some stress or exhaustion or physical stress. What I can do is make your body stronger and more resilient so that you’re stress-resistant. In the Food RX book, we have an adrenal protocol. We have supplements that are specific for balancing that. I don't like products that are stimulant. I don't like things that are going to drive the body harder. What I want to do is I want to make you stronger so that you can sustain energy throughout the day. If you go to the website, there is a booklet on the adrenal reserve that we have.
There's a whole food protocol and specific foods on the Fast Metabolism Diet. We have phase one of the Fast Metabolism Diet, which the first part of the week is adrenal restorative. We have a program that's called Phase 1 Intensive, which is a week-long boot camp for regenerating and restoring the adrenals. The first thing that I would do is make sure that it's usually 1 of those 3 things. It's typically either the digestive reserves aren't adequate enough. You can do the lemon challenge test. It's a simple at-home thing and you can go, “Haylie, my digestive reserves are lacking.” I will give you a sheet of foods to make sure that those are nurtured. You recheck your digestive reserve test and you go, “It's good.” You're also seeing that your energy level is better.
The other thing is looking at maybe adding fruit at lunch and seeing if that helps you stabilize your blood sugar in that afternoon. The third thing is seeing if your adaptogenic or adrenal hormones need more nurturing. There are a couple of at-home things that people do. Maybe you have your doctor do this when you go to the office, ask the nurse and say, “I'd like to do this little test for my adaptogenic hormones. I'd like you to take my blood pressure laying down on the table and then I'd like to sit up and have you take my blood pressure.” If the spread is more than fifteen points, your body is having a hard time adapting to the shift in the nervous system. As soon as we lay prone, our body naturally produces hormones that are for rest and restoration. As soon as we stand up, our body is producing hormones that are for excitation and movement. Those are some cool things that we can find out what specifically to do for your body.
This is awesome. I'm going to try everything. I'm going to do the lemon test.
You will be in awe. Make that wish list and dream big. Anytime your body says, “I want an abundance of energy from 2:00 to 4:00 every day.” You should have that and what we want to do is say, “What is that that your body is saying?” Do a little bit of self-diagnostic, a little bit of exploration, being in awe and then nurture. Get the body built up so that it has the energy to do whatever the heck you want to do at 4:00.
I can't thank you enough for your time and I'm going to tackle this.
Thanks, Sarah.
Thanks, Haylie.
We're having an awesome time. This is like being in the clinic all day long. I love the questions. Remember to go to HayliePomroy.com, get your free newsletter, make sure that you're looking at all of our incredibly delicious recipes, and become a member. You can do that for 30 days for free. Do join me free all of these worksheets that I'm talking about are self-exploration, self-diagnostic things that you can do to learn more about what's going on in your body, as well as the incredible eCookbooks that are specific for adrenal repair, some great travel tips, things about Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, all goodies are there in your member dashboard. It's going to be one of the best things that you do for your health and wellness. We're going to take one final question. Barbara is joining us from Florida.
Haylie, it’s good to talk to you.
Barbara, how can we help you?
I have a question regarding digestion and I have an autoimmune disease called Sjogren's, which creates a lot of issues with dry mouth and not able to digest my foods. I was wondering if you can help me with ways I can hydrate myself.
For our audience out there, Sjogren's is classified in the autoimmune world. It has a tendency to affect the mucosal lining of the body, things like the moistness of the eye and the moistness in the mouth. To your point, the mucosal lining sometimes in the lungs but definitely in the GI tract. Being autoimmune, one of the things that we want to look at is lowering your body's reactivity to its own mucosal linings or immune system. We had another autoimmune question and there are some great foods we have in Food Rx. That book specifically has a whole chapter on autoimmunity. With Sjogren's specifically, it's hard to focus on hydration when we're looking at just putting liquids or water into the body.
The way with Sjogren's when we look at hydration is how do we get the water or the fluids that we put into the body to migrate into the mucosal linings or into the linings of the tissue? A couple of little tricks that we do, one is making sure that your blood values stay as least reactive as possible. I'm not sure if you are regularly checking your sedimentation rates, your inflammatory, your C-reactive proteins. With Sjogren’s specifically, we look at two additional labs. We look at CK or Creatine Kinase as well as a lab that's called aldolase. My goal is to drive those numbers into the most normal range as possible with Sjogren’s. We do that by working with the anti-inflammatory protocol that we have on our website at HayliePomroy.com. You can look that up. It's in the member section, as well as specifically the autoimmunity protocol. I'd like you to look at that which is also there on the website.
From a general perspective, a couple of things that you can do at home from a digestive perspective is with Sjogren's I find that a lot of people do better with cooked vegetables as opposed to raw vegetables. Anything that's heat-related can be beneficial to the digestion. I have individuals that have malabsorption sometimes with Sjogren’s. Sometimes I have them do a hot water bottle over their tummy after they eat to help increase blood flow. Things like infrared saunas can help to increase blood flow into the mucosal lining in an individual with Sjogren’s. Sometimes a hot bath like deep epsom salt baths or anything warm with digestion. Warming foods can be good.
Sometimes they do well with spicy foods but be aware. With autoimmunity, if you do a lot of spicy foods, sometimes that can promote inflammation if you're already in an inflammation cycle, if you're not running labs all the time. In labs, we'd look at C-reactive protein from an inflammatory perspective, we'd also look at homocysteine levels. These are all things that you can walk into the doctor's office and ask your doctor for and we have that list. That's the Dear Dr. Sanders Letter. We say, “Dear Dr. Sanders,” whatever you doctor’s name is, “I've been diagnosed with Sjogren's. Because of that, I'm noticing I'm having a difficult time staying hydrated and I'm having a difficult time with my digestion. I would like you to please run,” you list your labs and why. It helps the doctor and together as a team, you’ll have a clear picture or protocol.
