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109: From Gut Issues to Functional Medicine w/ Rachel Scheer · Harder Than Life

• 0:07
  I'm Kelly Siegel, and this is Harder Than Life, a podcast about self-love, self-awareness, business and health. We tell outrageous stories and boil everything down to simple, practical advice you can start using today. Let's get living.
• 0:23
  Rachel Shearer is our guest today on the Heart of the Life podcast. A massive component of my path has been physical health, but man, do I have gut issues. I connected with Rachel on Instagram and met her in person, but today we're going to share her successful healing journey with all of you. I'm the luckiest person alive that I get schooled right in front of all of you. Rachel, welcome to the Heart of the Life podcast, and thank you for making time to play with us today.
• 0:47
  Yeah, Kelly, thanks for having me on your podcast. And we should talk about your gut issues today and get those sorted out for sure. Oh, we're definitely going to go to. I love that how this world works. And I say it over and over again. I was a big fan of yours. And then I got to meet you in person. And then I was looking for you to talk. And you had to bolt to go take care of your dogs. And I thought you were coming back. And I never got to talk. So we're going to have a talk. But there's going to be thousands of people listening.
• 1:15
  That's my out. I'm like, I have to go take care of my dogs. And if I go home, it's very unlikely. I probably won't be back. I knew it too. I could see it in your face. But I want to have more conversations. So we're going to have it. Introvert problems. So the first question I have is, I was reading your bio and it said, the doctors wanted to remove your entire large intestine. Really? So was that the turning point in your personal health journey when you decided to pursue this functional medicine stuff?
• 1:44
  That was the turning point in my functional medicine journey. I've had many different turning points in my overall healing journey that has led me to the place that I'm at today. But yeah, I struggled with severe gut issues. I was on five plus medication. I was on an antidepressant, birth control, thyroid medication, loxatives. I could go to the restroom and a lot of these health issues actually developed.
• 2:09
  After I was competing in bodybuilding for three years consecutively, I was the cover of a lot of magazines, Tran Magazine, Bodybuilding.com. I even got my degree in nutrition science and dietetics from Baylor University. So I was doing all of the health things that you're supposed to be doing. But here I was in the worst health of my entire life internally.
• 2:31
  and Western medicine really gave me not a whole lot of solutions. I spent about a year and a half being passed around from different specialists, right? You go to the endocrinologist for the hormones for the thyroid, you go to the gastroenterologist for your gut issues. I even went to the Mayo Clinic because I was so determined to figure out a lot of my health issues because,
• 2:53
  I could barely get out of bed. I had severe depression, anxiety. I would look six months pregnant at the end of every single day because of how bloated I was. And I had a six pack. So I would say I kind of looked like a ninja turtle at the time, finding the humor in it. Yeah.
• 3:11
  Literally, my life was miserable and I was living in survival mode every single day. And that was where soon after, because of the dysmotility that I had in my gut and not even able to use the restroom at all.
• 3:24
  they wanted to actually cut out my entire large intestine. And that was my turning point. That was my rock bottom. And, you know, sometimes I share that story and people are like, wow, that's insane because, right, there wasn't anything structurally wrong with me. This is when they did all the testing, you know, and everything came back as normal. I was given a diagnosis of IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, right?
• 3:49
  And this is really what Western medicine's approach is, right? When it comes to these chronic health issues like autoimmune conditions, IBS, depression, anxiety, you know, if we can't figure out what's wrong, we just slap a label on it and accumulate the symptoms that you're experiencing to something like IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, you have an autoimmune condition and
• 4:14
  These people are really love suffering and their life really goes to shit. And it was that point where actually I was sitting in the doctor's office and I was like, cool, yeah, let's cut out my large intestine. And I say that kind of humorously now, but that was truly what was happening before.
• 4:33
  in that moment, because I was that miserable in my life. So one thing I always share with people is I greatly know what it's like to suffer to be at that point where you want to give up. I have so much empathy for people who want the quick fixes, right? We give a lot of hate to people. I'm like, stop looking for a quick fix and all of that. And I'm like,
• 4:52
  to be in a place where you are so miserable, right? You think about addicts and people like that, like you will do anything to get out of that as fast as possible. And that's where I was. But my journey thereafter catapulted me into just becoming obsessed, literally obsessed with getting to the root cause of my health issues. And that's what led me to be the weirdo who studied so much about the microbiome and gut health because for me it was...
• 5:22
  literally life and death. It felt like I gave myself a timeline. I was like, I'm going to have six months of doing this more holistically. And I can't make any progress. I'm just going to move forward with the surgery. But, you know, as I began researching and studying and learning about the power of the microbiome and these bacteria that are in our gut that are literally connected to everything between our hormones, thyroid adrenals, to our brain function, to our immune system, to the motility in our gut. And
• 5:49
  I started looking at different testing that Western medicine wasn't offering. You know, that's really found in the functional medicine realm. And I started to make radical, radical changes with my lifestyle and do a lot more of the inner healing work. My body started to heal. And I say started to heal because it wasn't a quick process, right? But I started to see progress that I hadn't seen before.
• 6:16
  really at all to the point. And it gave me a sense of hope. And I continued to lean into that. And within a year, I was able to get off all medication, I was able to completely restore all function to my guts, and I was able to fully heal my body. And it created a passion for me to want to help other people. Yeah, do the exact same and get to the root cause of what's really
• 6:41
  going on in their own body. And not only that, but get to the root cause and heal, but optimize their health. Like I'm obsessed with also helping people, you know, achieve their aesthetic outcomes and, you know, want to look like a sexy metabolic beast. I think there's nothing wrong with that. But healing has to really be the foundation first and foremost.
• 7:02
  follow Rachel Scheer. It's Rachel, S-C-H-E-E-R on Instagram and Rachel Scheer Nutrition. Head over to her website, rachelscheer.com. You'll see... The story I just heard was bananas because she is...
• 7:19
  stunningly beautiful on the outside. I've got to know her. She's beautiful person inside and you wouldn't know it that she went through all that. So I, I, we're going to, we're going to really unpack that stuff. So one of the people I just interviewed said the best way to optimize is to eliminate. And so what were some of the things that you had to eliminate? And then was there any part of this that was in your mindset? Yeah.
• 7:46
  Was it because you said you had inner healing? How much of the inner healing had to be in your mind?
• 7:52
  Yeah. So all dis-ease, I say it that way always on purpose, dis-ease, because that's really what we're looking at when somebody is symptomatic and they have health issues, is always going to come back to a multitude of things. As I've been in this work now since I started my practice in 2017, very rarely do we run labs on somebody or get to know their lifestyle and their history and say, ah, this is the one thing. This is the root cause of all of your problems.
• 8:20
  it's very often a combination of a lot of different stressors that create this perfect whirlwind of imbalances in the body that ultimately lead to these chronic health issues. So for me, looking back at where my life was at at that point in time,
• 8:39
  You know, I had yet to do a lot of my own inner healing work, and I'll dive into that in a minute. But my whole sense of worth, it came from my physical body. I was pushing my body to a very extreme level. I was at 10% body fat. So if you think about the amount of metabolic physical stress that my body was under during that time of my life.
