Latest / The Everyday Awesome Project / 88: Our Detox Diaries: Gut Health, Cleanses, and What We Tried (Part 2)

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88: Our Detox Diaries: Gut Health, Cleanses, and What We Tried (Part 2) · The Everyday Awesome Project

• 0:28
  Polly Mertens: hey, superstars, welcome back polly here sam pruitt in the house.
• 0:32
  Samantha Pruitt: What's up, beautiful humans today we are actually.
• 0:37
  Polly Mertens: This is technically a part two, so if you haven't listened to part one, we talked about like cleansing and detoxing, and why is it, what is it about and whatnot.
• 0:44
  Polly Mertens: And this one, we're going to go deeper into our personal journeys.
• 0:47
  Polly Mertens: You know, like, what we've done, what we do, why we do it, our experience, all of that.
• 0:52
  Polly Mertens: So if you want to go on the ride with us and learn about I mean, you've been doing this since your Ayurvedic days 20 years ago.
• 0:58
  Polly Mertens: I've been maybe 10, 15 years, but so you know six years ago 15 years, but so you know when, six years ago damn, that's a long time.
• 1:10
  Polly Mertens: So just to catch you back up if you didn't catch that episode.
• 1:12
  Polly Mertens: So detoxing and cleansing is what we're talking about, and it's it's.
• 1:14
  Polly Mertens: Our bodies need a reset, right like our organs, our bodies, the blood, the brain.
• 1:20
  Polly Mertens: We've got a lot coming in at this body, right, whether it's we're taking in the skin or food, energetically sniffing you know environmental toxins, like every time I go fill up with gas, I'm like, okay, I just wear like some sort of you know gas mask or mask to prevent that stuff.
• 1:35
  Polly Mertens: Right, because all that stuff goes in the body and it's got to filter it and do something with it, store it or release it, right.
• 1:42
  Polly Mertens: So this episode could get a little.
• 1:44
  Polly Mertens: You know we're going to talk about some sensitive things like pooping and colonics and cleaning.
• 1:50
  Samantha Pruitt: We'd love to talk about pooping.
• 1:52
  Polly Mertens: And you've got a story from this morning actually.
• 1:55
  Samantha Pruitt: I know I was just pooping outside today like a little nature child that I am, totally Not, because I wanted to.
• 2:02
  Polly Mertens: So I thought we'd started off with my first foray into cleansing and detoxing.
• 2:08
  Polly Mertens: I just I have a little story, then I'll share mine.
• 2:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, hey, let's do it so time.
• 2:14
  Polly Mertens: I don't even remember what the like inspiration was like.
• 2:17
  Polly Mertens: Okay, was I in a group or something and we were talking.
• 2:20
  Polly Mertens: I don't quite remember, but I just know that in a certain and it was actually right before the holidays, I think it went through thanksgiving or something like that.
• 2:27
  Polly Mertens: So it was like that time of a year and, oh, let's do this three week cleanse detox, right zero to three weeks, okay, ambitious did not know.
• 2:39
  Polly Mertens: Okay, didn't know that that was ambitious.
• 2:43
  Polly Mertens: It was just like oh, you go on this website.
• 2:44
  Polly Mertens: So I'll just say the name of the product, because I still believe in it and I still use it.
• 2:48
  Polly Mertens: So it's Dr Schultz, s-c-h-u-l-z-e and he, so his, one of his.
• 2:54
  Polly Mertens: Like bigger protocols.
• 2:55
  Polly Mertens: Like I said, the three-week protocol is a five-day bowel, so you focus on the bowel cleansing, then a liver, kidney and then a bowel at the end, right, bowel cleanse and just a little about that.
• 3:12
  Polly Mertens: So if you look at, you know like the bowels are.
• 3:13
  Polly Mertens: You know, kind of, where the trash is before it gets taken out.
• 3:15
  Polly Mertens: You know it's like, oh, everything gets like put in there or whatever, right before it goes out.
• 3:18
  Polly Mertens: So he says you know, if you're going to detox and your body's going to release things from the brain or the blood or the organs, you want to have a clean system.
• 3:26
  Polly Mertens: You want to take the trash out before you sort of fill it back up with all these detoxes, right, or toxins.
• 3:33
  Samantha Pruitt: So toxins can get backed up, yes, and then you over toxify more exactly you sort of hyper plugged up and you do a detox, where is the toxic release going to go?
• 3:46
  Samantha Pruitt: It's going to get stuck literally in the systems and cause other issues.
• 3:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, sorry, I had to just interject.
• 3:52
  Polly Mertens: No, no, no and you know some people you know I didn't know about this.
• 3:56
  Polly Mertens: I'm pretty regular once a day bowel movement kind of person have been for my life.
• 4:01
  Polly Mertens: I haven't had lots of bouts of constipation or you know more than two days ever right In my life.
• 4:07
  Polly Mertens: But there's the people that go days and a week or more Right.
• 4:11
  Polly Mertens: So the I have a 10 day record.
• 4:13
  Samantha Pruitt: I have a personal record, I have a PR and that 10 days.
• 4:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, I was, uh, not like you.
• 4:21
  Samantha Pruitt: I was the pendulum, which is what they call it IBS.
• 4:24
  Samantha Pruitt: But don't label yourself just as IBS, because it's way more complex than that and that is not okay to live that way.
• 4:31
  Samantha Pruitt: But it was diarrhea, constipation, diarrhea, constipation, swinging back and forth for most of my life that I can remember.
• 4:39
  Polly Mertens: Wow, so very irregular, irregular, yeah, okay, well, well, and there's full protocols.
• 4:45
  Polly Mertens: So when you share your story, yeah, so, anyway, so I was a regular person, I would say so I think in medical terms they say a bowel movement a day is considered regular, maybe.
• 4:54
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, like that.
• 4:56
  Polly Mertens: Um, so the the protocol is it wants to get you to that place, right, depending on, and his protocol, it has a supplement that helps it remove constipation, let's say, or like release things down there so that that can get moving.
• 5:11
  Polly Mertens: And so you're having definitely regular movements and in his protocol it's actually more than once a day, just because you want the toxins going and going and going, which is it doesn't feel horrible, it's not like diarrhea, it just like things are smooth and moving along.
• 5:25
  Polly Mertens: So so 21 days, so did this, and it was a lot of like smelly ass teas, like there's this whole thing where you get all these herbs.
• 5:33
  Polly Mertens: I don't know if you've ever been to a Chinese medicine kind of place where they make these custom teas for you.
• 5:39
  Polly Mertens: If you've never done this like anyway, it's a whole nother episode.
• 5:42
  Polly Mertens: We'll do that episode sometime you go and it's kind of like these bark, this bark and all this stuff and you put it in a pot and you boil it for you know an hour or something like that, and then you get all the herbs and all that stuff and you just get this smelly, stinky, not great tasting juice, tea, whatever you want to call it, and that just helps put those herbs for your body that it needs to both detox and cleanse and whatnot.
• 6:06
  Polly Mertens: So it was this tea.
• 6:09
  Polly Mertens: I think there were some vegetable juices, lots of water supplements, herbs, things like that.
• 6:16
  Samantha Pruitt: And he sent you the protocol, right it's all, yeah, there's instruction.
• 6:20
  Polly Mertens: I mean it's beautiful and he's got it dialed in.
• 6:22
  Polly Mertens: If you just this, it's like it's like a cleanse in a box, for sure.
• 6:25
  Polly Mertens: It comes in a little box and off you go um and you know you've got to prepare yourself.
• 6:31
  Polly Mertens: You know, like I was like okay, doing it and this particular one, you know there's no eating or no eating, masticating, chewing, if you will, I think, for the first three to 18 days or something like the last five or something.
• 6:44
  Polly Mertens: You're on, you're back on a raw food diet, um, and I just found myself like wanting to chew and masticate, so I would eat like an avocado a day, just something.
• 6:52
  Polly Mertens: You know, you get used to it and it's amazing how much time frees up when you're not cooking all the time.
• 6:58
  Polly Mertens: Oh, my gosh, that was one of the things.
• 7:00
  Polly Mertens: So at the end, 21 days you know my partner at the time, we were like I can't freaking wait for this.
• 7:06
  Polly Mertens: You know you're, it's kind of like.
• 7:09
  Polly Mertens: You know you, you, you know if you've ever like been on a, you know people at um, the, the christian lent.
• 7:17
  Polly Mertens: You know where they, they, they lent and they go off alcohol or 21 days of whatever you're like, you think about it all the time, like, okay, what are we going to eat when we get off?
• 7:25
  Polly Mertens: This time that was like two of our favorites.
• 7:27
  Polly Mertens: They're like beer and pizza, you know?
• 7:28
  Polly Mertens: Okay, let's just say that that's not how you want to finish a cleanse.
• 7:33
  Polly Mertens: It was like big doughy pizza and beer.
• 7:37
  Polly Mertens: A little little did I know, oh, man tasted good.
• 7:42
  Polly Mertens: Going in I was like oh my God, hadn't tasted that, but yeah, yeah.
