What Really Happened?

Tune into our latest episode of the MD and Chef Team Podcast, where we promise to unravel the secrets to a healthier mind and body through our story of tragedy and wins! 

Drawing from over three decades of expertise in medicine and culinary nutrition, we explore the root causes of health issues and share compelling personal narratives, including Isabel's inspiring transformation from an aspiring doctor to a suicide survivor, driven by her uncle's dedication to healthcare. 

This episode is packed with actionable insights and motivational stories aimed at guiding you toward a healthier, more fulfilling life.

We dive deep into brain health and prevention strategies, spotlighting holistic approaches over the over-reliance on medication. 

Learn why individual decisions are crucial in crafting our collective future and how staying committed and "hungry" can help you achieve your goals. Join us on this journey as we provide the knowledge and tools to empower you in your quest for mental and physical wellness.

Chapters

• 0:00 The MDN Chef Team Podcast
• 16:29 Brain Health and Prevention Strategies
• 34:38 Making Decision to Get Hungry

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hello and welcome to the MDN Chef Team Podcast. This is your culinary nutrition expert and brain health coach, Chef Michael, along with my beautiful wife, my hottie bride Isabel, your Dr Isabel, I love it when you introduce me like that, your hottie bride, you are 43 years of being together and 37 plus plus, plus to go right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 0:36

Many, many, many more. Yes, I'm excited about that, yeah, excited about the future, and we'll talk about the future for everybody here today, hopefully make a difference in their lives. So, my dear somebody new coming onto the show might ask a question Well, what's this podcast all about? I mean, what are these podcast all about? I mean, what are these guys all about? What would you have to say to that?

Speaker 2: 0:59

Well, the reason I would encourage you to stick and listen is because what we're going to be doing is looking through a window, a window into your future, a window into the kind of life you can be having right now. I've been a doctor now since 1991. That's more than 30 plus years and I've seen over a half a million people face to face. And what I've come to understand from my personal experience and from the latest, most up-to-date research, is that medicine is changing. We're not focusing on what's your diagnosis, we're focusing on why is this happening to you? And once we figure out why, then we can start figuring out how to reverse it and fix it, so that, look, I'm not saying that you need to be fixed, I'm just saying let's get well so you can live your best life.

Speaker 1: 1:51

So that's what we're for is just to look at things differently right now, and I know you have a great analogy on that that you got from one of your mentors, dr Mark Hyman. He talks about basically the upstream and the downstream, and what's that great analogy that he's known to say?

Speaker 2: 2:10

Yeah, he says it's kind of like mopping up the floor when the sink is overflowing instead of just turning off the faucet. Well, the faucet is upstream. Let's learn to turn off the faucet so we don't have a kitchen full of water.

Speaker 1: 2:26

Just let it keep coming and keep mopping, no, no, no.

Speaker 2: 2:30

And when we say a kitchen full of water, we're talking about the downstream. And when we say a kitchen full of water, we're talking about the downstream, like for instance anxiety, depression, suicide, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, dementia all those non-fun things that we don't want to get to. That's right, and we can prevent by taking care of our upstream issues, which is all. It all starts with our number one muscle, our brain. Yeah, the brain.

Speaker 1: 3:02

Well, you know we've got a little bit of a different type of show today because you know a lot of folks might be is what Really Happened? Because we get that question a lot of times, where you know people might catch little snippets about us, little snippets about some things we're doing, but we do get the question, michael and Isabel MD and Jeff, what really happened along the way? So we want to kind of fill in a little some of those gaps today of what really happened along the way. So we want to kind of fill in a little some of those gaps today of what really happened. Would you like to start that off, my dear yes, with a little bit about your story, yes, or a lot about your story, however you feel like, and we're going to do your story.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Oh.

Speaker 2: 3:48

I get to come in.

Speaker 1: 3:49

Yeah, so people know both our story and then it's really a combined story. Yeah, all right.