• 9:00
  My diet was relatively healthy from like a macronutrient standpoint and from a aesthetic standpoint, but there was definitely things in it. Now looking back that I'd say weren't necessarily gut friendly, good for my microbiome, right? Because aesthetics can still be separate from overall health.
• 9:22
  And it was all of these things where my body really got put in this catabolic breakdown state, right? So what is a catabolic state? It's the opposite of anabolic, right? Bodybuilders want to be in an anabolic state because they're building up.
• 9:37
  But when you're incredibly lean, when you're training really hard, when you're in a caloric deficit, when you have a lot of emotional stress, which can be a byproduct of just chronic life stress over training, but it also can be unaddressed trauma. What is happening is the nervous system in the body is going to be stuck in a sympathetic state. It's going to be stuck in a fight or flight state. So why is this problematic? Well, when the body is in this upregulated state,
• 10:07
  It's going to affect every system in the entire body. So we see inflammation increase. Like we literally run labs on somebody. We will see their C-reactive protein levels go up. Chronic inflammation throughout the entire body. That is a root cause of disease. We see the gut completely shut down. It stops producing digestive enzymes.
• 10:26
  the immune system is massively impacted. And because of this high level of cortisol and the gut shut down, this also can lead to something called intestinal permeability where the gut lining begins to break down. And so now we start to get food toxins, bacteria leaking into the bloodstream.
• 10:44
  which is going to trigger a much larger immune and inflammatory response throughout the entire body. Also, we see the neuroendocrine system impacted. So we see hormones begin to decline. Testosterone, estrogen, progesterone for women. This is why a lot of women lose their menstrual cycle when they're under a lot of, whether it's emotional stress or physical stress or they're very lean.
• 11:07
  But we also see the same happen with men too. We see testosterone begin to decline. We see thyroid levels begin to decline. Thyroid is incredibly important for metabolic function, right? But it also plays a huge role in your motility, in your gut. So you can see this creates an entire cascade of events that begin to take place. And now you throw in things like somebody's diet's not that great. Maybe they're eating the sad standard American diet, right? Now
• 11:35
  eating inflammatory foods that are wreaking havoc on the gut. So that's what I mean where for most people, I believe there's some degree of a stressor that they're under. This could be dietary stress. This could be emotional stress. Those are really the big two. It could be environmental stress, right? We see in our testing all the time, people can come back with mold, heavy metals, things like that. But most often it's a combination of these things that really
• 12:04
  create dis-ease in the body.
• 12:09
  What was going on in your head? Hold on a second. Let me ask you a separate question. So I watch you and I'm not hitting on you. I just, I ask these questions, but I also want to give you, I work out seven days a week. Throw it at me. So I know what it takes to look the way you do. How did your body look before? Because I literally think you have the perfect body now. How was it? Were you leaner before? I was about...
• 12:39
  15 to 18 pounds lighter than where I'm currently sitting.
• 12:44
  Oh my. Because I, were you, was it bodybuilding? Was it fitness or physique or what? It was bikini. I was incredibly lean, right? 10% body fat. A lot of people have been surprised. I'm probably close to 20% body fat at all. All the fat goes to my butt. It just doesn't go to my belly. So I still have fat. You know how many people like the butt now? People, women, that's a thing now. Everybody wants this voluptuous backside. And I don't know. I have one, so I guess I don't care.
• 13:14
  Yeah. But you're saying like what was going on in my mind at the time? Yeah. Was there, let me rephrase that. Was there something personal going on at all? I just, I, I,
• 13:27
  We all have challenges because the next question is, when you overcome that, how is it helping you in business? Because I see this powerhouse business lady that's got everything put together. And that's the story here. It's, hey, man, you may be having this stuff going on over here, but once you get through it,
• 13:46
  you come over here. So that was kind of a loaded question, but how would you like to answer that? I know what you're saying, and I believe there's two sides to every coin. What we would say is a blessing can also become a curse too simultaneously. So for me, discipline, assertion of will, muscling through things, going after what I want, has never been the problem for me. I can create whatever I want in life. I know I can achieve whatever I go after.
• 14:16
  but to what extent, right? And so for me, when I got into fitness and bodybuilding and it was something that I was really good at, I grew up as a gymnast and a dancer,
• 14:27
  you know, I set out to win. I was like, I'm going all in on this. And I was competing for three years at the national level. I was always first call outs. That's getting to the point where I wanted to go pro and I put blinders up and I just, I go all in, but right to what extent, um, where this actually can become detrimental in a lot of ways. Right. And, um,
• 14:52
  You know, even for myself, that has been a huge part of my healing journey because it goes along with the hyperachiever side. It goes along with perfectionism. And if you look at the traits of all of these people and you were to really peel back, peel it back, what is really the driver of.
• 15:12
  of why people are pushing themselves to such high levels, which is beautiful. There's something called PTG. We've all heard of PTSD before, post-traumatic stress disorder, which we're now reframing as PTSI, post-traumatic stress injury, because it's not a disorder.
• 15:31
  But there's PTG, post-traumatic growth, where when people undergo trauma in their lifestyle, it can then create a lot of these positive traits where you have a high level of agency in your life to go after, to create what it is you want.
• 15:53
  A lot of entrepreneurs, if you were to look at their childhood and their lifestyle, so many of them come from trauma as a big part of what has created a lot of their edge or their drive, which again can create a ton of success if we're looking at the goal orientation on what they're
• 16:18
  like the root cause of the root cause, I think so many of us are operating from a place of not enough. I'm not enough, and I believe I'll be enough when I have the perfect body, when I have this achievement, and it's a never-ending hamster wheel. And the body's definitely impacted by that. What was your childhood like? Was there some of that going on? Were you born and raised in Dallas? No, I'm a Minnesotan born and raised, yeah.
• 16:48
  I should have known a Midwest girl. Yeah, I do not sound like a Texan, do I? No, I didn't think so. But you went to Baylor and you're still there. Yeah, I've been here for now over half of my life. So I'm a northern, southern girl. So we haven't had deep conversations yet, but what started all the hard... You just named everything about the hard life. I grew up in a terrible home. I had to fight, fight.
• 17:16
  It was fight, flight, flight, whatever I had to do to survive. And that's how hard in life. I literally was on with a coach this morning and said, you literally embody harder than life and you're still, your subconscious is still expecting it to be hard, even though everything's easy. I'm like, oh my God. Where did that come from, right? And it's like, I've healed all the trauma, but I still am in that, going in that direction, expecting things to be hard. Because that's safe.
• 17:45
  For you that's safe, right? Because if you grew up in chaos, if you grew up in hard chaos,
• 17:52
  you actually are going to feel the most comfortable in that type of environment. If we look at veterans, if we look at SEALs, why is it that they end up continuously putting themselves in those type of environments far after they come back from war and all of these things? And it's because they feel a level of safety in it. And their nervous system has become accustomed to it, right? It's like your nervous system can almost adapt to the hard. Yeah.
• 18:19
  And that is actually a trauma response.