• 7:46
  Polly Mertens: So tell me, tell me your story, yeah psychological experience not to be dismissed.
• 8:08
  Samantha Pruitt: That happens when somebody A commits to this level of self-care and self-investment.
• 8:10
  Samantha Pruitt: First of all, massive kudos to anybody, including you, that has repeatedly invested in your health mental, physical, spiritual health in this way.
• 8:20
  Samantha Pruitt: And then understanding that when you do something like this, of this level of commitment and process, there will be an emotional experience that comes along for the ride.
• 8:33
  Polly Mertens: Sometimes roller coaster all the way through right, oh, totally a roller coaster, totally.
• 8:39
  Samantha Pruitt: And my belief is that you're peeling back all these layers, right.
• 8:43
  Samantha Pruitt: And then, in this peeling back and releasing and allowing to come out of the body energetically, lots of things will be coming along with it.
• 8:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, and then not just your relationship with food and your relationship with the world and food, so like who you live with, what your patterns of behavior are, with that, um, your sense of your identity around food.
• 9:11
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, there's so many many things.
• 9:13
  Polly Mertens: if you're always cravings come from.
• 9:15
  Polly Mertens: You know, like the rant, the cravings you would get, and I was like, oh, what you know?
• 9:19
  Polly Mertens: And I noticed when cravings would occur during the day because I had had patterns of eating, you know, like mid morning, this or an afternoon snack all patterns, all patterns.
• 9:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, it's all patterns.
• 9:30
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, I speak candidly about my drug of choice, which is coffee.
• 9:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, and my like morning ritual at a local coffee shop that I go and I have this exquisite drink and I meet the people and I'm in the space and whatever it is a ritual.
• 9:45
  Samantha Pruitt: For me it is a habit ritual and with that there is an emotional experience.
• 9:51
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm not just getting a good cup of coffee, people.
• 9:55
  Samantha Pruitt: So anyway, I wanted to throw that into the mix and then riding the wave of all of that, knowing that you're unearthing things, just like you're unearthing layers of poop caught in your systems and you're releasing toxins through your lymphatic system and through all of the systems of the body circulatory system et cetera.
• 10:12
  Samantha Pruitt: That with that will come some feels, lots of feels.
• 10:18
  Polly Mertens: Yes, definitely Lots of feels good and bad.
• 10:21
  Polly Mertens: Well, you know, maybe now's a good time to talk about.
• 10:23
  Polly Mertens: Something I wanted to insert here that we didn't talk about in the first one was you know a little bit of what I was talking about, where you know the first week is the's go is, um, as the body gets permission to stop holding on to whatever it's holding on to because it's regulating and it's taking care of all these things and you're adding more toxins and you know it's, it's just like, oh right, it's storing it, it's putting it in your cells, it's putting in your brain, it's putting your fat, whatever.
• 11:03
  Polly Mertens: Right, as you go, you know what I'm gonna pause from abusing and and just like polluting.
• 11:10
  Polly Mertens: You know the body with diet, sodas and fattening whatever.
• 11:15
  Polly Mertens: You know when it, when it gets the signal, oh, we're only getting juice or water or something light it, it's like now I have permission to let go of this stuff.
• 11:27
  Polly Mertens: I don't know how it knows, but it gets the message right.
• 11:30
  Polly Mertens: So, after like day two, what you often see is, if you're doing a proper protocol for more than you know, two, three, four, five days, is you go into this kind of slump?
• 11:40
  Polly Mertens: Right, that's what I would just kind of liken it energetically because the body's like oh, I'm going to go to work now and push out or use the lymphatic system and if you're not moving, you need to be moving.
• 11:51
  Polly Mertens: So it doesn't just so.
• 11:53
  Polly Mertens: It like releases and so you get, you know, cold-like symptoms.
• 11:57
  Polly Mertens: Some people get like runny nose and coughs and you know just stuff coming out of the body of all.
• 12:02
  Polly Mertens: You know sweat, smelly, right, more pooping, whatever, and it can be kind of a draining feeling, you know.
• 12:08
  Polly Mertens: So like your head can be foggy because the brain's like releasing stuff, that it's amazing what gets stored in your brain.
• 12:14
  Polly Mertens: I had no idea, right.
• 12:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Sometimes people get really sick like flu-like symptoms.
• 12:19
  Samantha Pruitt: Don't be surprised.
• 12:21
  Samantha Pruitt: If that's a thing, it can be part of it.
• 12:23
  Samantha Pruitt: And that's why, in some of these instances, especially heavy metal cleanses and stuff like that, having a supervised cleanse is a good idea.
• 12:31
  Polly Mertens: And I would say it's a slump, but it's not just like it doesn't continue to go down.
• 12:35
  Polly Mertens: Usually it's like day two, day three.
• 12:37
  Polly Mertens: The body's like, oh, we can release this, we can take the garbage out now, okay.
• 12:41
  Polly Mertens: So it takes out all the little mini garbages and all the little areas that it's been storing it.
• 12:46
  Polly Mertens: It goes through, the body gets filtered, whatever, and then you start to feel better, right, like then the recovery starts to happen.
• 12:54
  Polly Mertens: Then the clarity of mind, the brain fog clears, the energy comes back.
• 12:59
  Polly Mertens: You feel a balance in yourself.
• 13:00
  Polly Mertens: I mean, like the amount of people I've seen that go through like a five-day cleanse and just sort of like say, you know, and I think that I don't loop my body as heavily as some people do, I don't usually have that like spring bound.
• 13:12
  Polly Mertens: You know, it's like a springboard, like I feel amazing.
• 13:14
  Polly Mertens: It's like I feel good, so good.
• 13:15
  Polly Mertens: You know it's like a springboard, like I feel amazing.
• 13:16
  Polly Mertens: It's like I feel good, so good.
• 13:17
  Polly Mertens: You know I don't have the depths of feeling horrible and the cause.
• 13:20
  Polly Mertens: I keep it pretty clean in here, if you will.
• 13:23
  Samantha Pruitt: But that's why two or three days is not probably going to be a lot of people's experiences but it will be years.
• 13:29
  Samantha Pruitt: So, like I'm healing a whole fungus and bacterial infection in my gut and also could have been cleansing more regularly the last five years, I'd say like pandemic all the way through till now.
• 13:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, and talk about where you are and you're working on other things, yeah, so my experience is much longer the uncomfortable phase, we'll call it, but I I recognize what it is and I'm tolerating it.
• 13:59
  Samantha Pruitt: But there are a few days that I've been like I'm kind of fucking over this excuse my French because what I'm doing is really long, in this instance because of the actual infection element that was on top of a detox.
• 14:11
  Samantha Pruitt: So basically I'm healing a small intestine bacterial infection there's bacteria and fungus, so there's really two a small intestine bacterial infection, there's bacteria and fungus, so there's really two things that have to be healed and then, on top of that, doing a detox.
• 14:23
  Samantha Pruitt: So I still have another 30 days and I'm 45 days in.
• 14:26
  Samantha Pruitt: This is not what I would recommend people experience for the first time and hopefully you don't ever have to have it become this sort of like heavy duty extreme thing and you had some.
• 14:38
  Polly Mertens: You know the symptoms you were having pre getting this diagnosed and addressing it.
• 14:42
  Polly Mertens: I mean, like you were just feeling bloating, you know.
• 14:45
  Polly Mertens: You just were like Jack, things weren't, weren't feeling good, right, and you're like I got into something and then, right, when you started to cleanse, I remember your face got all broken out, yeah, you know, and just things were just coming out, coming out.
• 14:58
  Samantha Pruitt: They're still coming out taking the trash out, y'all, yeah, but let me tell you my quick story of my first cleanse.
• 15:08
  Samantha Pruitt: So, I was about 30 when I was really having significant health problems, the the well, it wasn't really the first go around, but anyway when I had my real health crisis mental and physical health crisis.
• 15:22
  Samantha Pruitt: So in that I gravitated towards a trying to heal my mental and emotional state as well as my physical body.
• 15:30
  Samantha Pruitt: So I was looking at things from a spiritual lens as well as a physical, holistic health modality lens and just exploring and learning and trying to understand why this was happening and what was happening and all of that kind of stuff.
• 15:47
  Samantha Pruitt: So my path had a lot of layers to it, but it did lead me to the Chopra Center for Wellness.
• 15:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Deepak Chopra and David Simon who's no longer with us, but Deepak Chopra they founded that center and I was studying at that time holistic health and Ayurvedic medicine as one of the possible modalities I had a curiosity about.
• 16:10
  Samantha Pruitt: So I went that path for my initial experience.
• 16:13
  Samantha Pruitt: A it was completely supervised.
• 16:15
  Samantha Pruitt: It was a week long thing.
• 16:16
  Samantha Pruitt: I lived locally so I didn't stay at the center, but you can stay at the center and go through the practice of actually being there on site.
• 16:23
  Samantha Pruitt: But I just went every day for the seven days and was there every day, all day for seven days.