Speaker 2: 3:55

What do you got? And we've done it all together, babe. We've done all of this together, isn't that amazing?

Speaker 1: 4:00

43 years of the story.

Speaker 2: 4:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of people divorce, oh, and it's just so easy.

Speaker 1: 4:06

You know, just la-di-da butterflies and rainbows cruising along.

Speaker 2: 4:21

Dee-dee it along, no, no, yeah, so go ahead, all right. So I've read a lot of stories about people's lives and they seem so distant when they're sharing it and I'd wonder, come on, what really happened behind the scenes that helped them win. Because now I'm seeing them as a winner and I wanted the granular stuff, the real, raw, messy, human side of it, to learn how I could win through it. So I was trying to figure out how to put this together for you so that I just want to let you know that I'm doing my best to offer that to you to help you win and not deal with the pain that I went through. Hopefully prevent that.

Speaker 2: 5:01

Michael always introduces me as Dr Isabel, md and suicide survivor, and then we dive into our talks and there's a lot to being a suicide survivor and there's a lot to being a suicide survivor. When I was five, five years of age, I remember telling my mom that I wanted to be a doctor, just like my uncle Tio Julito Uncle Jules, he's from Cuba, so we call him Tio Julito. He was the kind of doctor who would come into the room and just light it up with his sunshiny face. He was a true sunflower, wouldn't you agree?

Speaker 1: 5:40

Oh yeah, amazing man, beautiful man. Yeah, just one of those people. If you were having a yucky day and you got around the Olito, he just smiled yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:51

And just made you feel better by smiling. Yeah, and you know, we know, that smiles mean I accept you. Oh yeah, yeah, that's what a smile means when somebody smiles Okay. I accept you and you're okay. Yeah, so I don't know if he knew that but anyway he was my inspiration. Yeah, I've been studying smiles, the power of smiling, the smile study.

Speaker 2: 6:13

Yeah, the smile studier, and I'll do a talk on that, the research on smiles. So Tionito was my inspiration. And fast forward from five years of age to 1991, I graduated from medical school in Colorado and I began my in hospital training for four years. And I began my in-hospital training for four years and there you do your 36 hours on for a shift and then you're awake. You get to sleep for maybe two to three hours during that 36 hours, but the whole 36 hours you're in the hospital with a beeper and the nurses and the doctors in the emergency department doctors get to call you and say, hey, we've got somebody else for you to review and it was a badge of honor not to sleep.

Speaker 2: 7:02

I mean, for me it was where my living hell began. I never realized how much sleep affected, lack of sleep affected me and I would go home after being awake for most of the 36 hours and then try to get back into my sleeping rhythm, very unsuccessfully, yes, yeah. And then two days later back into my 36-hour shift in the hospital. And that was for three years, three to four years. That was four years. That was four years of that stuff. Insane and the real me, with anxiety and self-doubt, would cry myself to sleep and only to sleep, a few hours before getting back up and going back into my hospital training, and I know you didn't realize what was going on because you were busy doing your work.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Yeah, yeah, At the time I was an executive chef. In a huge organization, different organizations doing. You know, it was kind of our own personal joke where I'd do 70 to 75 hours a week, or maybe even 80. And you'd say well, I just did 116 hours or 110 hours, something like that. Okay, I guess I didn't do that much this weekend, I guess I've been just kind of hanging out, but we were two ships passing in the night, aren't? We yeah, as you can. Imagine.

Speaker 2: 8:24

For four years. Huh. At that time, yeah yeah, it was crazy, and so the doctor.

Speaker 1: 8:29

I ended up going to see the doctor and they put me on vitamin P, also known as Prozac.

Speaker 2: 8:38

Yeah, because you had a Prozac deficiency, right. Right, I had a Prozac deficiency back then. That's a joke, everyone. Yeah, I did not have a Prozac deficiency, but the point is it did help me with my insomnia and it relieved a lot of the anxiety, because when you don't sleep you get anxious. So the medicine helped me sleep. So therefore it helped me not be anxious.