• 18:22
  I hadn't really known it until we recorded it. And then I re listened to what I said. Oh, so where I was coming, where I was going at is I built this big body to protect myself from, from my stepfather. What turned you is this? So really, this is a big protector for me. And it's also a good conversation starter and opener. Cause I kind of stand out when I walk in a room. What did you start doing it for? The working out and physical beauty.
• 18:51
  I was very insecure growing up. Yeah, I was very shy. So I had a lot of neglect growing up. You know, I have memories of when I was younger, just waking up in the middle of the night and my mom was gone and I would bawl my eyes out for hours and hours and hours trying to call her. And, you know, eventually she would turn off the phone on me. And, you know, this created a core belief of you're too much.
• 19:18
  But where did I actually get attention from my parents, right? When you're getting neglect, I got it because I was a gymnast and I was a dancer. So it was through achievements in these ways. So if you think about a young kid, you know, attachment, right? Attachment really means love, but attachment for a young kid literally means life or death.
• 19:40
  literally means life or death because a kid can't survive without love. They can't survive without their parents. So when it comes to choosing attachment or authenticity, who we are, we will always choose attachment over authenticity. And this is where as a young kid, we begin to put on all of these masks over time and we begin to shape and we begin to
• 20:10
  in order to receive the love that I need. These are subconscious. They're not conscious beliefs. There's a young kid, but we just learn through observation. Oh, when I'm doing this, that's where I find out that I'm enough and I'm loved. Right. So this was obviously not something I realized when I was a kid, this was revealed through a lot of my own inner work and my twenties and really peeling everything back for myself and healing a lot of those core wounds that I had, but
• 20:40
  If I had a belief of not enough and too much, my inherent need to heal that when I was younger and to protect myself was to become really good. Become really good at everything that I did. And so I did just that. Thank you for sharing that. Let me just, I've been there, done that. And let me just take a stab at the dark. Oh, it comes out in your romantic relationships. Yeah.
• 21:08
  Are you asking me how it does? Yes. Is that where it rears its ugly head mostly? You know, of course, right. Intimate relationships are always going to bring up most of our core wounds because where do our wounds come from? From our most intimate relationship. So it makes sense that those come up. I'm by no means perfect, but I have been able to heal myself.
• 21:34
  a lot of those areas where it doesn't affect me. And what I mean by that is, doesn't mean there's not ever triggers, right? A trigger is a physiological response that your body's having. It's happening in the physical level on the nervous system level, it's becoming upregulated. That's what happens with PTSD, but except essentially like these guys are stuck in that sympathetic state, right? And the body's overreacting, but that's what's happening in the trigger.
• 22:03
  And then you go back into an autonomic pattern that you did that when you were younger. So I've been able to do enough work. So if I am triggered by something, I can hold space for that. I can know exactly what it is when it's happening, where I don't continue to repeat the patterns that maybe when I was younger and I was unconscious that I would continue to.
• 22:25
  to act out in. There's, I think what healing is, it's not getting rid of it. It's creating space from the trigger. So you have the trigger, you notice that you have an awareness and you can hold space for yourself. That's a form of reparenting in a lot of ways. And then you can actively choose
• 22:43
  how you want to respond. And right as you're doing this, you're building new neural pathways in the brain that eventually become the autonomic way that you respond when things like those happen. And that's really how healing happens in many ways. You are a
• 23:02
  girl's girl or a woman's woman, this is, I am going down this path and just letting it go. Do you explain? Because women are listening and just going, oh my God, that's me. Oh my God, that's me. And you've done the work. Well, what point in your twenties did you just look and say, hey, I got to work on this inner, on my mindset. And then what did you specifically do? For me, mine was,
• 23:28
  hypnotherapy and EMDR therapy. That was the breakthrough for me. But my weighted, weighted until, weighted, easy for me to say, weighted well into my 40s before I did it. If I'm correct or wrong, you're 31? Yes. Yeah.
• 23:43
  That's my thought. Good job. Yeah, I was a circus clown before this gig, so I was able to – no prizes for you. Having said that, what was the – I want the ladies that are listening to this to say, I love this woman. I want to follow her. What was the breakthrough to heal those, I'll call them, mental thoughts?
• 24:09
  Yeah. You know, I've done it all when it came to my healing journey. So it's definitely not possible for me to pick out. This was the one thing that I did and it got rid of it all because healing is a journey. It's not really a one-stop shop. Just like wholeness, I believe, is a state of being. It's a place we operate from.
• 24:30
  When we are fully present in our life and we feel complete right here in the moment, we're not striving or hustling for something, thinking it'll be better in the near future. Wholeness is the state that we operate from.
• 24:43
  But the things that I've done, I mean, first and foremost, getting my physical health where I needed to be was the utmost importance. Because if you are looking through the lens of a jacked up nervous system, if you're looking through the lens of a toxic guts, dysregulated hormones, inflammation throughout your body,
• 25:08
  it's going to impact your view of the world and how you show up. I'm sure we've all had the experience before where we don't feel good. And you start to look through life and everything around you from a very negative lens. And then you start to feel better. You get a good night of sleep and you're like, oh, that wasn't really that big of a deal. That's how important your health is because it really is the lens that you're looking through in the world. And
• 25:34
  If that's not the foundation of where you're going to attempt to lean into your healing journey, I think we need to take a couple of steps backward and start there. Is your physical health where it needs to be? After I really healed myself physically, and that was where it began more of my inner work.
• 25:54
  journey. You know, it's been everything between coaching, talk therapy. It's been, I mean, I had a small bout of plant medicine. Wasn't for me. I will say that. What'd you do? Huh? Did you do ayahuasca or something lighter? Lighter. Yeah. Yeah.
• 26:15
  Yeah. I've done it. It ain't for the pain at heart. It was a very short period. And honestly, it wasn't for me. So I wouldn't even attribute it to be an integral part of my healing journey. But I do share that because I like to be open and vulnerable and honest with everybody. For me, it's been deep introspection and creating a true relationship with myself. Right? It's like...
• 26:42
  If you want to have a good relationship, right, with an intimate partner, you have to actually spend time with your partner, for one. You have to be present with them. You have to get to know them. And very often...
• 26:57
  Rarely do we do that with ourselves. It's like how you think you know yourself, but how well do you really know yourself? And so for me, really, a lot of my healing has been creating this incredible relationship for myself. So right when I'm
• 27:13
  strong emotions would come up because that's part of our healing. I believe that the wounds really, it's stuck living in our physical body. And right. So you could say rage and anger turned outward is just anger, but turned inward is ulcers in the body. Right. So the body holds on to all of these things. And that's where we get a trigger and there's an emotional response. Right.
• 27:40
  That's actually a beautiful opportunity to heal. A lot of people don't view it. They're like, I'm triggered. This is bad. No, this is you now going to actively heal. If you don't respond and instead you just hold space, you allow all of the emotion to come up. You deal with what's happening internally. You don't suppress because if you suppress, guess what happens? It stays in the body.
• 28:02
  And also you don't act outward. You just literally allow the emotion to leave your body, whatever wants to come up. That is you allowing that to leave your body. And it's not affecting your life because how many times do we ruin relationships, our work, businesses, all of these things because of these things coming up for ourself. So I think the power is knowing that they can be there, but they don't own you. They don't control you.