• 16:29
  Samantha Pruitt: It was freaking, amazing and I feel incredibly grateful I could carve out that time and have those resources to invest, but I was at a critical junction, like you know.
• 16:41
  Samantha Pruitt: I needed to do something.
• 16:42
  Polly Mertens: Intervention yeah totally.
• 16:44
  Samantha Pruitt: It was a self-intervention, 100%.
• 16:46
  Samantha Pruitt: Deepak Chopra is a lovely man, by the way.
• 16:50
  Samantha Pruitt: So Ayurvedic medicine which comes out of India, it's an old traditional medicine.
• 16:56
  Samantha Pruitt: It's all natural based, but basically they have certain beliefs and systems.
• 17:00
  Samantha Pruitt: I was doing a cleanse that's called the Panchakarma detoxification that's the actual name of it and it's basically a clearing of toxins from the body.
• 17:09
  Samantha Pruitt: And what they do is they first put you through.
• 17:13
  Samantha Pruitt: There's an educational element and you explore your doshas, which is understanding about Ayurvedic medicine.
• 17:19
  Samantha Pruitt: What kind of person am I in the world, in my physical body, but also who am I in this moment on this planet?
• 17:28
  Samantha Pruitt: How can I have a greater understanding for myself inside this human body?
• 17:34
  Samantha Pruitt: And then a protocol specific to my style or my dosha of being.
• 17:41
  Samantha Pruitt: So this might sound really woo woo, but it makes perfect sense if you look at this stuff and it's absolutely going to blow your mind.
• 17:48
  Samantha Pruitt: If you don't know anything about Ayurvedic medicine, you should definitely investigate this.
• 17:52
  Samantha Pruitt: So your doshas are, and based on my particular dosha at the time, I had a lot of moisture and heaviness.
• 18:00
  Samantha Pruitt: I was 50 pounds overweight.
• 18:02
  Samantha Pruitt: I was really sick, you know.
• 18:03
  Samantha Pruitt: I was totally malnourished.
• 18:05
  Samantha Pruitt: I was barely even eating and I had this extreme inflammation and weight and just dysfunction.
• 18:12
  Samantha Pruitt: I have so much stuff going on.
• 18:13
  Samantha Pruitt: It was craziness.
• 18:14
  Samantha Pruitt: So they took me through this educational process and then the series of protocols, which were, of course, nutritional based.
• 18:22
  Samantha Pruitt: There was massage, there was detoxification, there was different types of therapies and there was a process of exploring yourself as a human being.
• 18:32
  Samantha Pruitt: So to me that's pure freaking magic.
• 18:39
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean by the grace that I even was able to be there and experience that, it totally changed everything about how I perceive the world, yeah, and these things are readily available, not just things like that, yeah, but in there's plenty of this kind of stuff out in the space that might resonate with you differently or otherwise.
• 18:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, so the goal was to eliminate the toxins, or they call it the ama, from the body, so the waste or the and that's not just the physical toxins, but it's the emotional toxins, right, these things are interlinked so and so to eliminate those through the body and then rebalance your doshas, so you become a more balanced person, because health is a state of balance, right, when there's an imbalance in a system or in a part of the human vessel mentally, physically or otherwise that can cause disease state.
• 19:27
  Polly Mertens: Well, you know the one, and I'll just two things that that reminds me of from my limited study of ayurveda.
• 19:33
  Polly Mertens: One is they believe a lot in the fire, in the belly, right.
• 19:36
  Polly Mertens: So our ability to digest, right.
• 19:38
  Polly Mertens: And if you get overly wet, you know, if you think fire and water right, you get mud or no, you don't get mud, whatever like it puts fire out, right.
• 19:46
  Polly Mertens: And so the ability to fire up the digestion and whatnot.
• 19:50
  Samantha Pruitt: So Right and interesting.
• 19:52
  Samantha Pruitt: I've had an imbalance of that much moisture, dampness and then too much wind which is the air, so it is based on the elements.
• 20:01
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, yeah, and it's.
• 20:02
  Samantha Pruitt: There was no um.
• 20:04
  Samantha Pruitt: I was either having one extreme experience or the other, and again, a lot of that had to do with my physical state, but also it was manifesting in my emotional state and in my actual lived experience wow wild stuff dude so good and you know a little bit of what you touched upon is how there's so much more that's known about cleansing and detoxification today.
• 20:26
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, then you know it's like our ancestors and really humans who have walked the planet way before you and I were.
• 20:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Even I I mean okay, come on, there's so much wisdom, there's so much knowledge in indigenous people in other cultures of the world, I mean, and for us now, in this year 2025, to not have respect for that knowledge and wisdom is ludicrous.
• 20:54
  Samantha Pruitt: Like if we could all become more aware of some of these very rudimentary, almost like historical practices around establishing health and balance again balance within our systems, internal and external.
• 21:12
  Polly Mertens: Well, that's the definition of well-being yeah, yeah, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual well-being, you know, taking it all into account.
• 21:20
  Polly Mertens: So good, wow.
• 21:21
  Polly Mertens: So, so you did that.
• 21:22
  Polly Mertens: What do you so what?
• 21:23
  Polly Mertens: What are you on now?
• 21:24
  Polly Mertens: and I've done lots of other things, but well, and some of them, I want to continue to hear about them.
• 21:29
  Polly Mertens: You know, like what you know, this episode is all about like what worked, what didn't work, what, what, what would we recommend?
• 21:34
  Polly Mertens: Now, you know, and you've got a whole team that you've got right now, yours are very supplement based and there's not an antibiotic, right, because you're not trying to kill off the bacteria, but you're trying to, like, flush it or something, right?
• 21:46
  Samantha Pruitt: well, it's killing it off in the sense that it's herb you know these are based therapies, so they are meant to kill the fungus and the bacteria.
• 21:55
  Polly Mertens: But it's not an antibiotic or classic traditional pharmaceutical, yeah right.
• 22:00
  Polly Mertens: It's a side basically Wow.
• 22:04
  Samantha Pruitt: So yeah, over the last 26 years I've tried a lot of different things, but I haven't always needed to or been ill right.
• 22:11
  Samantha Pruitt: So it took me several years to recover from all of those illnesses, which I did naturally and lost 50 pounds, naturally, rebuilt my life, rebuilt my brain, changed everything all naturally, Like there wasn't any other source of fix that the Western world was going to provide me, you didn't go on antidepressants or anything yeah.
• 22:34
  Samantha Pruitt: I read surgery and never went on antidepressants, and I'm not saying that people don't need these things.
• 22:38
  Samantha Pruitt: In some instances Now they absolutely do and we're not, you know, shaming and blaming.
• 22:43
  Samantha Pruitt: All I'm saying is, like my path was was different, and there's lots of paths right so for people, and I could again, by choice and by grace you know, invest a lot of time and energy figuring this out.
• 22:56
  Samantha Pruitt: First of all, I'm incredibly stubborn, as you know, and I sure the hell was going to get down to the bottom of this, because my life was at stake.
• 23:05
  Samantha Pruitt: My life was at stake.
• 23:06
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, and I think it was part of the path that your soul really wanted to be on right.
• 23:12
  Polly Mertens: Like was a higher experience of yourself, you know.
• 23:18
  Polly Mertens: I mean, like look where you are now.
• 23:19
  Polly Mertens: You know, from not moving your body very much to moving it a lot right, and from studying a little bit.
• 23:24
  Polly Mertens: Now you know and you're, yeah, it created the trajectory that you've been on for these last 25 years.
• 23:31
  Samantha Pruitt: So yeah, there was a lot of reasons.
• 23:33
  Samantha Pruitt: I was in those limited belief systems and old stories and things of that up until my almost the age of 30.
• 23:40
  Samantha Pruitt: There's a lot of reasons, but there for me had to be a significant breakdown in order to break through right.
• 23:46
  Samantha Pruitt: Hopefully the listener is not going to have to go through that.
• 23:51
  Polly Mertens: No, get on the journey now.
• 23:53
  Samantha Pruitt: Is these very simple.
• 23:55
  Samantha Pruitt: One day three day you did a 21.
• 23:58
  Samantha Pruitt: The first day I did a seven.
• 24:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Like there's so many different ways to skin a cat here, right, like, come on, people, you can really be thinking about doing this in whatever way works for your current life, but to make this investment is really invaluable.
• 24:13
  Samantha Pruitt: So I've tried a lot of different things.
• 24:14
  Samantha Pruitt: I've tried some of the products that you've suggested and done shorter cleanses A lot of times.
• 24:18
  Samantha Pruitt: For me, what area will still break down will be my digestion, and that's generally my you know area of weakness, if you will, and my bowels and things of that nature.
• 24:30
  Samantha Pruitt: But I've figured most things out.
• 24:33
  Samantha Pruitt: 90% of the time things are working, but when they're not, I'm very attentive to small symptoms, you know, knocking at the door, and I'm quick to remedy them.