Speaker 2: 8:59

But I was an emotionless doctor, full of shame, and I just had this quiet secret, like I could not share this with my class, with my colleagues, because I would have been an outcast and bullied, and I thought for sure, babe, that you would leave me because I was truly a hot basket mental case.

Speaker 2: 9:21

But I kept it quiet that whole time and back in my training as a medical doctor, there was no education about sleep hygiene, just drugs During my hospital. Actually, after I graduated and I was a family practice doctor during my second pregnancy, it was very stressful and my sleep was terrible also and I remember crying at night just to exhaust myself and be able to fall asleep because I did not want to get back on the Prozac, because I had weaned myself off and I got off of it and I was afraid that the Prozac. If I took the Prozac it was going to affect our baby in utero and I didn't want that. But we now know that the fetus can feel and does feel experiences all of the emotions that the mother is experiencing in the womb.

Speaker 2: 10:19

And that child was born, a very anxious baby who had colic and slept terribly for the first year. Remember, do you remember?

Speaker 1: 10:27

Oh yeah, I was there I cannot forget that. Yeah, yeah, that was a terrible time.

Speaker 2: 10:32

Really tough time and then fast forward to 2013. Michael and I moved to New Zealand to raise our children here in New Zealand because I was really unhappy with medicine in America. You know, in America you had to have health care to get health care, which is crazy. You had to have health insurance to get health care. And I wanted to be a doctor for everybody. And in 2013, I just came to the realization that I was a frustrated physician who wanted to help people prevent disease instead of managing it, and all I was doing the whole time before that point was just managing people's diseases, which is nuts. And a year later, doctor on a mission was not growing as fast as we wanted. I was menopausal, I was 53, and I was experiencing severe insomnia and anxiety severe, and I didn't even realize that it was a side effect of being menopausal having problems sleeping.

Speaker 1: 11:38

Well, you'd even got to a point where you were afraid to go to bed just to pose and sleep, because you were worried that I might not sleep, meaning you, you were worried that you wouldn't sleep. So you're like I don't want to go to bed because I don't think I'll sleep.

Speaker 2: 11:51

Right, I had sleep anxiety, sleep anxiety, yeah yeah, which is pretty wild to bed because I don't think I'll sleep.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Right, I had sleep anxiety, sleep anxiety, yeah, yeah, yeah, which is pretty wild. I was like, oh my god, I mean, I didn't know I know I kept it quiet from johan.

Speaker 2: 12:00

I was very ashamed.

Speaker 1: 12:02

I mean, I was experiencing that, but I mean also even from myself. I was just like uh, you know, I don't know anything about this. I didn't have experience of that at the time. The last 10 years we totally turned that around and become experts in that area, but at that point it was like whoa, what's going on?

Speaker 2: 12:21

Mm-hmm and I would only sleep two hours every night for 17 straight nights and the thoughts that I was having is I am no good for my family, I'm a burden. I can't let them know that I want to kill myself. So I was very, very secretive because I'm telling you, if you don't sleep, you do become suicidal.

Speaker 1: 12:46

Yeah, and psychotic, and psychotic yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:50

And by the end of that, 17 nights, 17 nights of only two or three hours of sleep, I did try to take my life twice in three days and by the grace of God that plan was stopped and you took me to our pastor and the pastors prayed over me and then went to the hospital and saw the mental health folks, the psychiatrist who, um, who said, isabel, you're going to be on prozac and sleeping tablet for the rest of your life.

Speaker 2: 13:24

And I was, like you know, at that point I I had totally surrendered, like okay, my secret has been found out, I am not gonna be able to kill myself Now. I'm staying alive and I gotta figure this out. And nobody who has ever been, who's never been in that space, will ever, ever, ever understand what it's like to be suicidal.

Speaker 1: 13:46

Yeah, yeah, ever To be that sleep deprived and just to have those types of psychotic thoughts that it takes you to that point of an end. Like you said, thank God you're here today.