• 28:30
  And in that just allowance and holding space for myself, it actually in the process created a very powerful relationship with myself to know that I can hold space for anything that comes up at any point in time. And it's not going to shake me to be able to do. And I don't think many people can do that. They're afraid of it. They suppress it. They respond. We numb. You have to feel it all. That's the integral part.
• 29:00
  And from there, right, we can start to, I believe, I mean, a big part of this is reparenting ourself after creating the beliefs that we want to believe, responding, how our higher self would respond, how we want to respond. And that is really the process. So, I mean, all of the other stuff, talk therapy and EMDR, all of those are great, but I think it's this active relationship that you build with yourself every single day.
• 29:31
  Rachel, I find you so fascinating that I haven't asked any questions about your coaching. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and it's just tough in this world right now. I grew up before social media, and I couldn't even imagine if every single thing I did was scrutinized. So I don't envy you guys having to go through this, but this is fire, and thank you for sharing.
• 30:01
  all these fantastic questions about your coaching program. You didn't think we were going to talk about mindfulness and getting in our inner work and head stuff, did you?
• 30:11
  I didn't. But, you know, somehow it always gravitates to that conversation point, because, you know, if you were to say, Rachel, what's what's your purpose? I wouldn't say it's functional medicine and healing, you know, and all the different areas that encompass that. And that's what I feel so called to help people with and to be a light on their journey. So it's all it's all part of it.
• 30:35
  What motivates you? What specifically motivates you? You're a very successful woman, beautiful. What motivates you on a personal level every day? What gets you fired up and out of bed? To be the person that my younger self needed around in her life. I know why we didn't speak in Dallas because we would have talked for hours.
• 31:02
  you're fascinating to me to become that person that she needed. Yeah.
• 31:11
  All right. Let's switch to some fun. Moving on. Don't cry. It's so good. I love that kind of stuff because everybody needs to hear it, man. If you're not looking in the mirror and if you're looking out the window instead of into the mirror, you're missing life. This is where the work is. And I'm really proud of you for doing it so early. I mean, I wasted years. I knew at 31 that I had to make changes and I waited until 43.
• 31:40
  So I wouldn't say I wasted 12 years, but I sure the hell didn't really live those 12 years. So you get to live them and I'm happy for you. And it's just life is, your life is gonna be very, very good. You are a massive success. So let's talk about functional nutrition. Why do you believe functional nutrition is the healthcare of the future? Yeah, just if you look at my story, you know, the way our Western medicine
• 32:10
  Culture has been set up as not really geared towards healing.
• 32:16
  in optimal health. And I think people are sick and tired of having to just get sick and tired of just given a bunch of band-aid diagnoses thrown on a bunch of medication and people want a real approach. People want to heal. And that's really what functional nutrition is. It's taking a holistic, a root cause approach. It's,
• 32:41
  looking at the body as an interconnected system instead of a random collection of independent organs, because that's how Western medicine operates with, right? You go to all these specialists and they're looking at everything separately, not at the body as a whole, right?
• 33:00
  you know, managing and treating disease versus functional medicine is going to be more preventative. And not only is it going to be preventative, but it's also going to be focused on getting you into the best health of your life. It's going to be focused on
• 33:15
  you know, more so optimal levels versus, you know, if you go to Western medicine physician, and I've had this story told to me a million of times with the women who come to my practice, they're like, I went to the doctor, everything is quote unquote, normal. I feel like I'm crazy, you know, and there they are struggling with depression and anxiety and weight gain, and he's got issues, and they're just brushed off. They're they're gaslighted by their physician.
• 33:43
  And, you know, they're just left again with these medications to manage what's going on versus somebody actually doing.
• 33:54
  saying, hey, there's something truly happening in your body and we're gonna figure it out. And we're gonna get to the root cause of what's really happening. And when I step in and we run all of these labs and we look at the gut and we look at the hormones of thyroid adrenals, we look at it not from just general reference ranges and we look at it from optimal reference ranges. We look at how everything's connected. We look at their nutrition, we look at their diet, we look at their stress levels.
• 34:22
  We always have things come back and it's the most beautiful thing. It's sad, but it's beautiful when a woman's sitting there, you know, in the consult with us and she's like, wow.
• 34:33
  I'm not crazy. It's not just all in my head. And she feels empowered that now she can actually begin to heal from a lot of these areas. So I think people are beginning to wake up from what we've been taught is the solution to our health. And what I call it's really sick care. It's not health care anyway. Right. And they want something that is going to be actually geared towards health.
• 35:02
  Have you met Dr. Matt Chalmers? I have not. It's right in your backyard. I'm going to make an introduction. Okay. Literally. Does a lot of the same stuff. I was on your website today, rachelshear.com, and you can start this journey right there, people. She breaks it all down. You can actually, I believe you can actually apply. Can you do this anywhere in the country? Will you send them the blood tests and whatnot, or will you just send them to like Quest or something? Yeah.
• 35:31
  Yeah, we're a fully virtual telehealth practice. So we even work with people international. That's what's so incredible. All of the labs are done at home, except for the blood work. But like the stool test, that's done at home. The urine testing to look at heavy metals and mold, that's all done at home. And then we just find a local phlebotomy location or we find a mobile phlebotomist to do the blood draw. And then we get all of the lab results and we're able to do the consultations all virtual. It's pretty incredible. Yeah.
• 36:01
  It is. Honestly, I didn't know any of this until I was doing the show prep. And I do my own show prep because I got to feel the person to interview them. Yeah. And I was blown away by the depths of what you've done and what you've created. So I hope you do hold space and grace for this amazing person that I'm seeing here. Great.
• 36:23
  I meant to ask you this. I saw this on the website as well. What's your relationship with alcohol? I saw that you have a non-alcoholic, or there's an alcoholic wine, but a low alcohol wine. Do you drink? Not often. I'm not the 100% abstinence person, but I'm the person where I have not had a single drink in eight months. But who knows, when I'm in Europe, I may have a half a glass of wine as part of it, but it's not the...
• 36:52
  part of my health regimen currently, no. Nor do I recommend it if you're trying to heal your gut or your brain. That's the new low and no is the big thing. So I wanted to ask you, when you're talking about Western medicine, and this is gonna be controversial, you could just say,
• 37:11
  I am always controversial with my content, so let's do it. So Western medicine, how would you classify the COVID vaccine then? Do you think it's actually causing these chronic heart attacks and this heart disease that's
• 37:31
  This is just an opinion, people, so don't hold her to this. But I just I want to know she's in the business every day. Is are you seeing anything or feeling anything? What was your what would your gut tell you about this COVID vaccine? Is there some residual effects that they're not telling us?
• 37:46
  Yeah, I will tell you what I am doing with myself. And I will tell you what I've seen with clients coming to our practice. But I will not be getting it, nor do I intend to. And we have had people come to our practice who have developed an autoimmune condition shortly after they got the vaccine. Now I'm helping them work on heal that.
• 38:11
  All right. Microphone drop. That's exactly what I want to know. So how can traditional or how can functional medicine and traditional medicine work together to optimize health? Now, I do want to go back to because I do the same. I see so many different doctors and I have my I believe that the reason why I don't sleep well is gut health.
