https://gut.alessifunctionalhealth.com/main-page
Webinar Link https://gut.alessifunctionalhealth.com/main-page
(0:00) Introduction and importance of understanding your body (0:36) Bloating as a signal of gut issues (1:03) The Total Gut Reset explained (1:37) Case study: Sarah's journey to recovery (4:08) Overview of the four-part mini series (4:33) Redefining what healthy means (6:02) Common symptoms that are not normal (7:16) Five signals you've learned to ignore (11:11) What a functional workup looks like (14:00) Sarah's transformation and personalized protocol (14:56) Shifting from crisis management to optimization (16:13) Preview of upcoming episodes (17:22) Sponsor: Ascend Functional Health (17:34) Closing remarks and call to action00:00:00
Understanding your own body now pays dividends for the next thirty years.
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50 is not the beginning of decline.
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50 is the first time most women have enough data, enough life experience, enough self
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awareness to actually do this right.
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The women I see who optimize in their 50s are often performing at a higher level in their 60s
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than they were in their 40s.
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And that is not an accident.
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Welcome to Health Decoded, your number one source for real health information with your
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host, Doctor.
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Alessi and Matt Tack.
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Health Decoded listeners, if you're dealing with bloating that just won't go away no matter
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what you eat, no matter what you try, I need you to hear this.
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The bloating isn't the problem.
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It's a signal.
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Every external symptom you're experiencing, the discomfort, the fatigue, the frustration has a
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root cause.
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And in my years of clinical practice, it almost always leads back to the gut.
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Nothing else in your body can fully heal until that foundation is restored.
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I built this framework from my own health journey.
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I was that patient, frustrated, dismissed, searching for answers.
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I took everything I learned, refined it through years of clinical testing and have since helped
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hundreds of patients achieve complete relief from their symptoms.
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That became the Total Gut Reset, a step by step protocol with one goal: reset your gut in six
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months or less.
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If you're ready to learn exactly what's causing your symptoms and eliminate them for good, I'm
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hosting a free webinar where I walk you through the entire framework.
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The link is in the show notes.
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Go ahead and register and I'll see you there.
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I want to tell you about a patient that for sake of this episode, I'll call her Sarah.
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Sarah was 52.
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She ran a department of 40 people.
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She was up at 05:30 every morning.
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She was working out four days a week.
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She was eating by most standards really well.
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No junk food, no alcohol to speak of, lean protein, vegetables, the whole thing.
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And she was exhausted.
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She wasn't just tired.
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She was like that dead exhausted type of feeling.
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The kind of exhausted where you sit in the car after work for ten minutes before you can bring
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yourself to go inside.
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The kind where your brain stops cooperating around 2PM and you're running on caffeine and
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willpower to get you through your day.
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She had her blood work done twice.
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Her doctor told her everything looked normal.
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Her thyroid was fine.
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Her CBC was fine.
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Her metabolic panel was fine.
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And then, because she's the kind of woman she is, she assumed the problem was just her.
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Maybe she needed to sleep more.
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Maybe she was just stressed.
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Maybe this is just what 52 feels like.
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When she came to see me, she was almost apologetic, like she was wasting my time.
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She said, and I remember her saying this, I know I'm probably fine, I just don't feel like
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myself anymore.
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And I want to tell you what I told her.
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You are not fine.
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You are not sick either.
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You are underperforming.
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And those are completely different problems with completely different solutions.
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By the time we finished her initial workup, we found a subclinical hypothyroidism that her
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standard TSH had completely missed, a cortisol curve that had completely flattened, no morning
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spike, no normal rhythm that we should see, and her gut was producing almost no short chain
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fatty acids, which meant her mitochondria was basically running on fumes.
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She wasn't broken, she was running this high performance engine on the wrong type of fuel
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with a clogged filter and nobody had actually ever looked under the hood properly.
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And that's what this episode is about.
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If you've ever sat in your car after work and you've wondered when you stop feeling like
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yourself, this is for you.
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Welcome to Health Decoded.
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I'm Doctor.
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Alessi, founder and clinic director of Ascend Functional Health here in Tampa Bay.
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This episode is gonna be part one of a four part mini series that I'm recording
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specifically for the woman who is doing everything right by conventional standards and
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still doesn't feel the way she knows that she should.
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If that's you, stay with me for the next thirty minutes.
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This changes how you think about your health permanently.
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Let's get into it.
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Let me start with a question.
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What does healthy actually mean?
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If you asked your conventional doctor, the answer is probably your labs are within normal
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range, your blood pressure is acceptable, you're not presenting with any diagnosable
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condition, congratulations, you're healthy, I'll see you next year at your checkup.
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But that is the absolute floor.
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That is the bare minimum definition of not sick.
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And somewhere along the line, we've accepted that not sick and thriving are actually the
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same thing, but they're not even close to the same thing.
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Think about elite athletics for a second.
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When a professional cyclist wants to optimize their performance, they don't go to their
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primary care physician and ask if their CBC is normal.