• 24:44
  Samantha Pruitt: Now, this current infection I have was from swimming, a lot of open water, training for Ironman last year, training at a high level, also having a lot of life stress simultaneous.
• 24:55
  Samantha Pruitt: So it was physical stress, mental and emotional stress, lots of different elements, and then me not really being on top of my game with nutrition and other things that would maybe have helped me through the process, not with the infection ultimately, but with as severe as it got, and I didn't really know that that's what I had and I just was miserable for months and ultimately I changed doctors.
• 25:19
  Samantha Pruitt: I went to a functional medicine doctor.
• 25:22
  Samantha Pruitt: So I'm with Parsley Health.
• 25:23
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm very, very happy with Parsley Health and what they are offering the world.
• 25:27
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you're not familiar with them, check it out.
• 25:30
  Samantha Pruitt: And they do take insurance.
• 25:31
  Samantha Pruitt: So that's amazing.
• 25:32
  Samantha Pruitt: But it's functional medicine.
• 25:33
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's an integration of natural and holistic therapies with Western medicine and science integrated into practices that are root cause medicine.
• 25:45
  Samantha Pruitt: So what is the root of what is the underlying condition or dysfunction?
• 25:49
  Samantha Pruitt: We're not here to treat the symptoms.
• 25:51
  Polly Mertens: We're here to get to the root cause, understand it and then heal from the root cause up to get to the root cause, understand it and then heal from the root cause up, and starting with testing.
• 26:00
  Polly Mertens: I remember you did quite a bit of testing to get to the bottom of this and you know, a lot of times I see, you know, somebody walks into and I'm going to just poo-poo on Western medicine, but they just say this and then they just give prescriptions.
• 26:08
  Polly Mertens: You know it's like oh here, you know, rub this cream on it.
• 26:11
  Samantha Pruitt: you know whatever you know, and it's like no guys go deeper, go deeper.
• 26:19
  Samantha Pruitt: So anytime you're just placating temporarily a symptom, any kind of symptom, yeah, right, whatever it is, whether it's like I've had these blister, rashes and skin, whatever the thing is, it's a symptom, right.
• 26:30
  Samantha Pruitt: But what is underneath and it can be layers and layers of symptoms is a root cause imbalance.
• 26:39
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, it hasn't even become a disease yet, hallelujah.
• 26:44
  Samantha Pruitt: But if we try and get to and hopefully it doesn't become one, right.
• 26:48
  Samantha Pruitt: But if we can figure that out, then we know how to heal that, and the body actually is freaking brilliant at healing itself.
• 26:56
  Samantha Pruitt: It's brilliant.
• 26:57
  Samantha Pruitt: But if you ignore what is actually happening underneath all of these symptoms that you're experiencing and you just medicate the superficial symptoms, you're never going to feel great, never.
• 27:10
  Samantha Pruitt: It's a temporary fix.
• 27:12
  Polly Mertens: And it's something I just want to presence.
• 27:14
  Polly Mertens: I don't, I don't know all the studies and whatnot, but um in europe, you know, I remember hearing about um I think it was during war times and I'm not sure if it was in um uh.
• 27:27
  Polly Mertens: Uh, you know prison camps and and you know nazi germany and stuff like that, but I think it might have been where there was a doctor and they didn't give him any medicines.
• 27:39
  Polly Mertens: You know, I mean it was wartime, like everything was scarce, right, or seemingly scarce, if you will.
• 27:43
  Polly Mertens: And so you know he was taking care of, I think, people in a certain block or something and all he had was like recommending water.
• 27:51
  Polly Mertens: So he like just was like treating people with water and just giving the body time with just water, cleansing, if you will.
• 27:59
  Polly Mertens: It's amazing how the body would do its own healing right.
• 28:02
  Polly Mertens: And there's still places in Europe that you can go to for cleanses and doctor-supervised programs that are very kind of fast-like.
• 28:11
  Polly Mertens: You know, like some, you know, and I think every one of it, like I did when I went to Tony Robbins Fiji resort and we did a seven day cleansing and it was very there was, I think I ate like a piece of pineapple in like three days or so you know it was like and not a lot of juices, it was very balanced with, like, what the body needed specifically, but not nothing else.
• 28:35
  Polly Mertens: You know.
• 28:35
  Polly Mertens: No, no extras.
• 28:36
  Polly Mertens: It was very satiated, like I felt great, you know the body was just like okay, I know what to do here.
• 28:47
  Polly Mertens: Right, when you, when you get rid of all the signals of snacks and treats and your patterns of you know throwing in all this stuff into your body that you think you need and satiates you, or eating your emotions or whatever I I was eating my emotions and you get rid of that like the body actually needs very little, if you will, um well, fasting is a whole other thing it's a whole other station and there's a lot of challenges around it with science right now.
• 29:12
  Samantha Pruitt: How it impacts women is very different than men and vice versa.
• 29:15
  Samantha Pruitt: So really do your homework there.
• 29:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Don't go into some hardcore fast just out of the gate, especially supervised, really knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it right and especially that emotional component or support.
• 29:29
  Polly Mertens: So you know we didn't talk.
• 29:30
  Polly Mertens: I just want to throw it in here.
• 29:32
  Polly Mertens: When I was talking about the bowel cleanse, the um protocol that I used that first 21 days was herb based right, so forgive, you know we're gonna get a little graphic here.
• 29:42
  Polly Mertens: But, um, these herbs that he prescribes, the only way I can, the way it comes to me is imagine, you know, your bowel is like a large sausage.
• 29:51
  Polly Mertens: You know it's like the, the lining of a sausage, if you will, 21 feet or 27 feet or whatever it is, and the way that his product seemed to work was like these herbs when you add water to them they expand, especially the charcoal, yeah, and it's like a pipe cleaner.
• 30:08
  Polly Mertens: So it's like you've got something that helps keep things moving and you've got this pipe cleaner.
• 30:16
  Polly Mertens: So it's like cleaning the walls of your sausage to get all the things that get stuck on the walls of the lining of your gut and get right.
• 30:21
  Polly Mertens: And you know there's another way.
• 30:24
  Polly Mertens: When I was in fiji tony is a big fan of colonics.
• 30:28
  Polly Mertens: Right, we haven't talked about colonics.
• 30:29
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, that's fun.
• 30:32
  Polly Mertens: So if you've never heard of a colonic, uh, and you, you could maybe talk.
• 30:38
  Polly Mertens: So let's see how I can be not too graphic.
• 30:40
  Polly Mertens: So good luck.
• 30:42
  Polly Mertens: Basically, water pushed up in for your rear, into your bowels, um, and then people know what an enema is yeah that's a superficial version.
• 30:54
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, this is like water goes up into your sausage tube, if you will, and then you learn to like squeeze the whatever and it flushes, and so you know that you hold the fluid in there for a certain amount of time and then you can yeah, and so that backed up.
• 31:12
  Samantha Pruitt: You know the pipe like in a hospital setting or something.
• 31:14
  Samantha Pruitt: Let me just set the stage a little bit.
• 31:15
  Samantha Pruitt: You know the pipe like in a hospital setting or something.
• 31:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Let me just set the stage a little bit.
• 31:17
  Samantha Pruitt: People will get impacted, constipated, it can be dangerous, and so they'll have them do.
• 31:25
  Samantha Pruitt: It's a very superficial thing.
• 31:30
  Samantha Pruitt: It's just called an enema.
• 31:30
  Samantha Pruitt: They're little teeny bottles and you'll push the liquid up there just trying to break up the impact.
• 31:33
  Samantha Pruitt: That's not at all what we're talking about here.
• 31:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Colonics are a thorough up the entire pathway, filling it with fluids, and sometimes people have done coffee and other things like.
• 31:45
  Samantha Pruitt: There's different protocols around all of that stuff, but I've done the water ones and basically all that water flushes in there and is basically pumped backward in the system, if you will, and then you hold the fluid in there for a period of time and then you release it Again.
• 32:00
  Polly Mertens: You're trying to break down all of these things like what you're saying, that are along the walls, yeah, the tube or the piping sausage piping inside of your bowel system and it's.
• 32:10
  Polly Mertens: You know, and this is definitely not, there's no medical science behind this.
• 32:14
  Polly Mertens: You and I are just speaking from experience here, like I tried it.
• 32:16
  Polly Mertens: Definitely not.
• 32:17
  Polly Mertens: There's no medical science behind this.
• 32:18
  Polly Mertens: You and I are just speaking from experience here, like I tried.
• 32:19
  Polly Mertens: Totally.
• 32:19
  Polly Mertens: I thought it was, I thought it was amazing.
• 32:21
  Polly Mertens: I was like this if, if there were colonics available more readily, I would probably be doing them, not all the time.
• 32:25
  Polly Mertens: But you know, some people say, well, you want to keep a certain amount of diversity in your microbiome.
• 32:31
  Polly Mertens: So how much you do of this is you know, we're not saying do this every week or every month, even you know, just like it's an experience, maybe try it and see if it feels better for you or if you are backed up or if you're like I need something to really detoxify.