• 38:32
  I wake up to pee one or two times a night. I've been to sleep study doctors. I've been to the urine. You've had your prostate. I've gone to every single doctor. And when you just said that lady saying I'm not crazy, I feel crazy. You feel crazy? It's driving me insane. Nothing is wrong. I've done everything fast and fast.
• 38:59
  And I just learned to live with it. And you know what I said? If I can just manage my day perfect enough that I only wake up once, I'm like, eh, I can at least deal with it. But I'm convinced it's a gut issue and nothing. It must be just here. We should run a stool test on you to see because if you do have, let's just say, a degree of dysbiosis and bacteria imbalances, I'd be curious if some of the bacteria and the gas that they produce that leads to the bloating would end up pushing on
• 39:29
  your bladder and creating a level of urgency where you do have to go to the restroom. I remember when I was bloated all the time, I felt like I always had to go pee, but I didn't. My stomach was just, I felt that fullness in there.
• 39:43
  Now, you and I are going to fight because you obviously never see my content. I'm never bloated. Never bloated? I'm just kidding. No, I'm never bloated. And then when I do go pee, I fully go to the go pee. Okay. So it is something here. But when you were talking about all the different doctors, I've been to every one of them. I even had the 4D scanner on my heart. And then I had every test test.
• 40:08
  possible. I have a doctor in Miami that is a personal doctor that goes through everything on top of nothing, nothing wrong. I just, you know, 48, going to be 49 soon. And I just, I run really, really hard, really, really hot and really, really intense. So I just, again, how do you see functional or the functional medicine and traditional medicine working together? Or do you try to do only the functional medicine?
• 40:36
  No, I never would demonize Western medicine. I mean, we need it, right? And it saves lives every single day. I think we need to know when to go to each area and for what. So when it comes to acute-based problems, right? You get in a car accident, you break an arm. When it comes to diseases that are progressing cancer, right, for a lot of these people, right?
• 41:03
  medicine will save lives. You know, you have to think about it at what point do we need those type of interventions, even for people who are really struggling with depression. I have nothing against taking medication. If it can help somebody get into a better place in their life so that they can make some of the necessary changes, I am totally fine with that. However,
• 41:34
  So if we want to heal from lifestyle diseases, medication is not the solution for healing. We look at the epidemic of obesity. We look at autoimmune conditions. We look at depression and anxiety. Medicine can help.
• 41:52
  But for healing to occur, we have to address the lifestyle because that is what all of these things, chronic health issues, are rooted in. We have to work on the gut. We have to work on nutrition. We have to address what led to this problem in the first place. A lot of people who come to my practice think that, you know, the root cause is what comes back off in their labs. No, the root cause is what led to those imbalances again.
• 42:21
  that are off in your labs in the first place. For me, I had dysbiosis and SIBO. That was a byproduct of my lifestyle, the stress, competing, my nutrition. That is the true root cause. So again, medication can be a part of the overall approach, but chronic lifestyle diseases, we need that as an approach.
• 42:47
  But I should be asking you, and I hope, guys, you head over to YouTube and watch this and see how just stunning she is. What's your skincare routine? But, you know, before I get into coaching. My skincare routine.
• 43:01
  Seriously, you have your gut skin connection, 100%. Like most skin issues like acne rooted in hormonal imbalances, what plays around your hormones, oftentimes your gut microbiome. And then if you think about the bacteria in your gut, all of that is also connected through the gut skin access. Feel your gut, regulate your hormones, 100%.
• 43:25
  I didn't put any fitness questions in here, but I'm going to deviate before I get into your coaching program. Okay. It's just so much. I got to talk to you for hours and I don't know. You're my, you're my people. What do you do? You have amazing abs. What do you do for your ab routine? How often are you training them? Maybe like once a week. That's it.
• 43:45
  I came out of the womb with abs. I feel like the structure. Okay. There's definitely some genetics there structurally. I maintain a lean physique by no means lean like what?
• 44:00
  I used to be at when I was competing in bodybuilding, but I maintain a very lean physique. That's not difficult for my body to maintain. What I used to do before was difficult to maintain. What I do now is very easy to maintain. I don't count macros. I strength train, you know, five days out of the week. I move my body every single day. I eat real whole food. I focus on gut health.
• 44:22
  I get my lab work done. And for me, it's easy to maintain. And also, too, when you're getting a lot of these labs done, whether it's through Western medicine or a functional practitioner, we're not looking at it often in terms of optimal aesthetic outcomes, too. So that's also an area I really love to focus on. Yeah.
• 44:43
  How are your hormones balance regulated between your blood sugar, between inflammation, between sex hormones to actually create these optimal aesthetic outcomes? Because what the standard reference ranges are, for example, the estrogen range for a lot of women can go up to almost like 600. If you have estrogen that high, you are probably not going to have abs. You are probably not. So we need estrogen to be below roughly 100.
• 45:13
  And you can go to your physician and functional medicine practitioner and they won't look at that as a problem if that's just a little bit above the range. But if I'm looking at it in terms of optimal aesthetics and we don't get your hormones regulated, yeah, this is going to impact a lot of different things. We know, of course, testosterone, right? That plays a big role for men. Women don't really...
• 45:36
  put on a bunch of muscle from testosterone, but they do put on a good amount of muscle through more of the derivatives of testosterone. So we can actually convert into dihydroxy testosterone and that actually can be a better way for women to put on skeletal muscle mass.
• 45:58
  So there's a lot of different areas that we can dive into in order to really promote skeletal muscle mass and leanness from a lab perspective. But that's going to still consist of nutrition and getting that in a much better place. You're brilliant. I guess I got to ask this question, too. And I'm sorry. I got to get this coaching. Walking encyclopedia. I love this. What's your stance on Ozempic?
• 46:26
  on Ozempic, there's clinical use for it, 100%. There's a lot of... Is the clinical use if you're morbidly obese? Is that what I've read? That's what I've read pretty much, that if you can't lose it any other way, use Ozempic, but if you can, try other way because it burns fat. Is that right? I mean, it burns muscle as well as fat.
• 46:53
  Yeah. I'm no expert on Ozempic. I haven't dove into it. We don't use it a whole lot with our clients. But there is definitely some good clinical use. GLP-1, it is naturally produced by the body. Now, do I see negative effects from it as well? Definitely. One of the ways that it works is it slows down motility in the gut. It's all right. If you're somebody who, like I had motility issues or you're somebody who already has gut issues and you get on...
• 47:22
  you know, GLP-1, that can definitely negatively impact your gut microbiome. So we're very careful with that. But I guess I would say I'm very neutral on it. I think just like all medicine, there's always a clinical use, right? Like we're in this scenario, it's going to be very beneficial.
• 47:41
  But I think, is it for everybody? And should we be relying on that as like the sole way to lose weight? What I get on it? No, by no means. But there is definitely clinical use where it can be beneficial for somebody.
• 47:56
  I do want to go back and highlight the point where you said that you strength train five days a week. I just had somebody else on that was into fitness and that was one of the questions we asked. How often? No, a lot of women say, I don't want to lift weights because I don't want to get bulky. And I find your physique- I've been trying to get as big as I can for 10 years. I've been trying so hard. This is as big as I've been able to get. That's good. Literally.