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They get a VO2 max test, they get lactate threshold testing, they get detailed hormone
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panels timed to their training cycles, They look at mitochondrial function, they track
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their sleep architecture, not just hours of sleep.
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They optimize, they don't just survive.
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Now why is that standard only for professional athletes?
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Why is the woman who's running a business, raising a family, managing a household, still
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trying to take care of herself, why is she expected to operate on a completely different
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framework where the only bar is nothing's wrong, that's the gap.
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And it's a very big gap.
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The woman that I work with most, they're typically in their forties or fifties, high
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functioning by external measure, and has a list of things that she's accepted as normal that
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are absolutely not normal.
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So let me read you some of them and this may be as a wake up call for a lot of people.
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Waking up tired despite getting eight hours of sleep.
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Carrying weight around the midsection that wasn't there ten years ago and it doesn't
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respond to diet or exercise the way that it used to.
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A brain that feels foggy or slow especially in the afternoon, a libido that has quietly
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disappeared, joints that are achy, moods that feel flatter than it used to be, a sense that
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your drive and motivation, which used to be your superpower, are running at about 60 now.
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And she's been told these things are aging or stress or anxiety or you know, this is my
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personal least favorite, that that's just what happens at this stage of life.
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Now, if I had a dollar for every time somebody said that to me, it would be way too much.
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I want to be very direct with you.
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That is not aging.
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That is underperformance.
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And it has clinical causes that can actually be identified and addressed.
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So let's get into some of that.
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Let's get into what I call the five signals that you've learned to ignore.
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I want to walk you through these performance signals and these are things your body is
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telling you that you've probably been ignoring or worse just accepting at this point.
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So signal number one, energy that doesn't recover.
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Not tiredness after a hard day, I'm talking about a baseline fatigue that sleep doesn't
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fix.
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You got eight hours and you wake up unrefreshed.
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You need caffeine just to get started and you hit a wall every afternoon.
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That is not normal.
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That is almost always driven by either HPA axis dysregulation, meaning your cortisol rhythm is
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off, mitochondrial inefficiency, thyroid dysfunction or some combination of the three.
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These things are measurable and yes, they are fixable.
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Signal two: Body composition that resists effort You are doing the things, you're eating
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well, you're exercising, but the scale won't move.
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Or it moves and then it comes right back.
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Or the body fat has redistributed to places that it never was before, particularly around
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the belly.
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That is a hormonal and metabolic signal.
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Insulin resistance, cortisol elevation, estrogen dominance, thyroid insufficiency, any
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and all of these changes where your body stores fat and whether it will release it are affected
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by this.
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And effort alone cannot override biochemistry.
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Signal number three is that cognitive performance decline, brain fog, inability to
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retrieve words, difficulty concentrating, feeling like you're operating through a layer
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of glass.
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Again, this is not aging.
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This is almost always inflammation, gut brain axis disruption or hormone disruption.
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Estrogen is neuroprotective and when it fluctuates or drops, cognitive clarity goes
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with it.
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Neuroinflammation, I just did an episode on this last week, is driven very often by
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compromised gut barrier.
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It impairs the very mitochondria that your neurons depend on.
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Signal number four, sleep that doesn't restore.
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So again, you might be getting hours of sleep, but not architecture.
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Meaning you're not spending adequate time in deep sleep or REM.
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This is where your brain consolidates memory and clears metabolic waste through the
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glymphatic system.
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If you're waking at two or 3AM and you can't get back to sleep, that's a cortisol spike.
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And if you're sleeping through but you're waking exhausted, then it's often like a
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progesterone deficiency or blood sugar dysregulation overnight.
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And then the fifth signal that we see is a flat emotional baseline.
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This is one of the hardest for high performing women to name because it's not depression, it's
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not anxiety, it's more like a muting.
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Things that used to excite you don't quite land the same way.
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Your patience is shorter, your enthusiasm is lower, your drive, the thing that really makes
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you who you are feels like it's at 60 or 70%.
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That is often progesterone, testosterone and dopamine pathway dysfunction.
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It's not a personality change, it's a biochemical one.
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If you heard yourself in any one of those five, that's data.
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That's your body communicating.
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The question is whether you have someone in your corner who knows how to listen to it.
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So let's get into what does it actually look like now to optimize versus just survive, just
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manage a baseline of health.
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And let me tell you what we're actually measuring when I sit down with a new patient
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because it's very difficult from what you've probably ordered at your annual physical to
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decipher these type of things.
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A standard physical is gonna look at a CBC or a basic comprehensive metabolic panel.
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Maybe they'll look at your TSH and maybe they'll look at a lipid panel.
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That's usually it.
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And that's what most physicians are using to determine whether you're healthy.
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The problem is that none of those tests measure optimization.
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They measure pathology and only gross pathology at that.
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And so here's what a functional workup will actually look like.
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On the hormonal side, I'm looking at a full thyroid panel, not just TSH.
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TSH tells me your pituitary is sending a signal.
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That's it.
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It doesn't tell me that your cells are actually using thyroid hormone.