• 32:47
  Polly Mertens: This could be a more extreme measure for some people, but some people like this, this equipment, this machine.
• 32:53
  Polly Mertens: It's a colonic bed, I think it's called um, and then there's like mobile colonic people.
• 32:59
  Polly Mertens: Did you know?
• 32:59
  Polly Mertens: But I was like this is there's therapists, colonic therapists or whatever that go to people's or that you can go to their studio or whatever, and it's just anyway.
• 33:11
  Samantha Pruitt: It's another protocol, so all these options for people to explore, depending on what's comfortable for them.
• 33:18
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, and maybe we're just speaking like starting wherever you're at you and I didn't go in a colonics out of the gate.
• 33:26
  Samantha Pruitt: You know that's like years down the line where we're like okay and the next level might try something else, or let me try this other thing, or I have a curiosity about this or whatever, yeah and I want to talk about two other things that I was a fan of, that I've tried that.
• 33:39
  Polly Mertens: I still, you know, do from time to time.
• 33:42
  Polly Mertens: So two, I would say, natural things that I learned about.
• 33:46
  Polly Mertens: One is the beauty of activated charcoal, which some people if you kind of, if you put activated charcoal and don't think of like charcoal, like on a barbecue, it's like the yeah, we're talking like.
• 33:57
  Polly Mertens: Usually when you do it it's um, like a powder, right.
• 34:01
  Polly Mertens: So like activated charcoal is like a powder and the beauty of it is they say it's not an absorber, it's an ad absorber, which means things, it's, it has a charge to it.
• 34:13
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, it's like things stick to it.
• 34:15
  Polly Mertens: It doesn't absorb it, it like sticks to it.
• 34:17
  Polly Mertens: So if you have metals or drugs or toxins in the body, when you take a couple tablets or sometimes I'll do it just like at the powder and I'll drink it it's not to be recommended.
• 34:27
  Polly Mertens: The tablets are way easier to go down, but I do have a powder that I can do and so you drink it with a lot of water and it just sends into the body a sort of like a beacon.
• 34:39
  Polly Mertens: That's like, hey, let me suck all the, because activated charcoal in hospitals.
• 34:43
  Polly Mertens: They use it to when somebody's taking a poison.
• 34:46
  Polly Mertens: They put it in the body and it pulls the poison out of people, right?
• 34:51
  Polly Mertens: So just know that structure.
• 34:53
  Samantha Pruitt: It's amazing, isn't that, even how it works out in the world world, yeah, you know as a energy, and it's not a mineral and this is and you know and you'll see.
• 35:05
  Polly Mertens: You know, you see things these days.
• 35:06
  Polly Mertens: I've seen activated charcoal masks and toothpaste and I'm like, okay, I could see toothpaste seems a little weird.
• 35:14
  Polly Mertens: I've tried it, I've tried it, I it.
• 35:15
  Polly Mertens: I'm like, oh, I've tried it many times, I'm like okay.
• 35:18
  Polly Mertens: I mean I don't know that I need activated charcoal in my mouth.
• 35:21
  Polly Mertens: I mean, your mouth does get very Bacteria.
• 35:23
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, so it was cool.
• 35:25
  Polly Mertens: It was cool, you know, but I, what's the other thing?
• 35:27
  Polly Mertens: Wheatgrass.
• 35:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh, wheatgrass.
• 35:39
  Polly Mertens: I don't know if I don't know exactly what was going on.
• 35:40
  Polly Mertens: So in Tony Robbins.
• 35:40
  Polly Mertens: So you know, I'm there for two weeks in Tony.
• 35:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Robbins Fiji resort.
• 35:42
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, yeah, two weeks with Tony Robbins.
• 35:43
  Samantha Pruitt: That's why you don't know what's going on, because that's how the whole thing is planned.
• 35:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Yes, boom so nobody knows what the hell is going on little do you know.
• 35:52
  Polly Mertens: you're going here, you're going to this beautiful place, and the first day they serve you this amazing food, like the first day, was just like wow, this is amazing.
• 35:58
  Polly Mertens: We're on Fiji and you know people are all this stuff.
• 36:01
  Polly Mertens: And then it's like, oh, and day two, we're going into a, basically a juice fast, and it was like all this wonderful food's going away, what?
• 36:07
  Polly Mertens: And then so at I think it was breakfast, lunch and dinner I can't remember lunch and dinner, I can't remember.
• 36:13
  Polly Mertens: That might be too much, so not quite sure to say recommend that, but at least once.
• 36:21
  Polly Mertens: So we're sitting at this table and you get a wheatgrass shot right, like a little shot of it, maybe two ounces or something.
• 36:25
  Polly Mertens: And so I did, and I think this was maybe the second day anyway.
• 36:28
  Polly Mertens: So the person next to me didn't eat their wheatgrass shot and I was like, well, can I have your wheatgrass shot?
• 36:34
  Polly Mertens: So I did a double dose.
• 36:35
  Polly Mertens: Okay, within like 30 minutes I'm in the bathroom on the floor sweating.
• 36:43
  Polly Mertens: I was like what is happening?
• 36:45
  Polly Mertens: And so like it was this flash dude Like, so chlorophyll.
• 36:49
  Polly Mertens: Like you know, it's like a blood.
• 36:52
  Polly Mertens: It just like I think I was like, okay, maybe don't need to do a double shot of wheatgrass, but it helped me see something's going on here, like, like it like was like pulling toxins out, and I was like and it was like 10 minutes, you know, like it, just my body just needed to move through it and I just kind of sweat a little bit and got a little nauseous and I were like, oh, okay, she'd feel better, you know.
• 37:15
  Polly Mertens: So then I was like colonic, please, I need you.
• 37:21
  Polly Mertens: So I still am a fan of wheatgrass, because you can get organic wheatgrass, you know, at health food stores and stuff like that.
• 37:27
  Polly Mertens: And then and this is like cold press, like I do it when they press it right there type of thing yeah, um, and then the charcoal.
• 37:33
  Polly Mertens: What you have to be careful about, just so people think about this, is imagine it's pulling things right.
• 37:38
  Polly Mertens: So if you take any prescriptions or supplements or whatever, you don't do it because it's gonna that time yeah, yeah, like you know, and it's not like you do charcoal a couple times a day, like all you know.
• 37:51
  Polly Mertens: So usually like three hours before, after a meal and after your medications have processed and stuff like that, or your supplements or whatever you're doing, because it will suck it out of your bloodstream literally.
• 38:02
  Polly Mertens: So just let's step away.
• 38:05
  Polly Mertens: And then you want to talk some about the vagus nerve and why we like the vagus nerve and what you've been discovering right.
• 38:11
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, so we've talked about the vagus nerve before as part of your nervous system and a regulator between the brain and the gut.
• 38:21
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, Talking back and forth.
• 38:23
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, yeah, it's the primary communication source.
• 38:27
  Polly Mertens: How am I doing down here?
• 38:28
  Samantha Pruitt: And it's nerve running from the brain to the gut.
• 38:30
  Polly Mertens: Hello, you should call it the very important nerve.
• 38:33
  Polly Mertens: Obviously it's a pathway.
• 38:34
  Polly Mertens: The very important nerve yeah.
• 38:37
  Samantha Pruitt: It is kind of fun that it's now like becoming mainstream conversation and everyday science is like really exploring this, and everyday psychotherapy and trauma therapy and like physical.
• 38:50
  Samantha Pruitt: So there's this really great sort of coming of age of this system.
• 38:54
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, spotlighting it.
• 38:56
  Samantha Pruitt: Pretty cool.
• 38:57
  Samantha Pruitt: It's so good.
• 38:58
  Samantha Pruitt: It's so good, so just Google vagus nerve.
• 39:00
  Samantha Pruitt: But what we wanted to talk about today, in terms of it relating to detoxification, is I'm doing a lot of research on my SIBO SIFO, so small intestine bacterial infection, small intestine fungus infection.
• 39:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, so these are two things going on in my intestines and, by the way, I have since learned that about 40% of people with IBS symptoms, of people with IBS symptoms which is the catch-all for all the things right have either SIBO or SIFO completely undiagnosed.
• 39:36
  Samantha Pruitt: It could go on their entire life and, honestly, it is going to wear down all the systems of the body.
• 39:42
  Samantha Pruitt: So this actually made me really sad for a hot second, because that just pisses me off.
• 39:47
  Samantha Pruitt: And really it's because, again, western medicine it is a little bit hard to diagnose and they love to put us especially if it's just a primary care or general medicine doctor and not like a gastro specialist or a specialist in any other way into this just giant buck bucket of you know IBS or you know whatever.
• 40:07
  Samantha Pruitt: Again, not dissing Western medicine, there's a time and a place, but like we need to dig deeper, we need to dig deeper.
• 40:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, it can't just be my bowels aren't working.
• 40:21
  Samantha Pruitt: Take something for the symptoms to get them to either move or back up if they're diarrhea or whatever.