• 48:25
  Thank you for saying that. I've been trying, literally. Watch her story. There's not very many people that work out as hard as I do. You smoke me. The next time we're together, I want to train with you. I did Ben Newman's workout out in the freaking front of the...
• 48:43
  Never again. Literally, he text messaged me the next day and I said, literally, Ben, F off. Because I had feelings in my muscles that I had never. You know what? Familiar with it? The 4-4-4 workout he does? I've not done his workout before.
• 48:59
  it's all your body so you do everything's in 444 so you do 444 something or 44 seconds of something like a lot of hit yeah oh my god it was so hard I felt I was texting with Eric Rock who's buddies with him he's like Kelly I'm telling you right now this is not for you
• 49:21
  And he's sitting there. We're doing it. We're doing plank for 44 seconds or four minutes and 44 seconds. I can't remember. I was like, 44 seconds, not bad. Okay. Four minutes. And he's talking to me. And he's like, Kelly, so tell me about yourself. I'm like, shut up, Ben. Anyways, this is, I've been waiting for this question for the entire interview. What's the difference between striving for excellence and falling into the trap of perfectionism?
• 49:43
  Mm hmm. Yeah. Perfectionism goes back into what we talked about at the beginning of this call, right? Perfectionism is if I don't show up in a certain way, then I'm not good enough and I'm inadequate. And it's a never ending hamster wheel that we get stuck on.
• 50:05
  versus excellence is a place that you operate from it is doing your best in everything that you do it's not being the best it's doing your best right which will look different on different days right on days where you're tired or if you're a mama and you have kiddos and you're
• 50:25
  you know, driving them around or they're waking you up in the middle of the night, your level of excellence is going to look very different on that day versus the day where you just have a bunch of time to yourself and you're able to just crush your workouts and everything. But perfectionism doesn't have any middle ground. It doesn't have any grace. There's no empathy that's built into it. And if you think about a lot of the unhappiness, depression, even suicide and a
• 50:54
  ways usually comes back to having perfectionistic mindsets, right? It's like, what's your definition of success? If your definition of success is only, you know, at a very, very high level,
• 51:09
  And you can't be happy until you're at that point, which is really the core of what perfectionism is in a lot of ways. You're going to have a very miserable life. But if your value is excellence and it's more about how you show up every single day and you can lean into that and feel good about giving everything into everything that you do, you're going to have a very happy life.
• 51:33
  We haven't even talked at all about your coaching program. You have got to be one of the best coaches because you meet people where they are. Your kindness and compassion just exudes through. So that's it. So how do you tailor your coaching approach when working with different personality types? Because you're meeting me all over where I'm going.
• 51:56
  Yeah. Empathy is one of my core values. So excellence is one of mine, but then also empathy is another one. Yeah.
• 52:04
  One of my God-given gifts is really able to connect with people. I'm an empath. I can kind of see where they're at and what they need at that point in their life. With coaching, you know, I do different types of coaching. I mean, I have my functional medicine practice. So, you know, there's one-on-one coaching through that, whether that's with me or it's with my team of coaches. Yeah.
• 52:27
  And then I actually have my evolution mastermind as well, which is geared towards female entrepreneurs. I'd say this is the most recent evolution of who I am and what I really like to help women focus on, which is, you know, creating the life that they love. And, you know, for a lot of my early stages of entrepreneurship, there was a lot of burnout. There was a lot of burnout.
• 52:52
  anxiety there was a lot of stress almost very similar like a replication of what was happening in my bodybuilding days but not what's happening on the business side right like i said two sides to every coin i achieved an incredible amount of success but i was burning myself out in the process so for me right discipline's not something that i have to um
• 53:14
  I have to work on if anything for me, I've had to create more surrender and more ease and more flow into my life. And now I feel such a call to, to help other women because entrepreneurship, it's a very masculine role to get into. Right. And I've also had to learn that I can't.
• 53:33
  nor do I need to operate like a man does. We are built incredibly different. I am not going to compete. I'm not going to run a business. I'm not going to show up like a man does in his business. It did not work for me. It created a ton of burnout, anxiety. My physical health suffered. My mental health suffered.
• 53:52
  And the way that I operate from now, which is there's this beautiful dance between the masculine and the feminine, which the masculine is like very action, get shit done. But also the feminine is very surrender and flow.
• 54:06
  and alluring and inspiring and, um, more, uh, intuitive in a lot of ways I found when I can combine both of those, um, that's where really the true power comes from. And honestly, that's what I believe has created so much of.
• 54:23
  my success that I have now today. And I say success, not in terms of business, financial success, but how much love and happiness I now have in my life. And I don't know, there's many people who could really look at their life and say, I radiate light.
• 54:41
  And I feel so good. Like I'm buzzing on level 10 almost every single day. And I mean that when I say that I feel that good internally is a byproduct of all of this inner work and everything that I've done. And that's what has called me to not only the healing work that I do, the functional side, but also this other, this other level, because I think, um, you know, we, we do all of this healing and.
• 55:10
  To be on the other side and to be able to experience that, it's truly remarkable. And the radiance and the light that you truly begin to emit, it's life-changing. I see peace with you. Peaceful. Yeah.
• 55:27
  So I, um, you, you and I are similar. Uh, I think as you say that I, I tap into my feminine a lot more, which is I'm trying everything to surrender more and stop doing just be instead of do. And it's incredibly hard because everything about me was do, do, do, do. So what did you do to, to work on your surrender?
• 55:53
  How did I work on my surrender? That's a really good question. We'll come back to it because I actually got a good and easy one too for you. Yeah. It's a question that we can take off. I have an answer. I have an answer for it. I'm asking literally for me.
• 56:08
  Because it's not a, hey, I did this, right? Because surrender is the exact opposite of doing anything, right? It's letting go. It's kind of like what I mentioned with those triggers and when they come up, we always have this urge to hold on. Our body contracts. We feel like there's something we have to do. It creates this...
• 56:29
  this rigidity. And, you know, I can even feel that throughout my body throughout the day when I'm operating my business, right? I'm operating in more of this contractive place. So surrender for me, it's, it's a physical act and shift in my body. And as a by-product, it's a release and letting go of what I'm holding onto. There's always that grasp of control on something, whether it's an outcome or something I'm not liking and resistance and agitation. So it is,
• 56:56
  It's through breath. It's opening myself up. It's opening my physical body. I lean into play a lot. We talk about all the different types of medicine. I think play is one of the best healing medicines that we have. It doesn't have to be therapy. It's like when you are fully in play,
• 57:14
  You got music going, you're on the sun, you're with friends, you're laughing, you know, that is you in your true essence and bringing that more to the scene. And as I started to bring that version of Rachel, I started to operate more in that, which is also a form of surrender and ease. I started to release when I noticed a lot of this tension come up physically through my body. You just, you breathe, you let it go, you let it go, you let it move through you, um,
• 57:44
  That is really where I guess you could say I started to operate more in the low feminine place in my life. And it's a dance going back and forth all the time.