Speaker 2: 14:05

Yeah, by the grace of God, that plan was stopped.

Speaker 1: 14:07

I know, and I know part of that was I was there during that and first thing they did when you came in was they checked you for drugs because, I mean, you were like a caged wild animal just because of lack of sleep. Not because you were on anything, it was just this lack of sleep had driven you to psychosis.

Speaker 2: 14:26

Yeah, my cortisol was up. I was like a wild person. Yeah, yeah, my eyes were bugged out. They thought I was on methamphetamine. They tested me for methamphetamine.

Speaker 1: 14:38

Yeah, yeah, of course I was like I'm not on methamphetamine. They're like okay, gee, okay, we got to knock this lady out, yeah, but you know, and at the time I mean, this is one.

Speaker 2: 14:50

We're laughing about it now because we can, because we can, but at the time it was 10 years ago.

Speaker 1: 14:55

But also, you know, just from a relational point of view, it was a crossroads for us because the psychiatrist looked at me and said okay, michael, you got a choice We'll admit Isabel into the mental health section here of the hospital or she can go home with you and you are responsible for her. And you know, I hesitated for, I don't know, maybe five seconds, maybe it was 10, maybe it was 15. I don't know. It was fairly quick and you turned to me, my dear, and were like don't let them take me. I know what happens in here. I was like, oh my God, I mean, you looked almost like a child, was like don't let me, don't let them take me. Yeah, and I looked at you and I was like, well, no, there's no choice here. You're coming home with me.

Speaker 1: 15:48

We're going to get through this together. We're going to work through this, right, I'm not sure how it's going to happen. We're going to take it day by day, but there's something going on here. We can work on this together. We've got to figure this out. And we can use this mess because, also, we call this mess to mission.

Speaker 2: 16:10

Yeah, we can use this mess as a mission to save a lot of other lives. But we didn't know that. We didn't know it at the time. But now we know that. But it did reveal itself.

Speaker 1: 16:14

Yeah, the whole purpose did reveal itself, yeah but I, yeah, you came home and you know with me and, uh, we're stronger and better ever since.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Yeah, yeah that was pretty wild. Pretty wild and we've gone through that together. And during that I do remember when the psychiatrist said, isabel, you're going to be on Prozac and a sleeping tablet for the rest of your life. Deep down inside I was like, hmm, we'll see about that. Yes, I took the medication and, yes, it put me to sleep and I started to sleep very, very well. I think I was knocked out for two weeks.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Yeah, that's right. Whenever I was, I was like, okay, wow, that's tough, I'm going to check and see if I can wake you up here.

Speaker 2: 16:56

The mental health nurse would come and visit me, remember, like every other day and report back to the psychiatrist and said you need to lighten up on this sleeping?

Speaker 1: 17:05

Yeah, she's caught up in her sleep now. Yeah, she's caught up.

Speaker 2: 17:11

We've got to allow her to wake up again.

Speaker 1: 17:13

Yeah, so she can walk. Oh, my gosh yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:16

Now, during this whole journey, one of my mentors appeared in my life Dr Dale Bredesen, who's a medical doctor and neurologist, who's been studying how to prevent and even reverse Alzheimer's early Alzheimer's and he's written this book called the End of Alzheimer's. And when I was reading this book I read he said that the research shows that antidepressants increase your risk of dementia. Well, at the time, antidepressants increase your risk of dementia. Well, at the time I was on an antidepressant and I was like what? I'm not going to be getting dementia of the Alzheimer's type. That's not going to be my life. So Michael and I really started to dive into the latest, most up-to-date research on brain health and how to support it. And I just want to say that now I am off the medication and I'm saying this to you for you not to just come off your medication. I'm giving you hope and encouragement that you know what, wherever you are right now, you can get through this and over to the other side and have victory. You're just in a messy middle and you can get through.

Speaker 1: 18:29

And so Michael and I learned about the latest issues about brain health and how to work upstream and turn off the faucet Right, turn off the faucet and just learning some of those contributors about brain health and how to support it, would you say gut health is one of them.