• 40:27
  Samantha Pruitt: So when I was doing this, a little bit of additional research for myself and kind of understanding this detoxification process I'm in the middle of.
• 40:35
  Samantha Pruitt: That's going to last for at least another 30 days, right.
• 40:39
  Samantha Pruitt: So I have to keep unpacking it for myself, so I can.
• 40:42
  Samantha Pruitt: I want to make a point of this so I can stay committed to doing this, because when you're in a long healing process a healing crisis and then a long healing process you need to stay engaged in it.
• 40:53
  Samantha Pruitt: So the commitment.
• 40:56
  Samantha Pruitt: I made to myself is that I will heal this so it doesn't continue to degrade my other organs or the systems in my body that I so cherish and want for the rest of my life.
• 41:09
  Polly Mertens: Don't just give up and be like, well, I've just got this.
• 41:11
  Polly Mertens: Like anybody that has IBS, it's like keep going, you need to dig deeper.
• 41:15
  Polly Mertens: You need to like, don't just settle for I've got IBS, like, sorry, something else is going on there.
• 41:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, and there's a lot of connection with IBS symptoms and the vagus nerve and the nervous system and the dysregulated nervous system.
• 41:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, hello, most humans today walking around on the planet have a dysregulated nervous system and the vagus nerve is the boss of all of that.
• 41:40
  Samantha Pruitt: So what I was and I'm going to finish watching this there's a Dr Russo.
• 41:47
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm big fan of him.
• 41:48
  Samantha Pruitt: I can drop it in the links.
• 41:49
  Samantha Pruitt: I found him on a podcast and then I've since watched his YouTube and he's actually a specialist in SIBO, so it's just kind of fascinating.
• 41:57
  Samantha Pruitt: This is his specialty, but he was talking about a lot of times the symptoms will come back.
• 42:02
  Samantha Pruitt: So I will get through this detox, I will heal this, I will cure this, but the bacteria or the fungus might creep back in and reestablish themselves because of the pathway inside the vagus nerve between my gut and my brain, actually reactivating the internal conditions that have to do with my nervous system and the communication between my gut and my brain through the vagus nerve.
• 42:29
  Samantha Pruitt: That I have become a host for this thing.
• 42:32
  Samantha Pruitt: Wow, I'm a host.
• 42:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Believe me, bacteria and fungi are alive, yeah.
• 42:39
  Samantha Pruitt: There are live things inside our body.
• 42:42
  Samantha Pruitt: Our microbiome is part of us, it is alive.
• 42:45
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's like think of having a garden, okay, and you have this beautiful garden and you're curating all these vegetables and all these flowers and everything's lovely Flourishing.
• 42:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Inside the garden there are, of course, worms and bugs and fungi and bacteria, and some help, and some are good and some are not so good, right?
• 43:09
  Samantha Pruitt: So how are we going to weed out?
• 43:12
  Samantha Pruitt: If you will, everyone understands pulling weeds from this garden that we cherish so much without weeding out.
• 43:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Also, the good worms that we really need are the good bugs that are moving around and pollinating and doing all the cool things, right?
• 43:27
  Samantha Pruitt: So it is a tricky balance.
• 43:29
  Samantha Pruitt: And you're really talking about the internal systems of the body and, in particular, the gut, the microbiome.
• 43:34
  Samantha Pruitt: So, anyway, this vagus nerve is part of the interplay of all of that, and so I'm going to have to, after the rest of this and probably start immediately tomorrow, once I have the wisdom on what I'm going to be doing also start to heal my vagus nerve at a deeper level, and I do have some protocols already for that that I want to share with people.
• 43:55
  Samantha Pruitt: But what do you think about the vagus nerve?
• 43:56
  Polly Mertens: Oh, yeah, well, I just want to remind people when I think of it.
• 43:59
  Polly Mertens: You know in therapy world where I come from and you know hypnotherapy and stuff.
• 44:04
  Polly Mertens: So the rest and digest right.
• 44:11
  Polly Mertens: The sympathetic and parasympathetic right.
• 44:12
  Polly Mertens: So fight or flight is or your fight and flight, sorry, your fight mode.
• 44:16
  Polly Mertens: Your response to stress is your sympathetic nervous system.
• 44:20
  Polly Mertens: So you get that.
• 44:21
  Polly Mertens: You know in by design this human animal is meant to do that occasionally, not constantly, not all day, every day, right, and what you're talking about, that vagus nerve helps us switch, you know, between those into the rest and digest mode.
• 44:36
  Polly Mertens: So we can digest, so we can be.
• 44:38
  Polly Mertens: The body can say, oh, I'm not sending all the blood to the heart or to the feet to run or fight or something like that.
• 44:45
  Samantha Pruitt: I can Recovering.
• 44:49
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, recover, I can digest this food, this food I can, you know, be in the sympathetic, um, I would just say, the state of peace and ease right where that is our natural state, not a stress state or whatnot.
• 44:59
  Polly Mertens: So it's, it's huge.
• 45:02
  Polly Mertens: I mean, you're, you know and you and I've talked about, like where it lives in the body or you know, it kind of pretty much goes like down from the, the brain head into our gut.
• 45:10
  Polly Mertens: It's right, passing through like our chest.
• 45:12
  Polly Mertens: What is this, the, what's this bone like right in the middle of your chest, chest bone, or I forget what it right in the middle of your chest, between your anyway, and it's just on the side of it and you can just like do some touching.
• 45:25
  Polly Mertens: And really the biggest way to activate that I've heard about is my favorite is the sigh, because that signals to the brain, body I'm not being chased by a tiger, but I couldn't be sighing if I was being chased by a tiger.
• 45:42
  Polly Mertens: So that's my favorite.
• 45:43
  Polly Mertens: You know, or three seconds of breathing, you know, hold for one, you know sigh out slowly, whichever.
• 45:51
  Polly Mertens: It's amazing how breath is integrated with peace and ease.
• 45:56
  Polly Mertens: Or you know that hyperventilating that we get when we have to get into activation or whatnot, or breathing at a normal pace, or a sigh, something like that that can take us back and forth.
• 46:08
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, the breathing part, because it runs past your diaphragm also.
• 46:16
  Samantha Pruitt: So when your diaphragm is restricted and instead of being down here, where it's supposed to be, it's up here in my rib cage, buried under my ribs, because I've been doing that for a long time, it can get stuck there in a contracted state.
• 46:26
  Samantha Pruitt: It can get stuck there in a contracted state.
• 46:29
  Polly Mertens: So box breathing is a good technique and boxes basically, you bring it in deep, you hold it in an expansive way to open up the diaphragm.
• 46:39
  Samantha Pruitt: Push the diaphragm down.
• 46:40
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, exactly, push the diaphragm down, open that up.
• 46:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Holding it as if you're pushing the walls out right, you can think about trying to push out of the box and then letting it out is a good one.
• 46:50
  Samantha Pruitt: And I've learned the hard way about that diaphragm stuff from my athletics and putting myself in very high intensity and prolonged, hence the ultra life experiences, and I've had my diaphragm several times lock on me in sporting events, in particular in races, in ultra endurance events where there was an intensity either due to the climate or the intensity of my pace and the extremes of all of those things, and then the prolonged breathing Not what you want to get Wow not what you want to get Wow.
• 47:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Not what you want to get, and then everything can go terribly wrong which?
• 47:35
  Samantha Pruitt: It has done several times which is another story for another day.
• 47:38
  Samantha Pruitt: And then the brain's like you know what's happening, and then, of course, your brain's going to panic because of that.
• 47:43
  Samantha Pruitt: So I say that all to say that many people walk around every day like this Okay, I knew I was in a certain circumstance and what was causing this.
• 47:54
  Samantha Pruitt: Even then it jacked me up, okay.
• 47:56
  Samantha Pruitt: But imagine that you don't know, you don't have the awareness, and you just walk around every day right.
• 48:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Tanting.
• 48:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, that's not a good situation.
• 48:06
  Samantha Pruitt: So breathing cold therapies are great for this too.
• 48:08
  Samantha Pruitt: They tone the vagus nerve.
• 48:11
  Samantha Pruitt: So there's one thing that we're talking about, this breathing which is like a relaxing and a calming, but it is a nerve that you also want to have a quality tone to so it can respond appropriately when it needs to and relax appropriately when it needs to.
• 48:26
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you think about a muscle contracting and then releasing eccentric concentric reactions within the muscles, so flex and release state, this nerve needs to be able to do the same thing activate, deactivate and have vagal tone rather than it's always stuck up here at this high level and it's getting tighter and tighter and tighter.
• 48:50
  Samantha Pruitt: You couldn't do that with the muscle.
• 48:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Eventually, that muscle would just do what it's locked up yeah, and it would just give out like it just can't hold forever.
• 48:58
  Polly Mertens: Right.
• 49:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Another one is gargling and humming actually tones the vagus nerve, so I've I can gargle.
• 49:08
  Samantha Pruitt: I've tried to gargle for longer periods of time.
• 49:11
  Samantha Pruitt: It's actually quite hard.