If you are working well and the inflammation is down, then the food program that would be good is we have a program that's called the H-Burn because it's high in the essential fatty acids, the lipids. Those are foods like avocado, raw nuts and seeds. Sometimes with an autoimmune disorder, it's good to soak your nuts and seeds before you eat them. I also have an autoimmune disorder and what I do is I'll take almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and I will put them in water overnight, I'll drain it and then it's much easier for me to digest and utilize those lipids and those fatty acids. Those fatty acids that are naturally occurring in those foods will help moisten naturally the mucosal lining of the eyes, the digestive tract, the mouth, and the nose.
Because fatty acids sometimes are hard to digest, it's a great trick to get those in more efficiently. I want you to look at a lot of our soups and broths. I want you checking your inflammatory factors regularly, charting those, and letting your doctor know that you've now decided that we're going to do everything that we need to do to get those as low as possible. I want you to look at the H-Burn for the lipids, but I want you soaking your nuts because you have an extra difficult time digesting them. I want you to look at the anti-inflammatory protocols that we have available.
Thank you.
Does that give you some options there?
Yes, that's helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Barbara and best of luck.
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In today's world, it may seem like prescription medicines are the only health solution present to us. But for Haylie Pomroy, you can achieve a healthy body even without having to rely on medications. After having been diagnosed with ITP, an autoimmune disorder that attacks your body's platelets, Haylie went on a journey that led her to be able to bio-hack her body so that she did not even need the drugs. In this episode, she bares it all as she lets us in on her story of rediscovering health, sharing the principles she learned from watching plants, and seeing how her body not only is surviving but also thriving. How could you strengthen your body to weather the storm? What is your path to wellness? How can you free yourself from the weight of physical and emotional burdens? Is it possible to be drug-resistant? Haylie shows you the answers and more as she gives her food philosophies around nutrients to enrich the soil that is our body so we can grow, be healthy, flourish, and have an abundance of energy.
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Listen to the Podcast here
Empowered Patient- How I Fought Through a Crazy System & You Can Too
Let me tell you a little bit about how I got started in this. I was planning on going to vet school. I have a minor in Biochemistry and I was fascinated by how nutrients and micronutrients were used both in soil and soil sciences, as well as animal feeding and animal husbandry. It was fascinating to me, and then my health took a turn for the worse. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder after hemorrhaging from a tonsillectomy. They weren't sure what was going on. It took a couple of years, lots of Prednisone, some anti-rejection drugs, everything from CellCept to Imuran, 60 milligrams of Prednisone. That was a wild ride before they figured out that I had ITP, which is an autoimmune disorder that attacks your body's platelets. The things that would create clotting factors. It’s pretty important, that’s why I hemorrhaged after what would be a routine surgery.
In that process, one of the things that happened was I had to fight for my own health. I had to figure out how I could get off of the drugs that were wreaking havoc in the body. I'd lost part of the kidney function of my right kidney. I was hospitalized because I was having significant reactions to the drugs that I was on. It wasn't doing a great job in regulating the values in my blood. My labs weren't great even though I was on a ton of medication. All my life, I had what they called systemic eczema. It was like one of those kids that had terrible food allergies. The real thick eyelashes, the allergy shiners, cracked dry lips, the rashes behind the knees and the elbows. It was always difficult as a kid because there were a lot of things I couldn't eat, a lot of things I couldn't consume. Later, in studying the body and the body's mechanisms, how the metabolism works, and how all of the immune system works together, I learned that part of that is what they call Atopic disorder, which was a precursor or a foreshadow to going into full-blown autoimmunity.
I was planning on going to vet school. I had had an alternate position. I was working for a company that had a lot of different natural health therapy integration. It was something on that side that I was maybe flirting with a little bit. I was maybe starting to go, "It's interesting." Being a kid with food allergies, I grew up knowing what millet, quinoa, and kale were because I had to eat clean or I rashed out from head to toe. It wasn't something that I was integrating in my early twenties as a lifestyle. My health took a turn for the worse and I was in crisis. It was at that point that I said, "I've got to do something different. I've got to figure this out.” I've got to be able to biohack my body and see if I can either get these drugs to be wildly effective in my body or figure out how to heal my body so that I didn't even need the drugs.
That sent me on this crazy journey to understand if I could take some of the principles that I was watching plants, crops and herbs grow incredibly at a healthier and better rate because they were infusing the soil with nutrients. If I couldn't infuse the soil in my own body with the right nutrients that could change how maybe I could become drug-resistant. I could become bug resistant. I could become hailstorm resistant. How could I strengthen my own body so that I could weather the storm? That sent me on this journey. It was a journey that I have no intention of getting off of. In this journey, I've had the opportunity to meet amazing and incredible people. People like me that are trying to figure out how can they find their path to wellness? How can they free themselves from feeling like their physical, emotional, and the body that they carry around all day long is one that's thriving and not just surviving?
To fast forward a little bit, I was able to biohack my body. I was able to come off of all of the medications that I had been on. I have beautiful platelets. In that process, I also changed my life's work. I became a nutritionist. I became a natural health practitioner, specializing, incorporating and integrating all kinds of therapies. Probably the one thing that I was the proudest of is I became a diehard advocate for individuals going through health struggles. That's how my clinic began. I didn't continue going to vet school. I am not seeing dogs and cats, horses and pigs, sheep and snakes in my clinical office, although I have many of those as part of my family. In my clinic, I see real people, whether those people are individuals that are top athletes looking to seek incredible performance or individuals like myself who are hoping that there's some way that you can turn your health around.