Speaker 2: 18:49

Yep, Yep, Absolutely Gut, as you hear out there in the world. Your brain is your stomach. Your gut is your second brain. That is true.

Speaker 1: 19:00

And how about? I mean this is one I'd never heard of what's called ACE Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Speaker 2: 19:06

I had no idea the effect of adverse childhood experiences on our brain health. I had no idea that if you score greater than four then you've got a 1,200% increase of suicide. Who knew? I was never taught that in medical training.

Speaker 1: 19:25

Hey, here's another one for you. I imagine you didn't get much in this in your medical training. How about nutrition? Can that support our brain health? Well, chef, what do you think? I'll just say 100%, yeah, 100%, absolutely. And exercise? I mean, we hear about exercise and physical health, but can exercise support our brain health?

Speaker 2: 19:50

I love what Dr Perlmalter says. He says the number one supplement is a pair of walking shoes to get your exercise in.

Speaker 1: 20:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And another biggie and I know this is for you during your menopause, because it was your menopause years when this hit hormones. Does that something have to do with supporting brain health?

Speaker 2: 20:16

I was never taught the importance of hormones in our brain health, and I never also knew that the highest rate of women who commit suicide are between the ages of 35 to 44. That's perimenopausal, the time around menopause, and then the next highest rate of suicide occurs to women between 45 and 54. That was me, and it had to do with our hormones, and not only for women, but men. Men go through menopause too. You know low testosterone. But hormones such like vitamin D, thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, dhea, cortisol all those hormones they affect our brain.

Speaker 1: 21:06

Yes, and another one is relationships. Is that something that's important for our brain health?

Speaker 2: 21:15

Yes, and learning how to implement boundaries to protect yourself.

Speaker 1: 21:19

Nice, you know yeah.

Speaker 2: 21:22

A lot of people don't know that they need to have boundaries.

Speaker 1: 21:25

Yeah, A lot of people don't know that they need to have boundaries. Yeah, and how about I find this one so important is productive thought management the way we think in our brain.

Speaker 2: 21:38

Yeah, we have to control our thoughts or they will control us, and that is a job in and of itself. While you're awake, pretty much. Yes. Constant course correction, constant course correction. Babe, you and I have been working on having productive thought management, at least for the last 25 years.

Speaker 1: 21:58

Oh, by the way, babe, that's me.

Speaker 2: 22:02

And you know, look, today you and I were walking and you're like ah, you're going off course.

Speaker 1: 22:08

Constant course correction yeah, and spirituality is that a way to support brain health too?

Speaker 2: 22:15

Yes, depending on what people believe. I can only speak from what you and I believe. And at the time I thought that it was in my strength that was going to grow Doctor on a Mission. It was in my strength, it was all on my shoulders. But during this whole experience I've learned that it's not on my strength, it's in God's strength, with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And just being able to cast my cares unto God and knowing that he's there every step of the way really, really helps me. It keeps me light. It keeps me like Tigger. That's T-I-double-ger-er in Winnie the Pooh. That's my normal personality.

Speaker 1: 23:03

And what we discovered for everybody. It's just important to have something you believe in beyond yourself, right, yeah, so it's not all on you, yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:14

And my favorite prayer to God is God, use me, you kept me alive.

Speaker 1: 23:20

Kept me alive, used me in a great way.

Speaker 2: 23:22

Yeah, big, use us big now here's one.

Speaker 1: 23:27

We've seen a lot with people in brain health. Is toxins and toxicity important? What do you think? Oh yeah, yes, yes yes, are you on 100?

Speaker 2: 23:38

yeah, to pesticides, to glyphosate, to mold, to so many toxins that our body has to clean out. I forgot what the data showed, hon, but you had mentioned it in one of our podcasts that the umbilical cord has how many toxins in it.