• 49:12
  Samantha Pruitt: I was shocked, yeah, because they suggest like longer aggressive gargling.
• 49:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Which aggressive gargling.
• 49:18
  Samantha Pruitt: I just thought that was funny.
• 49:19
  Samantha Pruitt: It was like ah but it's kind of hard to do for a long period of time.
• 49:24
  Samantha Pruitt: Humming is great, singing is great and I do love to sing and I do know it calms the savage beast in me.
• 49:31
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean I have a savage beast.
• 49:33
  Samantha Pruitt: I am a Leo, yeah, like dude, and when I sing I'm like, ah, chill the frig out.
• 49:48
  Samantha Pruitt: Monitoring your HRV is a thing that can help, you see what's going on in your system, yeah, so there's lots of things now and they're going to become more and more things.
• 49:52
  Samantha Pruitt: It's going to become.
• 49:52
  Samantha Pruitt: What I hope for us, for the world, is it becomes a mainstream conversation in Western medicine, in Eastern medicine, in everyday life, in therapy, in psychotherapy, in all of these places where people are coming to heal, not just in the woo-woo spiritual world, but like where people are coming in the everyday life to me, through my work, through your work, through physical activity, through any kind of human contact.
• 50:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, we're all part of the human species.
• 50:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, humaning is difficult and luckily there's more to us, which is another conversation, right, but in this human experience that we're having, we're all made the same way, basically.
• 50:42
  Samantha Pruitt: So can't we just start having conversations about these things with our kids, with our friends, with our loved ones?
• 50:47
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, you and I are doing it here, but like, can it more mainstream?
• 50:50
  Samantha Pruitt: It's really my hope for the world.
• 50:51
  Polly Mertens: I was just going to say, you know, if we could just get more and more of this to the mainstream, you know and I think we are, and it is right, you know.
• 50:57
  Polly Mertens: So it's not just the fringe that know about this stuff, not just the people studying Ayurveda and in making its way in which is beautiful, you know thank goodness I just wanted to say two other things that I think about, and maybe there's more, but these two just popped into my mind.
• 51:16
  Polly Mertens: Um, in the world of cleansing, so I think about my bowel as something that I want to just helpfully move things through, like just help it move through.
• 51:27
  Polly Mertens: And one thing I've discovered from talking with a somebody who does a lot of cooking, a chef, is um root vegetable right, and you see this sometimes in some cleanses or whatnot.
• 51:38
  Polly Mertens: You know cabbage, I don't know, is a root vegetable, but carrots, you know so carrots um carnivorous turnips, um, anyway.
• 51:46
  Polly Mertens: So so like root vegetables, beets, beets, beets OMG, beets beets.
• 51:52
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 51:52
  Polly Mertens: So root vegetables somehow have a relationship with the gut that they're less like a helper.
• 51:59
  Polly Mertens: They're a helper to move the gut.
• 52:00
  Polly Mertens: So anything root vegetables.
• 52:02
  Samantha Pruitt: Please anything again.
• 52:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, it's taking from the soil.
• 52:05
  Samantha Pruitt: It needs the appropriate soil to become a quality food product for consumption and then it needs not to be sprayed with chemicals, which basically we're defeating the purpose.
• 52:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Anyway, sorry, I had to rant.
• 52:17
  Polly Mertens: So root vegetables are anything that grow in the ground.
• 52:19
  Polly Mertens: So if you didn't know that, like it grows, so like carrots you pull it out of the ground.
• 52:22
  Polly Mertens: Turnips you pull them out of the ground.
• 52:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Beets, you pull you know, not something that grows on a tree, like a berry or a fruit.
• 52:32
  Samantha Pruitt: The other thing is fiber.
• 52:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, I'm just going to give a shout out to AG1.
• 52:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Because so I did get myself to a point where I was pooping once a day Yay me.
• 52:41
  Samantha Pruitt: And that was a huge victory, considering for 35 or 40 years of my life actually 40 years probably by the time I actually got to that point.
• 52:49
  Samantha Pruitt: So 10 years of my life actually 40 years probably by the time I actually got to that point.
• 52:56
  Samantha Pruitt: So 10 years of like healing, um, and now I'm a two a day.
• 52:59
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm going to brag, bragging about my poop, and that really just started with AG one.
• 53:07
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's a multivitamin, multimineral, and on top of that there's a lot of fiber in there.
• 53:09
  Samantha Pruitt: So I'm just giving them a shout out because it's just part of my new regimen over the like the last year and it's made a big difference for me.
• 53:15
  Samantha Pruitt: Now, if you can get enough fruits, vegetables and all these things, great.
• 53:20
  Samantha Pruitt: But because my digestion is very slow and it is one of my challenges, it's helped.
• 53:25
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, mine needs support and my challenge needs help.
• 53:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, mine needs support, and you might be one of those humans.
• 53:28
  Samantha Pruitt: So I'm just throwing it out there.
• 53:30
  Polly Mertens: Well, I, so people don't have a relationship to fiber and what it is.
• 53:34
  Polly Mertens: I think we just need to spend a hot minute on how do you even like conceptualize for people?
• 53:40
  Polly Mertens: So I think of fiber as things that a the bacteria or sorry, all the little bugs in your belly can chew on, right Like they're looking for sources of food.
• 53:48
  Polly Mertens: My favorite one of the cleanses that I've done is John Duillard's Colorado Cleanse, and two of the big things in his cleanse I think that was a seven day one and I liked it also is apples and dal, which is an Indian product which is like kind of like a lentil soupy type of thing or whatever.
• 54:09
  Polly Mertens: I can't remember exactly what the it's like that, yeah, um, and beans do beans in your gut if you?
• 54:15
  Polly Mertens: Well, yeah, whatever, beans are a whole.
• 54:17
  Polly Mertens: Nother conversation, but apples.
• 54:19
  Polly Mertens: I think this thing was eating up to five apples a day was a part of it, and I'm sorry I couldn't, you know like I think I could eat three.
• 54:26
  Polly Mertens: I was like, oh you know, but it's so.
• 54:29
  Polly Mertens: Don't drink apple juice, that's a fuck.
• 54:33
  Polly Mertens: No, like apple juice.
• 54:34
  Polly Mertens: No, eat the apple.
• 54:36
  Samantha Pruitt: So the anti-fiber, yeah the benefit of it.
• 54:38
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, the skin.
• 54:40
  Polly Mertens: So I do it, I keep as much so like, um, I see people like peeling a lot of things off, like you know, like they peel their care.
• 54:47
  Polly Mertens: I'm like I eat the whole carrot.
• 54:48
  Polly Mertens: There's something I eat.
• 54:49
  Polly Mertens: Oh, kiwis, kiwis, I eat the whole damn thing, the skin and everything right.
• 54:54
  Polly Mertens: So, all of that, the benefits skin.
• 54:57
  Samantha Pruitt: You eat that I eat the hairy skin.
• 54:59
  Polly Mertens: I know, I can't remember when I started doing that years ago and I was like barbarian.
• 55:03
  Polly Mertens: I wouldn't eat a banana skin or an orange skin, but you know.
• 55:09
  Samantha Pruitt: So it's the Again you're going to eat the skin.
• 55:11
  Samantha Pruitt: So if you're eating the skin, I'm just going to point out it should be organic and you should still wash it.
• 55:18
  Samantha Pruitt: Totally, totally Okay, okay, sorry, go ahead.
• 55:21
  Polly Mertens: So, like I love grapefruits these days, you know, I'm just kind of a fan of grapefruit and I look at all of the because I get these ruby red grapefruits.
• 55:28
  Polly Mertens: I just had one this morning.
• 55:29
  Polly Mertens: It was amazing.
• 55:29
  Polly Mertens: I was like like I love the little bit of tartness, but sweet, you know, whereas oranges can be quite sweet, you know, ruby red grapefruits can be just a little bit of hang to it, if you will, and depending on in season.
• 55:43
  Polly Mertens: And what I love is I look at that ruby red grapefruit and I just see all the veins and all the stuff that my body, my bowel, is going to have to munch on, basically.
• 55:52
  Polly Mertens: So fiber is like all the you know vegetables, the broccolis, the you know beans, things that put something into your gut.
• 56:00
  Polly Mertens: It's not a powder, it's not the liquefied form, it's not ice cream, it's not apple juice, you know, it's an actual something for the body.
• 56:08
  Polly Mertens: So that's fiber anyway.
• 56:09
  Polly Mertens: And the other probiotics, you know people love to do this probiotics.
• 56:13
  Polly Mertens: But guess what?
• 56:14
  Polly Mertens: A lot of the probiotics, your, your and the enzymes in your tummy kill it, right.
• 56:20
  Polly Mertens: So just know that it's not making, it's not doing what you think it is.
• 56:23
  Polly Mertens: But, um, pickled foods are probiotics, right.
• 56:29
  Polly Mertens: So pickles like my favorite these days is red onions, like a pickled red onions like I just love just eating those man, I ate a bunch of those last night in my salad so that puts good, I don't know what it is about pickled like sauerkraut, kimchi, um the onions, whatever fermentation.