I have a lot of food philosophies around using those nutrients to enrich the soil that's your body so that you can weather the storm, but you can also grow, be healthy, and flourish so that you can have this abundance of energy. I always look at it as a bounty to give back. It's cool that we're coming right into this show. I've got a guest here that is a client that I said, “If you’ve got questions for me outside of the office, I want you to come on in and make sure that you ask it with all these people here that maybe are struggling with the same thing because that's what I found.” I found that I wasn't the only person out there that had their body completely trashed by the only thing that I thought was the option for me which was a ton of medication.
I didn't understand that I had the ability to heal my body. I have some clients that our goal is always to go as natural as possible, as helpful as possible. Sometimes I have clients that have to be on a medication. It's a lifesaving medication. How can we keep that body healthy through that process? How can we put power on the plate? How can we also create these crazy, amazing protocols for progress so that you're not being seen by a doctor or a practitioner, but you are the captain of your team and you're creating this health and wellness journey?
We're going to do a couple of fun things. I want to talk a lot about what happens in my clinic because I'm your nutritionist now. I've also had 25-plus years now of clinical experience working with some of the top doctors in the world, and some of the top practitioners in the world. If you have questions, we're going to have an opportunity in the second half of this show. Maybe you have already checked me out, it's HayliePomroy.com. On the website, you can get free newsletters. I've got incredible recipes. There is a whole educational section. We teach webcasts. It's all about educating yourself, being in awe of your body, and finding out how you can have the health that you deserve, should have and can have. I believe in you and I know you can do it. If I can, you can. When you have questions, you can always go to our Facebook page. We have a private Facebook page too where it's a little more discreet.
Some of our questions are candid. In the clinic, I always say that the chair that my clients sit-in is the chair that at that moment in that given time, the whole world revolves around them, around finding solutions, moments around maybe being cathartic, moments where we maybe celebrate some successes together, but about getting the help that you need. I get asked a lot what's unique about what happens in the practice, and what's unique about my books. First and foremost, I believe that anything is possible. As long as we're still breathing, our bodies have an amazing and incredible ability to regenerate, heal, pick life and vitality over degeneration. Regeneration is possible. The other thing is if I don't know the answers, I love the journey. We go into these great, amazing journeys with clients where it's all about figuring out what's going on, why, how, and what resources we can get.
I want to talk about creating a health wish list. It's important. When I was in that crazy insane space, I had a doctor asked me, “Why are you hell-bent on getting off of these drugs?” I said, “It's not about getting off of the drugs. I take them ten times every day if they made me feel good. I feel awful. I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I have a rash. I'm losing my kidney function.” I remember having eighteen bruises on my right leg because of ITP. You have a tendency to bruise easily. My gums bled, my hair was falling out. I said, “It's not that I'm hell-bent on getting off of these meds. I am hell-bent on feeling amazing and nobody's going to stop me.”
When my clients come through the door and I want you to start thinking about this, what is your health wish list? I want you to dream big. Don't take anything off the table. Do you want to run faster, jump higher, sleep deeper and love deeper? Do you want to know how to make something super easy in your kitchen? Whatever your health wish list is, it’s what we're going to talk about. I'm going to encourage you to stake your claim. Let me know what is it that you want for your health? The other thing is no matter who you see as a practitioner whether it's a nutritionist, a dietician, an internal medicine doctor, the top neurologist in the world, you want to walk in and walk out.
You want to walk in with a desire for a protocol for progress and walk out the door with that. When I was going through that and the doctors were asking me, “We're going to taper you down on Prednisone. We're going to burst you up again. We're going to layer you with CellCept because you're not tolerating Imuran.” The list was so large and I would say, “What is it going to take for me to get off of those?” I'll never forget when I was 21 years old and he said, “You're never getting off of these. We've got to figure out how long you can tolerate them, and hope that there's a new drug that comes along in time for when you stop tolerating them.”
I said, “That's insane and that's crazy. I'm going to ask you again.” This is the question that I always tell my clients to ask when they go in, “What is it going to take for me not to be considered diabetic again? What is it going to take for me to be able to lose weight, to be able to burn fat for fuel, to be able to take food and turn it into energy? What is it going to take? How are we going to measure the progress?” It's not if it's going to happen. It’s that it’s going to happen and what it’s going to take to make it happen.
The other thing is as you're enjoying this, as you're participating with us on HayliePomroy.com, as you're in our Facebook group, know that it's all okay if and only if it promotes real change. Whatever your health philosophy, whether you believe in Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese medicine, Daoism, five elements, internal medicine, pharmaceutical, the more the better, the many the merry, whatever it is that you believe in philosophically, I'm going to always ask you one thing. Is it promoting real change that's going to make your health wish list a checklist?
I want you to be bold and stake your claim. I have a client here that's got some things that he's going to ask us about and we're excited about that. Our whole world is about bringing together real people. That means people that travel, struggle, have victories, and have stressors. Real people that incorporate real food or whole products to evoke real change. Make sure if you have questions, I want to know what's on your health wish list and let's talk about some ideas for a protocol for progress for you. I'm going to give you some ideas that you can start today and not tomorrow. They are not theory. If you've read all my books, they are not fluffy. They are science-based. They are not about some theory that someone thinks that could possibly happen. I am results-oriented. We're going to make sure that we have tips for things that you can do today whether they are ways to thin it in a minute. We have a whole series on that. We have a Dear Dr. Sanders Letter, how to prepare for your next office visit. We have some great articles on labs, how to look at that and what does that mean in your body. We have some of the most helpful and delicious recipes in the world on our site.