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I want to see the free t three, free t four, reverse t three, and thyroid antibodies.
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A woman can have normal TSH and be functionally hypothyroid.
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And I see this all the time.
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We also look at a full sex hormone panel, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA,
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sex hormone binding globulin.
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Is your body creating and then actually utilizing the hormones Or is it creating them
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and holding them because it's blocked?
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And we look at cortisol and not just a single draw, but ideally a four point salivary
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cortisol to see the actual diurnal rhythm.
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Is it spiking in the morning?
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Does it crash by noon?
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Is it elevated at night when it should be low?
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This rhythm matters enormously.
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On the metabolic side, we'll see a fasting insulin, not just your glucose.
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You can have perfectly normal blood glucose and be significantly insulin resistant.
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I look at hemoglobin A1C.
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I look at triglyceride to HDL ratio as a proxy for insulin sensitivity.
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I look at homocysteine and high sensitivity CRP, and these are inflammatory markers.
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We're going to assess gut function because the gut is the foundation of everything else.
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Neurotransmitter production, immune regulation, hormone metabolism, nutrient absorption, all of
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it runs through the gut.
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We use a comprehensive stool analysis to look at the microbiome, at digestive enzyme
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function, inflammatory markers in the gut itself.
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Then, we look at micronutrient status because deficiencies in things like magnesium, zinc,
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B12, folate, vitamin D, omega-three fatty acids, these all directly impair the systems
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that I just described.
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Most people are walking around deficient in multiple nutrients and have no idea because
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they've never tested for them.
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This is what a complete picture looks like.
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When we have a complete picture, you can actually build a complete solution, not just a
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guess.
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Not a trial and error.
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Not just here's some medication, let me know if it works.
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This is a protocol built specifically for your biochemistry.
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Sarah, the patient I told you about at the start, within ninety days of her personalized
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protocol, she was waking up before her alarm feeling rested.
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The afternoon crash was gone.
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She lost somewhere around like eleven, twelve pounds without changing her exercise and with
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only targeted dietary adjustments.
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She told me at her follow-up that she felt like herself again for the first time in years.
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And these are the stories that we're seeing all the time.
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It's not a miracle.
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This is what happens when you stop treating the floor and start building toward the ceiling.
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And so there's an identity shift that needs to happen because we need to take the thought of
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just surviving, just being a patient to optimizing your health, be able to carry your
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body and carry you and your family and your loved ones for as long as possible.
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Because isn't that the goal?
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And so I really want to close with something that's more philosophical really than clinical
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because I think it's actually the most important piece.
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The conventional medical model is built around a reactive identity.
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You're a patient.
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You present with a problem, the system responds to the problem, you go home, and you wait for
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the next problem.
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That model is not built for you.
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It is not built for the woman who wants to be exceptional at 55 the way she was at 35.
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It is not built for longevity.
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It is not built for performance.
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It's built for crisis management.
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The identity I work with the one I want every patient at Ascend Functional Health to carry,
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is that of an optimizer someone who understands that their biology is a system and that systems
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can be measured, supported and improved.
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That the investment you make is understanding your own body now pays dividends for the next
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thirty years.
00:15:54
50 is not the beginning of decline.
00:15:56
50 is the first time most women have enough data, enough life experience, enough self
00:16:01
awareness to actually do this right.
00:16:04
The women I see who optimize in their 50s are often performing at a higher level in their 60s
00:16:10
than they were in their 40s.
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And that is not an accident.
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That's an intentional decision.
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The question is not whether you can feel better than you do right now, you absolutely can.
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The question is whether you have the right person, the right people, and the right
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accountability to help you get there.
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And so, over the next three weeks, stay tuned.
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I'm going be releasing three more episodes in this series.
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We're going to talk about the real conversations of taking your health seriously
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and what inaction is actually costing you.
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We're going to break down clinically why the things you've already tried haven't produced
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lasting results.
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And we're going to talk about what thriving in your fifties, sixties and beyond actually looks
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like and how you get there.
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So if you're listening to this and something landed with you, if you heard yourself in the
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five signals that I mentioned, if Sarah's story sounded familiar to you, I want to hear from
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you.
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You don't have to be sick to come to Ascend Functional Health.
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You don't have to have a diagnosis.
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You just have to be done accepting less than what your body is capable of.
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So you can always book a discovery call at the link in the show notes.
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If you have lab tests already done, bring them with you.
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If you don't, we can start fresh.
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Either way, we're gonna get you a complete picture and a real plan.
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Again, I'm Doctor.
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Alessi.
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Thank you for joining me on Health Decoded, and I'll see you next week.
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Thank you for tuning in to Health Decoded, where we break down the truth about all things
00:17:39
health and empower you to take charge of your well-being.
00:17:42
If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with
00:17:47
someone who needs to hear this.
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For more resources, personalized support, or to have your questions answered live on the show,
00:17:54
visit Ascend Functional Health and head to the contact page to connect with us directly.
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Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered, and remember, your health is in your hands.