• 56:48
  Samantha Pruitt: It's the fermentation, the fermentation feature of microbiome.
• 56:51
  Polly Mertens: Something.
• 56:51
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:52
  Polly Mertens: So that's another.
• 56:53
  Polly Mertens: So it's like the root vegetables.
• 56:55
  Polly Mertens: I think of it like when you know it's like a little pipe cleaner.
• 56:59
  Polly Mertens: And then the probiotic-y foods, the sauerkrauts and things like that, are like, hey, you belly bags, here something for you to munch on.
• 57:12
  Samantha Pruitt: And the fiber, you know the apples and things like that.
• 57:12
  Polly Mertens: So what I'm laughing about before we close, here it's just how you can totally nerd out on this stuff.
• 57:14
  Samantha Pruitt: Listen to this conversation.
• 57:15
  Samantha Pruitt: People are going to be like who the hell?
• 57:15
  Polly Mertens: are these people being and feeding their bacteria?
• 57:18
  Samantha Pruitt: But what I want to point out is and maybe that's my closing argument, if you will is like once you start down the path of understanding how your body works and, in fact, the human body, you will find it absolutely fascinating.
• 57:35
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, so honestly, we sound like nerds talking about the weirdest things here, but we're talking about you, the listener, and how your body works, sharing how our bodies are working, and can you think of anything more important as knowledge while you're in this lifetime?
• 57:55
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm super confused that this isn't our highest priority for self-education or education within the system, but let's not rely on others Self-education for taking care of this and being here, and not just being here in zombie mode, but really being here.
• 58:18
  Polly Mertens: So taking responsibility, you know, I think you know some people get very fixated.
• 58:23
  Polly Mertens: I think people get very fixated on the look.
• 58:25
  Polly Mertens: You know, you and I are not about the looks.
• 58:27
  Polly Mertens: It's how it feels, fixated on the look.
• 58:29
  Polly Mertens: You know you and I are not about the looks, it's how it feels, apparently, yeah.
• 58:31
  Polly Mertens: And so you know people get into fitness or health goals for the look of it and you and I are like let's get to the root of it, which is how you feel in your body.
• 58:40
  Polly Mertens: Do you have the vitality?
• 58:41
  Polly Mertens: Can you lift heavy, can you be flexible?
• 58:43
  Polly Mertens: Can you go on that backpacking trip for five days?
• 58:45
  Polly Mertens: You know like I'm very mobile right now.
• 58:47
  Polly Mertens: I have a probably a 45 pound scooter that I'm carrying around.
• 58:51
  Polly Mertens: As I move around, carrying that motherfucker at 50 something years old, I'm like, walking through these, whatever I'm like, you know, it's like couldn't do that if we weren't healthy, vital.
• 59:02
  Polly Mertens: So I think if you get past the looking good of fitness and stuff like that and you get to longevity and vitality and well-being mental, emotional and physical you're going to come up, you're going to bump up against the benefits or not, you know, if you run up against the dark side of not detoxing, right?
• 59:21
  Polly Mertens: So you and I have come across this just in our journey and we're sharing it because, not to say so, one of the things I want to before we close is I want to just give them a little like nudge to go do something is you know you don't have you and I are not.
• 59:34
  Polly Mertens: You're cleansing right now and detoxing because you had something show up.
• 59:38
  Polly Mertens: Right, so I'm not.
• 59:39
  Polly Mertens: I'm not right, so I don't do this, like we don't do this every day.
• 59:43
  Polly Mertens: I mean, we're've incorporated it into my life.
• 59:49
  Polly Mertens: Do I choose?
• 59:50
  Polly Mertens: Did I choose grapefruit instead of grapefruit juice?
• 59:53
  Polly Mertens: Because I love looking at that fibrous in the fruit and going, oh, this is going to be good for my belly bugs.
• 59:58
  Polly Mertens: Do I choose sweet potatoes?
• 1:00:00
  Polly Mertens: Because I know this is going to be good for my belly bugs.
• 1:00:02
  Polly Mertens: Do I choose red onions?
• 1:00:03
  Polly Mertens: Like you wouldn't see me 20 years ago just going out and buying red onions.
• 1:00:07
  Polly Mertens: It's not like I had an affinity for them, but now I like have them in the fridge all the time and I eat them wherever I can.
• 1:00:16
  Polly Mertens: You know, throw them onto things right, so it just becomes a part of your lifestyle and your observation of how can I incorporate things that make my system more vital, alive, improve my well-being, give me the energy that I want, give me the consciousness, the self-care that I deserve, we deserve.
• 1:00:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, yeah, I feel like I want to go around into people's homes and like empty cupboards and pantries.
• 1:00:43
  Samantha Pruitt: You do that too.
• 1:00:45
  Polly Mertens: I kind of do do that.
• 1:00:46
  Samantha Pruitt: Careful.
• 1:00:46
  Samantha Pruitt: If Samantha shows up at your house, I'm actually more than happy to do it.
• 1:00:55
  Samantha Pruitt: If somebody says they would love for me to come do this, I am into it but just helping people just understand themselves better.
• 1:01:02
  Samantha Pruitt: And again, this one precious body that they are getting to inhabit in this one precious lifetime that they are getting to inhabit in this one precious lifetime, yeah, like we're not getting another one.
• 1:01:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Last time I checked, no one's rolling on in and delivering me a fresh one, right, and that's true for all of us.
• 1:01:19
  Polly Mertens: So yeah, put the best fuel in it to get it maintained.
• 1:01:22
  Polly Mertens: All that good stuff.
• 1:01:24
  Polly Mertens: One thing I forgot to say Love it, love it, one of my favorite supplements to take in is L-glutamine, and L-glutamine is the rebuilder of your lining walls, of your intestine, and we almost all should be on that, just like we should almost all be on vitamin D Not shitting on you, but just look into L-glutamine.
• 1:01:42
  Polly Mertens: And lastly, I want to leave them with a little nudge a one-day or a three-day cleanse idea, right Like, think about this.
• 1:01:49
  Polly Mertens: So a one day or a three day cleanse idea, right like, think about this.
• 1:01:50
  Polly Mertens: So a one day cleanse could just be raw food.
• 1:01:52
  Polly Mertens: It could be like okay, don't eat any processed foods, don't do any dairy, no alcohol, sugars, sweets, stuff like that, just like maybe it's wrong it could be cooked too, but like none of the extra stuff, no sauces.
• 1:02:07
  Polly Mertens: take all that stuff and if you want to go a little bit further.
• 1:02:10
  Polly Mertens: And again, this is like follow a protocol, read about this.
• 1:02:14
  Polly Mertens: These are just simple ideas Like take on, maybe look into a one day cleanse, look into a three day.
• 1:02:19
  Polly Mertens: A three day could be some of the things that we talked about with the bowel cleansing assistance, you know, to just help the body move and sometimes it's just not taking in all the extra, you know, all that extra junk that we sort of throw in our mouth haphazardly, right, it's like let me clean that out.
• 1:02:43
  Polly Mertens: And most cleanses definitely sugar, alcohol, meat and dairy are usually off the table.
• 1:02:45
  Polly Mertens: Usually off the table.
• 1:02:46
  Polly Mertens: So, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry, yeah.
• 1:02:47
  Polly Mertens: So let's say that again Alcohol, sugar, dairy meat and gluten.
• 1:02:54
  Polly Mertens: So anything of those, anything else, keep it on the table and not processed Like don't buy store-bought pasta sauce or something like that.
• 1:03:03
  Polly Mertens: Make it from scratch or, you know, go juices if you want.
• 1:03:06
  Polly Mertens: Or look in some of the products that we've talked about.
• 1:03:09
  Polly Mertens: You know, I'm sure Deepak Chopra still has stuff, I'm sure, and Dr Scholl's HerbDoccom.
• 1:03:16
  Polly Mertens: He's got a great website, all kinds of stuff and Colorado Plans Lots of, and there's so many, so many.
• 1:03:22
  Polly Mertens: Dr Hyman on YouTube is great H-Y-M-A-N.
• 1:03:26
  Polly Mertens: He's got great protocols and ideas.
• 1:03:29
  Samantha Pruitt: So I think we've just get started, people Just get started.
• 1:03:35
  Polly Mertens: I'm not leave the scene of this episode without saying I'm going to take on something, whatever that is.
• 1:03:39
  Polly Mertens: What are you going to do?
• 1:03:40
  Polly Mertens: That's your invitation.
• 1:03:41
  Polly Mertens: All right, one thing, anything else to say Let the emotions fly.
• 1:03:49
  Polly Mertens: All right.
• 1:03:50
  Polly Mertens: What do you want to remind our humans that we say at the end?
• 1:03:53
  Polly Mertens: Of all of our episodes.
• 1:03:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh goodness gracious, how your life feels is so much more important than how it looks.
• 1:04:01
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, and every day is your opportunity to find your awesome.