We're going to take a couple of questions here and don't forget to go to HayliePomroy.com. Type in maybe chicken or beef, and look at all the incredible recipes. Don't forget desserts and pleasure in my philosophy can be the reason why you lose weight. Put power on your plate. Before I take my first question, I want to leave you with this. If you're considering doing a diet, I want you to ask yourself, what does that mean? For me, it means did I eat today? Did I eat today to evoke real change to make your health wish list a health checklist? I have been talking and I've had one of my clients, Steve, here. Steve, thank you for coming in.
It's great to be here.
He's been listening to me talk about the power that you can put on your plate and that anything is possible. Steve, do you have any questions for me?
I do, Haylie. When I come and see you, you are full of energy all the time. In my line of work, I travel incessantly and I'm constantly adjusting the time changes and late-night business dinners. How do you do it? How do you keep the energy that you have?
I have a ton of blog posts about travel on HayliePomroy.com. There are two things that I always do. I always eat within 30 minutes of waking. No matter where I'm at, I go to that time zone and I eat within 30 minutes of waking. Like you, I take my cleanse shake with me all the time. Whether I bring packets of oatmeal. I'll use an immune boost or echinacea tea as the liquid to make my oatmeal. I bring raw nuts and seeds. No matter what, I eat within 30 minutes of waking. If I got into something bad, I have clients that maybe have a food hangover, alcohol hangover, ham hangover, whatever happened the night before is gone when you wake up in the morning and you start eating within 30 minutes of waking.
The other one and it sounds basic is I hydrate. It is easy to get dehydrated when you travel. Remember that dilution is the solution to pollution. What I mean by that is if you can wash away or continue to keep yourself hydrated, your body is going to release a lot of what you're exposed to when you travel. I always make sure that I have food available to me the second I get home. Whether it's something that I've pre-packaged myself. I've made the chili. I've made the Warrior soup. I use one of the services to have groceries delivered to make sure that they get there. I order it right when I get to the airport so that I have fresh food because one of the things happens is you're exhausted. You get off the plane, maybe you're delayed. Maybe you haven't had enough food. You have your crash stashes things like the bars, the shake, the jerky. When you walk in that door, maybe there are some fresh berries.
When you travel, you're hydrated and you've kept your blood sugar stabilized because you've had your breakfast within 30 minutes of waking, I'm sitting here looking at you going, “Are you doing all these things?” If your adrenals are a little bit stressed, fruit can help calm the adrenals and get you settled back into the home. When I walk in the door, I try to have mangoes, berries, if I have frozen black cherries or things that are going to say, “You're back home.” Time travel or traveling on a plane, especially, there are stressors that we're not even aware of like radiation exposure and all these studies and things like that. I don't know that our bodies are meant to be going 500 and 800 miles per hour. When you get home, you've got to nestle back into “home” or maybe the hotel. I'm looking at you and I'm wondering if you're doing many of those things, but if you want to know how I have the energy that I have. I always eat within 30 minutes of waking. I bring a crash stash. I stay hydrated and I come home to a bounty full of fruit.
That’s simple. I have no excuses if I can't do that. I'm happy to report that I had my annual physical and my labs are better than ever. Thank you. I've been seeing you for the last few months and it's awesome. There was one thing however. The LDL or bad cholesterol was threatening the danger zone. I wasn't quite there. He said, “You might think about going on statins.” I'm not excited about that. I don't want to take any undue risks, but is there a way I can alter my diet to mitigate that?
There are also a couple of things to think about. Everybody's talking about cholesterol medications, statins specifically, whether it's Lipitor or a multifaceted one like Crestor, the old one like Gemfibrozil. They're talking a lot about, “Maybe we're overprescribing those. Maybe they don't have the cardiovascular benefit that everybody was hoping that they were this miracle drug that would prevent plaque and blockage in the arteries.” The research is leaning a lot more towards inflammation. Everybody reading out there might not know, but you and I worked a lot on inflammation and inflammation pathways. Our body takes the cholesterol molecule and it metabolizes that through a pathway, a group of enzymes called Cytochrome P450. It takes that cholesterol molecule and it manufactures all of your anti-inflammatory and pro-inflammatory hormones out of it.
If you're researching or listening to any of the news and media about statin drugs, everybody is talking about inflammation and inflammation pathways. You know that we want to look at different things. When we look at the LDL starting to creep up, we want to look at a couple of things. One, we want to look at how are we processing things through that metabolic pathway of those enzymes? How are you breaking down the cholesterol molecule? There are people that eat eggs and shrimp every day that doesn't have elevated LDL. There are people that eat these crazy, terrible low-fat diets that have elevated LDL. You can consume cholesterol, but your body manufactures it too because it's the precursor for all those hormones.