• 57:57
  That's a beautiful answer. I've forgotten to put, I'm head down. I own an IT company and I, and I'm launching this huge brand and the podcast is blowing up and I just forget to have. You got to play. I play all day, every day. I, I'm always like, I don't know about that. I saw you, you were all business.
• 58:19
  Huh? No. You were pretty, you were, I can't wait to see you again. Now that I got to know you, this was my second favorite question I want to ask you. So can you deep dive into your seven figure success formula and share some of the key components? Because I just love this. The seven figure success formula. Yeah.
• 58:44
  And remembering even, where did you get that guide from? It was all, whoever filled out the questions, not only attached the... Oh, my assistant. But then she took and cut and pasted and said, talk about these things. And I went, ooh, so that's why we're just now hitting those because there were so many...
• 59:04
  Hey, we don't want to go over it. It's fine. I just, I love hearing success foremost. Everybody, the audience loves hearing it. Because if there's one thing in there, one thing in there that I can take away, I love it. So if you remember, great. I got a ton more questions. Yeah, I mean, one of the first things, now we can dive into it. I mean, clarity.
• 59:23
  Right, is having a clear vision of what it is that you want is first and foremost, the most important thing. And any amount of success and early on, and I was creating my businesses, my dreams, my passion. I mean, visualization was a huge part of that. I literally,
• 59:43
  envisioned it every single day. I still do it to this day, first thing in the morning. I'm always leaning into meditation. I'm seeing, I'm experiencing it. And I think a really powerful way, which is a form of manifesting, is to be able to experience it every single day. Because really, if you think about success, we're very often operating from a place of lack, right? It's saying, I don't have something and I want something.
• 1:00:10
  But if you think about, you know, even manifesting in a lot of ways, it's being able to experience and tap into that energy to tap into that aura far before you ever reach it. So you almost experience it twice. And I believe that when you begin to operate from that place of you already have it, it's here, it's now, the excitement, you've experienced it already every single day, you start to show up differently in the day.
• 1:00:40
  Right. And for me, one thing I would say is because I did this so intricately as a part of my morning routine, when I went from growing my business from making $6,000 a month to a multimillion dollar business, I couldn't help not achieve what I wanted. And I think a lot of people put out there something that they want. They have a goal. Right. But how often do they really integrate it into their nervous system? Right.
• 1:01:07
  Right. Do they experience it? Do they feel that every single day? I think for most people, if they did that, it'd be really hard for you to not follow through and to achieve your goals. So so clarity is a big part of it. For me, massive action was another part of it, too. Right. You know, manifesting is also not just putting out there what it is that you want and thinking about it all the time.
• 1:01:32
  And it's a big part of it because you begin to show up differently in your day-to-day life when you're operating from that place. But being willing to take massive, immediate action, right? Stop and don't, like, start and don't stop. Continue going at it. And for me, you know, that's what I did in my business. I knew exactly what I wanted. I dove in without any hesitation, right?
• 1:02:00
  You know, and I don't even know how much you know about my own entrepreneurial story, but I had $60,000 in student loan debts. I had just gone through a breakup for five and a half years. I moved into the cheapest apartment that I could find in Dallas.
• 1:02:16
  I couldn't even afford to buy a couch. Actually, my friend bought me a couch for $500. I started to grow my practice to making $6,000 a month. I thought I was doing pretty good. COVID happened, everything shut down. And then I met a man, Bedros Koulian, who would become my business coach later. And with no money coming in during COVID, he tells me that it would be $50,000 to work from him.
• 1:02:45
  Now, at this point, I had saved $25,000. It was every last penny I had in my bank account. It was my life savings. And without hesitation...
• 1:02:54
  I decided to put $25,000 down. He gave me a payment plan. This is the funny thing, a payment plan of $25,000 down, which was every penny I had. And then 30 days later, the other $25,000 down. So I literally invested every penny that I had in my bank account, not to mention we're in a pandemic. I have no money coming in.
• 1:03:16
  And then I had 30 days to figure out. I said yes before I even knew how I was going to get the other $25,000. But I believe God works in incredible ways. And because I did it without hesitation, with absolute knowing, I actually, the funny thing, I got the COVID relief fund. And guess how much it was? 25 grand.
• 1:03:35
  25 grand. Exactly. So that's what I mean by massive action going all in. A lot of people say that they want something. It sounds great. But are you really willing to bet on yourself? Are you really willing? Because what I actually did in that moment and what was powerful and what I believe really created my success is I was willing to bet on myself.
• 1:03:56
  in a massive and a big way. And I don't think it was necessarily the business coaching that created my success. It was that moment. It was that moment that I said, I'm going all in. I'm doing this 100%. And everything started to act in accordance thereafter. So we have to know what we want. We have to be willing to take massive action. And those are two integral parts in order to create success.
• 1:04:22
  Ladies and gentlemen, this is the real live Wonder Woman here. We just had Bryce. I'm very multifaceted. I just had Bryce Henson on from that thing too. He and I, he's from Michigan and we just rapped for hours. He's such a good dude.
• 1:04:42
  One more business question and then we're going to flip to some personal and lighten the mood. And that was an incredible story. Bedros and I text or message each other. I love how he goes back to people who just rip him about taking steroids. He's like, here's what I do. And they still like yelling. I've been even accused of taking steroids. And I'm like, man, I wish I would be bigger if I was taking them.
• 1:05:08
  Yeah, I mean, I do the same. I'm on the same HRT that Bedros takes, that Bryce takes. And I'm 48, 49. Testosterone was low. Anyways, what's your vision for the future of Rachel Sheer Nutrition and the impact you hope to make in the wellness industry?
• 1:05:26
  Yeah, I'm actually expanding beyond, I think, just the current audience that I've been working with. And, you know, as we dove into all areas of healing, an area that I'm really passionate about is the deeper healing work and the trauma.
• 1:05:46
  and PTSD, working with people who have nervous system dysregulation. So my ultimate vision is to be able to offer veterans, wounded warriors, people who are really struggling with.
• 1:06:02
  Right. That have this PTSD post-traumatic stress injury where it's massively impacting their life. And if you think about what is really offered to them in terms of health care, same thing. They're put on a bunch of medication. They're literally numbed by the system. This is why so many of these guys end up homeless. They end up suicidal. Yeah.
• 1:06:22
  And I believe a multifaceted approach of not only functional medicine taking a root cause approach, but other alternative therapies or something called a stellar ganglion block. I'm working with a physician. His name is Dr. Lipov, and it's a revolutionary treatment.
• 1:06:39
  on the nervous system where it's actually a small injection that goes into the fight or flight nerve. So we've all heard of the vagus nerve before. At least most people have, right? That's our rest and digest nerve. It's the nerve that also connects the gut to the brain. But we also have our fight or flight nerve. It's called the stellate ganglion. And what Dr. Lipop has found is if you do a temporary block, just like a numbing that you'd get in your tooth, like Novocaine, it lasts about six hours.
• 1:07:07
  A lot of the autonomic pathways that have been created, like in trauma and PTSD, that causes the nervous system to go into an upregulated fight or flight state or people to literally who are operating in that state. It resets the entire nervous system and allows them to operate from a more grounded place. And now you combine therapies like that with functional medicine, getting gut health, getting hormones.