Speaker 1: 24:03

Yeah, when the baby's born, just on average, I think it's like 217 toxins or something like that on average when the baby child is born that's insane.

Speaker 1: 24:13

The child just from from mom, uh, and that's just on average, and it's not mom's doing anything wrong. It's just what we're exposed to these days anymore. Yeah, so we have to be aware of that, and that's a whole other topic, and, of course, there's a few other contributors, but these are all areas that we have to turn off the faucet or even find out. You know what's going on in our lives. These are contributors.

Speaker 2: 24:37

When we go upstream, yeah, and if I start making poor choices, I start heading downstream, so I get back on track because I never want to be in that place again, and I hope that this is going to help you so that you don't have to suffer unnecessarily like I did, because there are, and this is not being taught in medical schools. This is just not being taught. It may change.

Speaker 1: 25:06

It may change. Yeah, it will. It's going to take about 20 years. Yeah, we're in that time where it's an exciting time in the healthcare and medical field, where there are changes coming. How fast that will be we don't know, but yeah, there's changes coming.

Speaker 2: 25:23

Yeah, how about you, hon? Can you tell us about your story, because I've said so much about my story.

Speaker 1: 25:30

Well, I usually I keep mine to. Let's say, I guess you would call the title what jeans are you wearing? And with the jeans, it's not like putting Wrangler blue jeans on, I'm talking about jeans like G-E-N-E-S. What type of jeans are you wearing? So, in the traditional medical sense, I've been trying as an adult they try to put me into a box, and what I mean by that is because of both of my parents died young I consider very young from chronic disease at 53 and 69. That's so young, that's young.

Speaker 2: 26:12

Yes, that's young.

Speaker 1: 26:14

And because they died of chronic diseases. As we probably have all noticed, anytime you go somewhere you have to fill out a form, whether it's health care, medical insurances. There's always going to be something on there to tick the boxes and write it out, like your family history, because they want to know, oh, what jeans are you wearing, what jeans do you have in your family history? That's going to put you in a box and say, oh well, it looks like you're probably going to die young, early too. That's what the box they were trying to put me into.

Speaker 1: 26:49

Now, unfortunately, I was confirming that box because by the age of 50, after about 25 years of doing that 70 to 80 hour working and having very poor habits poor nutritional habits, no exercise, just working, overstressed, so many poor lifestyle factors that by the age of 50, I was heading toward an early death. I was heading toward either strokes, heart attacks. I was already pre-diabetic, stepping into diabetes, very overweight, obese, and mentally I was a mess myself and it wasn't that I was suicidal, but I did not have good thoughts, didn't have good thoughts about myself, and have good thoughts about the world Was just, you know, pretty much negative, and that wasn't my background is. I was always a good, positive person but as the years went on that just kind of eroded because of the stress and the lifestyle I was leading. I would call you cynical?

Speaker 1: 28:04

I was cynical, yes.

Speaker 2: 28:06

Yeah, cynical would be your personality.

Speaker 1: 28:08

Probably, it started coming out into my face and my attitude was cynicism. And, like I said, at the age of 50, it was my awakening, where, fortunately, I don't know if I was looking in the mirror or whatever we can use that metaphor looking in the mirror and seeing the look of my wife's face, my beautiful wife looking at me, going like, oh my gosh, what has happened to this guy? Who is this guy? And also for me, I had to understand. Well, wait a second. I don't want to die young. I have this amazing beautiful wife, I have these two amazing beautiful daughters. I love them all so much. No, I don't want to go down that track.

Speaker 1: 28:53

So I had to learn, okay, what's going on and that analogy of mopping up the floor while it's flooding. I went on my own. I guess you would call it journey, but basically I went on my own process of turning off the tap, finding out what were the contributors to, how the heck did I get to be that mess at 50, because I wasn't that mess at 25, but by 50 I was. So it didn't happen overnight, it didn't happen in a year, it happened in a couple decades. And so, in doing that for me personally, I sought research, I sought mentors, I sought conferences, I sought audios, I sought books. I just went after everything to kind of learn. You were hungry, I was hungry, you were hungry, I was hungry, you were hungry to learn, yeah.