Steve, why is your body manufacturing a little bit of extra LDL? How can we get your body to take that goldmine of LDL and manufacture it into all of the heart-healthy hormones? From a preventative perspective, you and I, we’re going to be looking at another lab called a CRP or Cardiovascular-specific Reactive Protein. That's going to let us see if you're creating the enzyme that is inflammatory that creates plaque. You can have tons of cholesterol circulating in the blood and not create any plaque. You can also have low cholesterol. We've seen individuals as low as 145. They want to keep you under 200, but under 172, 170 you start to have memory and cognition issues. We've seen people as low as 145 have blocked arteries. It's not that you're circulating cholesterol. It's are you creating the inflammatory enzymes that create the cholesterol to stick to the walls? We’re going to look at that, but from a food perspective, we're going to be focusing on activating those enzymes so we can take the cholesterol and turn it into these amazing feel-good hormones. How are we going to do that? I'm always saying that vegetables are unlimited. This time we're going to say, “Double the dose of vegetables are mandatory.”
How about the red wine?
If you're going to add a layer of that in, vegetables are going to be quadrupled. What I want you to do is I want you to oscillate between raw and cooked vegetables. Some people do a meatless Monday. I want you to do a raw veggie Saturday or Sunday. Pick one day a week where you're doing raw vegetables five times a day, then I want you to pick one day a week where you do absolutely no raw food and only cooked vegetables. One of the things that happen when you do raw vegetables is they're difficult to break down. They're hard for the body. The moment you start chewing to when they hit the stomach, to when the body starts to absorb those micronutrients, you're absorbing a lot of phytonutrients that are in the raw vegetables that go away when they're cooked, but that is created. We're going to call it positive peer pressure or positive stress response in the body that your body has to create a unique grouping of enzymes in order to deal with that many raw vegetables in one sitting.
We're going to stimulate this, then we're going to do the cooked vegetables. We do veggie soup when you're sick. When you have a fever, you do a chicken soup. We're going to do a whole day with cooked vegetables because they deliver micronutrients easily to the body. We're going to use these pumping mechanisms to stimulate that Cytochrome P450, metabolic pathway so that you can take your cholesterol. LDL is low down dirty lipoprotein because it has a low density. When it has a low density, think about the blood flushing through the veins. If it's a low density, it bobs around and can bind to the artery walls easier. If it's a high density, it pushes through with the flow of the blood. We want those low-density lipoproteins to be broken down into the healthy hormones. I want you to cycle. I want to check your CRP. We want to make sure that you're not in a pro-inflammatory state. That's much more important to me than an elevated or mildly elevated total cholesterol.
We want to make sure that we've got low inflammation in the body and then we're going to do that osculation between a day a week of cooked vegetables, and a day a week of raw vegetables. Make sure on the website, you look at the Warrior soup or The-Burn soup. Go in and punch in on HayliePomroy.com soups, you’ll see we have many incredible recipes. When you make them, make them double batched, triple batched. That way you can freeze them. When you're traveling and you come home, that can be your cooked soup day or your cooked veggie day, and we can play with that. Does that sound like some practical things?
Thank you, Haylie.
Thanks, Steve. We are having way too much fun over here. We have Dana from Orange County, California.
Haylie, I'm excited I got through.
I'm excited to talk to you. How can we help you?
I have a family history of thyroid all the way back to my mother's side. She had radioactive iodine when she was younger before she had kids. All three of the sisters all have thyroid issues. I had a thyroid nodule that they had biopsied. Everything was fine with that. I also had Hashimoto's but the doctor says, “You're fine. You don't need to do anything. See you in a year.”
To get everybody up to speed, Hashimoto's Thyroiditis is what it's called and we do see it a lot. It is considered an autoimmune disorder. Usually, there are two variations on the theme. It's not necessarily an issue that the thyroid doesn't produce what we normally hear as hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism. Hyper, the thyroid produces too much or hypo, the thyroid doesn't produce enough. If the doctor diagnoses with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, what we're seeing usually is either an antibody or peroxidase. There are two labs minimally that we typically have our clients run with this. The Anti-Thyroid Antibody or ATA and anti-thyroid peroxidase. Sometimes we see people with one or both positive and are diagnosed with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. The other thing that we want to look at is all of the other autoimmune markers.
In the Fast Metabolism Food Rx book, there's a whole section on autoimmunity. You can also go to the website and I've got a list of additional labs to run like sedimentation rates, ANA titers, eosinophils. They typically can also be an allergy piece, but it's unfortunate because oftentimes a lot of physicians feel like Hashimoto's is a disorder of the thyroid. They say, “Maybe your TSH levels, your thyroid-stimulating hormone is normal.” It is not even a thyroid hormone, it’s the pituitary hormone. Maybe your T4, which is the hormone that the thyroid produces through the liver pathways and converts it into T3, which is the bioactive hormone. Maybe those are normal with individuals that have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. A lot of doctors aren't sure what to do with the autoimmune disorder that it is.
There are some amazing and great things that you can do. In the Food Rx, there are specific foods that are good to put power on your plate from an autoimmune perspective. Individuals with autoimmunity have a sensitivity to the top allergens. We normally see individuals have some sensitivity to wheat and gluten. It's not because that's trendy. It's because it's a glycoprotein, which mimics the carriers in our own blood with our own DNA. If you're having an autoimmune response, your own immune system is reacting negatively to your own cell. Having that similarity in the food source, we see that people are sensitive to that. Most of the common allergens are dairy, corn, and wheat. Those are all things that we have found that if you can eliminate that can be helpful.
On the website, we have a Dear Dr. Sanders Letter. You might want to print that out. It's also in the Food RX book, but it helps you prepare for your next doctor's visit which is, “I have this issue, I'd like these labs run.” We take you through that process, but also what are they creating for your protocol for progress. You need to chart this yourself. Make a spreadsheet, write it down, go in every visit because they see tons and tons of clients. I always say, “Tell them something meaningful about yourself either a funny joke or something that's going to make them maybe snap out of the monotony of their day and know that you're this special patient. If you've had a history of cold nodules, it's important that we know what's normal in your chemistry and what's off in your chemistry.