• 1:07:35
  getting all of that regulated, getting nutrition in a much better place. You combine that with other therapies and coaching and counseling. Now we're talking about an entire revolutionary movement where it's literally changing lives when it comes to healing. And that's the mission that I'm on.
• 1:07:52
  We've gone an hour and seven minutes, we haven't talked about AI. So when you throw AI on top of it, you throw AI, yeah. How are things gonna get real interesting? Because you're not gonna be getting what's stored in this physician's mind anymore. They're gonna go feed it through AI and it's gonna go, oh, we found this one case
• 1:08:11
  of this 49-year-old man who pees and he doesn't sleep well. And this is what it was. Kidding. That's beautiful. You're beautiful. And I love it. Are you still working with Bedros, by the way? No, I'm not. But he's still a very close friend of mine.
• 1:08:26
  Good. I sit here and talk about these. You're going to love Dr. Matt Chalmers because he works with the veterans. He can be a tie-in to that too. Have you met Steve Kuklo? He's in Dallas. Yeah, I've met him before.
• 1:08:43
  He's awesome. He's from Detroit too. We're actually doing a really interesting study here. We're hoping to get it published, but we're doing the impact of an SGB block on the gut microbiome. So, right, because of the gut-brain access, we know the gut impacts the brain, mental health, right?
• 1:09:03
  um but vice versa right so when we can regulate the nervous system a top-down approach what is the impact on the gut microbiome i have a few um hypotheses on what's going to happen um but our goal is to really show that healing has to be uh really bi-directional we have to address you know the core trauma pieces we have to address the brain the nervous system but we also need to address the gut
• 1:09:28
  I'm a walking, breathing poster child of that, by the way. All right. Let's a couple more fun, relaxing, funny questions to get to know Wonder Woman deeper. So if you could swap lives with anyone for a day, who would it be and why?
• 1:09:46
  Ah, you know, I suck at these type of questions. Really? Because I never had a idol or anybody like that in my life. Like I never, you know, like when you're younger, people have like, I look up to this person. I want to be like that. I've never had that ever in my life. So I'm like, I don't, I wouldn't want anybody's life.
• 1:10:07
  You have a pretty damn good life from what I see. I mean that. Like, that's the honest answer. Here's an easy one. What's the most bizarre health trend you've ever tried or been asked about? I had a client who came to me once who was doing an all fruitarian diet.
• 1:10:29
  He just giggled. What happened? I mean, his gut was not in a good place and he was on it because he said his gut felt better when he was eating only fruit. And I was like, well, yeah, you're eating only fruit. And right now.
• 1:10:45
  You think about nutritional deficiencies, the loss of skeletal muscle mass. Like if anything, we can survive on protein and fats. Like those are essential. We can survive with just protein and fats. We can survive without sugar and carbohydrates. But you take protein and fats out of the equation. You know, people are going to be in a really bad place. So that was the most interesting, I'd say, diet that suddenly came to my practice on. Yeah.
• 1:11:12
  But you hear about all these weird fads and trends and things like that all the time. I did for one week the Lions diet, which is you could call it a fad diet, but it's actually has a lot of clinical use. It's like the carnivore diet, but a little bit more extreme, but it actually has some really good implications for people who have autoimmune conditions. So it works great for that kind of.
• 1:11:34
  like keto, right? Like keto could be a fad diet for a lot of people to do, but they also use it clinically, right? With people who have epilepsy, it's worked great in cancer and things like that. So did you call it the lion's diet? Lion's L I O N S lion's diet. Yeah. So how long was that guy on the fruit diet?
• 1:11:54
  I don't know how long he was on. I did not put him on it. He came on it and I tried to get him off of it. I tried to get him eating some protein. He was in the toilet forever. All right. Do you have a guilty pleasure food that functional medicine might not approve of?
• 1:12:11
  Oh, you couldn't even get it out. Chocolate. But I mean, chocolate's good. It's dark chocolate, but I have a bit of chocolate every day. My diet is literally steak, chocolate, and matcha and avocado. No, there's more to it than that. But I had like the main staples in my diet. Do you eat sushi? Not often. I see too many parasites in my practice and it scarred me. Really?
• 1:12:42
  Maybe that's what you have while you're waking up. Maybe the parasites are coming to life in the middle of the night and waking you up. I think that my gut, I used to drink so much that if that didn't kill me, there's no parasite going to kill me. They don't kill you, they'll just wake you up in the middle of the night. Smart Alec. What's one wellness tip you'd give, but you totally ignore in your own life? Wellness tip I give, I ignore my own life.
• 1:13:15
  I'm pretty good. And most of them, this is going to be a dumb one, but no blue light in the evening time. Yeah. The phone one for me is always that. I literally took my, look at my phone. I picked up my daughter and I just threw my phone on. And she goes, what? I'm like, I'm tired of this thing. Oh, and women not training fasted. I definitely trained fasted at times for convenience.
• 1:13:43
  Because you train in the morning, early? Yeah, I like to train early. I'll do like coconut oil and I'll have my matcha before I quit coffee. Actually, over a year ago, I've had like a coffee here and there, but I've pretty much given it up completely. Why?
• 1:14:00
  It was creating a lot of upregulation in my nervous system, but I also just loved coffee. So I'm addicted to it. Yeah. But matcha has a good amount of L-theanine in it and it's high in antioxidants, polyphenols. It's great for the gut. And I didn't get the same hyper arousal like I was getting from caffeine that came from coffee.
• 1:14:25
  Interesting. Last fun question and I'll ask you a final. We'll get out of here. If you were a superhero, what would your health-related superpower be? Health superpower? Yes. Health superpower. To...
• 1:14:48
  have a calm nervous system all the time. How about this one? If you could have x-ray vision and see right into their gut, into their gut and see what's in there and what's going on without having to take all those tests. How cool would that be? I'm looking at people's poop through my, but then you'd have to be able to see like their bacteria and everything. Listen, girl, you took it to the nasty spot. I didn't.
• 1:15:12
  Is there anything? I'm like, I'm selfishly doing something for myself. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you feel compelled to share? No, you've asked me so many questions. We've juggled a lot of different areas. Yeah.
• 1:15:28
  You are beautiful and I adore you and you are doing great things. And I am envious. I would love my daughter to grow up and be just like you and you're doing great things. Guys, follow Rachel on Instagram. Look into her on her website, rachelshear.com. Guys, I do all of these things she does and that's how I stay in this relationship.
• 1:15:55
  health somewhat. I go to a doctor every six months. I have my test on. You need to have it anyways. How else are you going to know if other things are going on like heart disease or something that can kill you in a second? These tests will find them. So go get yourself checked out. She's doing great things. She's beautiful. She's brilliant. Thank you for being on a harder than life. Thank you.
• 1:16:26
  Please rate and share this podcast. I'm active on all social platforms and love to hear from my Segal supporters. Each and every episode is sponsored by my company, National Technology Management, the easiest and best IT company to do business with, delivering peace of mind with technology every day, even simplifying cybersecurity. Visit TrustNTM.com for more info. Until next week, be harder than life.