Speaker 1: 29:47

And I wanted to see our daughters grow up. I wanted to be with my beautiful wife, isabel, who I'm sitting next to now, for many, many, many years. And I was like, no, no, I know what it's like to lose a parent at a young age, because that happened to me and I did not want that to happen to my two daughters and I didn't want to see Isabel lose me at a young age, because my mom died young and I saw what happened to my dad. He became a very unhappy man when he lost his beautiful bride at a young age and I didn't want that to happen. So I needed to change what was going on in my life. So what did I change? Well, like I said, I was hungry, went after it all, invested my time and money into learning my craft of being a certified culinary nutrition expert, a brain health coach, and that was a process of probably around 10 years or so.

Speaker 2: 30:50

Yeah, because all the while you were implementing this stuff, yeah, so probably 10 to 15.

Speaker 1: 30:55

Yeah, and I guess one of the best things I can say and this is not about me, but it's just to let everybody know no matter where you are in life, no matter what age you can change, you can change it in the good. You can change whether those genes of your family are being expressed in a bad way or you are turning them off. You said, no, they're just going to. Yeah, they might be there, but they're not going to be turned on.

Speaker 2: 31:28

And I just want to interject here, if I can honey Like type two diabetes. You have that in your DNA and your family, but you turned it off, like you had it turned on, but you turned it off. You turned that expression off. By the way, you decided to choose to live, yeah, and your lifestyle choices, yes.

Speaker 1: 31:50

And so what happened in that process, just to give you an idea is I slowed down, I actually reversed my aging. Now that might sound crazy, but here's what I'm talking about. So my chronological age at 50, meaning my calendar age was 50. But my physiological age, my biological age, meaning my body the way it was aging and all its body systems, my body the way it was aging and all its body systems I was probably in my mid-60s. So here I am, 50, but I'm already aging as though I'm in my mid-60s. So I was speeding up the aging process of my body.

Speaker 1: 32:39

Well, as you can imagine, that's not good. That's not good, but what I was able to do in the next 15 years now, at the time of this podcast, I'm 66 recently, having done the biological aging testing. That's all out there available body composition stuff you can do. Uh, at 66, my biological age is 51 and and it could be less, it's just the body comp we did only goes 15 years younger or 15 years older, so I'll go with 51. So at 50, the calendar age of 50, I had a biological age of mid-60s. But now, when I'm in my mid-60s 66 to be exact my biological age, my body aging is at 51.

Speaker 1: 33:27

So in a way, I reversed my aging by a cumulative of 30 years, which I did that by lifestyle factors, and that's not me being something special. It's just what we can do when we turn off the genes and understand what's going on, and we have a why and a decision and we say no, I am not going there, and that's what can happen. And I love that, to know that we can do that, and I will continue to slow down the aging process and that's all about that. Over the next year you will be chronologically a year older, but are you biologically maybe a month older, maybe six months older or maybe five years older? Older, maybe six months older or maybe five years older. That's what we can do by turning off the faucet of those contributors that are making us age faster. We can do that and that's exciting, and you can do that.

Speaker 1: 34:36

You, the listener, you can do this I say we, that means all of us.

Speaker 2: 34:39

That means you, you out there.

Speaker 1: 34:41

Yes, it's the proverbial we meaning all of us. All means you, you out there. Yes, it's the proverbial. We meaning all of us, all of us as a society, anybody listening and anybody you talk to.

Speaker 2: 34:48

You just need to make the decision and get hungry, for where do you want to be?

Speaker 1: 34:56

Right, so that's what happened.

Speaker 2: 34:58

So that's what happened, and there's more to the story. Just hang around we're training for 100 plus.

Speaker 1: 35:04

Well, the story's being developed every day as we speak yeah, hey, thanks for hanging out with us here on the MD and Chef Team Podcast.