Get that list of labs to have run sedimentation rates, ANA titers, T4, T3, reverse T3, TSH, sex hormone-binding globulin is important with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, then all of the sex hormones, estrogens, fractionated, progesterone, testosterone free and total as well as vitamin-D levels. Those are all important to check. You can say, “I'm going to go back.” Ask the doctor to run all these, but then what do I do? What we want to do is I always look at things as a scientist. What is normal first so we can take those off the table. Normal in labs doesn't mean health. It means that the body can be in a state of dysfunction to create normalcy in that chemistry. What are those values? Which ones are the red flags are being flagged? It’s looking at what we can do to balance and stabilize those.
We use a natural bioflavonoid. We have a product called metabolism energy. It has a lot of quercetin in it. We also have a natural product in metabolism histamine which has a lot of not only bioflavonoids, but helps your body create its own histamine blockers, balanced eosinophils. I want you to go onto the website, look at what are the ingredients that are in it, google those ingredients and look at what mechanisms that they help the body, and see if you're having any symptoms associated with that. Are you having cracked heels, thinning in the eyebrows especially out towards the corner of the eye? Do your hair start to break off either in the crown or around the sides of the face?
I have all those.
When you have a physician that doesn’t make you feel that he is taking and pulling you over the hurdle that you're having. Maybe he's even an adequate partner, but he's not going to drag you over the threshold or cross the chasm. Go in with some good research, NIH, CDC research, any Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Harvard. There are good articles on Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. We have some amazing blog posts on articles that I've written that can help if you bring in and do research sometimes for the physician. You have to remember that your health has to be most important to you and if you need to bring everybody along, I'm sorry that that's the case but that's sometimes the way it is. With Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, it's not something to be poo-pooed. It's something that you want to make sure that you are creating a standard of what your body is saying from a chemistry perspective, that you're checking that in the beginning.
Typically, with my clients, we do every 8 to 12 weeks. As I've always told you, I'm results-oriented. We're evoking a change in the body's chemistry. Go to our website HayliePomroy.com and there's a health wish list. On the health wish list, there's a questionnaire that lists all of your symptoms. There are traditional symptoms with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, but there might be some things that you're not thinking of. For example, waking not feeling rested, not being able to obtain quick and deep sleep. Any areas of inflammation whether it's in the hands, feet or elbows can correlate with that autoimmune aspect of it.
Let's get good labs run. Let's make a clear list of our symptoms and then let's look at the foods in the Food RX. I want you to think about modifying for autoimmune issues, not modifying for thyroid issues with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. Many people think that it's a disorder of the thyroid, but it's related to how your body's immune system is responding to you. We want it to be in love with you, not in combat with you. Thanks, Dana.
Thank you.
It has been awesome sitting here talking with you, Steve and Dana. That was amazing. I want to make sure that you guys have all the access to the things that I've recommended to both Steve and Dana. They're all available on my website at HayliePomroy.com. They are in the membership section though. You can still get incredible great recipes and free newsletters, but for those health wish list, the charts, the Dear Dr. Sanders Letters, those are all in the membership section of our website. You can use the code, JOINMEFREE, and you can have 30 days of our membership for free. Make sure that you are filling out all those questionnaires for yourself. You're taking in those requests to your doctors. You're creating protocols for progress and let's keep this science geek going. We have another Haylie from Los Angeles. How can I help you?
Haylie, thank you. I have a question about some of these current diets that a lot of people are talking about like keto or eating paleo. Are there any of them that you highly recommend or one that you recommend more than the other? I want to know what you think about some of these trendy diets that a lot of people are talking about and that a lot of health foods seem to be targeting.
The diet industry is a big business. I've been in clinical practice for many years. I've seen every diet fad come and go and be recirculated. I've had about every book across my desk from to your point keto or the DASH diet or five of these and don’t eat that. I have written myself five nutrition books with the concept of diet being, “Did I eat today?” To achieve whatever it is, particularly in your health. The thing that I always say is first define what it is that you're wanting from a food protocol. Secondly, if it's not something that you would do to your dog or your cat or someone that you love, don't do it to yourself nutritionally. What I mean by that is if you get up in the morning and you walk out the door and you have a beloved pet and you don't feed them for hours and hours, that would be deemed as cruel. It would also be bad for the dog’s psyche, for their digestion, and for their coat. It's bad for the human population in my opinion.
I'm not a big believer in fasting unless it's for medical, spiritual or religious reasons. When you incorporate that intention behind those, the body knows that it's not a stressful famine experience. Being in the agriculture and the animal science industry, we used the production of ketones in the dairy industry to hyper produce milk production. There are many organizations that have come out strongly against that being cruelty to the animal issue. When keto got popular, I was super frustrated that I was seeing that the diet industry was taking advantage of people struggling with their health.
When you do something to alter the metabolic pathways like in keto diet, you can lose weight. The issue is that it doesn't heal the metabolism. It doesn't even begin to address why it's become difficult to lose weight, why the body doesn't have energy, and why the body doesn't burn fat for fuel. That breaks my heart. With the popularity of CrossFit, it was an interesting marriage that we saw with this particular type of exercise and incorporating a particular type of food style and the concept of going back to paleolithic times or cavemen eating. There's been a lot of different verbiage around it. My trepidation about that is making sure that we don't alleviate any particular foods in our diet that are considered whole foods, that we look to see if you're getting and achieving what you want from it.
I've had individuals that have had some negative response from it and individuals that seem to love and flourish on it. For me, I always say that it's important to define what it is that you want out of any food program, and then make sure that you're getting that. Above weight loss, we have to have health gain. That’s critical in any of those. Every fad diets probably come across my desk and some of them are heartbreaking. Fasting and keto for me as a practitioner dealing with individuals that have significant health issues that have slow metabolisms, that have caused metabolic dysfunction in their body. To me it's abusive and it's preying on individuals that are desperate for a change in their lives.
There are all kinds of ways that you can play with food and put power on your plate. The biggest thing is to turn towards food to get the health that you desire. When it's classified as a fad diet, it's usually because it will come and it will go and then if you wait a couple more years, it will cycle back in. You want to make sure that you're looking at your metabolism. You want to make sure that you're using real food to evoke real change because after all, we're all real people in human beings that deserve like our beloved pets and animals to have food, nourishment, and enjoyment when we put power on our plate. Haylie, thank you. That's a great question.
Thank you.
Nothing is off the table. We can talk about anything as it pertains to you and your health. I want you to know that there are all kinds of ways that you can engage with myself and my team at HayliePomroy.com. We have our membership. Don't forget the JOINMEFREE code will get you 30 days of free membership. We have a free newsletter. You want to make sure that you get that because I send delicious and incredible recipes. I’m always science geeking out on those. Wherever you're at, however you feel that you're ready for the support, we have that for you. Make sure you check out the website at HayliePomroy.com. It looks like we have Sarah from New York. Sarah, are you there?
I'm here. Thank you, Haylie. It's an honor to speak with you.
Thank you, Sarah. How can I help you? How can we get power on that plate? What can I do to see if we can kick around some great ideas for your health together?
I suffer from the afternoon exhaustion like 2:00, 3:00. I have no more energy. I'd love some suggestions. I drink a ton of water. I need a little guidance in that area.
There are a couple of things that I look at when a person tells me that they're fatigued in the afternoon. It can depend a little bit if it's around food or without food. There are three things that we look at. One, we look at dysglycemia or making sure that the blood sugar levels stay stable throughout the day. In an individual that is not doing a particular nutrition plan like the Fast Metabolism Diet, or The Burn or something like that, but in general eating good health. Sometimes we need to make sure that we get fruit with your meals so that it can help keep your blood sugar stable post consuming your lunch.
If you're a person that gets tired after you eat. If you're telling me, “Haylie, I have lunch and about 1.5 hours, I need to take a nap,” we need to look at digestive enzymes. We have this test. It's like a home diagnostic test that you can do. It's called the digestive reserve test or the lemon challenge test. You can go to the website. It's easy to do. You need pH strips and a lemon. Try the lemon and test your pH of the saliva and see how long it takes you to stabilize. If it takes a long time, the body doesn't have a good digestive reserve and I've got a list of great foods that would support that. That's a great way for us to know if it's digestive-based. After lunch specifically, the body has a tendency to have a little bit of a harder time digesting.
If it's not food-based and it's not blood sugar-based, then we want to look at adrenal reserves or what we call adaptogenic hormones. In the afternoon, what happens is the body has these two parts of the nervous system. One is called parasympathetic tones and one is called sympathetic tones. The best way that I remember or can keep these straight is sympathetic tones are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, while the parasympathetic tones are deep restorative sleep. I can write 40 volumes of book on what the nervous system does, but this is a way that I isolate that out.
In different aspects of medicine like in Chinese medicine, they call the afternoon, 3:00, 4:00, the point of reflection. When you're doing workshops on how to get work done in a day, they'll talk about that point in the day where you say, “What did I get done now? How much time do I have left at work? What can I get done before the end of the day?” Part of that is a natural process in the nervous system where the body starts to come into more of the rest and restoration hormones naturally. When it's overwhelming and it doesn't feel like in balance, you're not able to sustain energy through that transition, it means that we need to nurture the adaptogenic or adrenal hormones more effectively.
We have a specific program for adrenal and stress. I don't want to say stress reduction because unfortunately, I don't have a magic wand that can change the particular environment that maybe is creating some stress or exhaustion or physical stress. What I can do is make your body stronger and more resilient so that you’re stress-resistant. In the Food RX book, we have an adrenal protocol. We have supplements that are specific for balancing that. I don't like products that are stimulant. I don't like things that are going to drive the body harder. What I want to do is I want to make you stronger so that you can sustain energy throughout the day. If you go to the website, there is a booklet on the adrenal reserve that we have.
There's a whole food protocol and specific foods on the Fast Metabolism Diet. We have phase one of the Fast Metabolism Diet, which the first part of the week is adrenal restorative. We have a program that's called Phase 1 Intensive, which is a week-long boot camp for regenerating and restoring the adrenals. The first thing that I would do is make sure that it's usually 1 of those 3 things. It's typically either the digestive reserves aren't adequate enough. You can do the lemon challenge test. It's a simple at-home thing and you can go, “Haylie, my digestive reserves are lacking.” I will give you a sheet of foods to make sure that those are nurtured. You recheck your digestive reserve test and you go, “It's good.” You're also seeing that your energy level is better.
The other thing is looking at maybe adding fruit at lunch and seeing if that helps you stabilize your blood sugar in that afternoon. The third thing is seeing if your adaptogenic or adrenal hormones need more nurturing. There are a couple of at-home things that people do. Maybe you have your doctor do this when you go to the office, ask the nurse and say, “I'd like to do this little test for my adaptogenic hormones. I'd like you to take my blood pressure laying down on the table and then I'd like to sit up and have you take my blood pressure.” If the spread is more than fifteen points, your body is having a hard time adapting to the shift in the nervous system. As soon as we lay prone, our body naturally produces hormones that are for rest and restoration. As soon as we stand up, our body is producing hormones that are for excitation and movement. Those are some cool things that we can find out what specifically to do for your body.
This is awesome. I'm going to try everything. I'm going to do the lemon test.
You will be in awe. Make that wish list and dream big. Anytime your body says, “I want an abundance of energy from 2:00 to 4:00 every day.” You should have that and what we want to do is say, “What is that that your body is saying?” Do a little bit of self-diagnostic, a little bit of exploration, being in awe and then nurture. Get the body built up so that it has the energy to do whatever the heck you want to do at 4:00.
I can't thank you enough for your time and I'm going to tackle this.
Thanks, Sarah.
Thanks, Haylie.
We're having an awesome time. This is like being in the clinic all day long. I love the questions. Remember to go to HayliePomroy.com, get your free newsletter, make sure that you're looking at all of our incredibly delicious recipes, and become a member. You can do that for 30 days for free. Do join me free all of these worksheets that I'm talking about are self-exploration, self-diagnostic things that you can do to learn more about what's going on in your body, as well as the incredible eCookbooks that are specific for adrenal repair, some great travel tips, things about Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, all goodies are there in your member dashboard. It's going to be one of the best things that you do for your health and wellness. We're going to take one final question. Barbara is joining us from Florida.
Haylie, it’s good to talk to you.
Barbara, how can we help you?
I have a question regarding digestion and I have an autoimmune disease called Sjogren's, which creates a lot of issues with dry mouth and not able to digest my foods. I was wondering if you can help me with ways I can hydrate myself.
For our audience out there, Sjogren's is classified in the autoimmune world. It has a tendency to affect the mucosal lining of the body, things like the moistness of the eye and the moistness in the mouth. To your point, the mucosal lining sometimes in the lungs but definitely in the GI tract. Being autoimmune, one of the things that we want to look at is lowering your body's reactivity to its own mucosal linings or immune system. We had another autoimmune question and there are some great foods we have in Food Rx. That book specifically has a whole chapter on autoimmunity. With Sjogren's specifically, it's hard to focus on hydration when we're looking at just putting liquids or water into the body.
The way with Sjogren's when we look at hydration is how do we get the water or the fluids that we put into the body to migrate into the mucosal linings or into the linings of the tissue? A couple of little tricks that we do, one is making sure that your blood values stay as least reactive as possible. I'm not sure if you are regularly checking your sedimentation rates, your inflammatory, your C-reactive proteins. With Sjogren’s specifically, we look at two additional labs. We look at CK or Creatine Kinase as well as a lab that's called aldolase. My goal is to drive those numbers into the most normal range as possible with Sjogren’s. We do that by working with the anti-inflammatory protocol that we have on our website at HayliePomroy.com. You can look that up. It's in the member section, as well as specifically the autoimmunity protocol. I'd like you to look at that which is also there on the website.
From a general perspective, a couple of things that you can do at home from a digestive perspective is with Sjogren's I find that a lot of people do better with cooked vegetables as opposed to raw vegetables. Anything that's heat-related can be beneficial to the digestion. I have individuals that have malabsorption sometimes with Sjogren’s. Sometimes I have them do a hot water bottle over their tummy after they eat to help increase blood flow. Things like infrared saunas can help to increase blood flow into the mucosal lining in an individual with Sjogren’s. Sometimes a hot bath like deep epsom salt baths or anything warm with digestion. Warming foods can be good.
Sometimes they do well with spicy foods but be aware. With autoimmunity, if you do a lot of spicy foods, sometimes that can promote inflammation if you're already in an inflammation cycle, if you're not running labs all the time. In labs, we'd look at C-reactive protein from an inflammatory perspective, we'd also look at homocysteine levels. These are all things that you can walk into the doctor's office and ask your doctor for and we have that list. That's the Dear Dr. Sanders Letter. We say, “Dear Dr. Sanders,” whatever you doctor’s name is, “I've been diagnosed with Sjogren's. Because of that, I'm noticing I'm having a difficult time staying hydrated and I'm having a difficult time with my digestion. I would like you to please run,” you list your labs and why. It helps the doctor and together as a team, you’ll have a clear picture or protocol.
If you are working well and the inflammation is down, then the food program that would be good is we have a program that's called the H-Burn because it's high in the essential fatty acids, the lipids. Those are foods like avocado, raw nuts and seeds. Sometimes with an autoimmune disorder, it's good to soak your nuts and seeds before you eat them. I also have an autoimmune disorder and what I do is I'll take almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and I will put them in water overnight, I'll drain it and then it's much easier for me to digest and utilize those lipids and those fatty acids. Those fatty acids that are naturally occurring in those foods will help moisten naturally the mucosal lining of the eyes, the digestive tract, the mouth, and the nose.
Because fatty acids sometimes are hard to digest, it's a great trick to get those in more efficiently. I want you to look at a lot of our soups and broths. I want you checking your inflammatory factors regularly, charting those, and letting your doctor know that you've now decided that we're going to do everything that we need to do to get those as low as possible. I want you to look at the H-Burn for the lipids, but I want you soaking your nuts because you have an extra difficult time digesting them. I want you to look at the anti-inflammatory protocols that we have available.
Thank you.
Does that give you some options there?
Yes, that's helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Barbara and best of luck.
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